Yesterday, I learned that Dr. Sultan Al Jabar has been appointed president for COP28, the 2023 iteration of the misnamed conference on climate change. Al Jabar is the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology but, more pointedly, also serves as chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the world’s 12th largest…
Tag: Environment
Photographs of Insects in Late Summer Haliburton
In the afternoon light, I wade through the reeds and stalk mature dragonflies and damselflies. As I kneel in the water to photograph a dragonfly on a blade of grass, another settles on my back and sits there until I’m done.
Beavers Cut Down Trees in Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works
When the quarry was first excavated, it exposed a local geological record going back 130,000 years, right down to a bedrock of shale that, itself, is probably half a billion years old. Near the bottom, at the 130,000 year mark, the geologist, Arthur Philemon Coleman, discovered the tooth of a giant beaver.
Self-Control in the Age of Covid-19
There are 478 new infections in Ontario, the most on a single day since May 2nd. This includes 153 new cases in Toronto.There is something about this I find dispiriting. The number itself is not dispiriting so much as what the number tells me about human nature.
Climate Strike
I had seen signs around the downtown core declaring a Global Climate Strike on September 26th 2019. Inspired by the outspoken activism of Swedish high school student, Greta Thunberg…
Holy Ferrari!
I’ve lost my faith. Once, I believed as most believed. It would be a virtue to own a Ferrari. It would be a sign that the gods had smiled upon me and blessed me with prosperity, or at least with the right to carry huge debt servicing charges. But the central myth that fueled that belief has fallen under the march of modernism.
Tommy Thompson Park
One place I like to go when I need to scratch my photographic itch is Tommy Thompson Park on the Leslie Street Spit.
Chorley Park Switchback Trail
So I’m standing above the site of the old quarry behind the Toronto Brickworks, tripod set up with my 70-200 mm, shooting across the ponds and paths below, captivated by the Z cut into the far hill, when I hear a voice behind me: “What are you taking a picture of?”
Thinking About Trees
Just as we tend to sexualize the swan (see my previous post), we tend to anthropomorphize the tree. Like humans, trees have limbs. We often draw or interpret trees as sentinels with arms held up at attention, maybe as a salute to the land, or as a supplication to the sky.
Billboard
Ogden Nash wrote: I think that I shall never seea billboard lovely as a tree.Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,I’ll never see a tree at all. If Nash were alive today, he might update his poem: I think the billboard’s here to staywith its products on display.If you want to see a tree,try Home Depot, aisle…
The Anthropocene Age: The Drowned World & J.G. Ballard
According to the BBC news online, we now live in the Anthropocene period, which is a fancy way of saying humans have so altered the planet’s surface that we’ve left traces of ourselves in its permanent geological record.
Story: Four Billion Year Old Water
It’s been years since I rode in a yellow school bus, the kind that bounces three feet in the air every time it hits a bump, the kind with cracked vinyl seats and a crotchety driver, the kind that can’t stop except with a lurch; and lurch we did when the driver stopped the bus in front of the main building at the Glengrove Nature Preserve.
Arm The Lorax
I took this image by the Eramosa River in Guelph, Ontario. Remember the Lorax? It’s Dr. Seuss.
Ghostbusters – a Privatization Propaganda Film?
On planet Dave, there is a special governmental agency called the Department of Epidemiology and Immigration. I’ve come to regard these two disciplines as sub-specialties of the same concern.
Poem: There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea
A children’s verse takes on a sinister tone when it’s tied to the irresponsible conduct of BP, the world’s 4th largest TNC, an organization which continues to feed us lies even as it becomes apparent that BP has perpetrated one of the worst environmental disasters in history.