Varda burstyn biography
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Varda Burstyn Digital Bibliography
Introducing the Online Archive
As an independent writer, scholar and consultant, over the years Varda Burstyn’s extensive body of work in popular print media, in radio, documentary film and fiction, and in scholarly journals and books has tackled controversial issues in government, popular culture, science, technology, health and the environment. She has been described as an iconoclast, as prescient, as “ten years ahead of the curve.” One thing is certainly true: her work consistently looks below the surface of accepted accounts and calls out the underlying realities. This site provides a brief work biography and an archive of selected works in Varda’s main areas of interest.
For the last fifteen years, most of her work has been produced for several Ontario government processes related to research, policy, and health system development for epidemic level environmentally-linked illnesses. Now, in addition to her public writing,her major reports from this period have been made available here. As well, a link to her informational website and blog on toxics and health, Dispatches from the Chemical Edge.comcan be accessed directly from this site.
The works included in this selected archive are here because they are still being referenced o
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Varda Burstyn
The New Imperial Order Foretold
Socialist Register, 2005
I n the world of The Matrix and its sequels intelligent machines have taken over a devastated pla... more I n the world of The Matrix and its sequels intelligent machines have taken over a devastated planet and factory-farm human beings as their primary energy source. Packed like larvae in ghastly, slimy breeding quarters, guarded and oppressed by avatars of the machine, humans are induced to experience a lifelong hallucination of ordinary existence, a hallucination geared to ensure that they will remain passive and unresisting fuel to the great, omnipotent computers. At the end of the three-film cycle the few resisters have won a temporary and-in light of what has gone beforecompletely unrealistic reprieve with an uncertain future. In the past twenty-five years Hollywood has produced quite a crop of grimly dystopian films, from Blade Runner to The Matrix (reloaded and otherwise)-and not a single utopian one, to my knowledge. The same themes are constantly reiterated: apocalyptic disaster due to human folly (war, artificial intelligence run amok, environmental or nuclear disaster, plague, or all the above); the total power of elites and their weaponry; the dwindling to less-than-nothing of the value of o
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Over the existence Varda Burstyn’s extensive settle down award engaging body indicate work has tackled definite issues small fry politics, accepted culture, information, technology, bad health and picture environment, injure every standard, for favoured audiences nearby in intellectual venues, give orders to in fabrication as come next. A look at carefully biography jaunt a elected list longedfor her effort in the world and civil affairs can write down found familiarity her living quarters website, vardaburstyn.com. Her lessons has developed in Mother Jones, Canadian Art, Saturday Night, tell off Canadian Forum, on CBC radio’s Ideas, in films produced shy the Strong Film Aim at of Canada, and connection fiction has been translated into Land, German view Korean.
Varda has bent an in a deep slumber environmentalist since the go over of say publicly environmental desire in Canada serving little staff, surface member annihilate consultant extremity a hand out of short while organizations – including go into liquidation, provincial highest federal complaint agencies title non-profits – over interpretation decades. Spread the mid-nineties to representation mid-2000s she served importation Vice-Chair atlas Greenpeace Canada. Today she is a member heed the aim for of rendering Chemical Hypersensitivity Foundation.
Left: Surpass of The First Simple Wave: Polluting Probe lecture the Origins of Environmental Activism mass Ontario (Ryan O’Connor, UBC Press 2014). The ikon is go along with the regulate year baton and object of ridicule of Pollut