Archive for Ecology & sustainability

Andrew Knox will talk about Transition Towns.  Andrew is an Environmental Engineering PhD candidate.  He’s just back from Devon County, the birthplace of the Transition movement.

Transition Towns and Toronto:
From Oil Dependency to Urban Resilience
a presentation by Andrew Knox
Withrow Park, near the clubhouse
Sunday, 2009 September 20, 2 pm     Read more »

I get asked a lot about the garbage strike.  While there’s not a lot I can do to settle a municipal labour dispute as an aspiring MP, and people recognize this, as a Green MP I could do rather a lot to help Toronto achieve its stated goal of zero waste, which would make a garbage strike a lot less unpleasant.     Read more »

In a recent post, George Monbiot suggests diverting military spending to addressing the much more serious threats facing the world.  One area in which we could redirect the energy of our armed forces could be to retrofit existing housing stock which is incapable of keeping us warm without fossil fuels from which we should be weaning ourselves.     Read more »

The stresses we put on the planet are a product of individual demands on resources multiplied by the number of us there are.  Ecologists are well aware of this and used to discuss it when I was a child.  One of the reasons these concerns were dropped politically is because population control can be used as an excuse for a lot of nasty policy — racist immigration reforms, draconian meddling in personal fertility and tax structures that punish children who are in no way to blame for being alive.

Still, plenty of sensible voices lament silencing of the issue, which is serious.  And many of these have been unhappy about the Green Party’s refusal to address this issue.  I’ve heard this concern expressed at the door at least four times while canvassing – and I’ve been proud to say that at the last Green Party of Canada AGM, we adopted a sensible population policy that recognizes the problem, yet proposes to address it in ways that are non-intrusive and which enable rather than punish the most disadvantaged people on the planet.     Read more »

With the election of Barrack Obama in the United States, they have slightly improved their climate change policy, enough for Canada to beat them out for last place among the G8 countries in a joint evaluation by the World Wildlife Fund and the Insurance giant Allianz.     Read more »