Conservation and Travel Journalist
The health of the Shubenacadie River is time and again the focus of resistance to Alton Gas, the Stewiacke company intent on hollowing out local salt caverns and dumping the resulting brine into this fragile watershed. A local geologist, however, is equally concerned with the caverns themselves.
Continue reading “Written In Stone: Nova Scotian Geologist Unsure of Alton Gas”
I’ve worked several newsrooms in my time, always at small rural papers and always as the only man on staff. As a consequence I became the de facto sports reporter, expected to assemble an entire section of the paper with photos, scores, interviews with players and coaches, and my insights on the worlds of hockey, rugby, soccer, basketball and softball, every week, entirely without supervision.
Several years back, while serving as sole reporter for a small community paper on Prince Edward Island, I was handed a very troubling calendar, distributed by a provincial home heating company whose mainstay was natural gas (methane). I flipped through month after month and discovered enough half-truths or outright falsehoods in its margins to seriously mislead anyone on the role natural gas plays in global warming. This calendar claimed, in no uncertain terms, that the burning of methane was good for the planet.
Continue reading “The Methane Myth: Natural Gas and Its Impact on Our Carbon Footprint”
I never thought we’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel like this. While Nova Scotian forests once yielded European fleets and world class lumber, today they have been degraded so completely that, in our desperation to continue the roller-coaster ride of clearcut forestry, we’ve begun chopping down the scraps and torching them for electricity, a process known commonly as biomass.