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magazine / ja03
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July/August 2003 issue |
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EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
Burn season
Forests half the size of Nova Scotia go
up in flames every year in Canada. On average. Some years, half
a million hectares burn; other years, eight million. It's the
big-fire seasons that are increasing in frequency.
"We saw a lot more big-fire years in the 1980s and 1990s,"
says Mike Flannigan, a Canadian Forest Service scientist who is
studying climate change and fire. "Instead of one or two every
decade, we are now seeing four or five."
Are we ready for more big-fire seasons? The provincial and territorial
agencies that fight forest fires can always use more money. But budgets
aside, Canada's forest firefighters are arguably the most advanced,
technologically sophisticated and experienced in the world. Last
summer, we dispatched writer Michael Clugston and photographer Todd
Korol to the front lines in Saskatchewan to report on the latest
in firefighting strategies and tactics. It turned out to be a big-fire
year; well over two million hectares were consumed across Canada
by season's end. What Clugston and Korol found was an aggressive
intelligence-gathering agency feeding such timely information to
ground-operations managers that they were able to deploy firefighters
and helicopters and water bombers in anticipation of fire rather
than after blazes had taken off. Clugston's story is a fast-paced
chronicle of the battle against one fire, dubbed the Dragon, as well
as the story of one of the best firefighting organizations in the
country.
Karen Wonders is
an environmental art historian who contacted us last year with praise
for an article we published on the bighorn hunt in Alberta. In passing,
she mentioned a book she had written on habitat dioramas, and she
wondered whether we knew the work of the great Canadian diorama
painter Clarence Tillenius.
She hit a nerve. You can say all you like about your computer-driven,
interactive museum exhibits, but if you want to introduce kids to
the marvels of nature, take them to a museum with a diorama, which
features mounted animals in their habitats. Their appeal is timeless.
And, as Wonders told us, some of the most spectacular dioramas in
Canadian museums were created by Tillenius. Contributing editor
Dane Lanken journeyed to Winnipeg to meet with an artist who has
become a living legend. Lanken's profile of Tillenius tells
the story of a man whose mission in life has been to faithfully
portray in his art, which is based on close observation in the field,
the spirit, character and habitat of Canada's wildlife.
We have Sir John Franklin to thank for much
of the mapping of the central Arctic. He, his crew and his two ships
disappeared in 1847 during an expedition to locate the Northwest
Passage. The search for the men and ships went on for years, each
successive search party returning to Britain with ever more detailed
maps of the High Arctic. Although the remains of some of Franklin's
men were eventually found, the location of the ships remains a mystery
to this day. This summer, Dave Woodman, Canada's most relentless
Franklin investigator, returns to the Arctic to continue his methodical
hunt for the ships. Bruce Grierson's profile of Woodman in
this issue reveals a man utterly absorbed in his pursuit of those
lost vessels, one of which may finally lie within his grasp.
Just as we were taking this issue to press, we learned that Franklin
was not just an intrepid explorer, he was a sporting man. According
to newspaper reports, Franklin noted in a letter he wrote during
an 1825 overland expedition that he and his companions played a
game of hockey at Fort Franklin (now called Déline) on Great
Bear Lake, N.W.T. This appears to be the earliest-recorded reference
to ice hockey in Canada. Associate editor Tom Carpenter reports
in our "Discovery" department on that historic game of
shinny at the lip of the Arctic Circle.
— Rick Boychuk
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