James Glave

When Times Are Hard, Eat Your Yard!

I recently spent a few days in Seattle--one of my favorite American cities--and was amazed to discover how many homeowners have planted victory gardens in their front yards. In much of America, the front yard is the place for a few roses, maybe a rhodo or two. But in Seattle, ...

How To Compost a Corpse

My first piece for The Walrus is up on the magazine's site. Here's an excerpt: Squirrels, it turns out, compost quite nicely. Small birds? Sure. Happens in the woods every day, after all. But stuff a human body into a backyard bin, and within a day or so the neighbours will ...

Backstage Tour at a Run-of-River Plant

Last week, Plutonic Power--one of Western Canada's largest green-power developers--invited me and a few other journalists to tour a 123-megawatt run-of-river project that the company is building at the top end of the Toba Valley, about 110 miles due northwest of Vancouver. In essence, these projects capture the kinetic energy of ...

The Beach Yields A Secret

A few weeks back, I found this artifact on a beach here on Bowen Island while grabbing fistfuls of stones to toss into the sea. It is very weathered, from many decades spent being tossed around in the surf. It appears to be an arrowhead or spear point of First ...

Portland’s Mayor on the “20-minute Neighborhood”

Notes from "Active Transportation in Portland," a lecture by Portland Mayor Sam Adams, at the SFU City Program, Vancouver, earlier this evening. - Stats: Population 570,00. 143 square miles, surrounded by urban growth boundary. - Sam is the mayor but also the city's transportation commissioner. - Out of 143 square miles, 73 ...

I’m “For Bowen.” (But Not Your Bowen.)

A petition is presently circulating through my community; it opposes a proposed development on the grounds that it is "far too big for our island." The Cape Roger Curtis Neighborhood Plan has its shortcomings, sure, but also its strengths—including space set aside for a seniors care facility, affordable housing, community ...

Are You an Atmosphan?

I've been mulling over in my head potential replacements for the word "environmentalist," a term that in the minds of many needs to be retired, then sent home with a pension and a gold watch. Why? Maybe it's that it's just not a very inspiring word. Maybe it's that the term ...

Collapse Anxiety: It’s Okay to Feel It

I've never been so good at the whole relentless optimism thing. So I'll just come out and admit it: I'm feeling pretty anxious these days. It's an odd twinge in my gut telling me that—despite the assurances from economists who swear up and down that "these things are cyclical"—that the ...

The Future of Influence

Liveblog on "The Future of Influence" talk, by Nate Elliott, Principal analyst, Forrester Research, Northern Voice Conference, Vancouver B.C, February 21 2009 - In my line of work, I hear a lot of people asking me about word-of-mouth marketing. But power of consumer influence been around for centuries: Tupperware, Amway, Avon. ...

Rees’s Thesis

What's the best way to stump one of the greatest minds of the global sustainability movement? Kidnap him and take him to Wal-Mart. That's what I did last November, when I took Bill Rees—the University of British Columbia professor who coined the term "ecological footprint"--into the belly of the consumer ...