Stop The Great Lakes Nuclear Dump Petition

Stop The Great Lakes Nuclear Dump Petition

Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a multi-billion dollar power generation company, is seeking approval to build a nuclear waste dump (a Deep Geological Repository or DGR)
1 km from the shores of Lake Huron.

The Dump will extend underground to approximately 400 meters below the lake level. Some of this nuclear waste remains toxic and lethal for over 100,000 years.
Approval is anticipated within 4 to 6 months.

This dump puts at risk the fresh water of the GREAT LAKES, relied upon by 40 million people in two countries.

Any risk of buried nuclear waste entering the largest body of fresh water in the world is too great a risk to take, and need not be taken.

We can and must deliver an overwhelming wave of opposition to OPG's plan. Tell Minister Aglukkaq and the Canadian federal government to stand up for the protection of the Great Lakes. 

Chile Scraps Dam Project in 'Greatest Triumph of the Nation's Environmental Movement' | Common Dreams

Chile Scraps Dam Project in 'Greatest Triumph of the Nation's Environmental Movement' | Common Dreams

In a decision hailed as "the greatest triumph of the environmental movement" in the country, Chile on Tuesday rejected a controversial dam project.

The HidroAysén project in the seismically active area would have included five dams on two rivers
in Patagonia—the Baker and Pascua—and, according to International Rivers, would have resulted in the flooding of "nearly 15,000 acres of globally rare forest ecosystems and some of the most productive
agricultural land in the area," impacting wildlife and forcing the displacement of people...

The rejection of the project follows an 8-year campaign led by the Patagonia Defense Council (PDC) coalition, which includes International Rivers, the Natural Resources Defense Council and local citizens and community groups and had highlighted the risks of the project and need for Chile to choose a truly sustainable energy future.

"What began as a grassroots effort to protect the pristine Baker and Pascua rivers, and the communities and culture of Patagonia, hasdeveloped into a fully-fledged international campaign and galvanized a
national environmental movement," writes Emily Jovais, program assistant with International Rivers.

"Over the past four years Chileans have taken to the streets to demand a halt to HidroAysén and around the world an international community has rallied around this call. It is these voices that have won
out, and together have set in motion a new path towards a bright future for Patagonia and the hope of a truly sustainable energy future for Chile," she continues.

Patricio Rodrigo, Executive Secretary of the PDC, cheered the decision as well, issuing a statement
that "the government’s definitive rejection of the HidroAysén projectis not only the greatest triumph of the environmental movement in Chile, but marks a turning point, where an empowered public demands to be heard and to participate in the decisions that affect their environment and lives."

Love the Ravines - add them to the greenbelt

Love the Ravines

Toronto’s Don and Humber River Valleys provide the city with fresh
air, clean water and a place for Torontonians to connect with nature
and enjoy recreational activities like cycling, jogging, kayaking,
fishing, and running.

The Don and the Humber River Valleys deserve the protection offered by the Greenbelt.

I fully support the inclusion of the Don and Humber River Valleys
into Ontario’s Greenbelt and I urge the City of Toronto to formally grow
the Greenbelt to best protect these ecological areas for decades to
come.

Let’s protect the Gulf of St. Lawrence from oil and gas development! | Sierra Club Canada

Let’s protect the Gulf of St. Lawrence from oil and gas development! | Sierra Club Canada

The Gulf of St. Lawrence is an exceptional, highly productive ecosystem supporting abundant flora, fauna, spawning and migration of over 2200 marine species while being at the heart of the economy of the provinces that surround it through fishing and tourism.

Coastal communities have always depended on the Gulf of St. Lawrence for their livelihood. For instance, the sustainable industries of fishing and tourism represent over two billion dollars annually in addition to supporting tens of thousands of jobs in the five provinces bordering the Gulf.

As highlighted in a recent report published by the St. Lawrence Coalition, these jobs and ecosystems of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are endangered by the imminent arrival of the oil industry while exploratory
drilling projects are being contemplated in the heart of the Gulf.

Are we willing to risk the health of this unique environment, the prosperity of the communities that depend on it and the biodiversity that the Gulf of St. Lawrence provides for hypothetical and
unsustainable oil revenues?

