Cities

As a Canadian I live in a country that has abundant resources, lots of freshwater, lots of energy, lots of food, a reasonable but aging infrastructure, and government and political leadership that is generally out to lunch when it comes to understanding the global issue of climate cha

Last week I finished reading Al Gore’s latest tome, a follow up to his well publicized “An Inconvenient Truth,” probably his most significant contribution to the global climate change debate, although I would think “debate” is an over statement at this st

Whole Foods, a grocery store located in Brooklyn, New York, is in the process of putting an 1,850 square meter (20,000 square feet) greenhouse on its roof in response to customer requests for locally grown fresh produce. The store is partnering with Gotham Greens, a company in Brookly

As I was reading my morning paper today I came across a quote from Robert Friedland, an entrepreneur and mining engineer who in giving a speech to the MineAfrica event of the Prospectors and Developers Association annual conference being held in my hometown of Toronto, talked about th

Humans are hard-wired social creatures. We have always organized ourselves starting with nuclear families and extending to formal and informal groupings such as tribes, gangs, clubs, political parties, nations and religions. Today we are on a macro level politically organized around t

What a world of contrasts – the emerging China of the 21st Century. Trying to control the message and what its citizens read and see while dealing with domestic environmental challenges fed by a burgeoning urban population and rising middle class seeking the North American lifes

We live on Lifeboat Earth. Our sea is the Universe. To be ignorant of this is to ignore the potential consequences of our bad behavior and its impact on the boat. We have to stop putting spikes in the bottom of it otherwise we will eventually sink. Instead we need to protect every squ

In previous postings on this blog site I have described the changing face of our world cities both in the Developed and Developing World. Much of human population growth is in urban centres. In the Developing World, A mass migration from rural to urban settings is creating a housing a

I live in Toronto, a city on one of the Great Lakes of Canada, Lake Ontario. Is climate change going to be an issue for my home, a mid-latitude city with over 5 million, far from any seacoast, far from Tornado Alley in the United States, and in today’s climate, a place with reli