Marc Fawcett-Atkinson is a reporter and writer covering food, climate, plastics and the environment for Canada’s National Observer.
His ongoing investigations of the plastic industry in Canada won him a nomination from the Webster Awards this year in environmental reporting.
Marc has previously written for High Country News, the Literary Review of Canada, and other publications on topics exploring relationships between people and their social and physical environments.
He holds an M.A. in journalism from the University of British Columbia and a B.A. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic.
Marc's reporting on food security and agriculture is highly valued by farmers and the academics who study agriculture as unique in Canada.
Moose populations are declining in many provinces, with the exception of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton. Wildlife researchers and First Nations say logging, sport hunting and climate change are to blame.
When Zhanyun Wang was a kid, his mother told him to avoid the sweet-smelling gases that sometimes drifted across his neighbourhood near Shanghai from nearby plastic factories. Anything that smelled "really nice," the now-researcher at the University of Zurich explained, was "probably very toxic."
Melissa Daniels is from Fort Chipewyan, an 850-person roadless hamlet in northern Alberta. It's the land her people have lived on for time immemorial, and the place her relatives and friends call home. Yet, despite her love for her home community, she doesn't live there. The settlement is directly downstream from the tarsands, which has contaminated the hamlet and nearby forests with chemicals.
In Victoria, the province’s most expensive city, two adults working to support two children would need to make at least $24.29 an hour to afford rent, groceries and other key expenses, according to a new analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The floodwaters covering the former Semá:th X̱ó:tsa, or Sumas Lake — now called Sumas Prairie — contained 379 chemical components and bacteria, researchers found. Two-thirds were created by humans, including several that aren't found in nature.
For Daniel Metheringham, fighting climate change is as much about securing an "assured supply" of french fries as it is about preventing global calamity.
Lobbyists for Canada's meat and dairy industries are showing up with unprecedented visibility at the COP27 climate conference now underway in Egypt. The industries have at least one representative on the official Canadian delegation, a position that gives easy access to negotiators and closed-door meetings.
The struggle to keep farmland off limits for developers is a nationwide problem. Unlike the U.S. and many other countries, Canada doesn't have a national plan to protect farmland.
For the past several months, well over a thousand Indigenous children in Yukon schools have had access to something many Canadian students do not — an affordable daily lunch at school.
