Conservation and Travel Journalist
The international wildlife trade is directly responsible for the emergence and spread of pandemic disease, and according to a new report from World Animal Protection, many Canadians have participated in one way or another.
Our canoe was laden with all the necessities of outdoor life, and sloshing with water carried in by our socks, soaked every time we were obliged to leap overboard and carry our craft over rocks and beaver dams and the simple shallows of August. The intense sun of afternoon scattered the clouds and laid claim to Sporting Lake ahead and around us, the easiest paddling of the day, its depths presenting few if any hazardous boulders through red tinted water. In this lake I saw an island, drawing my eyes with supernatural sureness and speaking to a deeply spiritual segment of my rigidly rational mind.
Continue reading “Where Grows the King of Hemlocks: My Search for our Oldest Tree”
The human being is a deeply social animal, which is why, amid the upheavals this pandemic has forced onto daily life, be it the closure of businesses, the sealing of borders, the cancellation of flights and cruises, the most radical imposition on our Canadian identity has been social distancing.
Hemlock Woolly Adelgid – the invasive aphid-like insect noted for its destruction of Eastern hemlocks throughout the eastern United States – was discovered in Kejimkujik National Park in August of 2018, and now Parks Canada is doing something about it.
Continue reading “In the Way of Solutions: Keji Receives $1.4 Million to Combat HWA”
I found my first Ram’s Head Lady Slipper while on hands and knees along an obscure walking trail in Hants County, Nova Scotia, its delicate purple flower, no larger than my fingernail, now the focal point of a groundbreaking lawsuit in the provincial capital.
Newfoundland once qualified as a “remote island,” its ecosystem forming more or less free of the continent, largely lacking in mammals and catering heavily to birds and marine life. In the absence of predators these animals of wing and fin flourished, giving rise to the feathered kingdom described by some of our earliest explorers.
It took nothing short of a billion years to craft Gros Morne National Park, its mountainous conglomerations the result of ancient continents colliding and breaking apart, of ice ages and glaciers shaving away soil and carving out fjords, and of course human beings, our contribution at times destruction, regenerative, even humane. It’s a place steeped in grandeur, infusing an Atlantic Canadian humbleness with earthen majesty. It’s enough to stagger us modest Maritimers, and yet it feels like home, a conundrum with which I grappled this past July.
Continue reading “Like Home, Except Bigger: The Many Faces of Gros Morne National Park”
The more diverse an ecosystem, the more resilient it is in the face of adversity. This is among the firmest precepts of biodiversity, and is without doubt one of my favourite. The more intact our wilderness, the more of its native species remain alive and well and active in the workings of ecology, the more prepared we will be for the incursion of invasive species plaguing North America, for the apocalyptic consequences of unfettered climate change, for the policies of regressive administrations which seem only too common these days. It’s as strong an argument for conservation as any I’ve ever heard, allowing us not only to maintain the functionality of the world which sustains us, but the beauty inherent within.
Point Pelee has always been unique among Canada’s national parks. It was the first to be established for primarily conservation purposes in 1918, its importance to the migratory songbirds of North America made evident by local ornithologist Jack Miner and others. Because it jutted so far south into Lake Erie from southern Ontario, it offered birds flying north their first opportunity to make landfall in Canada, sharing unorthodox company on this 15 square kilometre spit of land for a few weeks before scattering across the Canadian north.
Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, Virginia, was featured in both the New York Times bestseller The Omnivores Dilemma and the documentary Food Inc. for his farm’s unique and holistic management, servicing more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets and a farmer’s market with organic beef, pork, poultry and forestry products. What’s more, he’s published 12 books.