Author: admin

You get a lot of strange looks when you tell people you intend to get arrested. Most often, they assume you misspoke, and that you’re trying to do the opposite—break the law, but evade arrest. It’s hard to persuade anyone that there are reasons to want to get caught. It helps a bit to bring…

By now, if you aren’t aware that there is a looming climate catastrophe, then you’ve either been living in a cave (good job keeping your carbon footprint low!) or you are deep in denial. Other parts of the world may be receiving different signals, but here in Canada, the CBC has finally (sorta, kinda) stepped…

Summer is here–sometimes sunny, sometimes rainy, likely to be the hottest summer humans have ever known. Should we do something about that? I haven’t posted for awhile. First, I was on vacation, and then I took some time to adjust to my summer job, which I won’t be talking much about here. In between, however,…

A fairly quick update today, as I’m supposed to be spending this evening packing for a 10-day family vacation. Well-earned, if I do say so myself. This week was partly spent planning for an event at the end of June, and then delegating whatever tasks I couldn’t complete, so I didn’t have to keep planning…

Recently I have started half-joking that all of my pre-activist careers, skills, and talents were basically training me up for this task. I am, or was, a playwright and director–jobs which, let’s face it, didn’t provide much recompense or security or even renown. But if I hadn’t spent 25 years of my life writing plays,…

It’s been one week since we marched, but I’m still as sore as I was right afterwards. I guess that’s because I haven’t really given myself the chance to rest. In fact, the day after our Sydney action, I carpooled two hours to Antigonish, to join an XR demonstration outside the provincial Liberal AGM. The…

Sydney’s Open Hearth Park has a remarkable history closely tied to environmental recovery. In a way, it is a green miracle: less than 20 years ago, it was one of the most polluted sites in Canada, the “tar pond” tailings of the massive steel plant that supported Cape Breton’s economy for decades. Today, thanks to…

Whenever I direct a play, I start at the drawing board with a hundred thousand wild, impractical ideas. I move recklessly into the design process, talking to all the other team members as if my fantasies are definitely going to become reality — because how else can I inspire the best work from my actors,…

Imagine: it’s your first class of the day, and you’ve barely begun to sip your mandatory morning double-double when two strangers show up in your classroom and inform you that (a) the world is ending, (b) it’s mostly because of a bunch of other strangers are greedy sociopaths, but (c) it’s your job to step…

It’s a powerful word, isn’t it? We are trained to respond reflexively, instantly alert with all our senses, tensing for the worst. That’s one of the things I want people to feel, but if I stand in the park by myself yelling “Emergency!” I’d be easy to ignore. It’s something quite different when a city…