The Coal Valley mine, nestled in the foothills of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, is a sprawling 200 square kilometres and has been in operation since 1978. Three hours west of Edmonton, it stretches alongside Highway 40, forming a long, narrow gash that includes large open mine pits as well as areas in the process of being reclaimed. It’s part industrial, part moonscape, part nature. 

It has been closed over the years as markets dip — most recently for three months in 2025 — and it has moved tremendous amounts of earth and coal. Currently only one of its pits is active.

On paper, the mine looks bad. There have been 16 incidents in the past three years, almost all of which were spills into the creeks and rivers in and around the site. That makes it the worst existing mine in Alberta in terms of the number of infractions. But the company behind the mine says numbers don’t tell the whole story.

The mine operates under the name Prairie Mines and Royalty ULC, and is ultimately owned by Denver-based Westmoreland Mining, one of three companies that still operate commercial coal mines in Alberta. It was the only one to respond to questions emailed from The Narwhal for an article about infractions at coal mines. 

“We appreciate your questions and the approach you’re taking with this story,” Jon Heroux, Westmoreland’s director of external affairs, wrote. “I think we can do one better than simply giving you an interview over the phone or by email.”

This is not typical of Alberta’s coal mining companies, many of which seldom, if ever, respond to journalists’ requests.

A little more than a week later, company representatives spent a day driving two journalists from The Narwhal around the site.

Alberta government wants to bring industry back from the brink

Coal was once big business in Alberta. Rich seams were found buried in the mountains and foothills, and the Prairies offered easy access to lower-quality coal that powered local electricity plants for decades. As recently as 2018, coal-fired power was the main source of electricity in Alberta.

The Crowsnest Pass in the southwest boomed (and busted) alongside the black rock at the heart of its economy, bringing wealth but also disparity, which led to strikes and even communist agitation from disgruntled workers.

But the markets changed — changes in demand, swings in prices — and so did government regulations. As the industry waned in the south of the province, the 1970s government of former Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed introduced restrictions aimed at preserving beloved landscapes — and the all-important water that trickles and surges down those rocky slopes.

Three decades later in 2024, the phase-out of coal-fired electricity — a significant source of air pollution and emissions — in Alberta spelled the end of strip mines near electrical power plants, which are now mostly powered by natural gas. But that phase-out still allows for some mining. Alberta produces both thermal coal, which is exported to places that still burn it for electricity or for industrial uses, and metallurgical coal, which is used in steel-making.

Today, just three large commercial coal mines are up and running (four if you count Dodd’s, a family operation that mostly serves individuals and farms). Coal Valley is one of two that produces thermal coal mostly used in factories abroad while the third is a metallurgical mine. 

But it’s not the end of the story of coal in Alberta, at least not yet. 

The current provincial government has opened the door to new mines in areas set aside by the Lougheed conservatives in 1976, and a new coal policy — a guide to where and when mining can take place — is expected this year. This follows five years of acrimonious debate and public backlash against opening the Rocky Mountains to new mines.

According to data from the Alberta Energy Regulator, the three existing mines have struggled to keep coal waste and sediment out of the province’s waterways, a key concern for Albertans wondering what will happen to the headwaters for the Canadian Prairies if they’re contaminated.

There have been 42 incidents in the past three years, almost all of which involve water.

Further south of the existing mines clustered in west-central Alberta, new metallurgical coal mines have been pitched for the traditional mining region near Crownest Pass. The water that flows from the rocky slopes there tumbles across an astonishing expanse of prairie clean through to Manitoba, providing habitat and hydration to ecosystems, helping to irrigate crops and slake the thirst of livestock, wildlife and humans alike.

Cavernous pits and tree-lined lakes

Inside the main office at Coal Valley, the smell of coal — like fresh asphalt — permeates the two-storey space, which sits next to workshops designed to handle repairs on towering mine dump trucks. The walls are adorned with colouring sheets showing mine workers, carefully filled in by local young students, some of whom have parents at the mine.

Inside a conference room a map of the mine is displayed under a glass top on the table. Here, Scott Sturm, Westmoreland’s chief operating officer, and Steve Love, the mine’s general manager, talk about operations and reclamation, water and regulations while pointing to areas on the map. Charles Reid, senior legal and government affairs counsel, asks that the conversations not be recorded.

They talk about how the coal on site doesn’t have high levels of selenium, a compound that’s harmful to fish and human health in high quantities and a key concern in the ongoing debate about the future of coal mining in Alberta. The lack of selenium is a simple bit of geochemical luck rather than the product of engineering or human ingenuity, but it helps the company set itself apart when discussing spills. Its claims are backed up by water sampling conducted for the company by an independent contractor. 

Before setting out for a tour of the mine, they talk about the incidents listed by the regulator, including areas where spills have occurred. 

One recent incident dumped sediment in a creek, the result of erosion from a roadway and a collapsed culvert. At the site of the spill, the system designed to contain the sediment is still in place: a floating yellow barrier. Today, it’s closer to shore and smaller in size compared to three months earlier — Sturm pulls out his phone to share a photo from the time of the spill.

Sturm, a white-goateed man who looks somehow built for coal mining, says another incident in April was the result of ice blocking outflow from the mine’s long stretch of ponds. Known as Coal Creek, the long, narrow series of ponds are where debris and contaminants settle as the water slowly moves through them, ultimately discharging into a small waterway. The ice, combined with snowmelt and heavy rain, overwhelmed Coal Creek, and led to the spill.

Those spills involved sediment. And even without some of the chemical pollution concerns experienced by other mines, it can still have an impact. Sediment-laden riverbeds can smother habitat and impact fish and insect reproduction, and there is always the risk of contamination from pollutants including arsenic and heavy metals.

The company is also under investigation by the Alberta Energy Regulator for an incident related to a spill from the same area in 2025, but details have not been released.

In a follow-up email after the tour, Heroux says Westmoreland is working on “permanent engineering improvements” to the facility and says the company measures water quality after a spill. Heroux says conditions remained within regulatory limits following the spill in April and noted the company monitors surface water at 47 locations throughout the mine, as well as groundwater, streamflow and wetland conditions around the site.

“​​We also sample 20 additional locations upstream and downstream of the mine and exceed a number of the minimum monitoring requirements contained in its approvals,” Heroux wrote.

The tour pauses at the cavernous Pit 26, the only area of the mine that is currently active, a deep hole in the earth with a massive digger pulling loads from its lowest depths. There’s also a stop at the storage area where coal is washed prior to shipping to Japan. Further from the active areas, a short walk down a gravel road leads to a lush-looking lake that was once a mining pit — known as an end-pit lake, it’s part of a reclamation process those leading the tour seem particularly proud of and eager to highlight.

