If you’re a Canadian who cares about things like uncontaminated beauty and sustaining human life on earth, you should stand up and demand that the Alberta’s tar sands be shut down.
The latest news out of Alberta is that a flock of five hundred migratory ducks are drowning [Update: have drowned] in a massive pool of thick sludge, the ever-growing byproduct of one of the dirtiest engineering projects on earth.
The oil sands are licensed to use more fresh water in a year than the entire City of Calgary (about the same size as Austin, Texas) and 90% of that fresh water ends up in massive tailing ponds, so large that that they are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.
Forget the term ‘tailing pond’. Let’s call these things what they really are: pollution pits. The largest pollution pits in the world. In the Canadian wilderness. What an embarrassment.
(Remember what pits like this have already done to Canadians?)
And all this for an inefficient source of energy that even our mighty American customers are saying is too dirty?
Please do your part towards making sure that the tar sands get shut down.
(Image found over at oneearth.org)
[Update: To provide a degree of context, here’s the number of dead ducks that we’re talking about…]
April 25th, 2008
You may have spotted me getting beat up by John Cleese in a Just For Laughs gala, you may have noticed me sitting one over from the late-great Heath Ledger in I’m Not There, but I’ve just received word that I will be playing my biggest smallest role ever in the upcoming Black Flag Pictures hilariously B-movie flavoured film, Crawler. (I think I’m going to be the bull dozer deliveryman… )
The Black Flag site is here and the teaser trailer is below…
April 24th, 2008
Terrible news out of B.C. yesterday as the CBC reports that yet another ‘positive’ climate change feedback loop has been activated, accelerating the Earth’s rush towards full-blown climate crisis.
Warmer weather has allowed pine beetle populations to spread far and wide across British Columbia’s Central Interior region, turning a once effective forest-based carbon sink into a carbon smokestack. The article quotes estimates that the beetle will wipe out 80% of the pine forest in the next five years. And what does that mean…
Canadian Forest Service scientist Werner Kurz estimates the beetle’s devastation will release almosta billion megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020. That’s equivalent to about five years of emissions from Canada’s transportation sector, said Kurz.
What’s it going to take to start moving information like this from the science page to the front page? (More info here.)
April 23rd, 2008
I was recently reminded that the big book draft that darkened my doorway on Friday isn’t technically my first book… That dubious honour belongs to the soporific 8000 Series Components Manual. (Click the link for a free copy!)
When I graduated with a computer engineering degree from the Royal Military University in 1996 I knew a few things: the Canadian military was stuck in a massive rut and I wanted to go somewhere to combine my green writing and technology skills.
My first step down the writing/tech path was to become the Junior Technical Writer at Tundra Semiconductor Corporation. The dot-com boom was on and considering the mundaneness of the things we got into from day-to-day, they were fairly exciting times. I was young, flush with cash, given stock options and an expense account. The experience financed my move to Montreal and the purchase of the duplex that I’m happily ensconced in at this very moment.
One of my first jobs at Tundra was to touch up the 8000 Series manual right before they decided to discontinue that product line forever. Part of that job entailed drawing up a couple of schematics. As a non-artist, non-Adobe Illustrator guy, I remember being particularly proud when I finally figured out how to make the correct curves on a tricky little 28-pin SOIC package. (And no, I no longer have any idea what an SOIC package is…)
Hopefully the success of my second book will surpass that of my first…
April 19th, 2008
I haven’t really spoken about it here, but I spent much of last year and the beginning of this year writing my first novel. So far the book-writing process has been both highly satisfying and deeply maddening. Luckily the highs have outnumbered the lows. And one of those highs came on Friday via the mail.
For all of its life so far the book that I’ve been writing has only existed in my head and on the computer screen. No one else (including my best buddy life-partner) has seen or read a word of it… Until now. [Cue the dramatic music.]
Late last night after piloting our new electric scooter through the mean streets of Montreal, Jeanne and I laid eyes on the first-ever printed pages of The Virus Makers.
I finished the first draft of this Young Adult novel at the end of March and my soccer-loving, boy-fathering, cousin-in-law Peter Coles kindly offered to print it up for me. Pete’s the VP of Sales and Marketing at Arcprint (and imaging) and it seemed appropriate that the book be birthed back in Vancouver where I first started writing it in the spring of 2006.
I’ll speak more about the book in, I’m sure, way too many subsequent posts, but for now I just want to fête the newly corporeal block of text that is the first draft of The Virus Makers!
Terrible news out of B.C. yesterday as the CBC reports that yet another ‘positive’ climate change feedback loop has been activated, accelerating the Earth’s rush towards full-blown climate crisis.
I was recently reminded that the 
