The Quiet that Keeps Us Sane
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 [...]
Kevin Van Tighem
Kevin Van Tighem
The Pipelines We Need
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 [...]
Oil Sucks
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 [...]
Welcome, Strangers
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 [...]
Don’t Fence Me In
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. [...]
Eating Soil
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 [...]
Gods’ Footprints
If you could hold a black-throated green warbler in your hand, it would be soft to the touch and strangely light. Barely as long as an avocado, the slender greenish bird with a black neck and [...]
Stewardship
My dad used to derive a quiet pleasure from driving our family’s station wagon past stuck four-wheel-drives. Alberta’s foothills and mountains had few good roads in the 1960s. Dad took things [...]
It’s Complicated, Honey
Spring draws nigh: the season of the birds and the bees. Birdsong is a welcome gift, but where would we be without bees? Their obsessive quest for pollen and nectar keeps much of Alberta’s native [...]
Hunting in Jasper
A few years ago Sykes Powderface and I visited a mouldering old cabin in Banff National Park. He told me a Chinese immigrant market gardener who once lived there used to trade vegetables to [...]
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Reducing the Harm
It's a little after 10 o’clock in the morning and Taylor feels like she’s climbing the walls.
When her name is called and the door to Lethbridge’s supervised drug consumption site buzzes open, Taylor moves quickly on her crutches. She settles into a chair at the second booth from the end ...
Should All Drugs Be Decriminalized?
Hakique Virani says yes.
Twelve-step addiction recovery programs teach that it is irrational to “do the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” This should be a lesson for legislators too. As the 4,000 Canadian families who lost a loved one to an opioid overdose last year know, our ...
Holy Healthcare
Just tell them we don’t have it here.” That’s what the nurse told me in Killam Hospital, an hour east of Camrose. I’d asked what would happen if a woman came into our ER asking for the morning-after pill. The nurse wasn’t being self-righteous, but simply explaining the policy.
As ...