Category: environment

“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

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 …

Continue reading

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. …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

Private Property and Visual Intrusion

There should be regulations about what people can put on their private property that will be in view of their neighbours.  Even more than in public spaces, visual material on private property is not easily avoided.  If you put a swastika or a pornographic image on your garage door, and that door is right across …

Continue reading

New and Improved

‘New and improved’ is not just a bit of harmless puffery; it’s a two-party addiction.  Stupid consumers must have and stupid companies must produce – new and improved stuff.  And it hurts third parties.  Such as the animals who are used to test a product every time it changes, every time it becomes new and …

Continue reading

On Power Outages in the Middle of Nowhere

I live in a cabin on a lake in the forest.  You’d think that whenever the power goes out, there would be silence.  Lovely silence.  And lovely dark.  And there is.  For all of thirty seconds.  Then everyone’s backup generator goes on.  And for the next five, ten, twenty, or forty-eight hours, I hear engine …

Continue reading