Archives

I retired from a career with Parks Canada a few years ago, not long after signing off on a management plan that prescribed a 2 per cent annual increase in visitors to Banff. Local businesses were [...]

If you want to see elk or wolves in Banff or Jasper National Parks this winter, here’s a tip: look on an alluvial fan. Alluvial fans develop wherever a creek running down a steep drainage flows [...]

I knew about ranching back in the 1980s. Ranchers were the bad guys who killed off bears and whose cattle trashed their habitat. Like most environmentalists of the day, I got my insights from [...]

This past September I signed up for a volunteer work bee with Trout Unlimited Canada (TUC) and spent a day with about a dozen people I had never met before, including an oil engineer, a banker, a [...]

Each November I hunt elk. In the eerie darkness I set out into a silent world, hoping to spot elk feeding at first light. After that first hour or two, the animals retreat into dense cover to bed [...]

Read any of Alberta’s daily newspapers and you will know that our province’s only hope is new pipelines. Nothing else will save us. I took some convincing, but I’m in. In fact, I’d like to [...]

I’m an addict. I use oil. We all do. That’s how we’ve wired our economy. But the fact that we’re hopelessly hooked doesn’t mean we shouldn’t confront the issue. The first step, after all, is [...]

One June day I headed deep into the Whaleback wilderness of southwestern Alberta in search of one of the most beautiful of native lilies—the blue camas. Blue camas was part of the ecological [...]

Try and picture them all. On his first visit to the Waterton area in 1865, John (“Kootenai”) Brown wrote: “The prairie as far as we could see east, north and west was one living mass of buffalo. [...]

Look at a satellite image of Alberta at night, and you can map our richest agricultural soils by the concentration of urban lights. When European immigrants arrived here in the late 1800s and [...]