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January/February 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Polar vision Feature: Carbon cemetery Feature: North Shore highway The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

In our May/June 1995 issue, we published a back-page photo of a set of caribou antlers lying in the shallows of the Hood River in Nunavut, with three birds feeding in the foreground. It was an unforgettable image that signalled, to us, the arrival of a major new talent.

The photo was taken by Paul Nicklen, who grew up on Baffin Island, completed a degree in marine biology at the University of Victoria and was employed as a wildlife biologist in the Northwest Territories until shortly before we published that image. His work as a scientist, he says, left him feeling frustrated and he embarked on a career as a photographer to help bridge the gap between what he was learning as a biologist and what he believes the public needs to know about habitat loss and other threats to wildlife. The antler photo was, he says, "one of my first published images ever."

Since then, Nicklen has done so well and his skills are in such demand that we don’t often have the pleasure of showcasing his work. His last major feature for us, on salmon farming, appeared in our September/October 2004 issue. In the past five years, he has had seven photo features published in National Geographic, arguably the biggest and best photo magazine in the world, and his images have appeared in many other publications.

His photo essay in this issue, part of our International Polar Year series, is a selection of his shooting around the polar regions (one of his specialties is underwater photography) over the past decade. He still lives in the North — his home base is Whitehorse — and he remains passionately committed to the protection of the wildlife that he once studied and whose lives he now chronicles from the viewfinder of his cameras.

Here’s an example of a great free-trade arrangement: the United States sends us tonnes of its most damaging greenhouse gas, CO₂, and we use it to help save the world from the perils of climate change and make a buck at the same time. That’s the deal struck between Great Plains Synfuels, which operates a coal-gasification plant in Beulah, North Dakota, and the EnCana Corporation, owner of an aging oil field in Weyburn, Sask. Great Plains captures the CO₂ its plant generates and pipes it north to EnCana, which pumps it into its nearly depleted wells to enhance the flow of oil. Although both parties were motivated to initiate the exchange by business considerations, scientists and government agencies have stepped in to study whether CO₂ injected into deep geological formations will remain there indefinitely. So far, their studies suggest it is likely to remain stable and in place, but what remains to be seen is whether carbon capture and storage will become a critical part of the global effort to mitigate climate change. Writer Allan Casey visited the facilities in Weyburn and Beulah and reports on the project. His story offers a clear explanation of how carbon sequestration works and assesses its promise as a technological contribution to the problem of global warming.

What is a Canadian definition for the word "remote?" How about this: a community that you can’t get to by road. Last winter, writer Christopher Frey visited Quebec’s Lower North Shore, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and its string of about a dozen historic villages that are not linked by road to the rest of the province. They are connected to the outside world by snowmobile in winter and cargo/passenger ship in summer. The Quebec government recently promised to construct a road along the coast and has pledged $100 million to get it started.

The highway might well save many of the villages from disappearing, but it will also profoundly and irrevocably transform the character of life in them. Some residents can’t wait, Frey tells us, while others fear they will lose the benefits of a life apart. Most, however, are not at all convinced that the province will fulfill its promise. Building and maintaining the road may prove too expensive and the gains too marginal for politicians in Quebec who have often enough in the past conveniently overlooked the needs of such an isolated and small group of voters so distant from the television cameras that nourish the evening news.

— Rick Boychuk

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