The Recommendations of the Cohen Commission Report
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…
Ray Grigg
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Everest Ascent
Ray Grigg discusses veteran Everest climber Ralf Dujmovits’ reflections on the transformation of his beloved mountain into a major tourist destination. “’The jams of people…led to hours of waiting around…