That former mining pit, now called Sterling Lake, is open to the public, accessed via a hike and stocked with fish for recreational angling. It has not yet been certified as reclaimed nor has the land officially been passed back to the province.

Love jokes he’s been sampling drinking water for years to ensure it’s clean.

Is a better coal mine … good?

Driving through the mine, Love talks about the grizzly sow, Betty, who dens nearby and passes her unique colouring from one generation of cubs to the next. Out the window, the landscape shifts from areas replanted with fir trees, to deep pits and cuts in the land. Across the valley, clearcuts dot the hillside, which those on the tour are quick to point out are the result of logging operations and not mining — another industry, a separate problem, within view. 

The impacts on the land are clear and immense. The emissions when the product is finally burned, meanwhile, are out of sight.

It’s clear the staff at Coal Valley who spoke with The Narwhal care about the work, the site and the surrounding environment. The willingness of the company to reach out is critical to understand the nuance of its operations and its failures. 

The company is eager to point to how quickly it reports and responds to spills, and explain how those spills aren’t an apocalyptic deluge of wastewater sludge. That may be true, but it’s also clear the mine struggles to contain water not meant to flow into waterways.

The information provided by the Alberta Energy Regulator through its compliance dashboard is often unclear about the impacts of coal mining incidents. There are few details linked to most infractions beyond “sediment runoff and sediment to waterbody,” or a figure on how much sediment was measured on a given month or day. 

The regulator is also sparing in the use of enforcement powers, including fines, to deter violations. Only about $1.1 million in fines has been doled out since 2013 and more than 80 per cent were for one major incident.

Following the mine tour, Heroux said the regulator’s data can be misread. 

“The [Alberta Energy Regulator] compliance dashboard records reportable events and regulatory activity, but it does not necessarily explain why an event occurred, its environmental significance, the company’s response or the outcome of the regulator’s review,” he wrote. “Please remember that those distinctions are important when evaluating the figures.”

Not far from Coal Valley, mine operator CST Coal has been fined $53,000 for spills that took place over the past three years, and for failing to quickly report those infractions to the regulator. In one instance it waited days. The context and the failure to report contributed to the penalties, according to the regulator. 

CST Coal did not respond to questions from The Narwhal.

Driving home from the tour down Highway 40, following the length of the mine site invisible over an adjacent mound, there’s a comfort in knowing that it’s still possible to talk across divides and see firsthand where assumptions fall apart, and where they do not. 

But at the end of the day, there remains a lingering question the industry might not be able to overcome: given the impacts on the land, on water and on emissions that cause air pollution and exacerbate climate change, is it enough that a coal mine is striving to be better than its peers?

Updated on Sept. 3, 2026, at 2:35 p.m. MT: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that coal-fired electricity has been phased out in Alberta, not across all of the Prairies as was implied in a previous version.

Updated on Sept. 4, 2026, at 10:05 a.m. MT: This story has been updated to correct a photo caption that misidentified a plant as a dandelion.

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On the first Saturday of August, near the Tyne Valley United Church, dozens of members of the Hardy family are dressed in rags, faded fishing bibs and painted head to toe as zombies. The family staggers in unison as they practise their carefully choreographed dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller for the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival parade, an annual celebration of Prince Edward Island’s world-famous shellfish. 

The Hardy family has fished the waters of P.E.I. since the mid-1800s, and they’re a fixture at the small rural community’s annual festival, which also includes a hoedown, oyster-shucking competition and Miss Oyster Pearl pageant. But this year, a funereal mood hangs over the celebrations, reflected in the family’s choice of costume and performance: most of the island’s oyster farmers are grappling with catastrophic losses from disease, and the industry is on the verge of collapse. 

Up west, away from the crowded sidewalks of Charlottetown, is the heartland of P.E.I. oysters, where determined rural communities hug the cold shallow bays that house the majority of the island’s world-renowned shellfish. But since first being detected in 2024, a parasitic disease called multinucleate sphere unknown, or MSX, has decimated crops. Last summer, another deadly disease called Dermo arrived in P.E.I. waters, though so far its impact is much more muted. 

While the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirms the diseases pose no risk to human health, the economic toll is devastating. Farmers pulling up their cages have said they found a mortality rate of nearly 100 per cent, wiping out millions of earnings and leaving many with little — or nothing — to sell for years to come.

There’s a glimmer of hope: MSX-resistant broodstock and oyster seed from across the border in Maine could help staunch the losses in the short-term. But the long-term survival of the industry may depend on breeding a new kind of oyster, unique to P.E.I.

A seed of hope for P.E.I. oyster growers and harvesters

The provincial and federal governments have announced supports for the oyster industry that include interest relief for growers and processors, wage and retraining assistance and a licence buy-back program for wild harvesters. Ask anyone on the water and they’ll say they welcome the help, but fear it’s come too late. This crisis has been looming since MSX was declared on the island in July 2024, with little to no support or plan for the growers and harvesters.

Monique Horne, a farmer whose family owns and operates a 50-acre oyster lease, is prepared to persist through the crisis, but insists they need help. 

“We will make it through it, but we do need both provincial and federal governments to work collaboratively with industry and be quick to respond with the help we need when we need it for the next three to five years,” Horne says. “Our economy depends on it.”

In the meantime, a desperately needed boost arrived on the island on June 11, after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency approved the import of MSX-resistant broodstock and oyster seed from across the border in Maine to help stem the tide in the coming years.

Soon after its arrival, I joined Horne on the water with her father, Pat O’Brien, and son Connor, travelling to their oyster lease to plant the new U.S. seed. 

On this quiet June morning, theirs is the only fishing boat on Foxley River. The water is eerily still — as if mirroring the stark reality for oyster farmers in the region — as Connor navigates the boat around thousands of rows of cages that, in any other year, would be roiling with activity.

“It’s pretty quiet out here,” Horne says. “It’s not normal.”

Once Connor cuts the engine, the three generations of oyster growers begin filling slim suitcase-sized cages with the precious cross-border seed. Using a medium Tim Hortons coffee cup discarded on a work bench, Horne and her father ensure an equal amount of the Cheerio-sized oyster seed is distributed for each of their leases.

There’s no guarantee the lab-grown seed will take in P.E.I.’s waters. 

“It’s an experiment,” Horne confesses. “We’re willing to try it. What other options are there? Other than waiting for local hatcheries to find a resistant strain.”

The family members move smoothly around one another, hauling used cages that held diseased oysters from the line and seamlessly setting the new cages pregnant with oyster seed.

