The Works
“Like Cheez Whiz and the atom bomb, modern think tanks
are a distinctly U.S. invention
that has spread all over the world."
— From “Mind Games,” as quoted in UTNE's Great Writing Blog
Bearly With Us (April 2009)
 Jim Pissot rests his hands solidly on a lectern as the giant screen behind him illuminates his raison d’etre: “Path to Extinction or Path to Recovery? The Mismanagement of Alberta’s Endangered Grizzly Bear.”
With his spectacles and blue blazer, Pissot looks every bit the university professor he could have been had he not become a professional advocate for the world’s endangered species. Now employed by Defenders of Wildlife, one of the largest wildlife protection organizations in North America, he is one of seven guest speakers at this sold-out Canadian Institute of Forestry workshop on grizzly bear research and management in Alberta.
In the audience: some 200 foresters, biologists, bureaucrats, oil and gas workers, hunters, environmentalists and off-road vehicle enthusiasts – most of them lukewarm or outright hostile to what he has to say. So he begins with a Far Side cartoon: two giant bears standing tall at the mouth of a cave, beating back an onslaught of club-wielding Neanderthals. “Criminy,” the caption reads, “every summer there are more and more of these things.”
Want the whole thing? Visit the April 2009 issue of Westworld.
The Upside of Underground (April 2009)
 On a sunny Tuesday evening last June, I strolled into downtown Calgary, the heart of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, to hear David Keith speak about technological fixes to the issue of global warming at what is known around the world as a science café. Organizers bring scientists into public spaces, usually pubs or coffee houses, to talk about their research in an informal atmosphere, one that encourages a greater public understanding of the latest scientific research and, with the help of a cold beer or two, some healthy debate about what to do with it. This struck me as a rather valuable exercise, given the role that science and technology will need to play in keeping Alberta’s economy healthy in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.
I had never met the University of Calgary’s Keith, but I was led to understand that he was one of Canada’s foremost experts on both climate change and carbon capture and storage, perhaps the most promising techno-fix to what he often refers to as “the climate problem.” If the rumours were true, Keith was also an engaging speaker and an intellectual maverick inclined to take on everyone from the oil industry to the environmental community with equal skill and verve.
Click here to read more from the April 2009 issue of Alberta Venture Magazine.
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Mind Games (March 2009)
“Like Cheez Whiz and the atom bomb, modern think tanks are a distinctly U.S. invention that has spread all over the world.”
—From “Mind Games,” as quoted in UTNE's Great Writing Blog
 There’s an old saying in research: Go right to the source. And so, on a cool November Thursday, I stopped in to speak to former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein at his newest place of employment, the swank Calgary offices of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP. I wanted to know how a select group of ideologically motivated research institutes—think tanks—have influenced the politics and policies of the Alberta government over the last decade or two. Who better to ask than the man who was at the helm from 1992 to 2006?
I explained the reason for my visit, but before I could begin asking questions, Klein simply launched into an ad hoc speech about think tanks. “I appreciate the Fraser Institute and the Manning Centre [of which he is both a patron and a fellow] for doing their research and analysis, but a lot of it is beyond me, to tell you the truth. In politics, there’s very little time to consider policy.”
After he made several glowing references to the Fraser Institute, the Canada West Foundation and the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, I asked about the Pembina Institute and the Parkland Institute, Alberta-based think tanks that have staked out political territory to the left of Klein’s. Or at least I tried to; he cut me off.
Click here for more of Ralph Klein, think tanks and Alberta politics.
 The prisoner’s dilemma is probably the most popular game-theory scenario of all time. Imagine you are one of two suspects picked up by the police for, say, a New Year’s Eve bank robbery in Calgary. The detective knows he doesn’t have enough evidence to convict either of you, so he puts you in separate cells and offers each of you the same deal: testify against your friend in court and you will go free (though your convicted friend will spend 10 years in prison). If you refuse, and your friend turns you in, he goes free and you spend 10 years in prison.
There are other options, though. If you both testify, you each receive a five-year prison sentence. If neither of you testify, you both spend a measly six months in the local jail, out in time to enjoy the best of the southern Alberta summer. What do you do?
