Category Archives: Environment

Stewart Brand and the Nuclear Renaissance that Should Not Be

By Lisa Rumiel Note: Again, the author would like to thank Linda Richards for her helpful comments and suggestions in preparing this article. It is time to stop claiming that a nuclear renaissance is the solution to the current environmental crisis.  I’m talking to you, Stewart Brand.  A sort of Nostradamus of technological and environmental thought, Brand is one of… Read more »

Announcements

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This week, we have announcements concerning Earth Week, a new educational website for Chinese Canadian women’s history, a documentary on Chinese people and the CPR, as well as the Left History theme issue on Active History!

From Fukushima to Chernobyl: Bringing the Past to Bear on the Future

A historian’s reflections on the long-term consequences of the world’s four major nuclear energy disasters.

Historians and Global Warming

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As part of a small but growing number of environmental historians exploring the relationship between climatic changes and human affairs, Dagomar Degroot discusses how he is drawn into modern debates about global warming whether he likes it or not.

2012 Olympic Park: Remediating the Environmental and Social Conditions

Will the 2012 Olympics force the poorer people living in the Lower Lea Valley to relocate as the environmental conditions improve.

Buy Domestic, Buy Local, Buy Union? Historical Lessons for Today’s Consumer Activists

A look at some of the problems with current consumer activist campaigns and some lessons we can learn from the past.

Ecological Indigenization: Buffalo-Clad Imperialists at the 49th Parallel

Scrub oak speaks: It speaks Sioux. It speaks Anishinaabe. English now. Maybe – since Trudeau – it even learned some French. If you listen carefully, beneath the roar of stories about colonialism, it will whisper we were here, we were here.

If you go out to the woods today….From the “rest cure in a canoe” to “nature deficit disorder”

“In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.” Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder (7) In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder journalist and child activist Richard Louv defends his argument about the need to… Read more »

New ActiveHistory.ca Paper – Cancun Summit: The True Reasons for the ‘Failure’ of the Green Movement by Jean-François Mouhot

As the 2010 UN Climate summit in Cancun seems unlikely to make any significant advances, the green movement has been blamed for failing to convince the public that action on climate change is both urgent and necessary, in particular because of its refusal of technologies such as nuclear energy and geo-engineering. However, looking at a previous period of “boom and… Read more »

Archival Activism: from House of Amnesia to House of Memory

This post was also published on the NiCHE website I am a new arrival to Kingston, Ontario. I have been tossed into the ‘gown’ tribe, mingling with the many curious and creative folks at Queen’s University. Every day I walk from my home on the ‘north’ side, across the central town artery known as Princess Street, to the university campus…. Read more »