It’s a faster-growing seed, so if they grow well with a reasonable mortality rate of around 10 per cent, it’s possible the oysters could be harvested and sold by the fall of 2027. 

“Hopefully this works,” O’Brien says. He’s got decades of experience on the water, and hauled hundreds of oyster cages in his life. “If it does, we’ll feel safe. If it doesn’t, we’re gone.”

P.E.I. researchers chase solution to oyster disease

Playing a key role in the urgent search for an answer to the crisis is the team at Onda, a P.E.I.-based contract research organization specializing in aquaculture.

Tirosh Shapira, a scientist at Onda, says once the MSX infection first broke out on the island in 2024, he and other researchers jumped into action.

“These are our neighbours. This is our community. We have the facilities here … so we just said, ‘How can we help?’ ”

One of the main areas of focus for Shapira and the team is pinpointing the cause of the infection, which they believe is through a secondary host — similar to how malaria is transmitted by mosquitos. This means infected oysters can’t transmit the disease directly to healthy ones. But no one knows what the secondary host is. 

“Despite the disease being out there … infecting oysters all across the East Coast [of North America], there’s surprisingly little known about it,” Shapira admits.

When the MSX parasite wiped out the oyster population in Chesapeake Bay in the United States in the early 1960s, most watermen pivoted to clams and softshell crab. Opting to use natural selection as a means to fight the disease, it took over 20 years for any form of significant recovery of the oyster population — though oyster numbers never returned to their pre-MSX levels.

To crack the mystery of MSX infection, Onda is developing an infection model, creating the specific conditions to observe how disease is transmitted. At Rutgers University and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Shapira says American research teams have been using Dermo to breed disease-resistant oysters. He says Onda plans to follow their example and generate the disease in their infection models, “as Dermo resistance also bestows resistance to MSX.” 

The most recent testing detected Dermo present in only 0.4 per cent of tested oysters from across the province, and isolated in the east. On the other hand, MSX has caused such widespread damage that Shapira says, the additional impact of Dermo is “not significant at the moment.” 

According to Shapira, and many other leaders in the aquaculture space, the way out of the crisis is through breeding a local line of disease-resistant oysters unique to P.E.I.

“That’s how it worked anywhere that survived and came out of it,” Shapira says. “There are no scientific questions about it!”

This, however, takes time. Even if an MSX-resistant line was achieved today, it would take three breeding cycles — six years in total — until that new line of disease-resistant oysters could be propagated across the island.

It will take persistence, Shapira says. “P.E.I. is going to solve this. This is our culture. This is who we are. We are oyster farmers. We are not going to stop being oyster farmers.”

Back at the oyster festival, four generations of Hardy family members are putting the finishing touches on their parade float. The crash of thousands of lifeless oysters bounces off the walls of the Britannia Hall community theatre as buckets of dead shellfish are dumped around a gruesome mummified corpse.

Gordon Hardy, one of eight siblings whose parents, Leslie and Shirley, run the family business, is part of four generations frantically getting into position here today. As the last of the dead oysters — part of this year’s disease-ridden harvest — are being carefully positioned around severed skeleton parts, he steps back and evaluates the scene.

“Well, things aren’t really that great at the moment,” Hardy says when asked how the family business has been faring. But, as if embodying the resolve of all the island’s oyster growers and fishers, an encouraging smile buoys his face as he digs in his shirt pocket to pull out a single hopeful disease-resistant oyster seed.

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For 18 months, a pair of Cooper’s hawks have been hunting in the woods behind my apartment building. Though they’re primarily forest dwellers, these raptors have adapted to urban living, preying on smaller birds that frequent ground-floor feeders and sometimes hunting chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits.

They live year-round in southern Ontario, while those in northern climes may migrate south for the winter.

The sex of this pair is easily distinguishable. Like most raptors, the male is smaller than the female, about the size of a crow and while both have brown-streaked breasts, the male has blood-red eyes with blue-gray feathers on his back. The female retains some brown feathers at the moment but as she molts and grows new feathers those will be blue grey. Her orange-brown eyes will also darken with age.

Using speed, agility and surprise, they launch themselves from a perch, quickly locking on to their prey. Their rounded wings and long tail feathers allow them to maneuver through tree branches with the precision of a laser-guided missile. They rarely miss, but when they do, it can hurt.

The Owl Foundation in Vineland, Ont., which specializes in rehabilitating raptors, sees many Cooper’s hawks that have suffered concussions as well as broken coracoid and furcular bones, or breast bones, due to hitting tree branches or windows. Smaller birds can be confused by reflections of trees and sky in windows and when the hawks give chase they aren’t able to put the brakes on quickly enough to avoid a collision.

A study of 300 Cooper’s hawk skeletons revealed 23 per cent of them had evidence of healed chest bone fractures. Fortunately, this pair focus their hunting in the woods and I have rarely seen them near a building.

Despite the risks, the birds’ focus on the hunt is necessary to feed themselves and their young — Cooper’s hawks have a high metabolism and must eat roughly 12 per cent of their body weight each day. For the adult female that could mean two medium-sized prey birds.

This pair behind my apartment have become very comfortable in this location. In late March, from my balcony, I caught them engaged in some hanky panky, and within a few weeks I noticed things were getting serious: the male was breaking off twigs to build a nest in a nearby pine. The location failed to satisfy his mate, however, and ultimately they chose the crotch of an ash tree to make a home.

Even with an enormous overhead canopy, the nest is far from secluded — or quiet. Within 50 metres there are two apartment buildings and a public park complete with people, barking dogs and lawnmowers, not to mention occasional fireworks which surely wreak havoc when the hawks are listening for prey. These Cooper’s hawks seem to have developed a high tolerance for their human neighbours.

Initially I limited visits to the nest area to a minute or two, as I was concerned about stressing the hawks. Now they regularly dive past me on the hunt or when bringing prey to the nest, passing within a couple of metres. Twice they tag-teamed squirrels that came too close to their chicks and fended them off as I stood nearby. As a falconer friend told me, “they have determined you’re not a threat.” But when someone else approaches me I have noticed they will remain on their perch.

In early May the female was spending most of her time in the nest — a sign she was probably incubating eggs. The male took the occasional shift so his mate could eat, clean and stretch her wings. As the eggs hatched, the female became the doting parent.

The male is an excellent and well-practised hunter; with a mate and four rapidly growing chicks in the nest, he needs to be. When he returns with prey, he sits on a tree branch announcing his presence with a single squeak. The female then leaves the nest to eat while he stands guard.

