Topics – Environment

From resource extraction to climate chaos and food sovereignty, the environment is a topic that defies human-made borders like no other. Industrial capitalism and its dependency on unhindered, never-ending growth represents a sustained assault on the Earth and its inhabitants. In this context, seekers of environmental justice have their work cut out for them. Here, you’ll find stories on agriculture, food, environmental racism, resource extraction, climate change and more.

  • Flooded and forgotten

    Hydro development makes a battleground of northern Manitoba

    Around much of northern Manitoba, “hydro” is a dirty word, and for good reason. These projects have reconfigured the landscape of the entire region, drying whole rivers and engorging lakes.

  • Canadian mining on trial

    Murder, impunity and Pacific Rim in El Salvador

    As a court battle ensues between the Salvadoran government and Canadian mining company Pacific Rim, the disappearances and murders of anti-mining activists are a tangible manifestation of the lack of respect for individual and collective rights in the face of highly lucrative development projects.

  • Stepping up for future generations

    An interview with northern Saskatchewan residents resisting a nuclear waste dump on their land

    In summer 2011, several people from communities in northern Saskatchewan walked 820 kilometres from Pinehouse to Regina to raise awareness about the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in the province, and to oppose a proposed nuclear waste dump near Pinehouse. This is an excerpt from their radio interview with Don Kossick following the walk.

  • The next generation of land defenders

    5 young people step up against nuclear waste

    Meet the youth at the heart of a movement to raise awareness about a proposed nuclear waste dump near their communities. These five young people participated in an 820-kilometre walk from Pinehouse to Regina, Saskatchewan to oppose the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in the province.

  • Recipe for disaster

    Biotechnology, industrialization and Canadian culpability in rural Vietnam

    Monsanto is among a handful of powerful multinationals that, with the support of Western governments, including Canada’s, are priming Vietnam to become a hotbed of biotechnology development, with potentially devastating consequences for its land and people.

  • Peak oil for preteens

    Book review

    Claudia Dávila’s debut graphic novel, Luz Sees the Light, sets Luz and her friends on a path to transform their fossil-fueled world.

  • From the ground up

    Meet the women at the forefront of their communities’ transition from forestry to farming

    On the West Coast, agriculture has always taken a back seat to logging, which has generated a lot of money for folks in these company towns. Now, as the export-the-trees-and-import-everything-else economy seems to be running out of steam, there’s renewed interest in small-scale farming as both a way to make a living and as a community resource. And in contrast to the decades of focus on the male-dominated forest industry, this movement is in many cases being led by women.

  • Oil and water don’t mix

    Dakelh communities defend their watercourses from Enbridge

    On September 8, 2010, more than 500 people marched through Dakelh Territory in downtown Prince George, British Columbia, in a protest led by the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project.

  • Fracturing solidarity

    The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement in context

    When representatives from environmental organizations took the stage last May together with logging industry groups to promote what they billed as a new deal to protect Canada’s boreal forest, the announcement came as a surprise to Indigenous peoples across the country.

  • We say no

    Tsilhqot’in stand united against Taseko Mines

    Last November, hundreds of people gathered in the community of Tlet’inqox to thank the land defenders and praise the federal government’s decision to turn down Taseko Mines’ Prosperity project, a proposed gold and copper mine on Tsilhqot’in territory in northern B.C.