As winter hits our idyllic Vancouver wonderland, reminding us of what most of Canada faces for 3-4 months of the year, I can’t help but notice that the snow does, for a short time, make us nicer people. We greet neighbours we would otherwise ignore, smiling at the communal inconvenience, the forced withdrawal from the [...]

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Here we are, floating blissfully through our Universe, as the Christmas Star begins its annual glow overhead. Suddenly, warning lights begin to flash on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth, and a disembodied mechanical female voice bleats its irritatingly calm countdown of doom … “Warning… Waste disposal systems on overload. Bulkhead breech imminent ….” Soon, we [...]

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The global financial meltdown has hit the green movement hard, right here in our back yard. Everything that goes into your blue box for recycling is sold to mills, usually offshore, who process it and sell it to the factories that make the cheap consumer goods we love. This works well when commodity prices and [...]

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I have to come clean, dear Green Briefs Readers. There is someone else – that I write for, that is. SustainableMinds.com is a Massachusetts company that integrates product design, life cycle assessment and environmental systems design into a web-based software and information suite that answers the questions: “What is sustainable design?” and “How can we [...]

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I was down at the Cenotaph today, at Victory Square in downtown Vancouver, explaining to the 8-year old on my shoulders why we were watching at a sea of umbrellas in the cold November rain. As my mind grappled with imagining the sheer horror of the individuals involved in the dirty, brutish life of armed [...]

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Well it’s all over but the handoff. A planet collectively sighs with relief, and can now laugh a little less nervously at SNL’s Sarah Palin skits.
But with the economy disassembling itself, the environment has not been the stuff of big speeches in this election. So how will Obama’s ‘Change’ manifest itself for the green movement?
I [...]

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Green marketing isn’t just about products and services. People working to further the cause of sustainability become their own brands, and need to communicate their values, objectives and personality as effectively as any bricks and mortar company. Earlier this year, I was introduced to Adriane Carr, former leader of the Green Party of BC, and [...]

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Thinking about creating a corporate video to post on YouTube? Think ahead and you’ll thank yourself later.
In 2007, Unicycle Creative produced a video presentation for Inhance Mutual Funds – a DVD called Return on Responsibility™, that featured Dr. Marc Garneau (Canada’s first main in space) highlighting the beauty and fragility of our earth as seen [...]

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June 25, 2008, Canada’s Federal Government announced new regulations for the labeling of goods making environmental or sustainability claims. As many products and companies are stampeding to the Green Frontier with nothing more eco-friendly than their slogans, we at Green Briefs took a closer look at the 63-page PDF document entitled ‘Environmental claims: A guide [...]

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Patrick Gregston Producer, Ceilings Unlimited
Gregston is a film producer whose credits that include the post-apocalyptic Kostner fest, Waterworld. He is now creating a new documentary, Ceilings Unlimited (aviation term for blue sky) in association with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a federal agency focused on the condition of the oceans and the [...]

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