Climate Action, transgenic aubergines, chickens, food policy and CBC awards
Today is the International Day of Climate Action! To... er... celebrate it I'll be attending a screening of A Sea Change, about the acidification of the earth's oceans.
In Sweden, consumers are being offered new climate change food labelling in order to help them make climactically healthier decisions about what to eat.
Other interesting items to cross my vision include a story published in Nature about the Indian government's having said no (for now) to transgenic aubergines (eggplants; aka Bt brinjal) on the grounds they can't evaluate how likely (or not) the transgenic varieties are to cross with non-GM varieties, a well-worn concern that somehow keeps getting overlooked by biotechnology firms.
An article in the New York Times paints a cautionary picture about kind of issues that can result from overenthusiastic backyard chicken-rearing by people who haven't quite thought the issues through carefully. It's very much the sort of thing the SPCA argued would happen before bylaws were relaxed to allow it in Vancouver.
And if you want to put your oar in about Canadian food policy, the People's Food Policy Project website is the place to go. Because Canada hasn't got a food policy: although one was researched, discussed and proposed a few years ago, it fell into the cracks between elections and died, unknown and unloved on the mean streets of Ottawa. The people's project is inviting stories and policy suggestions by December 1.
Other deadlines looming include the CBC Literary Awards, which I hadn't - until last night - realized had tightened their terms to exclude any work that's had a public reading. Which made me despair, for I have read a lot of my poems aloud and I really couldn't tell you which ones. It also made me foresee ugly scenarios of literary whistle-blowing by disenfranchised contestant audience members. (Surely there's a novel in that?)
In Sweden, consumers are being offered new climate change food labelling in order to help them make climactically healthier decisions about what to eat.
Other interesting items to cross my vision include a story published in Nature about the Indian government's having said no (for now) to transgenic aubergines (eggplants; aka Bt brinjal) on the grounds they can't evaluate how likely (or not) the transgenic varieties are to cross with non-GM varieties, a well-worn concern that somehow keeps getting overlooked by biotechnology firms.
An article in the New York Times paints a cautionary picture about kind of issues that can result from overenthusiastic backyard chicken-rearing by people who haven't quite thought the issues through carefully. It's very much the sort of thing the SPCA argued would happen before bylaws were relaxed to allow it in Vancouver.
And if you want to put your oar in about Canadian food policy, the People's Food Policy Project website is the place to go. Because Canada hasn't got a food policy: although one was researched, discussed and proposed a few years ago, it fell into the cracks between elections and died, unknown and unloved on the mean streets of Ottawa. The people's project is inviting stories and policy suggestions by December 1.
Other deadlines looming include the CBC Literary Awards, which I hadn't - until last night - realized had tightened their terms to exclude any work that's had a public reading. Which made me despair, for I have read a lot of my poems aloud and I really couldn't tell you which ones. It also made me foresee ugly scenarios of literary whistle-blowing by disenfranchised contestant audience members. (Surely there's a novel in that?)
posted by Rhona McAdam at 8:27 a.m.
2 Comments:
Oh, Rhona, how right you are about the tightened rules for CBC's competition. They really make it tough.
Because I don't have a writer's group to give me feedback, public readings often turn out to be a valuable part of my self-editing process. You learn very quickly what works and what doesn't.
All I can hope is that one can defend a previously-read piece by saying it was an earlier version that had been performed. Like, really, just totally unrealistic.
Yep, I am in the same boat - I often air my poems in this way too. And they often do change a lot as a result. Anyway it's such an ephemeral thing to hear a poem at a reading, I wonder how one actually proves whether or not a poem was read, particularly at a small event?
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