By Chris Wood, Natural Security columnist How wide to cast the net when examining the environmental damage a proposed industrial development might do, is a contested issue. In Canada, panels weighing the impacts of proposed oil pipelines from Alberta to
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CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITY June, 2015 Canada’s heavy-handed ‘security’ strategy is a sham. That statement may be true in a number of readings, ranging from motive to likely outcome (more inflamed zealots with an excuse for violence on Canadian soil). But the sense
By Chris Wood Does a Canadian provincial government have any responsibility to protect your natural security? Nope. Nada. Rien. It can pretty much do as it likes, wrecking your water and any other part of the environment that it likes in the
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITY May, 2015 It’s hard to know what to make of the news that Pope Francis is planning an encyclical on climate change. On one hand, any intervention that pushes us to save the climate our species grew up with
It’s not unusual for environmental risk to come up at the World Economic Forum, held this month in Davos, notes Natural Security columnist Chris Wood. “What appears to be harder for the high-net-worth and high-power-quotient individuals meeting in the Alps to accept, is
Natural Security columnist Chris Wood is not impressed with this week’s much-trumpeted deal between China and the United States. He writes: “optimists greeted with hosannas the announcement that the Presidents Obama of the United States and Xi of China had agreed to a
Systems approaching the brink display some common features, and sometimes thresholds give advance warning, writes Chris Wood in his new Natural Security column. They recover more slowly from disruption; “in-state fluctuations” become wilder and less predictable; conditions “flicker” rapidly from one state to another.
Oddly, the new column by Natural Security columnist Chris Wood brought to my mind a sign outside a university chemistry lab when, a lifetime ago, I was studying biology. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” it quipped. It’s
“It’s one of those authorless pieces of universal wisdom: When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging,” writes Chris Wood. We have dug ourselves to the bottom of a hole — but there
To simply report on news about Israel is to enter a minefield. To comment is to invite extreme reactions of a sort experienced in few other issues. This week F&O columnists Chris Wood and Jonathan Manthorpe enter the fray with thoughtful, informed
By Chris Wood, Natural Security columnist How wide to cast the net when examining the environmental damage a proposed industrial development might do, is a contested issue. In Canada, panels weighing the impacts of proposed oil pipelines from Alberta to the Pacific