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Climate change

Spring 2024

Growing community

Neighbours are gathering across the country to seize their means of food production

Emesha Boyko

Kevin Sidlar’s garden has been a refuge for the past two decades, if not quite a major source of sustenance. For much of his adult life, he’s grown annual flowers, peas, and tomatoes in his backyard. In the early days of 2020, something shifted within Sidlar. He felt nervous about disease and the security of […] More »
Spring 2024

Battling burnout

The silent agony of a wildfire off-season

Dan Schertzer

In the middle of the 2023 fire season, A Critical Incident Stress Management counsellor came to our fire base. The season had been unprecedentedly busy, even with wildfires ramping up in recent years, and my crew in southern British Columbia had racked up more than 70 days on the fireline with no sign of it […] More »
March-April 2023

Sea of Love

We need to rekindle our relationship with blue spaces

Kiley Best

Blue spaces like arctic and antarctic ice, saltwater ocean, rivers, and lakes make up the global ocean. They cover 71 percent of the planet and are critical to the survival of all living things. River pollution, ocean acidification and melting ice caps are on the radar of most Canadians. But dire warnings from scientists rarely […] More »
May-June 2022

Thank you, Mom

For modelling sustainability

Saffina Jinnah

Illustration by Brintha Koneshachandra Dear Mom, The other day, I was making us breakfast and I reached into the fridge to grab the container of yogurt to eat with our puri. Now, you would think, having done essentially this every weekend of my entire life, I would not screech, “Ugh! Mom, where is the yogurt?! […] More »
May-June 2022

Pregnant pause

I’m scared of having children on a dying planet

Laura O’Connor

Illustration by Julia Galotta I’m a young woman, who can, to my knowledge, get pregnant and has long-held dreams of being a mother. When I was a child, I spent my days dutifully caring for my dolls—who were named Baby and Popstar. When I turned 13, I started babysitting the two toddlers who lived next […] More »
May-June 2022

Seed the forest for the trees

Seed the North takes an innovative approach to reforestation

Jadine Ngan

Photo courtesy Natasha Kuperman In Hazelton, B.C., one organization is undertaking an ambitious project: to regenerate the public forests of Canada’s north. Seed the North, founded in 2020 by infrastructure developer and architect Natasha Kuperman, isn’t the first to tackle reforestation. However, it has set out to do so with a fresh approach that combines […] More »
May-June 2022

Climate coverage crisis

Canadian media needs to reflect climate emergency

Dhriti Gupta

Photo by iStock; Design by Valerie Thai In August 2021, the UN Secretary-General declared the findings of a recent global climate report “a code red for humanity.” In response, a team of journalists and researchers released the “Climate Coverage in Canada” report in November, which heard from 143 scientists, 148 journalists, and 1,006 members of […] More »
May-June 2022

Not an afterthought

Disabled people are often left out of conversations about our climate future—when they should be leading the planning

A. H. Reaume

Photo by XURZON; Design by Valerie Thai At least 595 people died in B.C. from heat-related deaths during the summer of 2021. Most of these occurred during the province’s “heat dome” event, which took place from June 25 to July 1, and saw temperatures rise as high as 49.6 degrees Celsius. Many climate activists and […] More »
May-June 2022

Putting the brakes on electric vehicles

The government is pushing us toward electric vehicles, but it's not as simple as it seems

Paris Marx

Photo by byNRQEMI; Design by Valerie Thai Over a century since their introduction, cars dominate the streets of cities and towns across Canada to such a degree that many people feel there is no real alternative. In January 2022, Turo Canada in partnership with Léger found that 83 percent of Canadians have their own or […] More »
May-June 2022

Farming for the future

Conventional farming on P.E.I. is being challenged by a new approach to agriculture

Jill MacIntyre

Photo by Jim Feng; Design by Valerie Thai Severe and increasingly regular hurricanes, increased temperatures altering fishing grounds and crop development, drastic shoreline erosion, and the destruction of vulnerable ecosystems. These are all climate change impacts that are already happening on Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) and will only get worse in the future without immediate […] More »
May-June 2022

Protect the peatlands

Why we need to conserve the Hudson Bay Lowlands

Zakiya Kassam

Photo by JLH3 Photograph The Hudson Bay Lowlands is the third largest wetland in the world, covering the uppermost part of Northern Ontario and spilling into Manitoba and Quebec. It is also one of the most productive places in Canada—and arguably, the world—harbouring a carbon storage system unmatched by anything man-made. In January 2021, a […] More »