After three years of evidence, study and writing, Justice Bruce Cohen has finally submitted his $26 million Report on the disappearance of the Fraser River sockeye salmon. Despite being written in the restrained language of the judiciary, it is explici…
Continue readingAuthor: Ray Grigg
The Common Sense Canadian home page: The New Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis that occurred just over 50 years ago can provide us with some important insights about ourselves and how we might address the global environmental challenges unfolding around us…Climate change is like another threatening nuclear holocaust. It’s going to spin out of control if the “generals” of
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Ethics of Politically Impossible
We have the technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid the serious environmental consequences of raising the global temperature above 2°C. We even have an economy that can afford to do so. But our leaders lack the political will to rectify a problem that they both recognize and
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Enbridge Corporate Character
This is the poverty of ethics that undermines the credibility of any promises made by Enbridge. The $500 million in additional improvements came only when the possibility of a failed project threatened to cost the corporation more than the added investment. If Enbridge had really intended to build a state-of-the-art
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Shrinking Arctic Sea Ice
Arctic sea ice reached a record low of 3.42 million square kilometres on September 16, 2012, surpassing by 18 percent the record set in 2007 of 4.17 million square kilometres. And this 2007 record surpassed the previous 2005 record by 22 percent. Dr. Walt Meier of the National Snow and
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Collective Consciousness and Humanity
ermites and their collective consciousness raise some thought provoking questions about humanity. If termites can only express their true genetic identity in the amassed presence of their numbers — only then are they able to form complex social structures, build architecturally sophisticated mounds and endure eons of changing environmental conditions
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: A Sense of the Sacred
A sense of the sacred can arrive unexpectedly. Perhaps it is created by a mirror-calm lake enclosed by rocky hills all bedecked with the orange and yellow of autumn colours, where the profound silence of wilderness is only filled by the lonely call of a loon. Or perhaps it’s a
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Poetry, Questions and People
A writer and thinker of substance should leave more questions than answers. This is the case with Robert Bringhurst, the author of The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2008). Some of his questions are explicit and obvious, easily and quickly answered after moments of consideration. Others
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Weight of People
Behind the questions that people ask are assumptions that are often more revealing than the questions themselves. One of these revealing questions appeared in “Collected Wisdom”, a weekly newspaper column in which readers ask questions and various experts attempt to answer them (The Globe and Mail, Aug. 25/12). A certain
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Last Climate Change Skeptic
If Dr. Richard Muller, a professor of physics from the University of California, Berkeley, is not the last of the global climate change skeptics, he should be. For years he has been one of the highest profile critics of the procedures and conclusions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Internet Addiction
One of the most powerful and pervasive of our recent inventions has been the Internet, the digital magic that has compressed time into microseconds and space into irrelevance. The distance between individuals – wherever they may live – has been obliterated. McLuhan’s notion of the global village has become reality
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Dilbit Silence
“Dilbit” is a contraction of “diluted bitumen”, a little word loaded with controversy that has recently entered the English vocabulary. This is because “bitumen”, a word in long existence, has entered popular use as the peanut butter-like concentrate extracted from Alberta’s tar sands. Since bitumen is too thick to move
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Carbon Costs
Vancouver is the latest city to consider costly preventative measures that should reduce the astronomical costs associated with more active weather. The city is still stinging from a 2006 windstorm that left 250,000 people without electricity and required infrastructure repairs of $10 million. Then a 2010 rainfall flooded many homes,
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Carbon’s Terrifying Mathematics
Exasperation about the world’s ineffective measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was registered clearly on August 2, 2012, when Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and a principle founder of the environmental movement called 350.org, published a detailed article in Rolling Stone magazine called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Van Gogh in Perspective
Almost everyone knows about the Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh, and his turbulent life of abject poverty, bouts of insanity, total failure as an artist — he sold one painting in his career — and his eventual death from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot to his stomach. This personal tragedy juxtaposes
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Bread and Circuses
The Roman empire faced an unexpected internal problem as it reached the peak of its power and wealth in the second century BCE. Plunder and tribute filled its coffers, widening the gulf between rich and poor. Meanwhile, cheap slave labour was powering farms and mines, together with the construction of
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Keystone Kops
A “Keystone Kops” fiasco is the expression used by Debbie Hersman, Chairperson of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), to describe “Enbridge’s poor handling” of their huge oil spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River on July 10, 2010. Enbridge handled the spill like true comedians, a routine they had apparently
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Pieces: A Newspaper’s Portrait of a Planet
Collect enough pieces of information and they eventually fit together into a meaningful pattern. But rarely do enough of them appear in one newspaper on one day to create an environmental portrait of a planet. This happened in the June 21st edition of Toronto’s Globe and Mail — more poignant
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: From Market Economy to Market Society
If we can accept the scientific opinion that the primary ecosystems of our planet are seriously degraded — a United Nations’ report recently warned they are on the verge of collapse — then why have we been so slow to seriously address a problem that is rapidly approaching a condition
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Everest Ascent
Ray Grigg discusses veteran Everest climber Ralf Dujmovits’ reflections on the transformation of his beloved mountain into a major tourist destination. “’The [appalling] jams of people…led to hours of waiting around which led to hypothermia and exhaustion. Many were dehydrated. But none of that seemed to have put people off.”
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