Hometown Arts
Among the big trucks, big wages and big development in Fort McMurray, professional artists struggle simply to survive. The city’s housing costs are unforgiving for people not working in the oil [...]
Mar'ce Merrell
Mar'ce Merrell
Artist in the Classroom
Most jobs ask you to do practically the same thing every day, but do it more efficiently, make it prettier, survive the mundane. Most jobs do not ask you: If you could change the world, what [...]
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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 ...
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 ...