It's membership time. Cultivate Canada's media. Support rabble.ca. Become a member.
Mike Levin
How the arts in Canada lost its mojo
Talk within Canada's arts communities today has become as predictable as office politics, a projection of disengaged management fueled by personal anxieties. Discussions revolve vaguely around the need for "interpretive creativity" and "strategic innovation," and, naively, for more public funding. This is a huge problem for the industry's future.
It happened because arts associations and administrators have become risk-averse and lazy, unable to accept that art-as-a-possible-profession is broken. Their cheerleading is out of touch with how our culture defines value. And if they can't harness 21st Century energies, they'll die.
Canada’s Hydrogen Funk (Part I)
A hydrogen solution to the world’s energy problems is a done deal. The path from concept to reality, however, is proving a little tougher to negotiate. “We were way ahead, could’ve been a world beater,” says David Scott somewhat wistfully from his Victoria home about Canada’s role in the solution to an over-dependence on fossil fuels. His reflection comes at a time when most agree that green-house gases from burning oil are poaching the earth into something resembling petroleum jelly.
Scott is Canada’s hydrogen visionary.
Canada’s Hydrogen Funk (Part II)
When the Earth Policy Institute announced last November that hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCV) were hitting the market ahead of schedule, an eco-economy seemed a little bit closer. Then Toyota said it would start leasing them in Japan and the United States in December. Excitement increased, until we saw the price tag.
These cars lease for about $16,000 a month and would have access to a total of only twenty-two refueling stations in both countries. How was this going to change the world?
“I don’t believe I’ll ever have a fuel-cell car in my lifetime.
Dipping into Taiwan celebrity to fuel activism
This is a story about an activist/musician who is perhaps Canada's least-known environmental icon, an award-winning pop star in Taiwan and an official ambassador to indigenous peoples in both countries. He has lobbied Ottawa about North America's wolf slaughter, demonstrated in front of Washington's Capitol over the sovereignty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and sat under a 3000-year-old cypress tree in Taiwan's Chi Lan Mountains talking to the Attayal people about water.