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 [...]
Environment
Environment
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 [...]
Ice and Fire
Winter: trees stand leafless in the snow and animals seek shelter from bitter winds. Most birds have left. Of those that stay, many survive by scavenging the remains of the season’s victims. [...]
Hunting Season
Very early this morning, headlights crept down rural roads across Alberta, turned in to the edges of fields and woodlands, and blinked out. Had you been there, you might have heard the muffled [...]
The Carbon Tax
Rafael Baston is no climate change denier. A supply chain manager with TransCanada Corp. and a father of four, he broadly agrees with the Alberta government’s decision to impose a carbon levy on [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Gig Economy
When Edmonton rock radio station The Bear planned to broadcast an all-night Halloween contest from a graveyard, they wanted 22-year-old student Andy Ferguson to work the shift. Ferguson had already worked that morning and he really didn’t want to do the “graveyard shift” too—but then, who ever does? You do ...
Listening to Stones
Some of the world’s most enduring ways of knowing have staked their beliefs on a foundation of dreams cloaked in mysticism. Those that have dared to venture outside the canons of religious faith and scientific convention have often returned with fantastic visions and stories to tell.”—to the text after the ...
Lost Capital
On November 20, 1999, more than 400 artists and art lovers gathered at Artopia: The Party, an art event celebrating the unique art and community being forged in the Phillips Building, an old warehouse in downtown Edmonton. Groups of people milled about in a large renovated space recently vacated by ...