The fires are still burning here in Oregon. There are eight confirmed dead with almost 5.000 structures lost. Whole towns were substantially destroyed (look up Detroit, Gates, Blue River, Phoenix, Talent). Forty-thousand people were evacuated. This was not an ordinary year and although there was a terrible nexus of conditionsRead More

“It was an awesome spectacle; anyone who has ever seen an atomic explosion will never forget it. And all in compete silence; the bang came minutes later, quite loud though I had plugged my ears, and followed by a long rumble like heavy traffic very far away. I can stillRead More

How did you learn best? How do we learn best about anything? How do we retain what we have learned best? Learning styles have been written about since the dawn of time. To see, hear, touch, smell, read, experience – which one do you learn best from? My Mom, DadRead...

COVID as context I try not to write about COVID-19 in this space because it’s taking up so much other space but there are some stories that one cannot write in May 2020 without at least nodding in the direction of the virus. Or at least, I thought there were.Read...

Michelle Smith is taking a well-deserved break, leaving me with some space to fill for the month of December. Rather than choosing a theme and trying to stick to it, I think I will simply write about whatever strikes my fancy each week. This week is easy because something unusualRead More

Two things inspired this week’s feature story: the first was an Agence France-Presse article about a Michigan township that is trying to fight a deal under which the Swiss-based food conglomerate Nestlé may be allowed to pump 400 gallons of water per minute from a local wellhead for an annualRead More

On Monday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s bid to reverse a UARB ruling overturning a CBRM Council decision that green lighted the development of a 211-site, lakeside RV park in Big Pond Centre. That was a lot to pack into a single sentence,Read More

Like a Netflix reboot of a canceled TV series, Mother Canada has reappeared on my screen this summer. I’d all but forgotten the plan to build the 24-meter-high sad lady in Green Cove in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park — a plan that simultaneously flouted both the Parks CanadaRead More

Kudos to the Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forestry for providing information from the March 2019 moose population survey to the public in a timely manner, through stories in the media.  The 2019 survey in Cape Breton included participants from the Lands and Forestry, Parks Canada, the Unama’ki InstituteRead More

I FOIPOPed all correspondence between the CBRM planning department and Chris Skidmore — the Calgary-based developer who wants to establish an RV Park in Big Pond Centre — because I thought the planning department seemed to be rather decidedly in Skidmore’s corner on this project and I wanted to knowRead More