radio stories

Alberta Election 2012: Parties barely competing for votes on the environment

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips
Laurie Blakeman writes on the schedule dominating the wall of her campaign office in Edmonton
Liberal candidate Laurie Blakeman had some strong opinions to share with Terra Informa on carbon emissions and reclaiming land in the oil sands.

With a week to go until the provincial election, every other conversation I have these days is about the latest polls or what to think about the rising fortunes of the Wildrose Party. There’s plenty to scrutinize about their candidates’ “fiery” (ahem) opinions on sexual orientation, abortion rights, and launching a wider inquiry into doctor intimidation.

If you’re like me though, you probably watched that whole televised debate last week wondering when any of the four major parties would mention the environment. Sadly Liberal leader Raj Sherman couldn’t come up with a slogan about shale-bed methane as catchy as “fudge-it budget.”

Fortunately for you, the team at Terra Informa did the hard work and put together a story on the environmental platforms from the PCs, NDP, Liberals and Wildrose. For the sake of time, we couldn’t get to the Alberta Party or EverGreen for this segment. Our questions mainly targeted what to do about our dependence on coal-fired generation for electricity in the province, and the shoddy job oil sands developers have been doing replacing wetlands.

I will admit to taking a small amount of pleasure interrupting Alison Redford for this story to correct her about coal. She was trying to suggest we’re not still building coal plants in this province. Incredible as it is, we absolutely are.

Edit: Almost forgot: if you’re in Edmonton Tuesday night, you might want to check out Candi{date}, a meet-your-candidates event that Next Gen and InterVivos are hosting. It promises to be very shmoozy. I’ll add it to the Community section.

Destroy the environment before it destroys us

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

Caption: Positive effects of environmental degradation. Man in clear-cut forest smiles, "Hey, my allergies are gone!"This week’s episode of Terra Informa was a labour of love and the most fun I’ve had helping produce the show so far. We decided to use April Fool’s Day as an opportunity to make fun of our usual earnest environmental news reporting. We call it Terra MisInforma.

You can download the podcast on iTunes, stream it online or listen live in Edmonton tomorrow at 5 on CJSR 88.5 FM. Hear how the federal government passed up a huge opportunity for a parking lot with the new Rouge Valley National Park, the Top 5 Environmental Threats to Our Security and Freedom, and the Ezra Levant Award for Excellence in Excellence in Journalism.

I’ve also updated the Community section with a new Lawrence Hill lecture coming up, details about the Pride Centre re-opening, and a link to the bike lane consultations happening around Edmonton right now. The headlines might be all election all the time, but there’s still plenty of other stuff happening around town.

Fighting for environmental health in Durban

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips
Desmond D'Sa, coordinator for the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance
Desmond D'Sa, coordinator for the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (Photo credit: idex.org)

It’s hard to miss the major UN climate conference going on in Durban, South Africa right now (this one’s better known as COP 17), if only for the almost-daily embarrassments from Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent. He’s really good at sticking to his talking points about wanting major emitters like China and India included in any binding global agreement to lower carbon emissions. He seems unwilling to admit the uncomfortable fact that in a cumulative sense Canada is also a major emitter, because we’ve run an industrialized economy on fossil fuels for well over a century.

We were throwing ideas around at Terra Informa on how to cover what’s been happening in Durban, and decided an interesting approach might be to see what kind of work environmental organizations in the city have been up to. As it turns out, this is a big story. Fellow Terra Informer Kathryn Lennon and I tracked down a man named Desmond D’Sa who’s been working for over 15 years in South Durban to protect the health of locals from pollution in the area.

Des helped start an organization called the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance when he was part of a household survey that noticed diseases like asthma and cancers were much more common in their part of the city than elsewhere. Through research and environmental monitoring, they’ve been able to connect that to the industrial sites like oil refineries and paper mills that are concentrated in the poorer neighbourhoods in the south of the city. And as you can imagine, he had a lot to say about fossil fuel industries and the UN talks.

Listen to the interview online here.