Non-fiction

Botanical Interventions - Open Source Landscape and Community Repair

This is an article I wrote for the Access All Areas publication which came out as part of the Live in Public conference on community engaged artwork. I've attached the original document to this page, which is a pdf file.

I Love Turtles

•Attached is a little creative non-fiction piece I wrote that won the 2008 Knock Magazine, 'Eco-Lit' award.
It is a memoir of sorts, detailing the slow ecological destruction of the Southern Ontario landscape in which I grew up.

State of the Forest

I published this article in the Spring 1992 issue of FUSE Magazine. It examines the strategy that corporations employ to alter the language people use to describe the Canadian forest landscape. The article is in PDF format.

Strategic Manoeuvres - Corporate Money Laundering through the Arts

Strategic Manoeuvres - Corporate Money Laundering through the Arts

This is an article I wrote in the August 1989 issue of FUSE magazine. It detailed the funding of major Canadian art exhibitions by corporations involved in the defense industry, union busting and overseas human rights abuses.

The Future of Vancouver’s Urban Landscape: Open Source City

This article first appeared in the Vancouver Observer on May 31st 2011


Cottonwood and Birch colonizing abandoned car lot

When we talk about urban landscape, we usually think about grand 19th-century interventions like Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park or Haussmann’s epic re-engineering of the avenues and boulevards of Paris. In the modern, industrialized city, the design of the landscape is left to professionals; city planners, engineers and architects, whom we expect to have the agency and vision to accomplish this complex task.

 But is this really the right way to go? 

What would it look like if we freed up parts of Vancouver’s urban environment from the control of conventional planning and sat back and watched what happened? The results could surprise us, and might not be as bad as we fear.