The Blork Blog

Today is “Earth Day.” In honor of that, I am posting the following exposé on biofuels. I originally wrote this last year, before the looming global food shortages threw the whole biofuels question into the spotlight. I didn’t post it, however, as I wanted to do more research. But perhaps today is a fitting day […]

According to Wikipedia:
Earth Hour is an international event that asks households and businesses to turn off their lights and non-essential electrical appliances for one hour on the evening of 29 March at 8PM local time to promote electricity conservation and thus lower carbon emissions.
I’m all for lowering carbon emissions. But if you live in Quebec, […]

The last thing we Montrealers need is another blog post about the abundance of snow we’ve received this winter (and in the past week in particular), but for the sake of posterity and my readers in Australia, I thought I’d post a few pictures.
Here’s our back yard in greener times:

Here’s our back yard this morning:

It […]

(Updated! See below…)
According to Pascal Yiacouvakis, the morning weather guy on CBC Radio’s Montreal morning show, we’ve broken two seemingly opposing weather records so far this winter. Since December 21, we’ve broken the records for snow fall, and for warm temperatures!
We saw that writ large over the few days as the previous week’s big snowfall […]

I‘m fascinated by the various “off the grid” type homes one sees in books and magazines (like this one, which features a house in Northern California built by Martine’s friends Gaetan and Mario). It’s great to see people thinking about principles of sustainability and ecology in home building, and to actually act on them. Unfortunately, […]

Everybody’s talking about the Airbus A380 that landed at Montreal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport yesterday. I’m a big fan of airplanes and flying, so I wish I could have been there to witness it. I’m an uneasy fan, however, as I realize that air travel is one of the biggest contributors to pollution, oil consumption, […]