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Editor's Notebook
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| Holy Name of Mary Church overlooks the Mackenzie River at the ferry crossing in the hamlet of Tsiigehtchic |
Pipe dreams
You're going to be hearing a great deal in the next few years
about the Mackenzie
Delta, the terminus of Canada's
longest river, the Mackenzie, which flows north and
empties into the Arctic Ocean. The five communities scattered
across the delta's tangle of shifting channels — Fort McPherson,
Tsiigehtchic, Inuvik, Aklavik and Tuktoyaktuk — are on the
precipice of vertigo-inducing change. For the second time in
30 years, the economic and social health of the region is being
prodded and probed by consultants advising the federal government
on whether to proceed with a $16.2 billion gas-pipeline
project. That pipeline will carry gas from wells now studded
across the delta and the Beaufort Sea to energy-starved markets
across the continent. At the same time, climate change is transforming
the region's subarctic landscape, eroding shorelines,
melting permafrost, shifting the treeline, reshaping the habitat
ranges of plants and animals and rewriting the weather itself.
For those of us who feed ourselves from the nearest supermarket,
this might be just one more cause for concern about the
condition of the planet. But as writer Lisa Gregoire points out
in our cover story on the communities of the delta, for people
who still "kill more meat than they buy," there is nothing
abstract about the impending pipeline boom or the effects of
climate change. Both have the potential to knock the lives of
residents loose from their moorings. Many may benefit from
the river of cash that will flow from the pipeline. Others may
discover new opportunities in a warming climate. And many
more may be simply set adrift, unable to adjust to the new
economic and environmental landscape.
Gregoire's tale is a rich, layered and sympathetic portrait of
the delta's people and communities before the whirlwind hits.
Her story is accompanied by the indelible photography of
Patrice Halley, who has travelled widely in the North for this
magazine and many others, and by a poster map of the delta
created by staff cartographer Steven Fick.
Also in this issue: Sarah Scott profiles landscape
architect and green-roof advocate Cornelia Hahn Oberlander; photographer
Dan Doucette takes us along on a shark-tagging excursion with
marine biologist Steven Campana of the Bedford Institute of
Oceanography in Dartmouth, N.S., who is studying the life of
this little-known marine species; and, this being harvest season,
we sent writer Jodi Di Menna and photographer Vincenzo
Pietropaolo to Leamington, Ont., for a story on the Tomato
Capital of Canada, and photographer Brian Atkinson to the
fields of New Brunwsick, where students are still liberated from
school to help bring in the potato crop.
— Rick Boychuk
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