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 [...]
Environment
Environment
Meet the Minister: Shannon Phillips
AV: Does your government lose some credibility on the environment file due to its strong support for pipelines? No, because the replacement of a 50-year-old [Kinder Morgan] pipeline with a [...]
By Evan Osenton
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 [...]
Deliverance from Flood
When the June 2013 flood hit Calgary, Tony Morris was sitting at his desk in a downtown office tower. He looked out a window and could see the Bow River was rising. Morris left work and met his [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Retrospective: Game Changer
In 2008 the Beaver Lake Cree’s chief councillor, Alphonse Lameman, filed a court action against the governments of Canada and Alberta, alleging that the cumulative effects of industrial [...]
By Arno Kopecky
Retrospective: The Ponds
Every Albertan now knows that the tar sands, the world’s largest energy project, drinks an enormous amount of water. Separating tar from sand is a messy, water-intensive business: producing just [...]
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MOST READ
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 admitting you have a problem.
Addicts don’t make rational choices. They specialize in denial and ignore ...
Should Private Schools Get Public Funding?
Joel French, the executive director at Public Interest Alberta says no.
Our province has Canada's most generous subsidies for private schools. Setting aside those private schools serving children with special needs, many of which fill gaps in our public systems, the Alberta government spends $110-million per year subsidizing private schools. This ...
Closing Doors
No one likes having a door slammed in her face. But talking to dead people’s relatives is part of my job as a newspaper journalist. It is a skin-thickening, awkward task and I don’t relish it, but I don’t refuse it, either. I ignore the urge to back off. I ...