Salmon Confidential
Anyone who has been following the sorry saga of inexplicable diseases and unusual mortality in BC’s wild salmon will not be surprised that the information in Twyla Roscovich’s documentary, Salmon…
Ray Grigg
The Bitumen Cliff
The so-called “bitumen bubble”, the hollowing out of Alberta’s oil prices, has left the seemingly wealthy province with a staggering budget deficit of billions. With an economy now mostly dependent…
BC’s Fossil Fuel Folly
People who are concerned about global climate change are watching the steep rise of global carbon dioxide emissions. While a few nations have been heroic in their efforts to cut…
Harper Government Takes Muzzling Scientists to New Extreme
The strictures on what scientists can publicly say or publish, put in place by the Prime Minister’s office, have been tightening in recent years. In 2011 scientists protested and collectively…
Cautious Optimism: World Leaders Ready to Tackle Climate Change?
The world’s largest and most influential political and economic forces are showing signs that they might be ready to actively combat climate change. Presently the signs are only words. But…
History’s Repeating Patterns: Ronald Wright on ‘Progress’, Collapse
Why do civilizations tend to “collapse” soon after reaching their peak? Because they continue to expand until they overreach the maximum exploitation of resources that their environment can tolerate. Then…
Wild Forests
Real forests are wild. The forests of human contrivance are tree farms, plantations, monocultures, timber supply areas. Such clusters of trees may superficially appear to be real forests, but they…
Bearing Witness: From Vesuvius to Climate Change
Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger both bared witness to the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24th, 79 CE. Their writings on the subject are…
Of Frogs and Fishes: Farms Spawn Lethal Diseases
Ray Grigg discusses the parallels between a deadly fungus wiping our the world’s frogs and lethal salmon viruses – both incubated in industrial farming operations. “Somewhere in a frog farm,…
Idling Harper: Why First Nations Movement Poses Genuine Threat to PM
Ray Grigg discusses revealing insights from a former senior Harper advisor into the way the PM thinks – and how the Idle No More movement, which sprang up in reaction…
The Salmon Recipes
The Salmon Recipes: Stories of Our Endangered North Coast Cuisine is not only visually exciting but it exudes an intense and compelling power that is conveyed in an instant, before…
10 Ways to See Earth’s Temperature Rising
Ray Grigg provides some key facts and figures which chart the planet’s growing fever in recent years. “The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in October, 2012, that the…
The Business of a Cortes Forest
Ray Grigg on the logging of Cortes Island’s old growth forests. “These are the business forces allied against Cortes and the people of Wildstands Alliance who are trying to mitigate…
Climate Change a Failure of Political Will
Politicians who almost universally claim to be so well-informed that they can run countries, cannot also claim to be so ill-informed that they do not appreciate the gravity of the…
Sinking Cities: A Future with Rising Oceans
New York may be the environmental story of the year, not because of the 80 fatalities and the $50 billion in damages caused by so-called Superstorm Sandy, but because the…
The Spirit of Giving
The deeper meaning of giving is easily hidden in the hectic festive celebrations and frenzied gift buying that have become the habit of the Christmas season. Indeed, giving’s essential function…
The Fracking Mess
The relatively new technique of “hydraulic fracturing”, a process of drilling horizontally in shale beds and then breaking the rock by injecting a concoction of water, sand and toxic chemicals…
The Surrender of an Ecowarrior
When does heroism become folly? When does struggle become futile? When does surrender become liberation? When is enough, enough? Then what? These are just some of the questions that come…
The Ecology of Money
According to Professor Michael Hudson, an economist and finance expert profiled in the documentary "Surviving Progress", “Every society for the last 4,000 years has found that its debt grows more…
‘Apocaholics’: A New Word for New Times
For people who like words, “apocaholics” is a new and ingenious one. It instantly conveys the impression that those with a dystopian view of the future have a neurotic compulsion…