Results tagged “environment”

The farmland of Dufferin County looks exactly the way you'd imagine: softly rolling hillsides, the landscape dotted with old clapboard barns and quaint country houses, wooden fences neatly marking off the lots. Nestled in this terrain, about an hour and half northwest of Toronto, is the township of Melancthon (population 2,895), a small community that has been an agricultural centre for many generations' worth of farmers. The soil in this region—Honeywood silt loam—is said by local farmers to be unique in southern Ontario, and is, particularly, ideally well-suited for growing potatoes.

Bright and early this past Monday morning, Mayor David Miller launched the third Toronto Forum for Global Cities conference, dedicated to harnessing the economic power of large urban centres. Put on by the International Economic Forum of the Americas, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (or OECD, whose scope encompasses thirty of the world's wealthiest nations), the two-day conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre welcomed some of the world’s leading economists, city planners, CEOs, politicians, and economic policy makers to discuss how to restore growth in the post-bailout era. The overarching message was clear: cities have a huge role to play in leading the economic recovery, and the best way to do so is through innovation.

Last week, Live Green Toronto, the City of Toronto’s website for eco-friendly living, launched a new transit shelter advertising campaign with a unique twist: passersby can flip a giant switch that turns the ad on or off. The ad’s text encourages readers to "switch this poster off," and to switch on Live Green’s website for information about saving energy and living green. The ad was designed by Agency59, a Toronto-based advertising agency, and installed by Astral Media, the company behind Toronto's street furniture. While it’s undeniably clever, the execution is a little flawed.

At a preview, on Monday afternoon, of City Hall's new green roof, Chris Pommer stood in council chambers and explained some of the thinking behind the multicoloured carpet of vegetation that will soon engulf the podium area underneath Nathan Phillips Square's iconic concave towers. Pommer is a partner at PLANT Architects, the firm that designed the new roof. The project was conceived as "an elaborate series of plantings," he said, gesturing at a large architectural illustration full of minute detail. Elaborate plans are one thing, but we had to wonder just who was doing all this planting.

Back in May, when the Metro Central YMCA announced they were planning a green roof to accompany other repairs, it was an idea that made sense: the rooftop running track was a flat, ugly expanse of hot concrete, and certainly not much to look at from the surrounding condo towers. Originally intended as a outdoor terrace for exercising and lounging, it barely served the purpose—it was much more comfortable to run on the air-conditioned interior track, and with nowhere to sit on the hard surface, the area didn't lend itself to yoga classes, stretching, or even a nice place to read a book.

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Ah, IKEA. Bastion of the comfortably quirky; originator of accessible (read: cheap) design; first stop for first apartment decorators everywhere.

Hamilton gets a bad rap, much of it based on the only view of the city most Torontonians get: overlooking the steel factories from the Skyway Bridge. While Toronto sometimes bills itself as a "City Within a Park," the moniker is actually more apt to our Steeltown neighbour to the west, which repeatedly kicks Toronto's ass when looking for ways to get back to nature. Seriously.

It's 6 a.m. in Kensington Market on a Sunday morning, with the sun out but only barely, and Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale are busy planting flowers. At College and Augusta, on the two large posterboards on the west wall of Sam's, they cut the outlines of large triangles deep into the thick layers of posters, through and past the topmost movie ads for The Ugly Truth and District 9 on one board and the PSP on the other. Then they pull those triangles out, folding and curving them into a pocket that's shaped like something between a cone and a pyramid, using a staple gun to firmly attach it to the wall. When all the triangles across both boards are cut and folded and curved and stapled, which won't be for another few hours, Cheung and Martindale will fill each pocket with dirt and place a plant inside, spraying it with water.

We’ve heard a fair bit about the state of Toronto’s parks during the current municipal strike. Most tales have tended toward the negative, from fears of contamination stemming from temporary garbage depots to the unattractive aesthetic state that some green spaces have fallen into. But what if the withholding of certain services led to a positive effect on the local environment?

       

As the city celebrated Canada Day yesterday, a small group of Christie Pits neighbourhood residents—disgruntled by the City's policy of using parks as temporary dump sites during the city workers' strike—took their grievance to City Hall in a protest organized by Friends of Christie Pits. Residents' groups around the city have been confronting people coming to drop off their garbage at park sites.

The Metro Central YMCA at Yonge and Grosvenor found itself with a problem, but one that led to a new opportunity: the roof is leaking and needs extensive repairs. Featuring a running track and not much else, the large concrete rooftop slab is more akin to the upper deck of a parking garage than a place to exercise or enjoy, but its barren configuration made it a premium site for a forthcoming downtown green roof.

A small crowd of approximately twenty people, including the very short person pictured above, gathered on Tuesday before Union Station's Front Street entrance to blow bubbles with soap, after being denied the right to do so inside the station. They did this because they're upset with Metrolinx, the GTA's newish regional transit authority, for its refusal to consider running electric trains on a pair of proposed regional rail expansions. The expansions, which as planned will accommodate only diesel-burning locomotives, would link Union Station to Pearson Airport and more than triple service on GO Transit's Georgetown corridor between Union Station and Malton on opening day.

During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, much was made of Joe Biden's scrappy devotion to his blue-collar roots. A sudden widower and bereaved parent within weeks of his 1972 Senate win, his ensuing six terms—thirty-six years—were divided between the halls of Washington and caring for his two surviving sons in Delaware, riding Amtrak for ninety minutes in either direction to balance the demands of both. So when the White House announced its "vision for a new era in rail" on April 16, jointly declared by Biden, President Obama, and U.S Secretary of Transportation Raymond LaHood, the vice president anecdotally chimed in to underscore the strategy's importance. "Everyone knows railways are the best way to connect communities to each other," he said, "and as a daily rail commuter for over thirty-five years, this announcement is near and dear to my heart."

