The Canadian landscape has an abundance of lakes under pressure from multiple stressors. Lakes are sentinels of environmental change, as they archive changes occurring both within the lake, and in the surrounding terrestrial ecosystems within its watershed. Paleolimnology, that is, the study of lake sediment cores to reconstruct past climatic and environmental changes, helps us […]
The Leslie Street Spit is a 500-hectare construction waste dump that also functions as an ecologically rich urban landscape feature. Since the 1950s, trucks have been depositing construction waste along this narrow landform, to the point where it now extends 5 kilometers from downtown Toronto into Lake Ontario. Due to the site’s auspicious location […]
‘Impact producing’ is an emerging field within documentary film that combines creative distribution, coalition building and audience engagement to build formalized campaigns for social change. As the name implies, impact producing seeks to maximize the impact of documentary films, and to increase the capacity of documentary filmmakers to effect social change. Early this year, MES […]
The work to build Canada’s first Climate Solutions Parks (CSP) has received an important boost, thanks to new funding from the Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada (CEWIL Canada). The CSPs that are being built will focus on skills development in key areas such as community-focused agriculture, renewable energy, electric mobility, First Nations knowledge, sustainable […]
Performing and pushing back on diet culture: Exploring gendered messaging on Instagram Gendered messaging is a means through which ideas about power, norms, expectations, categories, behaviours, and practices of gender are presented, disseminated and reproduced across culture by Sarah Rotz With the rise of social media, hashtags have become key tools of cultural messaging, and […]
by Mark Winfield Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives went into the 2018 Ontario election campaign promising, among other things, to fix the province’s ‘hydro mess.’ In practice fixing the hydro 'mess' turned out to be a lot more complicated than it sounded. In the end, the first Ford government did little other than double down on […]
by Steven Tufts Airport workers are on the front lines dealing with irate passengers experiencing flight delays. The pandemic travel restrictions and testing regimes put in place were manageable when air travel was a trickle, but passenger traffic has increased significantly in recent months. The result is slow processing times at border and security checkpoints […]
by Randelle Adano Lake Scugog is a large, shallow reservoir in southern Ontario that has faced multiple stressors like climate change, eutrophication, and invasive species over the post-industrial period. The arrival of the first, early settlers in ~1700 has brought significant infrastructure development in the area, most notably the building of the Lindsay Dam in […]
by Trevor Doe This summer I was honoured to be one of four undergraduate students within the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change to receive an inaugural EUC Undergraduate Research Award (EUCURA). This award allowed me to work directly with Professor Martha Stiegman on her “Polishing the Chain: Treaty Relations in Toronto” seminar series, as […]
by Madison Downer-Bartholomew Forest fires are a frequent and natural disturbance within the boreal forest. The diversity of the boreal is largely the result of these fires that are varied in frequency, intensity, size, shape, and season. Fire behavior in the boreal varies from intense crown fires to slow moving ground fires, depending on factors […]