The Road From Here
Years from now we may well remember the date with a certain mythic significance. March 11, 2020: the day the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 virus a global pandemic. I was [...]
Jenna Butler
Jenna Butler
Our Real Journey
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary [...]
Saving Seeds
It’s the cusp of the growing season on our farm. The past year hasn’t been for the faint of heart, that’s for certain: another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it summer, the boreal forest lagging [...]
Washington Black
Esi Edugyan has long explored the concept of living between worlds, an identity both exhausting and destabilizing. In her 2004 debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, Ghanaian civil servant [...]
Pay No Heed to the Rockets:
The narratives of places shattered by war are often told lopsidedly—stories of violence and destruction become the focus, while the people themselves, their daily lives, losses and joys, their [...]
On Mockingbird Hill:
Fire lookout narratives can almost be considered a niche unto themselves in literature. There’s something deeply compelling about the concept of being paid to disappear into the bush for several [...]
Our Place:
Historically it’s been all too easy to write off Alberta as a province of redneck oil mavericks in big trucks, concerned more with quadding the back forty than with environmental conservation and [...]
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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 ...