April 30, 2010
College students learn sustainable design—by building it themselves
Fleming College students constructing a green building. “No one would think it’s possible to have students with no construction experience making an entire selfsustainable building from scratch,” says David Elfstrom, a graduate of Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario. But that’s what he and 25 of his classmates in the sustainable building design and construction program did in 2006, erecting... [More >>]
April 28, 2010
Mainstream success threatens cult cinema’s sleazy charm
Tell someone you like science fiction, fantasy or horror films and you might get “the look.” A look that says, “Are you silly, immature or, worse, pervy?” Fans of genre cinema—the term applies to many different categories of film but is most commonly applied to sci-fi, fantasy and horror—have long had a bad rep as freaky weirdoes, social misfits, gore hounds and so on. I know because I... [More >>]
April 26, 2010
Don’t save the economy. Make a better one
The golden age of the welfare state wasn’t that golden. The real solution is economics that actually promotes equality Remember the good old days when Canadians used to think the government was supposed to help everyone share in economic prosperity and prevent anyone from shouldering the brunt of economic adversity? We thought we’d learned the bitter lessons about the perils of the free market... [More >>]
April 23, 2010
Kick the grass habit: why your home should go lawn-free
It's time to rid our neighbourhoods of the green menace. Creative Commons photo by Robert S. Donovan. From the first breath of spring, we North Americans dream of an expanse of green grass, a vast carpet that tickles our skin and stains our sundresses on which we can spend long, lazy days barbecuing and reading summer fiction. But our love affair with the lawn has got to stop. Even pesticide-free,... [More >>]
April 22, 2010
An Alberta sculptor fights oil companies to exhibit art on his own land
Peter von Tiesenhausen with one of his sculptures. Photo courtesy the artist As you walk through Peter von Tiesenhausen’s land, artwork emerges as if summoned from the ground up. Ships and nests made of willow branches appear along well-worn paths. Statues carved from logs stand watch from between the trees. In Tiesenhausen’s studio, small canvases that resemble the cracked earth of recent droughts... [More >>]
April 20, 2010
7 environmentally friendly moves to quit the bottled water habit
In 2006, Canadians spent $731 million consuming 2.1 billion litres of bottled water, with most of those plastic bottles ending up in landfills. If you’re tired of slowly destroying the planet while building the bank accounts of companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé, here are a few tips for going back to the tap. 1. Create your own “pure” water by investing in an at-home water filtration system.... [More >>]
April 19, 2010
The gruesome genius of Michael Ondaatje, destroyer of worlds
Twice over the endless winter of 2007-08, I finished a pleasant-enough telephone conversation with my mother only to have her call me back a couple of minutes later. “I know what I wanted to tell you,” she said both times, “so-and-so died.” The first unfortunate object of forgotten conversation was a dear old great aunt in Vancouver I hadn’t seen in a decade. The second was my childhood family... [More >>]
October 19, 2009
Girls Gone Wild. So? Sometimes being brave means being bad
With Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears splashed across tabloid covers, racing toward early graves, it’s easy to think they’re stupid or sick. But there’s something irresistably subversive about women who won’t behave The website “When Will Amy Winehouse Die?” reads like a macabre count-the-jellybeans contest. How many days does a junkie have left to live?... [More >>]
August 20, 2009
“Socialism” and “Big Government” as Orwellian doublespeak
It’s not the size of your bureaucracy. It’s how you use it. Onward, Stephen Harper: lead us to the socialist utopia! If you follow the right-wing punditry you’d think comrades Harper, Obama, Brown, and the like are leading us along that slippery slope to—gasp—socialism. Not that any of these leaders has a nice word to say about socialism; they don’t. But the more alarmist fringes... [More >>]
August 18, 2009
Graphic: Where are all of Canada’s stimulus dollars going to?
When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty first revealed his stimulus spending package back in January, he announced that Canada’s Economic Action Plan would “protect Canadians during the global recession” and “put more money in the hands of Canadian families, to help them weather the current storm.” Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is “Canada’s... [More >>]
