Ah, Canada Day. God save the Queen ... and after Brexit, maybe the whole damn United Kingdom. There’ll be parades today, hot dogs, kids on bikes, a shrill seven notes from an overabundance of bagpipers marching slowly, steadily toward you, like the Scottish Walking...

One of most annoying burdens of growing up Protestant is the nagging belief that idleness is a sin. Summer is definitely the time to throw off this sadly mistaken belief. The truth is, doing nothing is arguably quite virtuous. When we are truly idle we burn no fossil...

When Earthlings first saw photos of our planet taken in space, it sparked a flowering of awareness that all humanity shares a common home – our inexpressibly beautiful and fragile blue dot. Our annual celebration of Earth Day arose from this new consciousness, and...

The noon-hour talk radio show host on CFAX 1070, Pamela McColl, invited me on her show last week to talk about a recent article of mine, “NIMBY is not a 4-letter word,” that appeared on the editorial pages of the Times-Colonist newspaper. (I also published the article...

Years ago, when I lived on Bainbridge Island, an elderly neighbor sold his five acres of forest on an idyllic inlet to a couple from California. They clear cut it. Although Bainbridge had been logged within decades of the first white settlers’ arrival, that initial...

I’ve been playing God lately. You know, deciding who lives, who dies. When to end a life, and whether by violent or somewhat more humane means. And I have to say that, while it’s kind of empowering to play God, there’s a lot of guilt involved. I can’t say for sure if...