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As kids we used dirt for play – ‘mud burgers’ anyone? – and parents demanded that we wipe our feet and wash our dirty hands when we came inside the house. But soil is not dirty! In fact, soil contains an entire universe of organisms – one gram of soil contains billions of bacteria, thousands of fungi and algae. In addition to the billions of organisms, soil is also a mixture of living and non-living materials. The non-living materials include rock particles that have weathered over thousands of years from the bedrock below, plant residues and dead microbes.

Environment and resource problems can seem hopeless at times, especially when governments abandon all pretense of good governance. Before we stop off at the local fast food joint and order a final “Ennui Meal” with extra bathos, it might be best to stop and think of the solutions rather than just the problems.

It always starts with unpredictable inclement weather, which generally includes snowstorms and temperatures below -10. But then it happens, the temperature climbs above freezing, the snow melts, and the moment the ice begins to break up on the smallest wetlands, there are ducks on the pond. This is my happy place. It’s spring in Alberta’s boreal forest and everything is literally coming to life. Spring marks the return of birds to the boreal, which is home to millions of breeding birds and charismatic megafauna that call this mosaic of forests and wetlands home.

Springtime for those of us that study ecology is typically a busy and exciting time. In the Fedy Lab of Wildlife and Molecular Ecology most of our research focuses on birds. So springtime means ducks are arriving from their southern habitats, song birds are singing, and grouse are displaying and mating. That also means that after months of preparation my students and I are finally back in the field.

One sunny day in the early 1990s the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, was gazing down from an airplane as he flew over Moreton Bay, halfway up Australia’s east coast. He noticed a discolouration of the water where the Brisbane River entered the bay – a dark plume that extended out into the bay. He pointed out the plume to his travelling companion and asked him what caused it. His travelling companion was probably the best person in the world to answer that question – Bill Dennison from the University of Queensland.

Appalled by the inhuman failures of modern architecture and planning, critics such as Jane Jacobs reflected on the capacity of traditional, vernacular, unplanned and organic development to produce pleasing, diverse and human scale architectural designs and townscapes.

Rationally speaking, there is a broad scientific consensus on the human causes of climate change, yet we have not managed to deal with it in practical terms. There is a dismaying lack of progress on many environmental issues despite the passage of almost fifty years since the inception of the environmental movement.

In a World Water Day Op Ed article for The Globe and Mail, Sarah Wolfe wrote about the connection between emotions and water.

On June 8, another World's Oceans Day (WOD) came and went without a lot of fanfare. Even so, WOD’s a good reminder that Canada is an ocean nation. That might seem pretty abstract at times for those of us living in southern Ontario. With three oceans (*can you name them?) and the world’s longest coast - all 244,000 beautiful kilometres of coast - we owe it to ourselves to pay more attention to 'life below water'.

I should begin with a disclaimer, I did not have a one on one evening with Jane Goodall. It was more like me and a few hundred of my closest friends. But the entire evening had this intimate feeling and Dr. Goodall herself had a way of connecting with each and every person in the audience.