Canada

by Susan McVittie

Deceased batteries from your TV remote, smoke detector and many household appliances no longer need to go to the landfill where they can leach toxic chemicals into the ground. The BC Ministry of Environment has mandated a battery recycling pro­gram. In partnership with Call2Re­cycle, all household batteries under 11 pounds (five kg) – including re­chargeable, alkaline, cell phones and household appliances can be dropped off at nearly 1,500 collection locations across the province.

It seems that much of humanity has very little in­terest in any recovery or concern for future generations.

by Don Malcolm

To many people on planet Earth, it must be apparent that we are hell-bent on using up or consuming

Findings from Clearcutting Canada's Rainforests

• In the vast majority of logging sites over 80 per cent of the trees were removed;
• Only four per cent of fish-bearing streams in logging sites had protective stream-side buffers;
• In the majority of sites not enough trees were left behind to sustain species or habitat that depend on old-growth forests.

by Rob Wiltzen

The federal government kicked off 2011 with announcements of $278 million in pulp mill subsidies from the Green Transformation Fund. The grants for mills in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and New Brunswick push the disbursement of the allocated one billion dollars in pulp mill black liquor subsidies to $591 million. 

The Fund was created in June of 2009 in response to US subsidies of pulp mills based on their usage of the pulp mill by-product, black liquor, as fuel – a standard practice in kraft pulp mills. [See “Greed and Black Liquor Fuel Pulp Trade Wars,” November 2009, and www.millwatch.ca for

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s proclaimed in January that environmental and other “radical groups” are trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy, so on Vancouver Island citizen activists are upholding their reputation as outspoken defenders of the wild.

by Joe Foy

“Wanna buy a t-shirt?” I turned to look across the

When you coat a shell with it, it slices through armoured plating as if it was cheese, turning tanks, buildings and bomb shelters into exploding incinerators.

It causes cancer among people who breathe its dust, or touch it. It causes horrible birth defects among the babies of pregnant women who breathe it or touch it. It causes a host of chronic ailments and sicknesses among returning troops.

Wild nature and commerce can live side by side if the landscape is shared. Damaged landscapes can be “rewilded” by protecting the land and creating linked wilderness parks.

by Joe Foy

I write this column sitting at a picnic table beside a little beach on Lake of the Woods at Kenora, Ontario. Our family summer va­cation this year has entailed a Trans­Canada Highway trip to Winnipeg to attend a wedding – then further east to points unknown. So far it has been a great odyssey across the amazing southern Canadian landscape.

We left our home at New West­minster in a heatwave, then motored on along the mighty Fraser River to Hope, then wound up the Coquihalla to fresh coolness at the summit of the Cascade Range.

Down the eastern slope, we descended into the tawny grasslands of Merritt, then over the mountains and