After she has ravaged the prey, picking off feathers and eating her share, she takes the remainder to the young. Sometimes she retrieves leftovers that she and her mate have cached on nearby tree branches. Never have I seen the male feed the chicks. His blood-red eyes might be mistaken for food by the young and trigger their pecking response.

As the chicks grow, the nest has become crowded, so the adult female perches in a nearby tree, closely watching for danger. I have watched her hunt several times a day from this spot, to help satisfy their voracious appetites. Her “food preparation” is now done in full view of the chicks — no doubt a teaching opportunity.

The odds of the chicks’ survival is low. The mortality rate of Cooper’s hawks is between 70 and 80 per cent in the first year, so learning survival skills early is critical. And threats abound. On Canada Day, a severe thunderstorm destroyed this nest. Thankfully, all four chicks survived, and the adults quickly commandeered a nearby squirrel’s nest.

No doubt there will be other hazards for these young chicks. Those that successfully navigate the challenges will fly off and eventually build their own nest — perhaps in a forest, but on occasion in a backyard with trusted and welcoming neighbours.

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The winding drive northward from Vancouver along the Sea to Sky Highway is a series of postcard moments — lush coastal rainforest, glimmering ocean and approaching mountain ranges. It’s easy to miss the closed Britannia mine nestled into the jagged northwest slopes.

The site, in Squamish Nation territory, was once a steep rockface sloping into the Pacific Ocean. In 1904, the Britannia mine opened and would grow to be one of the largest copper mines in the British Empire by the 1920s and ’30s. Little attention was paid to the environmental impacts of mining at the time. By the late ’90s, it became one of the most contaminated industrial sites in North America.

The mine shut down in 1974 and by 1975, the local historical society opened what’s now known as the Britannia Mine Museum. 

On a recent Saturday night this Pride Month, another evolution was underway, with 14 drag kings, queens and things strutting, lip-syncing and sashaying through the century-old Mill No. 3.

The Britannia mine had to transform to continue to exist, drag queen Dust Cwaine says, sitting on a giant tire and staring out at a rusty piece of discarded mining equipment. “When we look around, all you see is history.” 

The venue for tonight’s drag show, “Old Town, New Queens,” is the historic 20-storey mill, which once used gravity to help process ore, rock that contains minerals, dug up from the over 200 kilometres of tunnels inside the mountain. Large pieces would tumble down from the top of the mill, to be crushed, grinded and processed into the consistency of sand. A mixture of that powdered ore, water, aromatic oils and bubbles became a cakey copper concentrate, to later be sent out and processed with high heat and purified into copper.

From 1904 to 1974, the Britannia mine produced more than 45 million tonnes of ore. Tonight, the booming sounds of rock being crushed and grinded are far in the past, replaced by drag king Kyle Wiley turning it out to AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long.

Britannia’s copper mill could have been left to “rust and rot” like others across the country, Derek A. Jang, the museum’s director of programs and guest experience, says before the show. His radio beeps and crackles as staff prepare for the evening and try to grab his attention.

Typically, when a mine in B.C. is closed or decommissioned, plans focus on returning the area back to what it was. The local community doesn’t always get a say.

Some closed mines have been remodelled in unique ways. The Sunken Garden in Victoria’s famous Butchart Gardens was once a limestone quarry. There’s an old silver mine in northern Ontario that has lived many lives including a bookstore, flower shop, grocery store and now a tea room. In Pennsylvania, an abandoned limestone mine has become a resort where visitors can ride all-terrain and other recreational vehicles through the darkness of underground tunnels.

The community of Britannia Beach shared its vision to turn the mine into a museum years before the last shift whistle blew on November 1, 1974, Jang says. The opening of the museum the next year was thanks to intentional efforts by a number of groups, including the Britannia Beach Historical Society.

Tonight, the old mine likely looks very different from what the founders ever imagined.

Community groups like Queer People in Mining, Sea 2 Sky Allies and Pride Squamish have booths set up in the gravel courtyard outside the mill. Rainbow hearts and balloons direct the crowd. Inside, there’s an archway — much like the one Madonna danced through in her iconic video Express Yourself — next to a sound system, smoke machine and stage lights.

“As a member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community myself, I don’t always feel seen when I go to different museum attractions,” Jang says, adding that Britannia exhibits have been dominated by images and stories of working white men. “This event, in some ways, is a bold way of saying ‘Let’s change that.’ ”

It took years of relationship building with the local 2SLGBTQ+ community for the museum to see the mine go from tunnels to tutus. Trevor Wulff, president of Pride Squamish, says the nearby town he grew up in wasn’t always a welcoming place. “It’s really amazing because it’s all about community … everyone deserves a sense of belonging,” Wulff says, looking around as a crowd of many ages and genders slowly grows.

It was important to think about how to make the event welcoming for young people, Jang says. He heard from community groups that youth “have very few opportunities to see queerness in action.”

Drag artists played with themes of tech advancements, “Giants at Werk,” a nod to Britannia Museum’s summer exhibit on big machinery and the mine’s legacy of pollution.

“We’re adding to a new history while honouring and respecting the past,” Dust Cwaine says in an interview during intermission, as performers Homo Hardware and Peter Packer prepare for their acts.

Decades ago, when the Britannia mine was operational, its lights illuminated the nights of Howe Sound. The night of the drag show, sunset slowly seeped in through the mill’s 14,416 panes of glass adding to the dramatic glow of Homo Hardware’s iridescent, shimmering wings.

Drag is “a vehicle for self expression,” Homo Hardware explained on a phone call before the show. “There are so many different ways that people can use that, whether that’s a more direct, literal message about a cause, or something a bit more abstract.” What makes drag so effective, they said, is the energy and connection that comes from being in a live performance space.

In the second act, drag thing Rose Butch lip synced to Hillary Duff’s Come Clean. The lyrics hit a bit differently than usual, invoking the environmental impacts of mining. Duff’s voice reverberates through the rafters — “I’m shedding, shedding every color / Tryna find a pigment of truth beneath my skin” — as Rose Butch parts through bubbles floating across the stage.

In one far corner of the mill, bright blue streaks of copper reacting with water shine bright. Rose Butch moves up and down hidden in a star-speckled cloud, holding an umbrella dripping with tinsel until their big reveal: the clouds part into a dress draping them in sequined bright blue skies.

The mine was once called “the single worst point source of metal pollution on the North American continent,” causing devastating effects to marine life in Howe Sound. Acidic water containing heavy metals leaked into nearby waterways for decades. Water leaving the site has to be treated at an estimated cost of $3.7 million per year, according to an email from the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. That treatment process has to happen in perpetuity — meaning the public will foot that bill for the foreseeable future.

