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…
Extinction Rebellion does not condone violence or property destruction, but they do embrace tactics that cross the line of civility just enough to disrupt people’s ordinary routines. The point is to raise awareness for the climate crisis, and also to encourage people to think about relative levels of inconvenience: if it irks you to be…
It has been an active week for this activist! The biggest news for me, of course, was my participation in Extinction Rebellion Halifax’s climate protest on April 15. I wrote about my experience (at great length) in a special mid-week edition of Solar Flares here — or, if you’d like to read (theoretically) more objective…
The day before the Halifax action, I leave Sydney by car. I don’t feel great about driving, but I’m picking up my friend P in Antigonish along the way, so at least part of the journey involves carpooling. I listen to inspirational music till I’m off the island. The weather is fabulous. When I knock…
