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At the start of the semester, I opened it up for students to ask me questions. One of the questions was what is the hardest thing about teaching sustainability. Without missing a beat, I responded, “the despair.” I kind of joked about it afterwards, but the despair people feel is really serious and, as Bird … Continue reading
Many years ago, I heard about a city that made public transit free and ridership went up. This is a dream from a sustainability perspective. Make transit free, get people out of cars, decrease emissions, road wear, so much. Right? Fielbaum (2024) asked who rides the bus when it’s free and the findings show how … Continue reading
I had to book a flight recently and I “splurged” and paid the whole $5 or something around that to offset my carbon from the flight. This got me thinking about the impacts that offset might have. While the offset makes me feel a little bit better about the flight that I am taking, I … Continue reading
Driving through Jasper National Park in the last few weeks was a sobering experience. The scale of the destruction caused by the Jasper Complex fire is overwhelming. As a result, it was hard not to reflect on the reasons behind the scale of the fire. Climate change and wildfire is one of the more difficult … Continue reading
Sometimes, I just type random search terms into Google Scholar to see what papers pop up. Not going to lie; I was surprised by this one: Role of flying cars in sustainable mobility by Kasliwal and colleagues (2019). Flying cars? This is definitely not an area that I have kept up to date on since … Continue reading
We are currently in a heat wave. It has been intense, although I know that it pales in comparison to heat waves in other regions of the world. Sharing my space with both dogs and cats, I have been very careful to keep them healthy in this weather. Lots of available water, frozen treats, no … Continue reading
As a biology student at university, I was definitely left with the impression that humans were bad for diversity in the non-human world. This is a very colonial belief, one that had a huge impact on how nature was treated when European colonizers came to places like North America. I’ve discussed this before in a … Continue reading
I created a post a few years ago about what is “The Environment”? I’m working on updating this post. I’ve integrated it into the open textbook (freely available) Introduction to Sustainability. Based on some recent learnings and realizations, I have been challenging my view of this even more. This led me to an article by … Continue reading
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments introduced policies that temporarily restricted individual freedoms to bring transmission rates down. The combination of things shutting down or at least being less crowded, masking, and vaccination rates brought rates down. But, this created a reduced understanding of risk. The perception by some was that rates … Continue reading
I live in a higher-latitude city. We have cold winters with temperatures dropping to below freezing for several months with days when the temperature falls below -40 (which happens to be the point when Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature scales meet). We can also have warm summers with temperatures rising above +30 C (86 F). This … Continue reading
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