Wranglers vs. Wagner
Gleaming office towers and fading grain elevators. Business titans and the working poor. The Oilers and the Flames. Blue skies and red necks. The things that give Alberta its unique reputation [...]
Knowing the Score
“My wiggling bum was the first thing that my lovely wife claims she ever noticed about me, so I fear it shall remain,” William Eddins wrote last fall in a letter to the Edmonton Journal. The [...]
Theatre Goes South
Sometime in 1995. Another evening, another fundraiser, this one at the Red and White Club in Calgary. I’ve been trotted out as a celebrity, along with the other usual suspects: a radio talk show [...]
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The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
An Environmentalist’s Case for Beef
“…If you knew how meat was made, you’d probably lose your lunch. I know; I’m from cattle country, and that’s why I became a vegetarian. Meat stinks, and not just for animals but for human health and the environment.”
That was Alberta singer-songwriter k.d. lang, in a 1990 television spot for ...