Last night I heard Joella Foulds sing at the Celtic Colours concert in Port Hawkesbury. She’s a splendid pianist, and she has a rich, powerful voice. In addition, she’s a fine songwriter, which I hadn’t known. She’s spent the last 22 years off the stage, working in arts administration, notably in shaping the Celtic Colours Festival itself,...
Read MoreI’m delighted to report that the Atlantic Credit Unions will sponsor the Maritimes Green Rights tour that begins next Friday. It’s a beautiful alliance. Green Rights is about enabling citizens to take responsibility for their own habitat; the credit union movement is about enabling citizens to take responsibility for their own financial lives. Both are...
Read MoreSeptember 22 – October 2, 2017 Last September, Marjorie Simmins and I toured from coast to coast in Merlin, our 34-foot motorhome. I lectured and showed the 67-minute film Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World, in universities, churches and community halls, and we both sold books. This fall, to my delight, the New Brunswick Environmental Network...
Read MoreMaxine Burkett, our latest Green Interview, is out to help the most vulnerable human communities face the endless crisis of constantly rising seas. She’s a professor of law at the University of Hawaii, and in our newest Green Interview, she talks about the small Pacific island nations which are shrinking and vanishing, possibly forcing entire national...
Read MoreOrri Vigfusson is one of my heroes – a very successful Icelandic businessman from a fishing family who made it his mission to save the wild Atlantic salmon from extinction by purchasing and retiring all the commercial Atlantic salmon fishing licenses in the world. Charming but relentless, Orri visited fishers from Spain to Russia to Labrador to Connecticut, found...
Read MoreMaking a Difference The whole idea of our Green Rights project (www.GreenRights.com) – which includes 30 Green Interviews, three films, and a book – was to persuade Canadians and Americans that they should have the legal right to a healthy environment: clean air, pure water, healthy food. We don’t have that now. What we learned during our research and filming,...
Read MoreBig Joe Mufferaw paddled into Mattawa All the way from Ottawa, in just one day. On the River Ottawa, the best man we ever saw Was Big Joe Mufferaw, the old folks say…. Come and listen while I tell you what the old folks say. So goes the song by Stompin’ Tom Connors. When I first heard it, Stompin’ Tom was talking to Peter Gzowski on Morningside...
Read MoreJoel Solomon has spent much of his life engaged with money – earning it, investing it, thinking about it, and giving it away. Although his activities are centred on British Columbia, his impact is national and international. He is one of Canada’s most notable environmental philanthropists, and he is the author of a fascinating new book, The Clean Money...
Read MoreI was recently asked by someone compiling a catalogue page to provide a list of screenings and other presentations of our film Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World. It was an eye-opening task. Here’s the list of events both completed and booked: Universities Acadia University Mount St. Vincent University St. Francis Xavier University University of...
Read MoreFrom left: David Boyd, Lisa Sundstrom, Max Cameron, Sheryl Lightfoot, all of UBC; and Silver Donald Cameron. Out of frame: Nuno Porto, UBC Museum of Anthropology. On March 23, I was on a panel at the UBC Museum of Anthropology with the five remarkable people in the photo. We were discussing a stimulating and moving exhibition called The Rights of Nature, focussed on...
Read MoreNew Green Interview: Gary Saunders! We’ve published our newest Green Interview, with Nova Scotia forester, author, educator and painter Gary Saunders, author of the award-winning new book, My Life With Trees. The book is a unique memoir of 30 chapters each focussed on a particular species of tree, and on Gary’s memories of people associated with that...
Read MoreAwards, Screenings, Festivals, Keynotes, Everything! The whole idea of promotion is to get people to pay attention to your project. For a while, not much happens – and then the project roars off like a rocket sled, and you’re frantically hanging on. Here’s some of what’s going on with the Green Rights project. IMPACT DOCS AWARD Impact DOCS is an...
Read MoreNova Scotia artists and cultural critics Paul Andrew Kimball and Ron Foley Macdonald are the publishers of the podcast View 902 (view902.com. For those outside Nova Scotia, “902” is the province’s area code.) In the site’s current feature interview, Kimball engages Silver Donald Cameron in an extended conversation about Cameron’s new book Warrior...
Read MoreCamille Labchuk: Our Newest Green Interview And also Reflections on the Mother of All Book Promotion Tours How Your Organization Can Screen the Green RightsFilm Upcoming Screenings of the Film Camille Labchuk: Advocate for Animals Still in her early 30s, Camille Labchuk has been an environmental and animal rights activist for more than 20 years, since she saw...
Read MoreMy Christmas Story by Silver Donald Cameron What all three boys wanted for Christmas was a dog. Some kind of pet, anyway. No, said their mother. Toys possibly. Books or clothing certainly. But Hazel Cameron had an ailing husband and a home on a 33-foot city lot, and she was a tidy woman. She had three boys; Donald was 13, David nine, Kenneth five. They made enough...
Read MoreHow green is a motor home? Good question. It arose a few times during our cross-country tour, and I had no time to write about it. After all, we were on the road within Nova Scotia for the last 10 days of September, left for Ottawa on September 30, and arrived in Vancouver November 5. The tour was intense and tiring; we did 38 events in 43 days and drove 6743 km....
Read MoreThe rain patters on the roof, slides down the windows, sluices down the drains. Today’s forecast? Rain. Tomorrow? Rain. Three days, five days, ten days? Rain every day. We must be in Vancouver. And we are. When I wrote my last blog post we were in Thunder Bay, in late October. Thunder Bay was warm, gritty and fun; like Sydney, NS, it’s the capital city...
Read MoreTHUNDER BAY! The north shore of Lake Superior is magnificent – great sweeping vistas of water interrupted by majestic islands, endless reaches of yellow and green forest, an aloof northern landscape made for trolls and giants and the music of Sibelius. And then there’s the towering Canada Goose statue at Wawa, an enormous folly asserting the presence of...
Read MoreA rainy Sunday in Brampton, Ontario – part of a huge sprawl of malls, warehouses, factories and freeways spilling westward from Toronto. We’re in the Indian Line Campground, the closest one to downtown Toronto, but it’s not very close – about half an hour with light traffic, much more in busy periods. It’s a good base for the screenings and...
Read MoreWow. Just … wow. That’s the best word I know to describe the splendid audience reaction to the Green Rights film. People love it! They love the stories, love the hopefulness, love the pace, love the use of folk-art and folk-music to mark the transitions from one story to another. Canadians don’t know these international success stories, and they’re...
Read More
