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November/December 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor's Notebook Feature: Mussel bound Feature: Global warming Write to Know À la carte Our Home and Native Tongue

On the opening pages of our feature on mussel picking in northern Quebec, Lukasi Naapaluk holds a lantern inside a tunnel carved through the ice covering Wakeham Bay. Directly below the hole, lying on his back on the sea floor, underneath the two-metre-thick ice pack, with the tide out, is photographer Patrice Halley.

Halley is one of a kind, a photojournalist whose sensitivity and devotion to his craft throw a flattering light on his profession. His last shoot for us was the little-known festival of mi-carême on Saint-Antoine-de-l'Isle-aux-Grues, Que. The images were fantastic: islanders in brilliantly coloured handcrafted costumes parading across a winter landscape. It was a pictorial that offered readers a rare peek at a Catholic tradition from the middle ages, practised in Canada since the 17th century.

Halley says he first heard about the mussel picking on a previous visit to the village of Kangiqsujuaq, Que. On that trip, he was crossing the tundra on a snowmobile with Naapaluk and several others when a storm blew up. He and Naapaluk became separated from their companions and ended up waiting out the weather for three days in an igloo with no food. A friendship developed. Naapaluk invited Halley to make a return visit to pick mussels. Under the ice. Intrigued, Halley called us and we agreed to send him back on assignment. As the photos show, the practice is ingenious and perilous. But it does give the residents of Kangiqsujuaq access to fresh seafood during their long winters.

In the last issue we explored Canada's efforts to withdraw CFCs, the most serious ozone depleters, from service. This issue, in anticipation of an international conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan, in December, we are featuring the results of a landmark study of the Mackenzie River basin, one of the world's climate hotspots. Most climatologists now agree that the globe is warming and that human activity is playing a role in the temperature increase. In the Mackenzie Basin Impact Study, biologists, geologists, botanists and foresters examined and documented climate-induced changes already underway — melting permafrost, shoreline erosion and the increasing frequency of landslides and forest fires. The study is comprehensive and is likely to stand as a model for similar work that will be undertaken elsewhere. It also may serve as a critical reference point for policy-makers debating emission targets in Kyoto.

Accompanying the feature is an essay written by the eminent geographer Dr. F. Kenneth Hare, whose specialty is climate. Fifteen years ago in these pages he explored the confusion surrounding the debate on global warming. He argued then that the calculations underpinning the predictions might be wrong or that "we may have missed some countervailing effect... (and) even if the changes do come, they don't seem to pose the disastrous threat so often announced as inevitable." Now, after 15 years of additional study and debate by the international scientific community, Hare says the issue has come into much sharper focus and there is consensus about the trends and about the need to take action.

— Rick Boychuk

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