From Grey to Green
Every year, the world uses an estimated 10 trillion kilograms of concrete. Nearly every major construction project makes use of the stuff. It’s in everything from office buildings, dams, bridges [...]
Is Recycling Futile?
We Albertans find it hard to resist the allure of produce perfectly packaged in plastic clamshells. The containers are convenient—the strawberries, cherry tomatoes and blackberries are gloriously [...]
Frontenac House Poetry Quartet 2019
Frontenac House has published its Quartet 2019, a suite of four books of poetry, as they’ve been doing annually since 2001. The release of four poetry books by four authors simultaneously is a [...]
Power Play: Professional Hockey and the Politics of Urban Development
Rogers Place officially opened in downtown Edmonton in September 2016. The arena—the new home of the Edmonton Oilers—cost $483.5-million to build, and, along with hundreds of millions of dollars [...]
Chinatown
Calgary’s Chinatown has been relocated twice—first in 1886, after a fire on Stephen Avenue destroyed half the neighbourhood, and again in 1910 when a CPR proposal to build a hotel in the vicinity [...]
Bears and Brains
Winston Churchill said “History is written by the victors.” In other words, consider the source before believing an assertion. Another example of “he who holds the pen” relates to intelligence. [...]
Fates Intertwined
Line 9B. It’s not a fancy name. It doesn’t have the poetic ring of “Trans Mountain” or “Northern Gateway” or even “Energy East.” Yet the Enbridge 9B pipeline, for me, symbolizes the [...]
Initiation
I first skated in 1969 on a frozen slough at the mouth of the Fraser River, so far west of our nation’s capital that you could taste the brine of the Pacific on your tongue and hear Tokyo accents [...]
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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 ...
Alberta’s Black Swan
The best evidence of our conservative government’s cluelessness before the economy tanked in 2020 is the provincial budget. It was passed in a rush on March 18, 2020, two months after the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, had arrived in Canada. Oil demand in China was already down 20 per cent. Oil storage ...
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 ...