CONTACT:       john@johnmullinder.ca

BIOGRAPHY:

John Mullinder was born and educated in New Zealand. He was active in multiple sports as a young man and graduated with a Master of Arts (Honours) degree in English from the University of Canterbury. He trained briefly as a teacher before setting off to see the world, backpacking through the South Pacific, California, Mexico, and Central and South America.

Upon his return to New Zealand, John ventured into journalism, first becoming a reporter with South Pacific Television and then Television New Zealand as a researcher/reporter on one of the country’s leading news and current affairs programs. During this time, he freelanced for a variety of international magazines: National Farmer (Australia); Chronicle for Higher Education (USA); and Maclean’s magazine and the Financial Post (Canada) before emigrating to Canada in the mid 1980s.

In Canada, John was asked to lead an environmental council for the country’s paper packaging industry. He knew nothing about packaging issues at the time but learned quickly, and over the years coordinated the industry’s achievement of a number of North American and world firsts in waste reduction and recycling. He served on various national and provincial task forces, boards, committees, and councils, and became a widely respected blogger on environmental issues.

Now headed back to his writing roots, John has recently published a couple of short stories and a book of blogs on environmental policy and recycling issues. The widespread ignorance and misinformation being spread on social media, in particular, led him to write Deforestation in Canada and Other Fake News in 2018.

He has followed this up with his latest offering, Little Green Lies and Other BS, which focusses on the emotional subject of environmental claims and advertising. He highlights some of the overblown rhetoric, gross exaggerations, significant omissions, and blatant hypocrisy of some claims and claimants, while at the same time providing the sources for the facts as he sees them.

OTHER WRITING:

Packaging and the Environment. A selection of blogs on environmental subjects from 2010 through to 2018 (packaging waste; the control and performance of Ontario’s Blue Box; waste and recycling issues; plastic versus paper bags; reuse is not always the better alternative; and miscellaneous blogs. Available here

 Of Horses and Men (short story, available here).