B.C. seeks ban on public drug use, dialing back decriminalization
The B.C. NDP has asked the federal government to recriminalize public drug use, marking a major shift in the province's approach to addressing the deadly overdose crisis.
An international team of anthropologists, geographers and earth scientists from Canada, the U.S. and France is aiming to carve out a new discipline that seeks to use archeology and Indigenous knowledge to study climate change.
In a paper entitled “The archeology of climate change: the case for cultural diversity,” published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lead researcher and University of Montreal anthropologist Ariane Burke and her colleagues make a case for an evolving discipline they dub “the archeology of climate change.”
Burke and the team pitch the interdisciplinary science as a way to use data from archeological digs and the paleoclimate record to study how humans interacted with the environment during past climate change events such as the warming that followed the last ice age, which occurred more than 10,000 years ago, according to a release.
In the paper, Burke aims to identify the “tipping points” in climate history that prompted people to change how their society functioned in order to survive and showing how cultural diversity is an important tool to combat global warming.
"The archeology of climate change combines the study of environmental conditions and archeological information," Burke said in the release. "What this approach allows us to do identify the range of challenges faced by people in the past, the different strategies they used to face these challenges and ultimately, whether they succeeded or not."
For example, Burke said studying the rapid warming that occurred between 14,700 and 12,700 years ago, and analyzing how humans at that time coped with it through the archeological record, can assist climate specialist’s model possible outcomes of climate change in the future.
Researchers emphasized that Indigenous cultures have a “major role to play” in teaching how to respond to climate change, Burke said, citing Inuit in the Canadian Arctic having a detailed knowledge of the environment that is essential to planning a sustainable response.
Indigenous traditional farming practices, many of which are still in use today, are valid alternatives that can be used to redesign industrial farming, the paper states, including the Indigenous multi-cropping agricultural practice known as the “the three sisters”: beans, corn and squash.
“Indigenous farmers all over the world cultivate a wide variety of crop types that won't all respond to changing climate conditions in the same way," Burke said.
"They are preserving crop diversity in the global food chain and if and when the main crop types we currently rely on fail, this diversity could well prove to be a lifeline.”
The B.C. NDP has asked the federal government to recriminalize public drug use, marking a major shift in the province's approach to addressing the deadly overdose crisis.
An orca whale calf that has been stranded in a B.C. lagoon for weeks after her pregnant mother died swam out on her own early Friday morning.
Donald Trump's defence team attacked the credibility Friday of the prosecution's first witness in his hush money case, seeking to discredit testimony detailing a scheme between Trump and a tabloid to bury negative stories to protect the Republican's 2016 presidential campaign.
Sophie Gregoire Trudeau says there is 'still so much love' between her and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as they navigate their post-separation relationship co-parenting their three children.
More than 115 people who viewed the solar eclipse in Ontario earlier this month experienced eye damage after the event, according to eye doctors in the province.
An Ontario man who took out a loan to pay for auto repairs said his car was repossessed after he missed two payments.
George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s. Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest.
The Canadian Transportation Agency has hit a record high of more than 71,000 complaints in a backlog. The quasi-judicial regulator and tribunal tasked with settling disputes between customers and the airlines says the backlog is growing because the number of incoming complaints keeps increasing.
An American Airlines flight attendant was indicted Thursday after authorities said he tried to secretly record video of a 14-year-old girl using an airplane bathroom last September.
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The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
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A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.