Do you find buying sustainable seafood confusing? An increasing number of seafood sustainability certifications, labels, and consumer recommendation guides have appeared over the past three decades. Here is a quick guide to some of the most popular types of ecolabels you might find at the grocery store or on a restaurant menu. Eco-certification is a […]
This article was written with Dr. Howard Ramos, Western University, and Dr. Karen Foster, Dalhousie University. It was published online and in SaltWire newspapers on September 8, 2021. Too often, politicians present the public with a false choice between economic stability and environmental protection. Stoking fears of job losses and income insecurity, they wield the […]
If you’re anything like me and most of the people I’ve talked to recently, you might be feeling a little jarred by the change in Halifax the first week of September. For the first time in almost two years, we are seeing mass groups of students on campus, in the grocery stores, on the streets, […]
It is a trope repeated to the point of cliché. Act 1 of the disaster movie, the under-rested and over-caffeinated scientist discovers the first signs of the incoming cataclysm and rushes off to alert the government. As we in the audience have come to expect, the government does not take the threat seriously until the […]
If you are new to the area of positive psychology, check out my previous blogs on the “Psychology of Self-Compassion” and “A Deeper Dive into the Benefits of Self-Compassion” which examined what self-compassion is and the research supporting the efficacy of this practice. Given that being self-compassionate has a plethora of benefits, in this blog, […]
Note: This blog was prepared end-August 2021 and is certain to be superseded by further fast-changing events in Afghanistan. In the two decades since the American-led ouster of the Taliban regime, events in Afghanistan have frequently dominated the news headlines. President Biden’s April 2021 announcement that all American troops would withdraw from Afghanistan no later […]
The development of vaccines was one of the major milestones of modern medicine. Without it, deadly infectious diseases like smallpox and polio could still be threatening our lives. Vaccines help us manage and live with new infectious agents that are continuously evolving. The arms race is inevitable and will continue between humans and infectious agents; […]
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin Since the COVID pandemic hit in December of 2019 in Wuhan, China, the face of healthcare has changed forever. The public can no longer ignore the unsafe conditions that medical staff […]
Seafood fraud has been making news this summer, first with a New York Times investigation into claims that Subway tuna sandwiches are made of “anything but tuna”, and then with a report from Oceana indicating high rates of seafood mislabeling in Canada. Both investigations were based on DNA sampling of seafood, from Subway in the […]
Reports of cherries roasting in orchards in Western Canada made headlines during the record-breaking heat wave in June. More recently, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent due to the accelerating and intensifying effects of climate change. The multiple days of […]