That history isn’t lost on the organizers of the event. We’re all here because of the continuous efforts to keep the land clean, Dust Cwaine says. Work continues today to ensure “this place doesn’t poison our waters and poison our nature … It has this complicated existence … I think putting drag in it is this incredible juxtaposition.”

Just a few hours ago, Jang was wearing a plain black Britannia Mine Museum polo shirt, as he prepared for the show. Now, he’s on stage with a flashy new look, sharing another evolution of the mine — and a hope for more to come. The waters surrounding the mine site were once severely damaged, he tells the crowd, but there’s been incredible work done to bring back aquatic life and restore the ecosystem. 

“In the 2010s spawning salmon returned to Britannia Creek, for the first time, in what we suspect to be over 100 years,” he says to an eruption of cheers, through which Jang continues. 

“I worry [young people] think they’re inheriting a broken world that is beyond help … I hope that in some way Britannia Mine Museum can play a role in inspiring the next generation of great thinkers to remember that work is going to be hard, but solutions can be in reach.”

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Doting mates, coddling parents and a touch of tough love; the animal kingdom has a lot to teach us about rearing young.

As a wildlife photographer for 14 years, I’ve had the chance to see these parents in action, and feel the loss of young left to fend for themselves. 

I’ve spied a Cooper’s hawk, watching closely as its parents hunt, so it can one day feed its own family. I’ve seen an eagle drop a fish into a river for an eaglet, when their own angling skills weren’t yet up to snuff.

Perhaps the most relatable scene was a worn out male fox, taking an afternoon nap in the grass, as his kits rough-housed nearby.

From the fields, rivers and skies of Ontario, here are some of my favourite family portraits.

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It’s a windy night and unusually warm for October, as visitors gather at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory in Milford, Ont., for the “Starry Nights with Saw-whets” event. One barred owl was caught early in the evening, before any of the participants arrived, and is being kept in an owl carrier for closer observation later in the night. But now, word is getting around: it’s probably too warm to see any saw-whet owls, a disappointment to the attendees who have come to see them up-close and learn about nighttime migration monitoring. “South wind,” station manager Ashley Jensen mutters as she checks her phone for radar weather updates. It’s not the right kind of wind current for the migrating owls that are making their way from the north. 

At the observatory, volunteers gather for bird banding, a scientific technique in which a small, uniquely numbered metal ring is attached to a bird’s leg to track movement, migration routes and lifespan. Jensen is the bander-in-chief, while another bander, Ketha Gillespie, has donned a felt owl suit for the public event. Other visitors are humming with excitement despite the unpromising weather.

Prepared with thermoses and blankets, they gather in front of the banding station as Mira Furgoch, the observatory’s vice-president, gives a presentation about the owls and the station’s conservation efforts using a television that will also show live footage of the birds being handled. That is, if any are found. 

Bird-banding stations like Prince Edward Point collect data and conserve natural spaces that are invaluable habitats. They respond to factors affecting avian populations like disease, climate change, birth rates and more, while engaging the public in the natural world and promoting conservation. As of July 2025, the North American Bird Banding Program database includes 85 million banding records and 5.5 million encounters with banded birds. That includes both encounters reported by the public and recaptures reported by bird banders. 

Unlike people, birds cross borders freely, and the program relies on migration data collected and shared by both Canada and the United States. But the stability of American bird-banding efforts is at risk. The 2026 U.S. federal budget proposes eliminating the Ecosystems Mission Area, the parent agency overseeing scientific bird-banding efforts.

The possibility of disruption to scientific efforts in Canada as a result of what’s happening in the United States is real, and it is causing anxiety among some Canadian banding stations. If there were to be a shutdown on the U.S. side, Matthew Fuirst from Birds Canada explains that it would affect the collection of data that promotes conservation efforts. “If there was no U.S. bird-banding program, Canada would lose a crucial part of North America’s migratory bird science. It would really hinder our data availability, past and future, for population estimates, habitat protection and hunting regulations,” Fuirst says.

Despite these looming threats, the mood among the group waiting for owls at the Prince Edward Point observatory is peaceful. 

Engaging the public

Under the stars in Prince Edward Point, an audio lure designed to draw in saw-whet owls plays on repeat into the night. To everyone’s delight, one owl is caught before the event ends. A member of the public symbolically adopts the owl, makes a donation to the observatory and spends a few extra moments with it before it is released into the night.

Owl bander Gillespie, who also runs a youth ornithology program that introduces bird observation and banding to school-age children and teens, began her volunteer journey with a casual interest in birds. “I didn’t know a huge amount when I started here. I just came as a volunteer one day and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so cool,’ and I saw birds I didn’t know.” From there, she started volunteering and “put my mind to learning.”

She also sees banding as a way to promote conservation, and to enrich the lives of people who live near the bird observatory but might not know about it. This reflects a public engagement challenge for many observatories: their remote locations. In the Prince Edward observatory area of Ontario’s Prince Edward County, tourism and wineries play a big part in the local economy. Gillespie sees an opportunity to expose the migrant workers who labour in these industries to bird banding, giving labourers the chance to see new birds as well as birds they may already be familiar with from their home countries. 

There have been changes to improve accessibility at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory, including the addition of walking canes and foldable seats to accommodate mobility needs, and a taxidermied owl display offering a tactile way to interact with bird bodies for visitors who might have limited vision. 

Some banders can recall a negative experience with the public, owing to an unfavourable perception of bird banding that is usually cleared up with education and an explanation of the process. Birds waiting in nets can look alarming to someone unfamiliar with banding, which is why net lanes at bird-banding stations are closed to the public. “They may try to remove or cut the birds from the net if they don’t understand what’s going on,” Jensen says, which adds an extra layer of stress for the bird. 

“Once people know what you’re doing and get to see birds up close, or even get a chance to hold a bird and let it go, then they’re really usually pretty good with it.”

A day of banding

On a fall day at the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory in Lion’s Head, Ont., as a beaver swims across the bay, three bird banders take note of bird migration patterns from their temporary home in Wingfield Cottage.

It’s not easy to get here. The location is remote and currently not open to the public, only accessible by a closed unpaved road. But the cabin, perched on the water and surrounded by trees peppered with colourful autumn leaves, is the perfect pit stop for migrating birds, and the banders who stay on-site can expect to interact with a variety of species each season. This is just one of the stations that bring people together to monitor migrating birds in the fall and spring, deepening their knowledge of the natural world. 

