Welcome to Silver Donald Cameron’s blog! Dr Cameron is the author of 19 books and of many plays, films, magazine articles, radio and TV scripts. He is currently the host and executive producer of TheGreeninterview.com and of its feature documentary, Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World. In 2019, he was appointed the first Farley Mowat Chair in Environment at Cape Breton University, where he earlier served as professor, dean and writer-in-residence. He currently teaches an on-campus/online course called Green Rights.
I do a lot of public speaking — please remember that, if you’re looking for a speaker! — and speaking generally involves air travel. That troubles me. I do buy carbon credits to offset my emissions, and I always manage to amortize the emissions over several projects by doing a variety of things at my destination — picking up material for columns, doing new Green Interviews, networking and so on.
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On November 17, The New York Times published a long article under the title “There Will Be Fuel,” maintaining that “the outlook, based on long-term trends barely visible five years ago, now appears to promise large supplies of oil and gas from multiple new sources for decades into the future.” The basic argument: Shortages and high prices have stimulated exploration and discoveries, and unconventional fuel sources (from the deep oceans, the tar sands and so forth) will provide reasonably-priced oil for many decades to come.
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In the current issue of Progress, one of Atlantic Canada’s leading business publications, is a lovely column about The Green Interview by Lara Ryan, the magazine’s corporate social responsibility columnist. The piece is lovely not just because it’s well-written and complimentary — though it is both of those things — but because Lara Ryan so profoundly "gets" the whole concept of The Green Interview.
The site provides "a wealth of knowledge on environmental issues in one place," she writes, and its interviews are the opposite of a sound bite.
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Canada is “a country that sees itself as a force for good in the world,” says Andrew Heintzman, but “the dawning realization that we have landed squarely on the wrong side of the biggest issue of our time will continue to undermine our self-identity, our self-respect, and our stature on the world’s stage.”
Our transformation into an environmental rogue state is not just a moral and environmental failure, Heintzman notes.
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"Silver Donald Giving Up Lovenest" shrieked the headline in Frank magazine, our local scandal sheet in Nova Scotia. Wow! Hugh Hefner wannabe nabbed with Another Woman? Is Silver Donald a bigamist? Is the lady in question a married woman?
Well, ahem.
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There’s a new section on this site this week. It’s called Green Pieces, and in it I’ll be posting my own environmental writing, both reprints and new items, both substantial features and lectures and also some of my newspaper columns. To view it, just click on the "Green Pieces" tab above.
"Green Pieces" makes its debut with three hefty reprinted pieces, one of which is my major attempt so far to articulate a political and environmental philosophy that would provide a way out of the frightening situation we have created for ourselves.
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“Did you always intend to be a writer?” asked the student.
“No,” I said. “ The idea never crossed my mind. One of the things I learned in school was that to be a writer, you had to be British and dead.” The phrase “Canadian writer” was an oxymoron, as silly as “jumbo shrimp.”
I vividly remember when the idea did occur to me.
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Introducing Chris Turner, author of The Geography of Hope! Dismayed that environmentalism had become "a sort of mythology of death – passionate, lyrical, righteous and hopeless,” Turner set out to discover what he called “the archipelago of hope,” the places and initiatives all over the world where people are fully aware of the environmental crisis – but are attacking the problems with imagination, exuberance and optimism. It’s a fine, stimulating, hopeful book, and it became the basis of a memorable interview.
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WATER COURSES
(Reprinted from Equinox magazine, 1990)
by Silver Donald Cameron
"I saw a graveyard of ships rotting in the dried-up seabed," writes Sandra Postel in Pillar of Sand, her new book on the world’s water problems. "I stood on a seaside bluff outside the old port town of Mynak, but I saw no water – the coastline and the sea were 40 kilometers away.
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RECYCLING BY THE SEA
(Reprinted from Canadian Geographic, 2001)
by Silver Donald Cameron
You would expect David Wimberly to be jubilant — like other Nova Scotians — but maybe that’s not in his nature.
Nova Scotia has suddenly become famous for its environmental achievements.
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