According to a game theory analysis recently completed by the Canadian arm of Deloitte Consulting, the answer to that question may provide some insight into the future of Canada’s booming oilsands industry.
To read how the prisoner's dilemma applies to the future of the oil sands, read the April 2008 issue of Alberta Venture Magazine. |
 The good people of Lethbridge probably won’t like this, but it feels a little odd coming to a small university, in what can only be described as a rural city, to learn about one of Canada’s newest and fastest computers. Don’t get me wrong. Lethbridge has its virtues – climate, for one, and a reputation for friendliness, not to mention an almost infinite source of carbon-free power blowing in the wind – but the cutting-edge zeitgeist of a technologically obsessed 21st century? All I saw driving into town were wheat fields.
Click here to read about how University of Lethbridge computational chemist Dr. Stacey Wetmore is using Alberta's fastest supercomputer to help find a cure for cancer. From the November 2007 issue of Alberta Venture Magazine. |
A century ago, grizzly bears disappeared from Alberta's Great Plains – or so the story goes. Haunted by the sight of a grizzled bear heading east toward the Great Plains, one man thinks it's not too late to rewrite the ending.
 I saw my first ghost bear 10 years ago on the Stoney Indian Reserve west of Calgary. My new wife and I were headed home after getting married in Canmore. It had been a long day and a short night.
Exhausted, we bypassed the fury of the Trans-Canada Highway in favour of the rolling blacktop of the 1A, a backcountry road that follows the gentle curves of the Bow River as it meanders out of the mountains and down onto the Great Plains.
This feature was a finalist for a 2008 Western Magazine Award. Read the rest in Calgary's award-winningest weekly, the inestimable Swerve.
Every year a
funeral or two is held in Canmore for a mountaineer or skier or climber claimed by the mountains. Already this year, Karen McNeill and her climbing partner, Sue Nott, disappeared on the slopes of
Alaska’s Mount Foraker. Closer to home, Tom Brodribb died while
climbing nearby Windtower. Last summer, my friend Isabelle Dubé, one of the most adventuresome people I know and a lover of risky business — ice climbing, backcountry skiing, mountaineering, extreme mountain-bike racing — died as a result of a run-in with a grizzly bear while running the trails on the slopes above town.
Not that Canmore has a monopoly on risk-taking. In 2003, American hiker Aron Ralston had to cut his own arm off to save his life after being trapped under a rock for several days (say what you will about the dangers of exploring the backcountry alone, the gumption to hack off your own limb with a multi-tool is beyond the pale). What is it, I’ve often wondered, that compels us to take such risks? Are our un-risked lives so worthless, calendars of drudgery not worth living? Why do so many people do so many extreme things — and why do so many more revel in the doers’ accomplishments, or at least in their attempts?
Find the answer, or at least an attempt at an answer, here. As published in the inestimable Swerve .
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Having already destroyed billions of dollars worth of standing timber next door in B.C., the mountain pine beetle is poised to devastate Alberta's forests. But the problem isn't really the insects. It's how we manage the land.
This feature was a finalist for a 2007 Western Magazine Award. Click here to read more from the June 2006 issue of Alberta Venture Magazine. |
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Alberta Venture Magazine |
The Bear Minimum (May 2006)
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Powerful, grand and sometimes ferocious, the grizzly bear has no natural enemies in the wild—except one. Human predators are taking their toll on what is now considered a perilously small population of this mammoth omnivore. Despite the suspension of the spring grizzly hunt, this noble symbol of wilderness continues to struggle in a political landscape that has little room for it. Read more in the April issue of Avenue Magazine. |
© Peter Dettling |
When Alberta's legendary raconteur Andy Russell
died on June 1, 2005, Premier Ralph Klein honoured
called him a “true Albertan original,”
someone who “was a living symbol of the
values that define the province.” The
words themselves are appropriate enough, given
Russell’s legacy as a mountain man, conservationist,
and writer/filmmaker, but what do they really
mean?
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Like most political rhetoric,
Klein’s kind words are fraught with contradiction.
