I spent the first weeks of 2017 in New Zealand, celebrating my son’s wedding to a Kiwi girl.  After the wedding, my wife and I drove around some of that beautiful country, enjoying the beaches, birds, wines and green grass of summer.  Fresh apricots in January were a real treat!...

Mere hours before the New York Times went to press with its look at the B.C. Liberal party's ethical scorecard, the party chose to get its 2016 fundraising results out ahead of the storm. One last chance at political counter-spin and what a marvel of spin it was. U.S. Republican party strategist Karl Rove would have been...

The Art of the Possible Politics has been called an art, at universities it’s called science, but whatever we call it, its fascination is perennial. Aristotle simply summed up we humans as “political animals” and that seems appropriate....

The lighter’s flame touches the end of your cigarette; you take a deep drag and the warm smoke enters your lungs. If it’s your first cigarette, you might instantly find it harder to breathe. The smoke tastes heavy and robust, not entirely unpleasant and reminiscent of drinking coffee for the first time. Then comes the nicotine...

If you fly over a forest and look down, you’ll see every green tree and plant reaching to the heavens to absorb the ultimate energy source: sunlight. What a contrast when you look down on a city or town with its naked roofs, asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks, all ignoring the sun’s beneficence! Research shows we might...

    As has been pointed out by too many people, 2016 was a devastating year for progressives (a homely term for all those who are want equality, democracy and ecological sanity). There is no need to repeat the list of atrocities, failures and disappointments, as we all have them indelibly marked on our psyches....

There, a nice picture of a cat. Now for some of the stuff we'd rather ignore, even if that's not a very smart move. In Ruth Ozeki's 1998 novel "My Year of Meats" the main character ponders ignorance and explains, "ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms...

Hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but 2017 is an election year in British Columbia. On the presumption they're not the same thing, government and election ads should be over by the Stanley Cup semi-finals. There are bits of unfinished business the B.C. government could attend to in the meantime, though. Just as there are...

The longer we delay addressing environmental problems, the more difficult it will be to resolve them. Although we’ve known about climate change and its potential impacts for a long time, and we’re seeing those impacts worsen daily, our political representatives are still approving and promoting fossil fuel infrastructure as...

...