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“I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.”

By Chris Wood  Some time back a friend of mine and I were sharing a coffee in downtown Vancouver and worrying at the problem of journalism before the apocalypse. Not the Biblical one; the biological one. It’s hard to look most of the trend lines in our society, our economy, our biosphere, in the eye, and feel happy about where they point. If everything’s going to hell and no-one much is paying attention (because the mainstream media has turned itself over to celebunews), what are a couple of ink-stained wretches from the old school to do? My friend found part

City of St. John’s

Offshore supply vessels dock at the old port in  St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Billed as the “Oldest City in North America” it was once the cross roads of trans-Atlantic shipping, communications and  fishing commerce. Now its economy is driven as the base of operations for the offshore oil and gas industry in the northwest Atlantic ocean. Photo by Greg Locke © 2013 (click photo enlarge)

Wood: Philippines typhoon a taste of the future

For Chris Wood‘s family, the typhoon and aftermath that devastated the Philippines is personal: his nephew was  in its path. Only one brief text, after the storm passed, has provided reassurance that Leighton Wood and his family were fine. Wood warns that unless we take action, many more families and communities will needlessly suffer freak weather events. “If Yolanda/Haiyan is not yet a smoking gun for climate change, it is where our climate is going, and our natural security policy responses are not keeping up,” writes Wood in today’s Natural Security column, then outlines what needs fixing. Excerpt: I’ve spent a

BC Butts Out

Vancouver, Canada’s west-coast big city, is known globally as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, as North America’s (and one of the world’s) most expensive places, as the birthplace of Greenpeace, home to the world’s first automated-teller-machine to swap cash for bitcoin virtual currency, and as a production centre for a strain of hydroponically-grown marijuana known as BC Bud. Today the city claimed another “first:” it installed 110 receptacles to recycle cigarette butts. The butts, which litter the landscape and often end up in the ocean to poison sea life, will be made into building materials, among other things, by TerraCycle,

What Might Have Been

By Brian Brennan The recent headlines in Canadian newspapers have been all about things that didn’t happen. In Toronto, the headlines have been about a mayor who didn’t step aside or undertake to seek help after admitting he’d smoked crack cocaine while “in a drunken stupor.” In Ottawa, they’ve been about three government appointees to the Canadian Senate who didn’t do the honourable thing and resign after auditors found they had fiddled their expenses. (The miscreants have since been expelled.) In Calgary, they’ve been about an Olympic-ranked Canadian speed skater who failed to win a medal in a routine World Cup

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