Bio
Adria Vasil is one of Canada’s leading environmental journalists, with more than two decades of experience in sustainability reporting and a trio of bestselling books on green living. The longtime “Ecoholic” columnist was the managing editor at Corporate Knights, a sustainable economy magazine circulated in the Globe & Mail, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. The former lecturer with Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism lives in the east end of Toronto with her spouse and their cat, Ziggy.
Adria is currently on sabbatical.
Journalism and books
Adria started as a staff news writer Toronto’s NOW Magazine largely writing about corporate irresponsibility when she launched the Ecoholic column in April 2004. Ecoholic began as a green advice column and later became a mash-up of green news, interviews and brutally honest green product reviews. Vintage Press/Randomhouse turned her weekly column into a series of bestselling books. She published four books under the Ecoholic banner: Ecoholic (2007), Ecoholic Home (2009), Ecoholic US edition (2009/Norton) and Ecoholic Body (2012). She went on to run Corporate Knights magazine from 2019 through May 2025.
My story
I spent much of my childhood on an organic goat farm in Quebec raised by a commune of earth-loving hippies. The real story is my Greek Canadian dad and French Canadian mom moved my family from Montreal to the aluminum-smelting town of Shawinigan when I was a kid to open up a McDonald’s. Admittedly, steady access to milkshakes and McNuggets was nirvana to a 5-year-old, though it was a fact I would later hide from my activist friends. My family ended moving up back to Montreal in the late 80s. A lot of bad sh*t was happening to the planet. The Exxon Valdez oil spill, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain. Watching it all unfold on the nightly news with my news junkie dad changed me. By the time we moved to Toronto when I was 15, I became involved in pretty much every issue I could and became obsessed with the hidden impacts of our everyday choices. Was it tested on animals? Made in a sweatshop? Screwing up the planet? After I got my degree in political science from the University of Toronto in the late 90s, I was volunteering then working in the non-profit world researching corporate abuses in developing countries. I was in a planning meeting jamming about how the hell we were going to get the media to write about one of our anti-sweatshop campaigns when I decided I needed to go back school to became a journalist to draw attention to the issues I felt were being underreported. I got a post-graduate degree in journalism from Ryerson University while working at NOW Magazine. Soon after, I started the Ecoholic column.
My biggest influence: Definitely my brother Nick. He was my family’s original environmentalist and health guru. When I was a young teen, he started working for Greenpeace Montreal and began bringing home all sorts of flyers and stickers on saving the world, which I promptly plastered everywhere. Nick later developed pretty heavy duty health problems, including a lot of environmental sensitivities. In truth, he was a canary in the coal mine, picking up on all sorts of pollutants that most of us couldn’t detect. He unplugged as best he could, studying herbalism, holistic nutrition and permaculture. In everything he did, he showed all of us how to live more consciously, more mindfully, more simply. He was also a longtime meditator and after he died in 2010, I began meditating at the little Buddhist centre near my house. I’ve been curious about the intersection of mindfulness and sustainability ever since.
