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July/August 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: St. Lawrence Seaway Feature: Park wardens Feature: Summer camps Feature: Iqaluit arts The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

(Photo: Darrell Lecorre)

AWARDS
Going with the flow

This fall, Michael Church (above) will load up a raft with scientific instruments and ride down British Columbia’s Fraser River from Quesnel, through treacherous canyons, to Vancouver. His goal? To weigh in on an ongoing debate over gravel.

Residents living along the lower Fraser’s diked banks worry that the buildup of gravel and sediment as the river flows to the Pacific Ocean increases the risk of flooding. They support large-scale removals of gravel. But others argue that extracting too much of it threatens one of the world’s richest salmon habitats.

To know how much gravel can be removed sustainably, explains Church, you must first figure out how much is being deposited in the waterway. “This is known for very few reaches of very few rivers in the world,” says the fluvial geomorphologist — a specialist in how rivers and streams shape the landscape — and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

On his rafting trip, Church will measure the Fraser’s flow and analyze sediments to determine whether recent gravel deposits downriver are the result of placer mining during the 19th-century gold rush and blasting to build the first railways and roads. “If we can show that this is a reasonable possibility,” he says, “then we have to really rethink the government’s developing plan for removing gravel from the river.” (The B.C. government has an ongoing program to extract gravel and sediment from the lower Fraser River.)

For his thought-provoking and rigorous science, Church has been awarded the 2009 Massey Medal for outstanding achievement in Canadian geography. Inaugurated by Governor General Vincent Massey in 1959, the award is administered by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Church has been “instrumental in turning fluvial geomorphology from a descriptive discipline into an analytical science,” says Chris Burn, a professor of geography at Ottawa’s Carleton University and a vice-president of the Society who has known Church for more than 20 years. “He’s brilliant because he sees the crux of an issue and can explain it to people in terms they can understand.”

Church has lent his expertise to numerous resource management debates. He helped write a new forest practices code for British Columbia in the 1990s, regarded at the time as one of the most progressive pieces of environmental legislation in the world. For 40 years, he has studied the effects of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Peace River in northern British Columbia. What he has learned is startling. “It will take 1,000 years or more,” he says, “for the Peace River to completely adapt to something as puny in nature’s scheme of things as a dam.”

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CHALLENGE
Geo whiz kids

Photo: Scott Wiebe

To prepare for his winning performance, Brandt notes that he studied categories in which he didn’t do as well in previous years. “I looked at websites,” he says, “and punched in various geographical terms and read up on them.”

Two-time British Columbia champion Chris Chiavatti, 14, of Burnaby, took second place. Alexander Cohen, 13, of Ottawa won a tiebreaker for third.

Brandt and Chiavatti, along with Graham Tompkins of Dartmouth, N.S. (last year’s second-place national finalist), will represent Canada at the 2009 National Geographic World Championship to be held in Mexico City from July 11 to 16.

MAGAZINE
A cut above

Canadian Geographic has also garnered three honourable mentions at the National Magazine Awards: Katherine Gordon, in the Politics and Public Interest category, for her account of the Tsawwassen First Nation’s groundbreaking treaty (“No reservations,” April 2008); Allan Casey, in the Science, Technology and the Environment category, for his investigation of carbon capture and storage as a potential remedy for climate change (“Carbon cemetery,” Jan/Feb 2008); and Stephen J. Krasemann, Eric Harris, Rick Boychuk and Suzanne Morin, in the Words and Pictures category, for their work on Yukon grizzlies (“Hungry as a bear,” December 2008).

— Samia Madwar

EDUCATION
Seaway’s birthday

The Québécois navigates through a lock at Saint-Lambert, Que., along the St. Lawrence Seaway. Photo: Martin Beaulieu

— Samia Madwar

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