Our cover story, “No Running Water” by Helen Fallding, former reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press and new manager of the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Human Rights Research Initiative, exposes the horrendous situation on northern reserves where Canadian citizens have no running water in their homes, putting them at increased risk for a host of health problems usually associated with the world’s poorest countries.

BC journalists Dawn Paley and Sandra Cuffe share the results of their investigation into the resistance that is growing against the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline that would transport tar sands oil across the territories of 30 First Nations crossing hundreds of rivers and streams through to the northern coast of BC to be shipped onto oil supertankers across the Pacific Ocean.

Zoe Blunt and Chris Johnson explore the ideas of the controversial writer and ecological activist Derrick Jensen. Jensen dismisses the mainstream environmental movement that takes the continued existence of industrial capitalism as a given and looks to market incentives to alter business behaviour, to silver bullet new technologies and to changing personal consumption patterns.

Environmental philosopher Gregory Mikkelson argues that there is a strong connection between rapidly growing loss of biodiversity and growing income inequality. And Canadian Dimension collective members provide a short but handy and insightful guide to both false solutions to the climate crisis and to roads for renewal.

Dimension also invites some of David Noble’s students to write a few words in memory of this CD friend and frequent contributor. The much beloved professor at York University on December 27, 2010. He was only 65 years old.