Atlantic Chapter

Give us your best shot for the Halifax Goes Wild photo contest!

Show off your photo skills and the city’s green spaces in our photo contest, with prizes provided by Atlantic Photo Supply. Here's the answers to all your questions about this contest!

 “What kind of photos are you looking for?” – Photos should depict a green space within the municipality. This could be a park, a beach, your own backyard, or more. Photos can have people in them (with their consent), or not, it’s up to you!

It's been a few nights since Nova Scotia's independent fracking review passed through Halifax, addressing a frustrated and distrusting crowd of concerned citizens. These brave PhDs stood before hundreds of people and presented some unpopular conclusions...on an even less popular topic.

Fracking - the controversial process of fracturing shale rock deep underground using a toxic mixture of chemicals in order to retrieve bubbles of natural gas. We've become a profoundly desperate people, haven't we?

The public meeting was held in a lecture hall at King's College. Some people from the audience spoke out of turn, while others simply shouted over the panelists trying to deliver their findings. I was caught between sympathy for the panelists and stark agreeance with the hecklers.

A long awaited roundabout is going to mean the end of some long standing trees on the Halifax Common.

Work is beginning this week on the conversion of the North Park and Cunard Street intersection into a roundabout and will causes significant changes to the surrounding area. Most noticeably this will involve reshaping the intersection into a traffic circle, including the use of some land that was formerly green space on the North Common. 

There's been a moratorium on deep water wells for over a decade on PEI. It was established in 2002 because of major drought conditions that year, linked to the overuse of groundwater by these wells.

They pose a danger to the Island in particular because its residents depends heavily on groundwater. For example, the city of Charlottetown runs entire rivers dry with its water consumption; Winter River hasn't flowed for several summers now. Clearly this is a delicate water table.

When the PEI Potato Board requested the moratorium be lifted in 2012, all fingers were pointed at Cavendish Farms as the motivator behind this request. Potatoes are a thirsty crop and if Cavendish wanted higher yields, they needed to exploit groundwater.

By Zack Metcalfe

zack.metcalfe@gmail.com

The single greatest challenge in my life has always been avoiding despair when facing the mistakes of the last century. Several months ago I read a book called Here On Earth, by Tim Flannery, and in one chapter he describes a terrible mistake made long before I was born. The spent nuclear reactors of Russian power plants were dumped into the Arctic Ocean. Time and tidal forces will eventually penetrate their casings and cause unimaginable harm to the oceans.

Problems like this are beyond my power to rectify, as so many of the world's problems are. I imagine diving into those icy depths and hauling each reactor back onto land, but this is of course ridiculous; perhaps it's a coping mechanism.

Do you know the impact that gardening with native plants can have on local wildlife? Bill Freedman does! As a professor of ecology and long-time practitioner of the principles of naturalization, he wants to spread the word about the benefits of using native plants in your garden. Walking his own talk, Dr. Freedman naturalized his own yard years ago, curating a collection of native plants where a lawn once dwelled, now home to a vibrant collection of greenery, exploding with colour throughout the various growing seasons.