Canada's Natural Security: Chris Wood and Tyee Solutions

Just devoured a great read.

A 25 year analysis of Canada's record on water, land and air, as well as species, ecosystems, and climate change from the Tyee Solutions Society researchers and writers.
www.bottomlines.tyeesolutions.org

The Report asked "a deceptively simple question: Cutting through all partisan rhetoric, how well has Canada cared for its environment, really? "

The Tyee Solutions Society explains how and why our grades have fallen from A's to F's over the last quarter century.

Mikeg

PS
Don't have time to read the whole report, visit the opinion piece in the Toronto Star by one of the reports lead authors Chris Wood.

State of the Art Review on Interdisciplinarity

I have always liked Newell's take on the field. He offers some small criticism of the Repko approach here. As we use Repko in our MAIS program at Athabasca, it is worth reading for this corrective.
Newell on The State of the Field Interdisciplinary Theory.

LATIMES FOOD Inequality Mexico Tomatoes

LA TIMES SERIES ON MEXICO

A Times reporter and photographer find that thousands of laborers at Mexico's mega-farms endure harsh conditions and exploitation while supplying produce for American consumers.

First of four stories

The Scaling Imperative

Social Innovation Generation Blog Post

Oil and Culture In Alberta

A New Book and a New Thesis


On Fracking
Alexia Lane
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/1927330807
A Manifesto booklet
from  Rocky Mountain Books
Some good information.










and



Framing Alberta's Bitumen Extraction Onscreen

 

A new doctoral thesis from George Takach examining films about the tar sands / oil sands with an emphasis on works produced from 2005 onwards. Takach examines how they frame the issues and argues:

"unconventional oil seems to have overtaken cowboys and Rocky Mountains as the primary symbol of the province in the global public's imagination."

Find the thesis here at:

theses.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/11023/1050/4/ucalgary_2013_takach_geo.pdf


 

See below for the list of the films that George analyzed using a media frame analysis.

Appendix E: Films and Videos Studied

The following list of films and videos includes URLs linking to capsule summaries of each production, except for two cases where the producer is the Government of Alberta
and for which no official links are available.


Pay Dirt(Palmer 2005)
www.worldcat.org/title/pay-dirt - making-the-unconventional-conventional/oclc/797128543?referer=br&ht=edition


Tar Sands: The Selling of Alberta(Radford 2008)
www.cbc.ca/documentaries/discussion/2008/03/tar-sands-the-selling-of-alberta-1.html


Downstream
(Iwerks 2008)
www.downstreamdoc.com

Petropolis
(Mettler 2009)
www.petropolis-film.com


H2Oil
(S. Walsh 2009)
h2oildoc.com/home/about-the-film


An Open Door
(Alberta 2009)


Land of Oil and Water: Aboriginal Voices on Life in the Oil Sands and Overburden(McArthur and Cariou 2010)
landofoil.com/Home.html


Dirty Oil
(Iwerks 2010)
thoughtmaybe.com/dirty-oil


Canada’s Oil Sands: Come See for Yourself
(Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers - CAPP 2010)
www.capp.ca/canadaIndustry/oilSands/Dialogue- Resources/oil-sands-videos/Pages/Oil-Sands-Tour.aspx


Alberta: Tell It Like It Is
AKA
About the Oil Sands (Alberta 2010)
www.oilsands.alberta.ca/about.html


Tipping Point
(Radford & Thompson 2011)
www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/tipping-point.html


White Water, Black Gold
(Lavallee 2011)
www.whitewaterblackgold.com/about


Pipe Dreams
(Iwerks 2011)
pipedreamsdoc.com

Local Capital

The first part of this 2012 paper discusses the ‘financing gap’ and dominant trends in the international world of finance and how local capital can be regarded as somewhat of an alternative to these trends.		The second part analyzes how local capital not only mobilizes local investment dollars, but also other community resources to foster growth and development. The report explores some of the mechanisms for raising local capital using debt and equity to finance community owned businesses and presents some successful examples. The last section of the paper introduces several financing mechanisms that could be used by rural communities in Alberta to raise local capital.
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/2149/3207

Westlock Terminals New Generation Cooperative: A Case Study

This is a bit out of date now, but worth reading to grasp how one community used local community investment and the cooperative model to finance retention of a community asset. Westlock Terminals is now one of the most successful of its kind.


Source: Westlock News

In 2002, Tawatinaw Community Futures (CF) and Miller Thompson Legal Services assisted in the formation of the Westlock Grain Terminals New Generation Cooperative. Their model processes allowed the community to raise over a million dollars in local investment using a new generation cooperative share offering, and another $1.2 million in 2005 (Cabaj, et.al. 2009). The NGC allows co-operatives to raise capital within a larger network beyond their membership. It invites and permits community members, patrons, suppliers, and other groups to become involved in owning local economic resources. However, unless they are a member, investors (shareholders) cannot vote on matters related to the co-operative, although the Management Board includes some respected local business people. The same model of local investment through a NGC was used by Battle River to raise $3.5 million for the purchase of a short-line railway - the Battle River Railway (Barney, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). Both community assets, the grain terminal and the railway, were owned by large corporations outside the community, and were under threat to be closed by these corporations.

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