     

Out of sight, out of mind.

If you are walking by the northwest corner of Bloor and Spadina, be sure to look down: there is a message amongst the black splotches of chewing gum and the general grime of the city that reads "Cultivate Grace," a message that may at first look as though it were spray-painted onto the concrete but that was actually created by a stencil and a high-pressure water hose and is repeated every twenty feet from Spadina to just past Brunswick Avenue. That's right: the whiteness of the letters is the original colour of the sidewalk under your feet.

With the passage of the City of Toronto Act 2006 on New Year's Day 2007, rumblings that the city would impose green regulatory measures on new developments pointed to significant reforms of the Municipal Code. Today, as the Planning and Growth Management Committee meets to hammer out the finer points, those reforms appear poised—at this stage, anyway—to make Toronto the first city in North America to require green roofs on new commercial and residential buildings.

The first item on the agenda for the April 8th meeting of City Council's Public Works and Infrastructure Committee is headed "City of Toronto Receives the Canadian Motorcycle Association Government Award" [PDF]. As the agenda was released Wednesday, we considered it an April Fools' joke, in the brief moment before we remembered that bureaucrats don't have a sense of humour.

Although March has been remarkably snow-free, Toronto and Region Conservation has still issued flood advisories as heavy rains swelled rivers throughout the city and wreaked havoc in the city's low-lying valleys. What floody surprises will April hold? There's no need to wait passively for weather forecasts and news releases. Thanks to TRCA, you can monitor river and dam levels throughout the GTA's watersheds in near real-time.

The food we eat, and the sources thereof, have become the subjects of increasing attention over the past few years. In an attempt to bring farmers and the people they feed closer together, Slow Food Toronto hosted its second annual Farm-to-Home Fair at the Gladstone this past Saturday. Local farmers and food producers came out in force for some agricultural show-and-tell, and local eaters (that's us) came to learn more about the importance of buying from sustainable, Toronto-area farms. Torontoist departed with two dozen pastured, laid-this-week eggs, and also a bit of insight into our local food culture.

Some, like the Star, were a tad overzealous about Earth Hour's success earlier tonight. "No," wrote Daniel Dale, "you are not witnessing a city-wide power failure. Toronto's Earth Hour has begun." From where we were, sandwiched between a few dozen high-rises downtown, there was still plenty of light to be seen—and from our site statistics for the hour, it's not looking like all that many (of our Saturday night readers, at least) switched off their computers, either. But, now that another Earth Hour has come and gone, this one bigger and even more contradictory and token-y than ever, it's still worth asking the same question we did last year: did you participate in Earth Hour?

We are, just to be clear, very fond of Planet Earth. Big fans. Huge. We are, likewise, fond of initiatives which safeguard our environment, and also in favour of consciousness-raising efforts that promote such initiatives. Therefore, when we say that many of the events being held to celebrate Earth Hour tomorrow are vacuous publicity exercises that insult our intelligence and with which we want no truck, we are not doing it because we think this whole environmental crisis we've been hearing so much about has been overblown. We are doing it because they are so vacuous and so insulting that we have been rendered awestruck by their inanity, and find our consciousness to be depressed, angry, and frustrated rather than uplifted.

It's hard to know quite what Toronto will look like by 2030. Detailed plans become harder to formulate the further into the future one goes: contingencies multiply upon contingencies, and predictions are rendered ever more tenuous. There are, however, some trends that seem fair to anticipate and some others that are fair to hope for.

If you had any doubt that Earth Hour—a little less than two weeks away now—is an all-but-empty symbolic gesture, click on over to its website. As Brett Lamb writes on his blog: "There is actually NO CONTENT about useful things you can do for the environment on the Earth Hour website. Not a single thing ... unless you count turning out the lights for an hour at the end of March. The website does offer product placements. Corporations receive mention for token gestures. Did you know that Coke is shutting off its billboard in Times Square for an hour? Wow, that must be a real sacrifice." As Lamb puts it, Earth Hour is less about awareness of environmental issues—many of the problems, after all, are perpetuated by the very companies sponsoring the whole thing—and more about "awareness of awareness."

When was the last time you opened the Yellow Pages? In a world of Google and Canada411, it's probably been a while since you've consulted any kind of phone book. When was the last time you saw someone take a phone book off that giant shrinkwrapped pile that eternally guards so many apartment building lobbies and grocery store entrances? It's probably been even longer.

Do you think you know what items go into the blue bin, what items go into the green bin, and which things go into the garbage? You don't. Even if you've studied the charts in the collection calendar, attended several meetings of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, read all the municipal news all the time, you don't. Sorry.

Putting together a concise biography for Severn Cullis-Suzuki is something of a daunting task. Not due to a lack of achievements, but rather because the Vancouver-born environmental and social-justice activist has an incredibly long resumé for someone not yet three decades old. There's so much there, it's hard to whittle down to size.

Walking down Queen West can be an obstacle course. We've got to navigate the hazards of traffic, meandering pedestrians, and patches of ice at the same time as car stereos, bits of overheard conversation, flashing signage, and the temptations of shop windows all fight for our attention. The chaos of street life can be lively and invigorating, even comforting. Yet a new study from the University of Michigan (as reported by Jonah Lehrer in the Boston Globe) concludes that streets like Queen West are hard on our brains.

Wild Toronto was a bi-weekly comic strip, created by Rosemary Mosco, about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. It ended last July, when Rosemary left the city for greener pastures, but we decided to bring her—and her column—back for one final edition before the new year.