The banders at Bruce Peninsula wake up before sunrise, put up the mist nets and wait for birds to fly into them. Weaving through well-trodden but narrow forest trails, they check to see if any birds have been caught before carefully extracting them, placing them in a small cloth bag and carrying the birds back to a small shed for processing. 

During processing, the bird is identified and its data recorded: species, weight, wing-span, age and sex (where possible) and the date and location of capture. To determine the amount of fat the bird is carrying, banders blow lightly on its chest to separate the feathers for observation. Lastly, a metal band is attached to the bird’s leg before it’s released to continue its migration. 

In between net checks, banders cast a trained eye for birds. A small shuffle in a faraway bush might catch everyone’s attention: in moments, they’ve identified a bird that an untrained eye may not even see. “Junco.” “Hermit thrush.” They peer through binoculars.

The banders also take census on observation days: a walkthrough at the start and end of the day, slowly and attentively, identifying as many birds as they can. 

Bruce Peninsula’s bander-in-charge and station scientist, Stéphane Menu, has been doing this for nearly 20 years. His colleagues Michaela Parks and Catherine Lee-Zuck bring their own set of skills: Parks is also a photographer who donates her work to the organization, and Lee-Zuck is an ornithologist who has been banding for three years. They share the work of observing, documenting and banding birds during the fall migration season.  

Menu describes the importance of the information being gathered: “We provide a lot of data that we think is very useful for not just general knowledge, but also for the government to make management decisions on the cheap.” 

Much of the bird-banding labour is done by volunteers, who may receive a small daily food stipend like they do at the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory. In more remote areas, some locations offer accommodations, but banding stations in more urban areas allow for volunteers to come and go for their shifts. During my visit to Bruce Peninsula, locals come by the banding station to offer their help on a stonemasonry repair that needs to be done. It’s all in the spirit of collaboration.

The banders’ cabin is full of bird reference books and sunlight. There’s a large stone fireplace in the living room, a big open kitchen where Menu makes pancakes between net checks, and a couple cozy rooms — including one with bunk beds — that give the place an atmosphere of bird summer camp. Parks shows me some of the nature photography she has made during her stay at the observatory. Later, Menu describes the wildlife: “We have black bears, we have rattlesnakes, we have beavers here on a daily basis. You can see otters. I feel very privileged to be here.” 

Even though she’s sharing a space with her fellow banders, Lee-Zuck describes the period at the end of the banding day as her “me time.” Looking out over the bright blue bay in the sunshine, it makes sense.

“Birds don’t see borders”

Some Ontario station managers and banders are concerned about the political instability in the United States and its potential impact on cross-border collaborations. “It would be super unfortunate not to have that level of connection, getting band returns and sharing information back and forth with our American colleagues would be really unfortunate,” Jensen, the station manager at the Prince Edward Point observatory, says. 

Matt Fuirst of Birds Canada explains what such a loss would mean. “If there was no U.S. bird-banding program,” he says, “Canada would lose a crucial part of North America’s migratory bird science.” It would hinder data availability, population estimates, habitat protection and hunting regulations. “It would kind of force Canada to determine a new system for regulating and tracking migratory bird data.”

“The Canadian Wildlife Service is committed to the bird-banding program in Canada,” Fuirst says, adding they plan to “continue operations as normal, continue bird banding, be maybe more conscious of reporting encounter data, or maintaining accurate band inventories.” The aim is to collectively stay on top of potential shortages of physical bands, which are manufactured in the U.S., while continuing data collection. He says the service has been “taking precautionary measures to ensure a mitigation plan.”

At Bruce Peninsula, Menu says he tries not to think about losing the collaborative relationship between nations. “It’s not just bird banding, it’s a service that’s been done since the late ’60s. Sixty years of breeding-bird surveys gone, and it’s done by volunteers. The organization and the collection of the data and the analysis of data is done by a federal agency, but the running of it is by volunteers.” 

Different places; same mission

Rick Ludkin, the co-founder of Haldimand Bird Observatory in southern Ontario, says birds are “telling us very clearly that our environment is declining in quality.”

Birds also show the impacts of good conservation practices, according to Ludkin. After soybean fields were replanted with prairie grass at Haldimand Bird Observatory, the number of birds banded increased from 90 to 450 birds in one year. 

Ludkin says the observatory has been getting rid of buckthorn, “a terrible invasive plant,” and also thinning out the walnuts. “Both of those species inhibit the growth of native shrubs and trees, and the impact of that has been pretty astounding.”

Jason Smyrlis, who has one year of banding experience, camps at the observatory when weather permits as a way to cut down on travel time. With the early mornings associated with banding, that creative solution to no on-site accommodations makes plenty of sense, even when it requires a double sleeping bag and multiple layers. “The light levels at night are tremendously reduced. It truly is a fabulous place to spend time,” he says. 

Different bird-banding stations have their own look and feel to them, but there are some common threads. For one, there’s the bander’s tools: the bands themselves sit on strings of wire before they’re attached to birds. Special rulers to measure the wing-spans sit on wooden desks; in some places these desks are doodled with highly accurate bird cartoons. 

There are also scales to weigh the birds, and small cylinders that house the birds while they are weighed. Different stations get creative with these containers in their own ways. At one place, empty Pringles cans suggest a love for snacks that conveniently supports science. At others, there are empty tennis ball canisters. At another, an empty tube that once carried a whiskey bottle.

What makes a volunteer?

To someone who isn’t familiar with the process, bird banding may seem almost like a secret club. “People that have been here will talk to other people about it,” Ludkin explains. “I kind of like the way we’re doing it, because you get people that really are interested and want to be here.”

To become a bander, the first important thing is the ability to identify birds by sight and sound. Volunteers can receive training to become banders but, says Jensen, “If they ever want to get to the point of being an independent bander, you have to be able to ID every single bird before you put the band on it. You cannot band a bird until you know what the species is.” 

With some popular banding sites like Long Point receiving more volunteer applications for banders than there are positions, finding a place to volunteer can be competitive. According to Menu, “It’s competitive because there are not a ton of positions but there are also not a ton of people with the skills. And then not just the skills but the desire to do this kind of work.” 

At Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Bird Research Station, located on Lake Ontario, volunteer positions are given by priority to those with a genuine passion for birds and those who intend to pursue a career in ornithology. Bander-in-charge Shane Abernethy says it’s important for volunteers to know how to handle animals, drawing comparisons to those with experience as vet techs or pet groomers. Even something seemingly random like playing a wind instrument, he says, can be a valuable asset at a banding station, as it can help with blowing on a bird’s chest to evaluate fat.

