The Carbon Rush: The Truth Behind the Carbon Market Smokescreen edited by Amy Miller

Michael Classens reviews The Carbon Rush: The Truth Behind the Carbon Market Smokescreen, edited by Amy Miller

Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto’s Urban Landscape

Book review by Michael Classens of Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto’s Urban Landscape written by Na Li

The communicative ecology of social democracy: The case of the CCF/NDP

A good deal of scholarship on the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party has focused on the party\u27s trajectory away from a form of prairie populist, social democratic politics towards a centralized, liberal democratic politics (e.g. Zakuta 1964, Young 1969, Cross 1974). This longitudinal study bears out a similar conclusion, but focuses specifically on changes in the party\u27s communicative ecology over time. Using the work of Carey (1989) and Nancy (1991) the notion of communicative ecology, defined as the ways in which an institution communicates through non-mass mediated means is used to understand both how the party conceives of abstract categories such as democracy and citizenship as well as how they proceed with communicating these ideas

Quality assessment of thyroid ultrasound and implementation of a standard reporting template to be used in training hospitals

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Medicine in the branch of Diagnostic Radiology, Johannesburg, 2017Ultrasound is the conventional and best imaging modality used to visualize the thyroid and thyroid-related disease. An adequate ultrasound report can significantly influence clinicians in making management decisions in these patients. Aim: The aim of this study was to critically assess the quality of thyroid ultrasound reports generated at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital (CMJAH), a training hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. Method: A retrospective cross-sectional study was performed. The quality of thyroid ultrasound reports was determined by using a data collection sheet that included items that should be contained in a thyroid ultrasound report. The contents of the data collection sheet was guided by current literature (including Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System (TIRADS); Thyroid, Head and Neck Cancer Foundation (THANC); American Thyroid Association guidelines (ATA), British Thyroid Association guidelines (BTA) and the Society for Endocrine, Metabolism and Diabetes of South Africa (SEMDSA)). The data collection sheet was designed by the principal investigator and supervisors. The quality of reports of training radiologists, sonographers as well as qualified radiologists were documented. Comparisons of the quality of reports was made between the above groups of reporters.XL201

From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms

Driving through the Holland Marsh one is struck immediately by the black richness of its soil. This is some of the most profitable farmland in Canada. But the small agricultural preserve just north of Toronto is a canary in a coal mine. From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms recounts the transformation, use, and protection of the Holland Marsh, exploring how human ideas about nature shape agriculture, while agriculture in turn shapes ideas about nature. Drawing on interviews, media accounts, and archival data, Michael Classens concludes that celebrations of the Marsh as the quintessential example of peri-urban food sustainability and farmland protection have been too hasty. Instead, he demonstrates how capitalism and liberalism have fashioned and ultimately imperilled agriculture in the area. This fascinating case study reveals the contradictions and deficiencies of contemporary farmland preservation paradigms, highlighting the challenges of forging a more socially just and ecologically rational food system

Food, Space and the City: Theorizing the Free Spaces of FoodShare's Good Food Markets

This paper explores a social and spatial (socio-spatial) response to urban food insecurity in Toronto, Ontario as expressed through FoodShare’s Good Food Market (GFM) program. I argue that the GFMs draw on a multi-scalar conception of urban food insecurity to inform a strategy of resistance to the globalized food system and as a means of reducing food insecurity in Toronto. In as much as the GFM markets are relatively fixed places of resistance to the globalized and industrialized food system, I argue they can be more broadly theorized within the free space literature, a product of the confluence of social movement and critical human geography scholarship. Situating the GFM markets within this hybrid theoretical context illuminates strengths and raises cautions of employing place-based scalar strategies in the context of urban food activism

From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms: Socio-Ecological Change and Making Food in the Holland Marsh

In the early 1920s a three thousand hectare area of the Holland River lowlands, 60 kilometers north of Toronto, Ontario, was canalized, drained and transformed into fields. In the contemporary period, wetlands are places to protect not dredge, drain and farm. Yet in the 1920s support for the conversion of the Holland Marsh was virtually unanimous. Indeed in 1920 not converting the wetland to farmland would have been considered reckless. The pages that follow excavate the complex social, political, biophysical, and cultural processes that account for this significant divergence in ideas about, and uses of, land. Through a chronological environmental history of the area, important historical conjunctures and constellations of institutions, ideologies and technologies responsible for driving landscape change and the production of nature in the Holland Marsh are highlighted. Conceptually, I problematize the idea that the agricultural landscape is natural by drawing on Neil Smiths (2008 [1984]) provocative production of nature thesis. I combine this with more traditional political economic and political ecological approaches to the study of food agriculture in order to elaborate and extend Smiths work. I demonstrate that the context of natures production the actors, institutions, locale, history and politics both facilitate and impinge upon the production of nature

End Times and Beginnings: A Retrospective and Relaunch

In the Beginning...In 1988, a group of intrepid graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, at York University in Toronto, Canada, conceived and launched UnderCurrents. The founders’ main objective was to provide a space for alternative, critical, and creative explorations of environmental issues, thinking, action, and scholarship. Although many of the theoretical and conceptual tools to enable such a project were only in embryonic form, the founding editors sought to destabilize the ontological and epistemological moorings of some stubbornly persistent signifiers, including “nature,” “wilderness,” and “environment.” Direct action environmentalism of previous decades, though visceral, corporeal, and essential, had proven insufficient in the heady days of Reagan’s culture wars. The founding editors understood this implicitly, and launched UnderCurrents as both a material and discursive salvo. This wasn’t their parents’ environmentalism....