Whose Woods Are These?
Each year as summer approached, we prepared our escape. We hauled bins of dried food, boxes of tattered paperbacks, sleeping bags and an immense, hideous, grey-green army surplus tent out to our [...]
Der Indianer
The first thing John Blackbird learned when he was growing up on the Canadian prairies was that his people were no good. Indians were history’s losers: dethroned, displaced, rounded up and [...]
Where Does Your Food Come From?
Oranges from Japan, dates from Morocco, gouda from Holland—if we are what we eat, Albertans speak many languages. We fly or truck in most of our food from places we’ve never been, grown by people [...]
Painting the Province Green
A young Green politician is being interviewed by QR77 radio in Calgary. It’s November 2000, a week into a federal election. The program host’s questions are of the meatball variety, maybe due to [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
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 ...
Uncanny Resemblance
Historians are loathe to use the past to describe the present. But sometimes similarities between past and present are sufficiently striking that they may well offer up some useful lessons for today. The parallels between Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government and William “Bible Bill” Aberhart’s Social Credit government of the ...