As he does almost every day of the fall and winter, Ron Gruber heads from his house near UBC down to Spanish Bank Creek yet again this cold sunny Friday. He grabs his binoculars and he makes sure to be there just before the morning’s high tide. Once he is down at the beach, the [...]
A community group is rushing in to save one of the last two wild streams in urban Vancouver. Still Creek, which runs through east Vancouver’s Renfrew Ravine yards away from heavy traffic, has been a habitat for discarded shopping carts and plastic bags. But that’s changing as the Still Moon Arts Society, a community group [...]
A particle accelerator facility at UBC could get the go-ahead to harness its waste heat to warm nearby homes early next year — a project that would be the first of its kind in the world. TRIUMF — a 12-acre nuclear physics lab that accounts for about a quarter of UBC’s total electricity consumption — [...]
Louise Schwarz talks trash or more precisely she talks about the virtues of reducing trash, but it seems condo residents in the eco-friendly Olympic village do not. On July 10, the city funded a pilot project to eliminate food scrap waste in the Olympic village. It set up an easily accessible composting location but all [...]
A low-impact walkway and habitat improvements could be compromise options for a controversial stretch of foreshore in Vancouver’s Kitsilano, where groups have been battling a proposal to extend the city’s seawall. Marine ecologist Jamie Slogan says there doesn’t have to be a black-and-white solution to the debate, which is currently at a standoff between building [...]
Asat Bidu stood in line at Vancouver International Airport (YVR) one afternoon in late March, waiting to check in to her flight to India. She makes the trip with her husband and son every couple of years, transferring through cities like Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Manila along the way. Bidu and her family are [...]
On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground off the coast of Alaska, resulting in the one of the worst ecological disasters in history. The 23rd anniversary of the spill was marked by the gathering of hundreds of people at the Vancouver Art Gallery who, at the same time, voiced their opposition [...]
On a stormy day, angry surf crashes against the Iona Island jetty with enough force to shake its foundations. The jetty is a 4-kilometre needle of land that sticks out into the Strait of Georgia, exposure that ensures it’s in need of constant repair. It costs the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) up to $2.5 [...]
Long before it became the ‘condo city,’ the prized waterfront real estate of Vancouver was home to towering kelp forests, roaming herds of sea urchins and beaches blanketed with shellfish. The creatures that depend on those staples as food — like salmon, sea otters, seals and even whales — were abundant in Vancouver’s waters. Many species have [...]
In December 2011, Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Accord, citing economic reasons. According to a statement by Environment Minister Peter Kent on Environment Canada’s website, the accord “is not the path forward for a global solution to climate change; instead, it is an impediment.” The world consensus through the International Panel for Climate Change reports [...]
