WAKE-UP-TO-CANADA DAY – TAKE 2

  So here we are in Quebec, Kamouraska country, with me chasing around after my 17th-century Quebecois ancestors.  Sheena shot these pix. Are we having fun yet? You betcha! Because also we are celebrating WAKE-UP-TO-CANADA DAY!  Whole-heartedly. Unreservedly. Even, dare I say it, unapologetically. Of course we Canadians face a myriad of concerning issues, starting…

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Wrestling Visions of Climate Change in the Northwest Passage

Sailing Out of the Passage with Adventure Canada Day 12: Aujuittuq National Park Katabatic winds came roaring down off the mountains of the fjord. By some estimates, they were gusting up to 80 km, carrying higher-density air under the influence of gravity. Just before noon, the winds forced a brief closure of all decks for…

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Meet the Inuit activist who made climate change a human rights issue

In December 2005, Inuit author and activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier launched the world’s first legal action on climate change when she presented a 167-page petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Signed by sixty-two Inuit elders and hunters, it charged that unchecked emission of greenhouse gases from the United States had violated Inuit cultural and…

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Confusing poor John Franklin with conquistador Hernan Cortes

The 2014 discovery of Erebus increased interest in the Arctic, where climate change is more in evidence than anywhere else, while inciting commentary that has sometimes gone over the top. “What the Franklin Expedition glorified,” Roy Scranton wrote recently in The Nation, “was the war of Man—white men—against Nature. Franklin was indeed a tragic figure,…

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Celebrating a Buried Treasure

If you missed it in the Globe . . . Buried Treasures / An Arctic adventurer worth remembering Elisha Kent Kane was a superstar adventurer and writer in the 19th century but is remembered today only by specialists and aficionados KEN MCGOOGAN Globe and Mail February 28, 2009 Back in New York City after spending…

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