It is arresting to chart the type of names Halifax ,Nova Scotia based NGOs have given themselves over the years.
It can tell us - muchly - about changes over time in communication and transport and how people alter what they conceive of as their home and region.
Nova Scotia originally was much larger - making up most of the province of New Brunswick, all of PEI province, and all of Cape Breton (which itself was a short-lived province, and so should be again).
These three provinces have long called themselves the Maritime provinces or more simply and more commonly, the Maritimes.
After 1949 and the entry of Newfoundland and Labrador as Canada's tenth province, the powers-to-be in Ottawa found all four provinces "Down East" to be provincial beyond belief (this from 1950s Ottawa, that hotbed-not of worldly sophistication !)
So they got lumped together as Atlantic Canada - neatly excluding the large portion of Quebec that is by any standards of science, in Canada and fully in the Atlantic coastal zone.
Halifax has always been the capital and biggest city by far of Nova Scotia.
And since WWII, it has been the biggest city by far of Atlantic Canada and its unofficial capital ---and one of five unofficial regional capitals of Canada.
When transportation was so bad in Nova Scotia that all rural seats had to be represented in Halifax legislature by Halifax men with business or family ties to that rural area, what would be called today NGOs tended to be realistic and 1840s educators called their new NGO, the Halifax Mechanics' Institute.
But once rail and steam ship travel was more reliable and speedy, one sees the Nova Scotia Institute for Science in the 1860s.
By the 1930s, it was common to see NGOs calling themselves the Maritime School of Social Work.
New post 1970 NGOs, set up by the boomer generation, tended to call themselves the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op.
(This was real hubris as this co-op of volunteer 'hands-on' amateurs really was effectively Halifax area based.)
Recently, St Mary's university and the Atlantic School of Theology, two second tier post secondary institutions in national Canadian terms, and located in the smallest by far region in Canada in terms of wealth and population, set up The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs (CCEPA) .
Chutzpah bravo !! Why should all the national NGOs have to be run by default out of Ottawa or Toronto ?
Now the "Global Commensality NEWS" - is my blog and journal an attempt by a Haligonian to bypass Canada and cover the planet ?
No.
"Global Commensality" is one concept, utterly indivisible - that is why it is in my blog and journal title and my key subject area.
In fact, while I am thinking globally on this subject, I have tried to limit myself to reporting locally.
I am working hard to find the hyper-local 'angle' to any international news stories about 'global commensality versus late modernity' (aka Doomers versus Deniers.)
Can't see, though, why some local Halifax based physicist couldn't blog - straight-faced - under the moniker of Multi-Universe Maven : go for it !
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