Alternatives Journal – Sustainability Taken Seriously

It’s not that we don’t know how to determine if a project is sustainable. More often it’s that we fail to apply the tests that exist.
This issue of Alternatives describes the many ways that we can test the sustainability of a project, a product or a service.
It features concrete examples of progress toward sustainable development, lending credibility to this highly overused and largely misunderstood term.
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BC’s Kemess North and Nova Scotia’s Whites Point projects promised jobs and revenue, but the communities were looking for overall sustainability. Both built on the gains made in Voisey’s Bay.
Alberto Fonseca and Robert Gibson
NORTHGATE MINERAL CORPORATION’s proposed Kemess North Project will not be going ahead, at least not soon and not as proposed. The project – an open-pit, copper-gold expansion to an existing mine in a remote, mountainous area of northcentral British Columbia – was rejected by provincial and federal authorities.
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Thinking Like an Ecosystem
The inherent uncertainty of natural systems calls for the integration of resiliency and diversity in environmental management.
Chris McLaughlin
Do you suppose that Humpty Dumpty saw it coming? Did he have any advance warning of his impending fate? Even the slightest wobble to tip him off? I mean, as it’s told, he went straight from sitting to falling without a single intermediary step. And with no means of reversal, the results point to a change in his circumstances that was as dramatic as it was sudden.
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Brain Mulch
Moving from Aught to Do
Ryan David Kennedy
We are well into 2008 and there still is no common global name to define this decade. There’s no catchy term like the Roaring Twenties or the Dirty Thirties. These past eight years have remained unnamed and undescribed.
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Edward Burtynsky
Classic Edward Burtynsky photos spotlight Robert Gibson’s rich introduction and Kent Peacock’s thoughtful conclusion to the sustainability section. Burtynsky, Gibson and Peacock are all veterans along the path to sustainability. Edward Burtynsky’s recent photos of the tar sands reveal the scale and extent of damage to the landscape when it is striped for bitumen.
Check out current photo exhibitions on other environmental photography.
Story and Song
In this issue’s “Letter from Bhopal”, Andrea Joyce tells us about Sambhavna Trust’s medicinal garden. Sambhavna grew out of health and financial need years after the Bhopal disaster. Bhopal (Driftnet plan) by Bob Wiseman, was written not long after it happened. The song offers another take on the 1984 Union Carbide pesticide plant explosion that catastrophically changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of residents in Bhopal, India.