Saturday May 17, 2008
ENVIRONMENT 
Smashing global warming with greener design
The goal of graphic design is to make things look good. Really good. So good that we want to buy these things, even if we don't need them.That can be a problem - or perhaps an opportunity.
He's bullish on bears
THE BLACK GRIZZLYOF WHISKEY CREEKBy Sid MartyMcClelland and Stewart,282 pages, $34.99''The best thing to do is avoid an encounter,'' reads the headline in a Parks Canada pamphlet on bears and people. Today it may seem like an obvious statement, but in the late 1970s, the distance between bears and humans in the tourist mountain town of Banff, Alta., had become dangerously small. Grizzly and black bears regularly raided the town's garbage dump for food. Tourists flocked to watch the feasting omnivores, snapping photos of them as if they were harmless as chickadees. A similar photo op unfolded downtown when bears fed behind Banff restaurants that refused to bear-proof their garbage bins, despite numerous warnings from Parks Canada.
Pay your voluntary carbon taxes: Move into the fashionable high-rise city
Timing is everything. Anticipating the long weekend fill-up, I realize that every hour of procrastination will only increase its outrageous cost. That leads me to wonder what might have happened had Michael Ignatieff stood up for his one best policy - a carbon tax - two years ago, when the idea needed a champion undaunted by the predictable backlash.
Sam Malone asks Canada to step up to the plate
The following is excerpted from a speech made by Cheers actor and Oceana board member Ted Danson to the Economic Club of Toronto on Tuesday. You may ask why you've invited Sam Malone to talk to you about fish.
Canada's greenhouse gas emissions down for second year in a row
Greenhouse-gas emissions in Canada declined for a second year in a row during 2006, falling to 721 million tonnes, or by 1.9 per cent from a year earlier, according to figures released yesterday by Environment Canada.
Polar bear politics hurt Inuit
Your editorial on the U.S. decision to list the polar bear as threatened (Burying Our Heads In The Snow - May 15) insults the significant knowledge Inuit have about the species. Your characterization of Inuit traditional knowledge is condescending, and trivializes a central part of an indigenous culture that is thousands of years old, and that the Supreme Court of Canada has understood by virtue of the Delgamukw case.
Polar bear politics hurt Inuit
While Canada's independent science body, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife, has assessed the polar bear as being of ''special concern'' since 1991, it has not yet been added to the Species At Risk Act list. It receives no federal protection at all. Environment Minister John Baird needs not only to list the bears, but to develop more marine and terrestrial protected areas, and to work to cut Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate change is the main threat to polar bears.
