Holly Dressel

Best-selling author and researcher Holly Dressel has become one of Canada's most recognized names in environmental studies, health care history and practices, economic concerns and aboriginal issues.

Dressel is best known for her work with celebrated environmentalist David Suzuki on film and radio programs and books. She was the producer, researcher and co-writer with Dr. Suzuki of the eight-hour CBC radio special, From Naked Ape to Super-species, which sold more copies than any other series in CBC history. Dressel and Suzuki then co-wrote a best-selling book by the same title, and followed up with another, Good News for a Change. Their latest book, More Good News: Real Solutions to the Global Eco-Crisis, was published in May 2010. In addition to her extensive involvement with environmental subjects, Dressel published Who Killed the Queen? The Story of a Community Hospital and How to Fix Health Care. It address controversies and explodes many myths about health services, including doctor shortages, funding options and wait times, and was nominated for six national and international awards, including the Grand Prix du Livre, the Governor General's Award and the Charles Taylor Award for non-fiction. She is working on her next publication, due out in 2011.

Dressel graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Indiana University with two honours bachelor’s  degrees in art history and English literature.  She was a Fulbright Scholar with a full grant to France and holds a Masters in English from Simon Fraser University. She is now an adjunct professor at the McGill School of the Environment. Dressel became a writer, producer and broadcaster for CBC radio and a writer/researcher at the National Film Board in the 1980s, and has gained national prominence through her work, especially on television documentary. Her production credits include several specials broadcast on CBC's The Nature of Things, many other CBC and National Film Board works, as well as programs and series broadcast on the National Geographic Channel, CTV, PBS and Global television.

Dressel was on the Board of the Sierra Club of Canada until June of 2009, has written extensively for newspapers, magazines and is a contributing editor for the U.S.-based Yes! Magazine. She is often interviewed as an expert by documentary film series and news specials on many controversial, current issues, including dam building, genetic engineering, water management and habitat preservation.  

She is in demand as a lecturer at CEGEPs and universities and has delivered her popular speeches for audiences such as the Vancouver Public Library's Necessary Voices series, the Alberta Health Services Association, the International Association of Historic Landscape Preservation, the Green Party of Canada, the Association of Ontario Midwives’ and the Canadian Museum of Nature.

At McGill, Dressel is involved with countless projects including working with the School and the Wemindji Cree to establish a major preservation zone in northern Quebec. She is involved in campus and local food issues as well as water and habitat preservation, in the two latter cases with the Traditional Council of the Kahnawake Mohawk and local grassroots groups in southern Quebec. She was a researcher on the recent feature documentary on the Alberta tarsands, H2Oil, as well as on a ten-hour radio series with David Suzuki for CBC’s The Current, called “The Bottomline,” to be broadcast in July of 2010.

• 8. Resisting Increased Health Care Centralization to Preserve Health Equity

• 7. Good News or Else: The Need for a Radical Expansion of Landscape Preservation Goals

• 6. Avoiding Biofuels: How to Tell What's Really Sustainable

• 5. What's Good (and Bad) about the Canadian Health Care System

• 4. The Big Surprise: Small Farms are the Only Way to Feed the World

• 3. The Adirondack Park model and the New Paradigm is Conservation

• 2. Cleanliness and Crowding: The Lessons of History in Emerging Disease

• 1. Stopping Contamination at the Source: New Technical and Philosophical Developments

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  April 2010

  More Good News: Real Solutions to the Global Eco-Crisis

  In this edition of their bestseller, the sequel to the best-selling Good News for a Change, authors David Suzuki and Holly Dressel provide the latest inspiring stories about individuals, groups, and businesses that are making real change in the world. More Good News features the most up-to-date information about critical subjects, such as energy and the economy, not covered in the previous edition. These stories offer compelling proof from the front lines that sustainable solutions already exist.

  
  
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  May 2008

  Who Killed The Queen: The Story of a Community Hospital and How to Fix Public Health Care

  Who Killed the Queen? is the first sustained investigation ever attempted into the mass closures of hospitals and hospital beds in Canada during the mid-1990s, showing the effects that the loss of 20 per cent of beds has had on health care across the country. It provides very strong evidence as to who and what was responsible for bed losses that are unparalleled in the history of any other industrialized country. It also provides well-supported templates for saving and strengthening the entire Canadian health care system despite this attack. Who Killed the Queen? makes its arguments by means of a particularly dramatic and telling case-study. It investigates the life and death of the exemplary, 100 year-old Canadian community hospital, the Queen Elizabeth of Montreal, site of many national and international medical firsts, which nonetheless became a typical victim of the mass closures in the mid-1990s.

  
  
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  November 2004

  From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

  In this revised and updated edition, David Suzuki and Holly Dressel explore the ways in which human beings have evolved beyond their needs, trampling other species, believing that they can make the Earth work the way they want it to. The book examines how human arrogance — demonstrated by a disregard for the small and microscopic species that constitute the Earth’s engine, and the reckless use of technological inventions like powerful herbicides or genetically engineered crops — is threatening the health of the populace and the safety of the food supply. But this is not simply a doom-and-gloom scenario or alarmist creed. The authors introduce readers to the people who are fighting back, those who are resisting the inexorable advance of the "global economy" juggernaut. From Naked Ape to Superspecies offers strategies for making the right turn at this crossroads and prospering by reshaping the place of humanity in nature.

  
  
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  August 2003

  Good News for a Change

  The litany of environmental bad news — rapid extinction of species, pollution, depleted food sources — can be overwhelming, but there's hope too. In this thoughtful look at what’s happening behind the grim headlines, authors David Suzuki and Holly Dressel show that thousands of individuals, groups, and businesses are already changing their ways. They highlight the growing number of profitable companies with a positive presence in their communities, activists and Third World villages practicing true participatory democracy, farmers and ranchers sharing their land with other species — even some governments, local and national, basing economic development on an eco-friendly model. The technologies needed to make a better world, say the authors, are already within reach — and being used. This practical, inspiring guide to saving the planet is based on the true stories of ordinary people who are doing it every day.