There is also a lifestyle factor: you must be willing to work according to migration season hours, often in isolation and with no days off save for the occasional weather day. “If you’re gone for two months in the spring and almost the same or more in the fall, it’s not necessarily a life that works well with what you can call a normal lifestyle,” Menu says.

All volunteers follow bander’s ethics: guidelines set out by regulatory bodies such as the North American Banding Council that are meant to guide people through the best ways to handle and interact with birds while conducting research. The code prioritizes the well-being of birds and the standardization of data collection and accountability. 

For stations that publish photos or share content on social media, photographic standards ensure the public image of bird banding promotes bird safety. “It’s admittedly very easy for the public to see a photo of a bird and think what we’re doing is bad. It happens more than you would realize,” explains Bird Canada’s Fuirst.

Birds and people are a double act

Thilini Samarakoon, a volunteer bander who just completed her third season, started out as a birder in Sri Lanka at the age of 13. Through a youth exploration society at school, she became very interested in birds and butterflies. 

Now she lives in London, Ont., and with her husband who is also a bander, she travelled to the Long Point Bird Observatory in Port Rowan, Ont., Canada’s oldest birding station. There, they met another bander visiting from Peru, and used an online translator tool to communicate.

There can be a special camaraderie among banders – after all, they spend time together hunkered down in some beautiful strips of nature, united by a common interest. Some return every year to these locations. Fuirst describes Long Point Bird Observatory as “a migration of people in addition to birds.”

“People from all across the country are spending their winter at home, and then spring comes, and the birds return. And the people also make this migration to a very specific spot. You know, this one trail that I love to walk every year. And it’s the same thing as what the birds are doing,” Fuirst says.

The interconnectedness of the birds and their environments is hard to ignore. Banders, whether they be volunteers or trained scientists, share stories about a love of nature and passion for wildlife that spans many years, often starting in childhood. It’s a deep passion for many, and one that quite literally moves people across borders. 

Faced with uncertainty about what the future of scientific collaboration may look like with the United States, the day-to-day reality of bird banding in Ontario bird observatories is quite normal. The NatureCounts database, which is an open data platform by Birds Canada that collects, interprets and shares biodiversity data, is running as usual. Volunteers, who have always been willing to give their time and expertise in exchange for some closeness with birds and time in beautiful natural settings, are still motivated to contribute their skills. 

Birds migrate. People migrate, too. Scientists and bird enthusiasts travel, sometimes internationally, to visit banding stations during migration seasons in order to earn banding experience, deepen their knowledge, receive training, get credentials, complete university studies, conduct research, make friends. 

“For me, I like birds but I also like migration. Birds connect the world,” Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory’s Menu says. “They don’t really see borders.”

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Few of us will admit to loving coyotes. The distaste for this exclusively North American canid runs deep: in a 1985 Yale University study respondents ranked them beneath skunks, rattlesnakes and vultures in terms of popularity. But are they simply misunderstood?

I have been fortunate to photograph many coyotes over the years, including three adorable pups in rural southern Ontario. I have learned much of the negativity directed at them comes from fear. 

Urban coyotes have followed humans to dense population centres where rodents are in abundant supply, providing an ample food source. Despite talk of modern “coywolves,” these are the same eastern canids previous generations knew, whose crossbreeding with wolves happened over a century ago.

Naturally, there are occasional encounters with citizens — and their pets — which become news. If a coyote acts aggressively and bites someone it is widely reported, usually without important context.

A study from 2011 found, on average, three people are bitten by coyotes annually in Canada, compared with 300,000 dog bites. When coyotes do attack, it’s often after humans have fed them, either intentionally or inadvertently. Sadly, the common response to a coyote attack is for the animal to be culled.

Rural coyotes face a different problem. Having become the top predator in regions where traditional apex predators have been extirpated, coyotes sometimes target lambs and calves — if they can get inside their pens. But again, coyotes get blamed even when other species — such as dogs — might be responsible. The provincial government compensates farmers for livestock lost to predators. But coyote casualties and death by dog are treated much differently.

Losses due to coyotes are covered under the Ontario Wildlife Damage Compensation Program. Of the approximately $1.5 million paid out to farmers in 2024-2025, more than $1.2 million was for alleged coyote predation.

Domestic dogs aren’t covered by that program at all. Those losses fall under Ontario’s Protection of Livestock and Poultry from Dogs Act, which offers generally lower compensation than the wildlife damage program.

All over the world farmers complain of livestock loss due to dogs, so it’s curious why it is not widely acknowledged here. It’s a reason conservationists have suggested coyotes might be taking some of the blame for dogs.

No doubt coyotes are more than a nuisance to some farmers. If a coyote, particularly one with mange, hangs around their house they will shoot them.

But many I speak with say coyotes around fields are mostly left alone, because they control populations of rats, mice and even groundhogs — a significant role. Coyotes are amazingly resilient, and their populations quickly rebound after attempts to cull them. They’ve migrated to every U.S. state (barring Hawaii) and every Canadian province and territory.

In a typical coyote family only the parents will mate, but if one or both parents are killed any females will come into estrus earlier or disperse to find mates and start a family. And they will have larger litters if the food supply is abundant.

But their bad reputation remains. In Ontario, hunting and trapping of coyotes is allowed all year, everywhere except in and around some provincial parks — a restriction put in place not for the coyotes’ sake, but to protect the endangered eastern wolf, which can look similar. In much of southern Ontario there is no limit to the number of coyotes that can be hunted. 

In Ontario, provincial law empowers municipalities to kill coyotes that pose a threat. Until recently, one outdoor store in Belleville, Ont., held an annual coyote killing contest. Animal conservationist groups took the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to court in 2022 arguing they were not complying with the law preventing bounty hunting. Although they lost the case, the contest does not appear to have been held since.

But those of us who appreciate the animal for its resiliency, its devotion to family and its adaptability, know getting rid of them is nearly impossible. It is estimated the coyote species can withstand a kill rate of 70 per cent of their population, year after year.

It’s denning season now across Ontario and in the coming months coyote pups will appear. I, for one, hope people can accept them as a valuable species, playing a vital part in our ecology.

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The cold snap held its grip on southern Ontario for weeks. On the shores of Lake Erie, some speculated this could be the year the ice makes it all the way across — something that hasn’t happened in three decades.

Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, typically sees the most ice cover. Still, the most recent full freeze-up was in 1996, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

On a Sunday in early February, as ice cover crept over 95 per cent, locals and visitors braved frigid temperatures to look out across the frozen surface. 

