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Heather Menzies’ Blog postings on

Environment

Reclaiming Cities as Commons

Reclaiming Cities as Commons

People working to reclaim cities as habitats, especially habitats that can sustain them with healthy food, water and transportation options, are in a sense reclaiming the commons. Certainly the commons offers a useful heritage to draw on, starting with the shift of...

Occupy Habitat?

Occupy Habitat?

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...

People’s Climate:  Countdown to Paris, 2015

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...

Cheers to Blue Communities

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

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

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...