Tell our federal and provincial governments to work together to protect the Gulf of St. Lawrence from oil and gas exploration and exploitation projects by establishing a moratorium for the entire gulf
as well as calling a thorough and extensive interprovincial public consultation on the oil and gas issue in the gulf.

Action Alert: Report on Northern Gateway Deeply Flawed | Sierra Club Canada

Action Alert: Report on Northern Gateway Deeply Flawed | Sierra Club Canada

You can sign this...
This is what 300 scientists are saying about the Northern Gateway environmental assessment:

1. Failed to adequately articulate the rationale for its findings;
2. Considered only a narrow set of risks but a broad array of benefits, thereby omitting adequate consideration of key issues;
3. Relied on information from the proponent, without external evaluation;
4. Contradicted scientific evidence contained in official government documents; and
5. Treated uncertain risks as unimportant risks, and assumed these
   would be negated by the proponent’s yet-to-be-developed mitigation
   measures.

The Impossibility of Growth Demands a New Economic System | Common Dreams

The Impossibility of Growth Demands a New Economic System | Common Dreams

On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of
the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable(4), the Ecuadorean
government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the
Yasuni national park(5). It had made an offer to other governments: if
they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it
would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as blackmail or
you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are
rich: why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without
compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of
hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that
Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and
spills(6), will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the
planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species
than exist in the entire continent of North America(7).

The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest
national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo(8); one of
the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of
chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4
billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the
south-east(9), the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs
into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to
enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local
people(10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our
hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the
planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands,
everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will
be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the
world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey
stubble.

Petition | Save the Red Door | Change.org

Petition | Save the Red Door | Change.org

Red Door Shelter for Homeless Families Threatened by Condominium Development.

The building that houses our long-term home has been put into receivership
and is now being bid on by condo developers, leaving the Red Door Family
Shelter without a concrete future.

Please sign our petition to help save the Red Door!

Since 1982, the Red Door Family Shelter
has provided hope and help for thousands of homeless families that have
come through our red door.  We play an integral role in the community,
helping more than 500 families each year to heal and rebuild their lives
so they can live safely and independently.

“Our home has been at 875 Queen Street East for 30 years,” said Bernnitta Hawkins, Executive
Director, Red Door Family Shelter. “We are an integral part of the South
Riverdale community. We do not want to leave, and we certainly do not
want to reduce the number of beds we offer homeless families in need.
The receiver and developer have not given us any answers and we need
them now!”

A permanent solution for our 106-bed shelter must be sought. We want to stay where we are and continue to provide much needed services.

WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW!
We need to send a message to city council, to the developer and to the receiver to let them know that a refuge for homeless families is more important than condos.   We have done all we can and have not received any concrete solution.  We need your support to make the message heard! Help us reach 1,000 signatures to send a strong message of public support for the Red Door.

Please sign our petition now to help ensure that homeless families still have a refuge at 875 Queen Street East

For more information about the Red Door and how you get involved in the campaign visit www.reddoorshelter.ca/save-the-red-door

Soil as Carbon Storehouse: New Weapon in Climate Fight?

Soil as Carbon Storehouse: New Weapon in Climate Fight?

According to Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University's Carbon
Management and Sequestration Center, the world's cultivated soils have
lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock, much of
which has oxidized upon exposure to air to become CO2. Now, armed with
rapidly expanding knowledge about carbon sequestration in soils,
researchers are studying how land restoration programs in places like
the former North American prairie, the North China Plain, and even the
parched interior of Australia might help put carbon back into the soil.

Absent carbon and critical microbes, soil becomes mere dirt, a process
of deterioration that's been rampant around the globe. Many scientists
say that regenerative agricultural practices can turn back the carbon
clock, reducing atmospheric CO2 while also boosting soil productivity
and increasing resilience to floods and drought. Such regenerative
techniques include planting fields year-round in crops or other cover,
and agroforestry that combines crops, trees, and animal
husbandry.        

Seeds of Freedom | Common Dreams, Vandana Shiva

Seeds of Freedom | Common Dreams

For thousands of years farmers, especially women, have evolved and
bred seed freely with the help of nature to increase the diversity of
what nature gave us and adopt it to the needs of different cultures.
Biodiversity and cultural diversity have mutually shaped one another.


Every seed is an embodiment of millennia of nature’s evolution and
centuries of farmers’ breeding. It is the distilled expression of the
intelligence of the earth and intelligence of farming communities.
Farmers have bred seeds for diversity, resilience, taste, nutrition,
health and to adapt it for local agro-ecosystems.

In times of climate change we need the biodiversity of farmers’
varieties to adapt and evolve. Climate extremes are being experienced
through more frequent and intense cyclones that bring salt water to the
land. To develop resilience against cyclones, we need salt tolerant
varieties of seeds, and we need them in the commons. Along coastal
areas, farmers have evolved flood tolerant and salt tolerant varieties
of rice such as Bhundi, Kalambank, Lunabakada, Sankarchin, Nalidhulia,
Ravana, Seulapuni, Dhosarakhuda.

"By adding one new gene to the cell of a
plant, corporations claimed they had invented and created the seed, the
plant, and all future seeds that were now their property. In other words
GMO meant 'God Move Over.'"

These seeds have been evolved by farmers and need to stay in the commons to gain resilience against climate change.

After the Orissa Supercyclone, Navdanya could distribute salt
tolerant rice to farmers because we had conserved them as a commons in
our community seed bank run by Kusum Mishra and Dr Ashok Panigrahi in
Balasore, Orissa. Hence we were about to donate two truckloads of salt
tolerant seeds to the farmers, who could not grow rice because of the
sea salt deposited on their farms. As I have written in my book—Soil, Not Oil—40
per cent of the greenhouse gases come from an industrialised and
globalised model of agriculture. Having created the crisis,
corporations, who made profits from industrial agriculture, now want to
turn the climate crisis they have contributed to into an opportunity to
control climate resilient seeds and climate data. Corporations like
Monsanto have taken 1,500 patents on climate resilient crops. With these
very broad patents, Monsanto and other corporations can prevent access
to climate resilient seeds after climate disasters since a patent is an
exclusive right to produce, distribute and sell the patented product.
This implies that the farmers’ right to save and share seed is now
defined as “theft,” an “intellectual property crime”...n times of climate change, such monopolies aggravate the disaster by blocking farmers’ rights to seeds they have evolved.


Hence, seed as a common good became a commodity of private seed companies, traded on the open market....

The vision of the corporations and sadly the US government is to
privatise every aspect of life — our seeds and biodiversity, the
atmospheric commons, and the knowledge of the climate and weather as a
public good.


At a time when the world needs to recognise that life forms,
including seeds, are not an invention and the US should correct its laws
to be more in alignment with the Rights of the Earth and with human
rights, the US government is threatening India with trade retaliation to
force us to change our patent laws yet again and introduce the
unethical, unscientific and anti-human laws of patent monopolies on seed
and medicine.


America’s National Association of Manufacturers — which represents
about 50 US business groups — gave the suggestion to the US Trade
Representatives’ office to designate India a “Priority Foreign Country”,
a tag it gives to worst offenders of intellectual property rights. This
is not just a US-India dispute. It is a fight against corporate
enclosures of the commons. If we have to survive as a species, we need
to reclaim our commons — of seed, of climate, of knowledge and resist
the privatisation of every aspect of life.


We need to create the commons of the seed and cultivate seed freedom
through seed saving, seed exchange and participatory breeding.

Organic Consumers Association Statement on GMO Labeling Law Victory in Vermont

Organic Consumers Association Statement on GMO Labeling Law Victory in Vermont

INLAND, Minn. – Today, by a vote of 28-2, the Vermont state Senate passed H.112,
a bill to require mandatory labeling of foods sold in Vermont that
contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The bill also makes it
illegal to call any food product containing GMOs “natural” or “all
natural.” Unlike bills passed last year in Maine and Connecticut, which
require four or five other states to pass GMO labeling laws before they
can be enacted, Vermont’s law contains no “trigger” clauses, making it
the first “clean” GMO labeling law in the country.

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), issued the following statement:  "Today’s victory in Vermont has been 20 years in the making. Ever since
genetically modified crops and foods entered the U.S. food supply in the
early 1990s, without adequate independent pre-market safety testing and
without labels, U.S. consumers have fought to require the labeling of
foods containing GMOs.

