Blog

The Keele St. Tank Farm: A report from Sentinel Road

This little blog is co-written by Anna Zalik and myself. We hope to do more cross-posted "reports from Sentinel Road" about issues that are of interest to both of us. Here's the same piece on Anna's blog. February 15, 2012, Updated: November, 2012 In July 2010, the Toronto Transit Commission recommended that City Council exempt […]

Wildfire Canada 2012

Wildfire Canada 2012 has just finished. I presented some speculations titled "What if we couldn't fight fire?" It was the beginnings of a study based on simulation using PROMETHEUS (the Canadian Wildland Fire Growth Model) to look at what would happen if the fires we currently fight were left to grow freely. Turns out that […]

Sustainable energy in the movies

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Summer movie season is over and it's back to school. I don't know whether anyone noticed, but this summer movies were full of references to sustainable energy. I thought that was interesting, since political culture seems to be moving away from it. 1. In the Avengers, Tony Stark (Iron Man) had just completed a "clean […]

Haiti's New Dictatorship

After maintaining two separate sets of interests, scientific and political, for the past 12 years, I am finally publishing an academic book on a political topic, specifically Haiti's New Dictatorship with Pluto Press. Also forthcoming is a chapter called Incompatible Objectives about counterinsurgency and development in Afghanistan, in University of Toronto Press's book Empire's Ally, […]

Another small victory for free software

I'm working at home today and was trying to import a JET database made for MS Access, which I don't have at home (because I use the Ubuntu GNU/Linux system). OpenOffice, which is the free software version of MS Office, isn't able to manipulate these databases. But a quick google search turned up the mdb-tools […]

Alain de Botton on the joys and sorrows of work

We had an FES Faculty Retreat last week, and one of the themes we discussed was the career anxiety of students who come to us (and their parents). They want to study, and they might be attracted to Environmental Studies because of concern for the planet, but will they get a job? Will they be […]

Environmental Problems in South Kivu

In June 2009 I visited Bukavu in South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I did a seminar on Ecological Restoration at the Universite Evangelique en Afrique (UEA). Researchers there, including the rector of the UEA, agronomist Gustave Mushagulusa, limnologist Pascal Isumbisho, and director of the Natural Sciences Research Centre Katcho Karume, also […]

Power corrupts, powerpoint corrupts absolutely?

Next week in my Landscape Ecology class I will devote a lecture to scientific presentation. I try to follow Michael Alley's methods for scientific presentation, as he describes in "The Craft of Scientific Presentations". I try to teach these things, which are quite different from "conventional" uses of powerpoint, to my students. I think it's […]