Weather websites and municipalities are issuing air quality alerts because of the smoke coming from several uncontrolled forest fires, and yet people in cottage country just a few hours north of Toronto have smokepits going all day, presumably so they won’t be bothered by mosquitoes. Never mind that said smokepits fill the whole neighbourhood with …
Category: environment
Feb 19 2021
from We are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer
Reason to stop eating meat (well, would’ve been that back in the 70s … now, well, it’s reason to accept the blame, to feel the guilt for our demise … ): “Globally, humans use 59 percent of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock.” (p79) “One-third of all the fresh …
Jan 26 2021
Excerpts from The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, David Wallace-Wells
“In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his …
Jan 15 2021
“332 litres of gasoline and oil are dumped over each and every one of the 49,000 kilometres of [snowmobile] trail …
Read the whole piece here: http://www.pinecone.on.ca/MAGAZINE/stories/the-well-groomed-trail.html
Dec 18 2020
Why the fuck are ATVs, jetskis, snowmobiles still legal?
“By 2050 at the latest, and ideally before 2040, we must have stopped emitting more greenhouse gases [typically caused by the burning of fossil fuels] into the atmosphere than Earth can naturally absorb through its ecosystems (a balance known as net-zero emissions or carbon neutrality). In order to get to this scientifically established goal, our …
Nov 08 2020
Hunting – simply unjustified
It’s hunting season again — moose for a week, then deer for two weeks — and I have yet to hear an acceptable justification. The animals are having enough trouble surviving because of what we’ve done, and what we’re still doing, to the forests. And now you want to just go out and kill them. …
Sep 29 2019
Business, Responsibility, and the Environment
The following is the introduction to Chapter 10, Business and the Environment, of my business ethics text, Ethical Issues in Business 2e, Peg Tittle (Broadview Press, 2016). I post it here, motivated by the recent astounding meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, and the reports that the Alaska glaciers are melting 100 times faster than …
Aug 10 2018
Noise Trespass
We need a noise trespass law. At the very least, the concept of noise trespass should be as familiar among the general population as physical trespass. Why is going onto someone’s private property without permission (physical trespass) considered a wrong? Because doing so is intrusive (presuming a right to privacy) and potentially damaging. The same …
Jul 10 2018
Blind to Natural Beauty
Living in a world in which most people are blind to natural beauty is so painful. What little beauty there is left so often gets destroyed, irrevocably, without a thought. After polite requests and rational explanations, I simply beg, Please don’t, but they just smile at me, with incomprehension, perhaps amused by my apparently baseless …
Jul 01 2018
Life as We Know It
So I noticed this morning the birds are gone. They used to wake me up every morning around five o’clock and since I’d just gone to bed at two or three, I’d roll over, put in my earplugs, and go back to sleep. And I just realized that I haven’t had to do this for…must …
fiction
