Chris Wood

Chris Wood is Coordinating Editor for the Vancouver-based independent non-profit Tyee Solutions Society. He has been a professional journalist for over four decades.

The forthcoming "Down the Drain: How We Fail to Protect Our Water Resources" (Greystone, spring 2104, with Ralph Pentland) is Chris Wood’s seventh book, his fourth non-fiction title. Chris is also the author of hundreds of long and short magazine and newspaper articles.

Coming of age in southern Ontario at the end of the Sixties’ era of dissent and social revolution, Chris chose the itinerant life of small-market radio, first as a disc-jockey, later as a newsman. By the end of the ‘70s, by then based in Maritime Canada, he had found his calling as a freelance journalist in radio and print. His commentaries on current events aired weekly on CBC Radio in Toronto and a dozen other cities from Victoria to St. John’s; he won awards for radio documentaries on nuclear power, and the danger to farmers from agricultural pesticides, among other subjects.

Chris’s widening professional reputation for vigorous, accurate reporting and crisp prose attracted the attention of editors at Maclean’s magazine, and in 1985 Chris joined its masthead as Atlantic Bureau Chief. Over the next decade and a half, his many cover stories for Maclean’s took him to the favela shantytowns of Brazil, behind the bars of Canadian prisons, to the tense front lines between Israeli troops and Palestinian demonstrators, and into the media corrals of three Olympic games. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as the magazine’s National Editor, Chris oversaw coverage of the era’s constitutional and unity crises.

In 2001, Chris declined reassignment back to Maclean’s Toronto headquarters from Vancouver, where he was serving as the magazine’s National Technology Correspondent while living afloat on a classic wooden boat. Returning instead to freelance writing, Chris completed his largest work to date in "Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World" (Greystone, 2004), with Peter S. Grant; the title was shortlisted for the Donner Prize for best Canadian Book on Public Policy. That same year Chris and his wife, Beverley Wood (the two have written a series of young adult adventure novels together) moved to Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island.

In the last decade, Chris’s work has returned to subjects that concerned him early in his career: the ongoing destruction of the natural environment that sustains human life and the economy. Melting Point, a feature article in The Walrus magazine on climate change, won two National Magazine Awards and was later expanded into a book, "Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America." It was short-listed for the 2009 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Best Canadian Political Writing. Chris is also Coordinating Editor for the Vancouver-based independent non-profit Tyee Solutions Society.

While continuing with ongoing projects on Canadian subjects, Chris and his wife, along with their two English bull terriers, will relocate in late 2012 to historic central Mexico for a year of immersion in Spanish, and to study the environment of Canada’s third NAFTA partner.

10.10.12