Eileen Delehanty Pearkes has been researching and writing about the history and politics of water in the upper Columbia Basin since 2005.  Her book on the Columbia River Treaty, A River Captured, was released in 2016. Recently, her travelling exhibit on the Columbia River Treaty, curated for Touchstones Nelson, won a national...

At the end of this summer, Wednesday (August 30 2017), the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) will mark exactly 20,000 days of conservation. This milestone provides an opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the work done by NCC and our partners each day, and the conservation we need to accomplish in the 20,000 days to come....

B.C.'s 2017 election will go down in the history books and in more ways than one. The province’s closest election also turned out to be its most expensive. While the final numbers will increase as a few stragglers report and additional candidate spending is tacked on, the B.C. Green party spent $905,000 on its campaign, the...

The opioid crisis is deeply troubling, for many reasons.  One reason is the tragic deaths of so many, so unnecessarily; another reason is the likelihood that those deaths were precipitated by pain, either physical or psychological, that caused a search for relief in the illicit drugs that were fatally used. Another reason is...

Are we entering a new Dark Age? Lately it seems so. News reports are enough to make anyone want to crawl into bed and hide under the covers. But it’s time to rise and shine. To resolve the crises humanity faces, good people must come together. It’s one lesson from Charlottesville, Virginia. It would be easy to dismiss the...

It's the prettiest crosswalk in town.  The lovely set of rainbow colours across Washington Street, by the Rossland Summit School, invites admiration.  And its message is admirable too:  it invites us to accept others without prejudice or intolerance ― without rejecting them on the basis of their appearance,  their religion,...

Premier John Horgan released the following statement about a rally by hate groups taking place on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017 in Vancouver: "Hate has no place in our province. We reject all forms of racism, discrimination, intolerance and bigotry. "Recent events and images from Charlottesville, Virginia were horrifying, and hateful...

Wildfires are sweeping B.C. Close to 900 have burned through 600,000 hectares so far this year, blanketing western North America with smoke. Fighting them has cost more than $230 million — and the season is far from over. It’s not just B.C. Thousands of people from B.C. to California have fled homes as fires rage. Greenland...

How much alcohol should a person be allowed to have in her bloodstream while being in control of a  motor vehicle?  Is there a "safe" limit below which someone is not really impaired, or  not too impaired? Canada's Justice Minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, is considering lowering  the blood-alcohol content limit that constitutes...

This continues the discussion begun in last week's column. Greek Science, Israelite Religion, Human Selfhood Egyptian ideas of a ka and a ba make a distinction between the experience-self [personality] and the animal-being [life-force]. Hebrew words for living being [nephesh hhayyah] and for breath-of-life [ruach] indicate ...