What’s the gift that keeps on giving? Our natural resources—the land, air and water that make up our majestic environment—and it’s an especially exciting time to report on the state of our blue dot.
In Canada, we’ve got our work cut out for us, with new nation-building projects, controversial pipelines, super charged wildfires, microplastics in our Great Lakes, PFAS in our drinking water, massive flooding and more. Bah humbug!
But don’t discount the potential for human innovation: clean energy projects, decarbonizing data centers, the power of captured carbon, converting waste to energy, climate resilience, and clever strategies to cleanup and transform contaminated sites.
Environment Journal is on call to cover it all. These are a few of our favourite things from 2025:
■ Our annual Excess Soils Symposium attracted more abstracts and attendees than ever before, which made for an action-packed plenary and a fun time. This event has become so popular that we’re expanding to the Evergreen Brick Works for more capacity and more opportunities to connect.
■ Speaking of soils, a well-attended webinar that dug deep on Soils Management in Western Canada led us to realize we need to introduce a Western edition of the Symposium, starting with Calgary.
■ Recognizing ground-breaking brownfields projects and champions at the annual Brownie Awards, which is presented in partnership with the Canadian Brownfields Network (CBN). We celebrated standout projects such as Biidaasige Park and were inspired by the keynote on the importance of Indigenous partnerships from a founder of Indigenous Clean Energy.
■ Kicking off the Women’s Environmental Group and providing meaningful opportunities to connect and empower women working in the a variety of roles in the environment sector in Canada.
■ Launching the History of the Environment, a new online resource that chronicles over 170 key moments in the environmental industry, from policy milestones to environmental disasters and scientific breakthroughs.
■ Venturing to a variety of industry events presented by the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, Pollution Probe, the Ontario Environment Industry Association, the Qualified Persons Community of Ontario, the Environmental Services Association of Alberta and others. It was also nice to pen a report for Reseau Environnement and feature stories from Climate Stories Atlantic.
■ Putting the spotlight on movers and shakers in the industry, including CEOs and financial analysts, we conducted in-depth interviews on timely subjects such as greening the grid and flipping the switch for cleantech through financial incentives and thought leadership in our Market Watch series.
■ Investigative feature articles that didn’t pull punches examined our hot air over wildfire woes and puzzling PFAS contamination. I also had an exclusive data center tour that felt like an episode of the X files, which I’ll be writing about soon.
■ Garnering new readers via the LinkedIn edition of the newsletter and our new Instagram account.
■ In appreciation of your appetite for details on big cleanup projects, we kicked off the Top 25 Remediation Projects Report, and our elves are working away to bring this to you in the new year.
Plus, I was personally honoured to receive a few special invitations: Nature Canada invited me to join the incredible change-makers in the Women for Nature initiative; the CBN asked me to join a dynamic panel discussion on changing the narrative around brownfields; and, it was a thrill to appear live on CP24 to discuss why it’s a new day for decarbonization in Canada.
To top it all off, an exciting merger with SiteMedia Group now makes us part of the largest B2B media platform serving the industrial sector in Canada. This means a bigger team to accomplish more together. It’s teamwork that makes the dream work and we are grateful for our dedicated work family and our distinguished Advisory Board.
Looking forward to unwrapping more stories and making more memories together in 2026! Our environment, with all its majestic natural resources, is the gift that keeps on giving—but we must keep doing our best to protect this precious blue dot for future generations.
Happy holidays,
Connie
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