Occupy Habitat? Reviving the Occupy Movement, Climate Change & the Commons By Heather Menzies (author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good) Oxfam’s recent report, Working for the Few, on one per cent of the world’s population controlling most of the...
Heather Menzies’ Blog postings on
Environment
People’s Climate: Countdown to Paris, 2015
“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 1 This article starts “The People’s Climate” blog series by Heather Menzies, author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A memoir & a manifesto. In Reclaiming the Commons, I praise Bill McKibben and 350.org as...
Remembrance Day in Ottawa
Remembrance Day is always an important day for me as a peace activist and also as a writer who tries to speak truth to power. I participated once again in a White Poppy ceremony at the Cenotaph in Ottawa, after the main Red Poppy event. In my speech I made it clear...
New, Old Notions of Land Title – Ottawa Citizen op-ed
First published in the Ottawa Citizen, July 8, 2014. The Supreme Court’s 8-0 decision recognizing Aboriginal title to land First Nations communities have inhabited since before European contact is huge. It legitimizes understandings of land tenure as habitation and...
Cheers to Blue Communities
Every time a community passes a resolution or otherwise chooses collectively to become a “blue community,” I cheer. A blue community is one that recognizes access to water as a human right and promotes publicly owned water and waste services. (See Brent Patterson's...
Healing our Relationship with Bees
Walking the land of my ancestors helped me remember that we live in nature, even as we turn on the tap for a drink of water in a high-rise apartment, or hang a planter full of marigolds and salvia in the backyard of our suburban home. Walking the land that they...
Our common connection to the land
In Halifax, the last leg of my book-launch tour, I met a beautiful person: a Mi’kmaw elder, Billy Lewis, who welcomed me to his ancestral land. I offered him a pouch of tobacco as my gesture of thanks. I also told him that I now understood why it was so important to...
Breaking from the Status Quo
When you’re stuck, you’re stuck because you know you’re at a dead end. You know you’re just flapping your lips, moving words around on the page or in your mouth but without cutting through to something that truly is an alternative to the status quo. I knew that the...
Karl Polanyi and the Commons
Commons blogger David Bollier posted recently about the works of the great Karl Polanyi now being available online. Yes, too, I am cheering over this. I quoted a lot from Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation when writing Reclaiming the Commons for the Common...
On Thomas Berger and the Peel River Watershed
printed on rable.ca on February 24, 2014 Once again, Thomas Berger is at the centre of a case that questions whether only one understanding of development will rule, or whether justice demands negotiation among alternatives. In the 1970s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline...