Archive for Social justice & diversity

Adriana’s Chinese flyer text:     Read more »

I attended the Canadian Organic Growers Toronto conference today, and could easily write a dozen posts.  I’ll write about just one speaker, Percy Schmeiser, who I had first listened to perhaps a decade ago or more at a Toronto Vegetarian Association event.  In those days I was not a food activist at all.  I just liked vegetables and wanted to be informed about what I was eating and feeding my family.  So I went to Mr. Schmeiser’s talk then not necessarily expecting to be convinced of the harm of genetically modified foods.

Mr. Schmeiser’s story is one of profound and infuriating wrong.  When I first heard him speak, he was embroiled in a legal battle with Monsanto, which had identified their genetically modified crop on his field, and demanded that he pay for using their patented product.  As a heritage seed developer, he certainly didn’t welcome Monsanto’s “contribution”, which had contaminated all his fields and destroyed 50 years worth of work.  All he did was refuse to pay.  And in retribution, Monsanto dragged him right up to the Supreme Court, counting on the fact that he would succumb to the immense pressure of overwhelming legal bills.     Read more »

These are hard times for those of us working on climate change – scientists, environmentalists, policymakers and others.  The breathless rumours about the death of climate change science from denialists are not only premature, however, they are contrary to what anyone working in the field knows and understands.  The real question is whether we will embrace the science in time to prevent catastrophe.

I was studying Anthropology at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s.  At that time, Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson were embroiled in a bitter feud about the significance of Australopithecus afarensis.  Johanson had found remains of the 3.2 million year old hominid and was sure that it was a human ancestor.  Leakey was initially unwilling even to acknowledge that it deserved its own species name.  Johanson was still fighting off accusations of professional misconduct because he publicized his findings in a popular magazine and gave the specimen the catchy name “Lucy” before submitting his research to peer-review.  Some old textbooks that we used still referred to Piltdown Man, which had been revealed as a fraud four decades before.     Read more »

I’ve wanted to write for a while about Afghan prisoner issues, but for a while every day brought new revelations.  And now for days I’ve wanted to write about the prorogation of Parliament, but I’m honestly stumped about what to say.  And obviously I’m heartily ashamed of Canada’s performance at Copenhagen, which earned us the “Fossil of the Year”  award once again.

Maude Barlow ties all this together, and more, here.

I watched Avatar with my family on New Year’s Day and highly recommend it.  One of my friends described it as a futuristic Pocahontas story that ends well for the natives.  He also found it amusing that the substance for which mankind was willing to lay waste to the beautiful moon of Pandora was called unobtainium.  Spoilers ahead.     Read more »