Consumer demand for mandatory labeling of GMOs spawned a national
grassroots movement that has persevered despite hundreds of millions of
dollars spent by the biotech and food industries to lobby state
lawmakers in Vermont, and to fund anti-labeling campaigns in California
(2012) and Washington State (2013).

Today, consumers and a number of principled legislators in Vermont made
it clear to Monsanto, Coca-Cola and other opponents of consumers’ right
to know: We will not back down. This movement is here to stay

We expect that Monsanto will sue the state of Vermont in order to
prevent enactment of H.112. We also expect that Monsanto will lose, and
the law will go into effect on schedule, on July 1, 2016.

We expect that the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a multi-billion
lobbying group representing more than 300 food, pesticide and drug
makers, will try to pass their “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014,”
introduced last week by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), intended to strip
Vermont, and all other states, of their right to pass GMO labeling laws.
And we expect that Congress will not pass this law, dubbed the DARK
(Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act, which seeks to deny consumers
the right to know if their food has been genetically engineered, and
deny states the right to enact laws designed to protect public health.

Vermont’s landmark victory today will force food companies to either
label GMOs in all states, or reformulate their products to be GMO-free
in order to avoid stating “this product was produced using genetic
engineering” on their packaging. When Oregon passes a citizens’ ballot
initiative to label GMOs in November, as we believe it will, the biotech
and food industries will have lost, beyond the shadow of a doubt, their
battle to keep consumers in the dark.

The OCA has worked closely over the past several years with the
pro-labeling grassroots movement in Vermont. Today we congratulate
Vermont activists for their passionate pursuit of this law, Vermont
lawmakers for having the courage to pass the law, and Vermont citizens
for being the first in the country to have the benefit of GMO labels on
their food. And we reaffirm our commitment to work with Oregon and other
states to pass similar laws, and to fight any and all attempts by
industry and/or Congress to overturn these laws.

If Fredericton's Morgentaler Clinic Closes, Women Will Die | Anne Theriault

If Fredericton's Morgentaler Clinic Closes, Women Will Die | Anne Theriault

This cannot happen. We cannot, in good conscience, let this happen.
We need to do everything that we can to allow women to exercise
reproductive freedom. We need to stand up for the right of women in New
Brunswick -- and all across Canada -- to have access to safe,
legal abortion.



Our voices, united, can affect change. There are so many things that
you can do to help create a better future for women in this country;
here are just a few:



1. Reach out New Brunswick's NDP party -- they are actively working
to end the two doctor requirement for abortions, and will happily
provide you with the contact information for members of the legislative
assembly so that you can write to your local representative. Call 1-844-NDP-NPD1 or email info@nbndp.ca



2. Put pressure on your MLA to have the law changed by writing to them, calling them, and emailing them



3. Tweet about this using the hashtag #NBProchoice



4. Share this story on social media -- chances are that many
Canadians are not aware of how limited access to abortion is in New
Brunswick



I want to leave you now with one of my favourite quotes from Dr.
Henry Morgentaler, who was a feminist hero, agitator for women's
reproductive rights and founder of the Morgentaler abortion clinics. D.
Morgentaler was a Holocaust survivor, and his experience at Auschwitz
left him with an enormous desire to make the world a better place. While
receiving an honorary doctorate of law from the University of Western
Ontario, he said:



"By fighting for reproductive freedom, and making it possible, I have
made a contribution to a safer and more caring society where people
have a greater opportunity to realize their full potential."

Fisheries Act no longer protects fish & fish habitat | The Council of Canadians

Fisheries Act no longer protects fish & fish habitat | The Council of Canadians

The Fisheries Act can still be saved. Minister of Fisheries
and Oceans, Hon. Gail Shea, still has the ability to reject the new rule
for the sake of our swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters. We await her
decision.

On World Water Day, the Council of Canadians sent a letter to Prime Minister hopefuls
Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party of Canada and Thomas Mulcair of the
New Democratic Party of Canada asking them to rollback the changes the
Harper government made to environmental legislation and recommit funds
needed for water research. The Council gave the Prime Minister hopefuls
until Earth Day, April 22, to respond. It is critical to know how Mr.
Trudeau and Mr. Mulcair plan to address the clawback of our fresh water
protections and so we urge you to do the same.