News
The Artemis II successfully completed its mission and the crew, including Canadian Jeremy Hansen, has safely returned to Earth. We were able to hear about this mission and the work at NASA from Forum guest Charity Weeden in December 2025.
“The purpose of humanity is joy and lifting one another up, creating together versus destroying” - Artemis II Astronaut Jeremy Hansen
Former Forum guest, politician, diplomat and activist Stephen Lewis has died at age 88.
Lewis was a former leader of the Ontario NDP, Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and a longtime journalist and environmental activist.
Lewis is remembered by some as one of the most gifted speakers of his generation in Canadian politics.
Time Magazine included Lewis in its 2005 list of the most influential people in the world. "Until there is a future in which the vulnerable are protected and new life and new hope can blossom again," the magazine wrote, "Stephen Lewis will never consider his work to be done."
We are grateful to have had the opportunity to converse with Stephen Lewis here on Salt Spring Island.
The winner of the 2023 Donner Prize was announced on May 8, 2024, by Gregory Belton, Chair of the Donner Canadian Foundation, during a gala dinner in Toronto.
Michael Byers and Aaron Boley were awarded the Donner Prize for Who Owns Outer Space? International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space, published by Cambridge University Press.
In Who Owns Outer Space, Byers and Boley, an international lawyer and an astrophysicist, identify and explore the challenges of humanity’s rapid expansion into Space. They propose actionable solutions and explain the essential aspects of Space science, international law, and global governance in a fully transdisciplinary and highly accessible way.
The Donner Prize Jury praised the book for “providing a grounding in a field of law and policy, which is essential to the age we live in. The topic is vital, the analysis is thorough, and the finer points of law are meticulously explained. There is a clarity and “down to earth” quality to the writing, which make this a very accessible book on an “out of this world” subject.”
Suzanne Simard was a guest of the Forum in the fall of 2021 for a fascinating and uplifting evening at ArtSpring.
We note that she has just been included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2024.
You might also be interested in this recent article about her in the Guardian.
At the end of February we brought Lauren Shea to talk to GISS students about her recent team row across the Atlantic ocean- also known as “The World’s Toughest Row.” By completing the 3000 mile row in only 38 days, Lauren and her 4 woman team (Salty Science) were able to raise more than $250,000 for marine conservation education.
We are excited to see that Chile and Palau have become the first countries to ratify the “High Seas Treaty”. This treaty was put forward by our October 2023 guest Rashid Sumaila with the aim of keeping international waters fishing free zones which would help to stabilize fish stocks around the world, as well as promoting a sustainable fishery and boosting the health of the oceans.
Rashid Sumaila was the joint recipient of the 2023 Tyler prize for his work on this. He was informative, passionate and even optimistic when he was a guest of the Forum at ArtSpring. Our congratulations to him. We hope other countries now follow suit
