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What's in the September-October 2011 issue of This Magazine

Graham F. Scott

The September-October 2011 issue of This Magazine (that’s it on the left there!) is now in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on better newsstands coast-to-coast this week. Remember that you can subscribe to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going […] More »
September-October 2011

Canada’s coming $50-billion hydro boom brings environmental perils, too

Will Braun

Canada is a nation of wild, legendary rivers. The Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Churchill, and dozens more all empty into our national identity. They flow through our landscape, history, and imagination. They are vital to any history textbook, Group of Seven exhibit, or gift-shop postcard rack. Canada is also a nation of river-tamers. We revere […] More »

A look at the inner workings of one of Canada's greenest buildings

peter goffin

In 2001, when Earth Rangers was planning for its new facility, the mandate its members gave to the engineers and architects was that they wanted a building with the lowest environmental impact possible, a building on the cutting edge of eco-friendliness. Ten years later, the Earth Rangers Centre is one of the most energy efficient […] More »

Everything you'll find in the March-April 2011 issue of This Magazine

Graham F. Scott

The March-April 2011 issue of This is now in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands. As usual, you’ll be able to read all the articles here on the website as we post them over the next few weeks. But also as usual, we encourage you to subscribe to the magazine, which is the best way to support […] More »
March-April 2011

How Canada is being left behind in the global race for geothermal energy

Jason Brown

In the world of green power, enhanced geothermal systems technology has big potential. How big? Like enough potential to provide 2,000 times the United States’ annual energy consumption kind of big. The premise of EGS is simple: use recently developed drilling technology to bore a hole four to six kilometres deep into the earth. Pump […] More »
July-August 2010

As green-collar jobs boom, Canada is mired in the tar sands

Jessica Leigh JohnstonWebsite

Canada and Abu Dhabi share one big trait: an economy addicted to oil. But while Canada doubles down on the tar sands, the emirate quietly plans a renewable energy hub in a gleaming zero-emissions city in the desert. Can either of these bets pay off? Looking out over the site of Masdar City in Abu […] More »
May-June 2010

How bad science stifles rational debate about wind power

Andrea McDowellWebsite

Wind energy ought to be a shoo-in. Yes, the infrastructure costs a lot of money but the fuel is free and plentiful, turbines produce no emissions, and no mountaintops need to be removed. And unlike nuclear power, no long-term radioactive waste needs to be stored for millennia. Yet, bizarrely, small groups of committed neighbourhood activists […] More »

Coming up in the May-June 2010 issue of This Magazine

Graham F. Scott

The May-June 2010 issue of This Magazine has been on newsstands for a while already, so I apologize that I’m a little late to the party blogging about what you can read in this issue. You can find This in quality bookstores coast to coast, or get every issue without making a special trip by […] More »
July-August 2008

College students learn sustainable design—by building it themselves

Jesse McLean

“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 an eco-friendly outdoor-living […] More »

Book Review: George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning

daniel tseghay

[Editor’s note: Heat has been out for some time, but given it’s Earth Day, and also given the recent shutdown of so much air traffic after the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption, we thought it wasn’t a bad time to revisit it here.] Few issues require as much research as climate change science. You have to know […] More »

Exclusive: When Ontarians conserve power, wind farms will be first to shut down

darcy higgins

Despite its recent investment in wind energy, Ontario will periodically ask wind operators to turn off their turbines, leaving gas and nuclear operating, This Magazine has learned. Conservation efforts and more energy production have led to an occasional surplus of electricity in the province, requiring Ontario to power down some generators at certain times of […] More »