Water

Shower with a Friend

FOR MOST CANADIANS, energy efficiency is synonymous with light bulbs. Switching to compact fluorescents might be simple and inexpensive, but it is not the only cost-effective way to reduce energy use in homes, businesses and utilities. Reducing water use, especially the hot stuff that flows from showers and cleans our […]

Taming of the Hogs

IS IT JUST ME or has energy replaced child pop star Justin Bieber as this year’s hot topic? There are advertisements for clean energy on television, signs on the side of the road about wind farms, newspaper headlines describing yet another catastrophic oil spill, and Oprah is asking me to […]

Water House Rules

FROM VANCOUVER ISLAND’S southern Seymour mountain range to its dry eastern coast, the Cowichan River drains a 930-square-kilometre landscape – an area a little smaller than Ontario’s Prince Edward County. With its rural charm and boast as Canada’s warmest locale (its name means “warm land” in the local Hul’qumi’num language), […]

Editorial: Reversing the Flow

This issue of Alternatives focuses on water soft paths. For most people this statement invites the question: What are water soft paths? Though noun and adjective have been reversed, water soft paths share a common heritage with the soft energy paths developed in the 1970s by a group of researchers […]

This Soil, This Water book review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

This Soil, This Water

Like the landscape it aims to preserve, the inherent power of This Soil, This Water comes from returning to and lingering- in its open spaces, nourishing colours and stoic wisdom. Environmental issues and controversies are certainly plentiful in 2012, but few books take aim with such subtle effectiveness, leaving room […]

Creative Community Organizing book review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

The Agitator’s Library

With the worldwide explosion of the Occupy movement, and related Indignado protests in Europe, renewed attention has focused on the possibility of a new high water mark in the push for social change. Each of these four books approaches issues of social change from different perspectives, all drawing from a […]