How can one of the Canada’s greatest environmental
activists stand for an empire with an environmental
track record that makes George W. Bush’s Republicans
look like Greenpeace? And what do Klein’s opportunistic
remarks say about the future of Russell’s grizzly
bears–and Alberta?
Visit the AlbertaViews Magazine website to read the entire
article.
Located between the Trans-Canada
Highway and the Bow River, about 80 kilometres west
of Calgary, Seebe is a quirky place, a fitting set for
a David Lynch film. It was once a bustling company town
built by the TransAlta's precursor, the Calgary Power
Company, to accommodate employees who worked its nearby
Horseshoe and Kananaskis dams. Now it is a ghost town,
waiting for corporate executives and an upstart collection
of Calgary developers to determine its future.
If you'd like to read
the entire article, just visit the AlbertaVenture Magazine website.
In the early hours of November 13, 2001, just
a day before eco-saboteur Wiebo Ludwig was to
be released from prison, the Monkey Wrench Gang
struck in Canmore, Alberta. Under cover of darkness,
and armed with more than a passing knowledge
of the workings of heavy machinery, unknown
bandits snuck through the forests as silent
and certain as a pack of wolves. They entered
the construction site of the Three Sisters Mountain
Village, where they poured sand into transmissions,
gas lines and hydraulic lines, and dumped corrosive
chemicals into fuel tanks. When the night was
over, eight backhoes, loaders and bulldozers
sat ruined.
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Conflict over who does what where and when in the wilderness
surrounding Canmore is hardly new. For much of the last
decade, conservationists and municipal officials have
argued with developers and provincial politicians over
the issue of how much the town can grow before it irrevocably
disrupts the mountain environment that has drawn people
here in the first place. But the contentious debate
has now spilled out of the council chambers and backrooms
to include—and divide—the residents of Canmore
themselves.
This article can be found in the March-April
2002 issue of Explore Magazine.
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Ottawa has laid
down the law. Now the world watches as Albertans
square off over the future of Canada's first national
park.
Visit the AlbertaViews Magazine website here to read
the entire article. |
A native boy is
savagely beaten to death with a garbage can in
an Edmonton schoolyard. What does this tragedy
say about poverty and social injustice in Alberta's
Indian Country?
Visit the AlbertaViews
Magazine website to read the whole story. |
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Yellowstone
National Park holds a special place in the annals
of conservation. Founded in 1872, it is the world's
first and most famous modem national park, designated
to protect a natural history found nowhere else
in the world. Now it is the southern namesake
of an exciting new conservation initiative called
Yellowstone to Yukon. |
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Florian Schulz |
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This
Yellowstone to Yukon region runs up the spine of the
Rocky Mountains, from Yellowstone National Park to the
Yukon Territory. It has been identified by an unlikely
array of organizations and individuals - scientists,
hunters, recreationists and other conservation-minded
individuals, gathered together as the Yellowstone to
Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) - as a unique landscape
ripe with opportunity. And it is. Defined by a range
of biogeoclimatic similarities, this region is one of
the last in the world where significant numbers of human
beings can coexist with a fully functioning mountain
ecosystem.
Click
here to get the full story.
On a remote lake in the
unforgiving wilderness of central British Columbia,
a tenacious woman builds three cabins, a business and
a life.
Wanna' read more?
Grab the March-April
1998 issue of Explore Magazine.
Two old friends and I had just hiked five miles
through venerable stands of Douglas fir and
western hemlock, from the northwest end of the
West Coast Trail to an unnamed vantage point
on what felt like the edge of the world. We
watched for more than an hour as the whales
moved north, from their winter calving lagoons
off the coast of Baja California to the fertile
waters of the Bering Sea, one of the longest
migrations of any mammal.
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Once abundant, these ponderous giants
were almost exterminated in the early years of the twentieth
century. Now more than 20,000 individuals inhabit the
waters of the eastern Pacific. They signify hope, these
whales, that even the most destructive human behavior
can be rectified with a concerted amount of commitment
and hard work.
If you'd like to read more about
the West Coast Trail, click here.
Any work by Jeff Gailus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License
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