Have you ever noticed a little blue fish on your farmed seafood packaging, or on the glass at your grocer’s fish counter? Those little blue fish are known as “ecolabels” and they’re meant to provide consumers with assurance that the fish they are buying has been farmed sustainably. But what do they really tell […]
Recently, I was struck by a peculiar thought while I re-read Mary Shelley’s The Last Man—the 1826 novel by the author of Frankenstein that depicts a global plague systematically wiping out humankind until the “last man” is all that remains. Here I am, I thought, almost a year into a global pandemic, once again reading […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to think differently about many things. Still, this crisis has given us a much-needed opportunity to look at our society and our lives differently and in a better informed and contextual manner. One such opportunity regards the community problem of Organized Crime. Examining the problem of Organized Crime alongside […]
Have you ever read a news article that referred to someone as a “drug addict”? Or maybe you’ve seen “drug abuser”, “druggie”, “pothead”, “alcoholic” or something like that? Using slang like the above can further perpetuate the stigma felt by individuals with addiction. Stigma can be harmful, distressing, and marginalizing for individuals and groups who […]
Where are you from? You might expect this question when meeting a new acquaintance, but what about at the beginning of a research paper or presentation? When a non-Indigenous person asks me, “Where are you from?”, they usually mean, “Where were you born or raised?” However, among Indigenous community members and researchers, this is a […]
When you hear the word “metabolism”, while there may be a few different things that come to mind, I am willing to bet it isn’t cancer. You may think about diet and exercise, or weight loss and gain. Just think about all the diets people have ranted to you about: the juice diets, low-carb diets, […]
As someone who studies failed states, it has been exhausting living next to the American carnival. The incessant braying of the lion-maned, tiger-hued barker; the marquee lights distracting from tawdry set stages; the never-ending parade of hucksters and kewpie dolls; the ever-to-be-disappointed promises of a country returned to greatness. The carnival’s midway has afforded the […]
One of the largest, most diverse apple orchards in the world is found in Kentville, Nova Scotia. This orchard has over 1,000 cultivars of apples from over 40 different countries. To put the number of cultivars into perspective, if you ate an apple a day from this orchard, it would take you over three years […]