- An Outside Chance

ruffled feathers

PHOTO POST Where have the Herons gone? Through the month of May I wondered: isn’t the marsh looking and sounding kind of empty? As I make my local rounds I’m often achingly aware that many bird species are in decline, across the continent and around the world. This year, there has been the added danger … Read More

Building car-dependent neighborhoods

Also published on Resilience Car-dependent neighbourhoods arise in a multi-level framework of planning, subsidies, advertising campaigns and cultural choices. After that, car dependency requires little further encouragement. Residents are mostly “locked-in”, since possible alternatives to car transport are either dangerous, unpleasant, time-consuming, or all three. At the same time, municipal officials have strong incentives to … Read More

Recipes for car dependency

Also published on Resilience A car-dependent society isn’t built overnight. It takes concerted effort by multiple levels of government and industry to make private cars the go-to, all-but-obligatory choice for everyday personal transportation. If you want to see what car dependency looks like on a map, you need to look at a regional or neighbourhood … Read More

How parking ate North American cities

Also published on Resilience Forty-odd years ago when I moved from a small village to a big city, I got a lesson in urbanism from a cat who loved to roam. Navigating the streets late at night, he moved mostly under parked cars or in their shadows, intently watching and listening before quickly crossing an … Read More

bumblebee and scilla

PHOTO POST Which is prettier, a Wood Duck or a Bumblebee? The reddish orange of a Robin’s breast, or the orangey red of Staghorn Sumach fruit? The sunrise or the sunset? This April there’s no need to pick answers to silly questions – there’s a different beauty around every corner. Closest to home, at just … Read More

waves of spring

PHOTO POST Spring comes with a splash, and it comes with a sigh. The first Red-winged Blackbirds and Robins arrived several cold weeks ago. On calm mornings the air rings with the songs and screeches of many recent arrivals, but nest-building is just beginning. Even the cold-weather stalwarts – gulls, the winter ducks, geese and … Read More

What we know, and don’t know, about bees

Also published on Resilience It will be several more weeks before bees start visiting flowers in my part of the world. But while I wait for gardens and meadows to come alive again, it’s been a joy to read Stephen Buchmann’s new book What a Bee Knows. (Island Press, March 2023) Buchmann sets the scene in … Read More

fragile february

PHOTO POST A few days of very early spring, brief periods when it felt like the depths of winter – and now and then, a few days somewhere between those extremes. February, we hardly knew you. Not many of the diving ducks which typically winter here have been hanging around Port Darlington this year. Perhaps … Read More

A road map that misses some turns

A review of No Miracles Needed Also published on Resilience Mark Jacobson’s new book, greeted with hosannas by some leading environmentalists, is full of good ideas – but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The book is No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air … Read More

Profits of Utopia

Also published on Resilience What led to the twentieth century’s rapid economic growth? And what are the prospects for that kind of growth to return? Taken together, two new books go a long way toward answering the first of those questions. Bradford J. DeLong intends his Slouching Towards Utopia to be a “grand narrative” of … Read More

Lost in traffic: does your time count?

Also published on Resilience Traffic congestion studies make for quick and easy news articles, but they don’t even begin to calculate the true time lost to car culture. The news story practically wrote itself: Toronto was ranked 7th worst among world cities for traffic congestion in 2022. A web search showed similar stories popping up … Read More

the north side of a storm

PHOTO POST On this edge of Lake Ontario the wind did blow, but for the most part the snow did not fall. The great Christmas storm of 2022 brought us gale-force winds for thirty-six hours but very little snow. At the height of the storm there was almost as much sand as snow blowing across … Read More