07-01 Au Contraire
My goodness. Our five-month holiday in California was accompanied by wet and cool weather at a time when it is usually dry and mild. And how about at home in Ontario where for the first summer in 12 years I have not had to water the lawn.This is not sexy stuff, but it is climate…
07-02 Technology
It was a third-year engineering course in metallurgy and the discussion was about copper and its many alloys. Like copper and zinc gives you brass. And copper and tin gives you bronze. Someone asked the professor if there is a danger that we could run out of copper. And his response was an early lesson…
07-03 Politics
It was the fall of 1978 and I put a call through to Premier Alex Campbell of Prince Edward Island. And, son-of-a-gun, if he did not answer the telephone call himself. He invited me down for lunch with his full cabinet. One of the things we discussed was the need for PEI to develop renewable…
07-04 A New Religion
It has always been difficult for me to define religion. For most it means belief in some form of supreme being. But when the Dalai Lama calls kindness his religion, it means it can also be a belief in something bigger than ourselves. Like a great idea.I am old enough to have lived through WW2…
07-05 Winners and Losers
She was eight years old, half Danish and half Innuit. And it was 2009 in the small city of Qaqortoq in southern Greenland. The young girl’s father owned the local restaurant. She spoke Danish and Greenlandic. But she was also studying English.What was so important about this story is that it was a time when…