Among them was photographer Carlos Osorio, who captured the lake and the people who set out across it — on foot, studded-tire bicycle or all-terrain vehicle. Wind had sculpted blowing snow into rippling waves, as if the water, on a blustery summer day, suddenly stood still.

“When you think about water freezing, you think about smooth ice, and then you come here and the ice almost looks like frozen waves,” Frank said. “You can just imagine the water swelling up and down, but it’s not, it’s just frozen.”

“This is exceptional,” Gerald Meyering said, marveling at the amount of ice and snow on the lake, compared to recent mild winters.

— With files from Carlos Osorio

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‘Na̱mg̱is Chief Ho’miskanis, Don Svanvik, is on the phone when I walk off the little ferry in Alert Bay, B.C.

“Standing water and wood is never good,” he says to the person on the other end. “I can come by after I drop my truck off, maybe tomorrow.” 

Svanvik, a hereditary chief and former elected chief, hangs up and tells me he was talking to someone in Port McNeill, B.C., about a support system for a totem pole he helped carve. 

“Usually we put them at the back,” he explains. He drives us to the ‘Na̱mg̱is burial grounds, where he wants to show me the steel braces at the backs of the poles there, overlooking the bay. The Port McNeill pole, he says, has a brace in the middle — which is aesthetically pleasing but not great at withstanding the weather.

Alert Bay is a quiet community on a little island near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Sea otters and seals swim the semi-protected waters of the bay as eagles lazily circle above the trees at the top of the hill that climbs steeply up from the shoreline. The weather here can be relentless, especially this time of year. Winter storms batter the community with heavy winds that regularly knock out the power, sometimes for days on end. Svanvik says things have changed since he was young. Then, he says, the island would often be blanketed under deep snow for weeks at a time. Now, snow is a rarity and the storms are unpredictable, sometimes blowing in from the opposite direction to the prevailing winds.

As we drive around the island, we talk about stewardship and sovereignty and how the ‘Na̱mg̱is, who are part of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, or Kwakʼwala-speaking peoples, made ‘Ya̱lis, a winter village on the little island, their permanent home. He says when the colonial government set up the reserve system and allocated land to settlers, ‘Na̱mg̱is were told they didn’t need it.

“I don’t know how many acres we have but it’s not much,” he says. “They said we didn’t need the land because we had the ocean.”

Winter here moves at a slow pace. Around 1,000 people, give or take, live on Cormorant Island, which is about four kilometres long and one kilometre wide. Little in the way of shops and restaurants are open and the town’s mayor, Dennis Buchanan, says it’s hard to attract businesses, in part because of the regular power outages.

“One year we had 21 power outages,” he tells me over a cup of coffee. “The grocery store here lost over $40,000 in product one time.”

Still, Buchanan says he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Arriving here in the 1970s, he fell in love with the place (and a woman) and never left.

At the far end of the bay, past the village of ‘Ya̱lis, a handful of derelict boats sit on the gravelly beach, tilted at crazy angles. Lorne Smith, a clam-digger, stands on the deck of one, tying off a rope. He says he’s hoping to salvage the radar mast when the tide comes in.

John Webster pulls up in his truck, poking around to see if there’s anything worth snagging for his boat. Among other jobs, he fishes up north with the Haida. The two joke with each other and tell me about the challenges of getting fish these days. Both remain hopeful about the future but there’s a wistfulness to their stories that says times are hard.

While the fishing fleet here is a shadow of its former size, the ‘Na̱mg̱is and non-Indigenous allies are working to rebuild struggling fish populations and develop land-use plans that support sustainable forestry practices. Elected Chief Victor Isaac wasn’t available to meet in person, but tells me on a phone call the nation is making strides at getting the provincial government to respect ‘Na̱mg̱is sovereignty.

“Everyone was in their siloes before,” he says. “They didn’t listen to us, the stewards.”

He says things are slowly changing and people are coming together, listening at last.

G̱ilakas’la (thank you) to the ‘Na̱mg̱is, stewards of all the places photographed for this story, and to everyone who made time to speak with me.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 8:44 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the location of a totem pole in Port McNeill, not Port Hardy. It was also updated to add context that the village of ‘Ya̱lis predates the arrival of settlers.

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Ken Johnston walks north on a gravel road through southern Ontario farmland on a July morning. It’s cool just after sunrise, but in a few hours everything will be enveloped in thick midsummer humidity.

“By 10 or 11 o’clock, the land was just on fire, like walking in an oven,” Johnston says. He wasn’t expecting this heat in Canada, he says, nor the bugs. He dabs his face with a bandana.

“Look how dense it is in there,” he points to a thick stand of trees in Wellington County, about an hour west of Toronto, as mosquitos buzz around him. “Freedom seekers would have had to fight their way through that.”

Gravel crunches under Johnston’s brisk footsteps. On his pack swings a placard that reads “Northern Underground Railroad — Niagara Falls, NY to Owen Sound, ON” and a leather strap of jangling bells.

“These are not bear bells,” he says. “They’re bells I wear to signal to the ancestors and spirits that I’m here, if they want to reach out and communicate.”

Since 2018, Johnston has been retracing freedom routes used by African Americans escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, through his project Walk to Freedom.

He followed the footsteps of abolitionist and conductor Harriet Tubman from her home in Maryland to Niagara Falls, N.Y., and is, on this hot July day in 2025, closing out the final 265 kilometres from the U.S. border to Owen Sound, Ont., a major terminus for the Railroad. When he finishes, he will have walked more than 1,360 kilometres on this route.

Johnston has commemorated other freedom struggles on walks through the Deep South, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, Texas and Northern Ireland — in total, he’s trekked some 3,540 kilometres. When he’s not walking, the 65-year-old works in visitor services at the Penn Museum, an archeology- and anthropology-focused museum in Philadelphia.

The ancestors “willed me to do this walk,” he says. Months earlier, he had been waffling on whether to commit to this particular trip when he saw a U-Haul truck parked in front of his home. On its side was an illustration of a freedom-seeking woman, carrying a lantern and peering warily into the unknown. Behind her was a map of eastern Canada and the U.S. marked with arrows pointing north. “Venture across Canada,” the slogan cheerily invited, with a write-up of the Underground Railroad.

“The woman is literally staring right at my front door,” he laughs. “I remember looking up to the sky and going, ‘I hear you! I hear you!’ ”

Not all freedom seekers ventured all the way to British North America, which had abolished slavery in 1834. Movement accelerated after 1850, when U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Escaped slaves and free folk in the northern free states could be kidnapped by slavecatchers and sent back to the South, which meant northern states were no longer a safe haven.

An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers pushed to Canada. They came overland on foot, but when possible also used trains, horses, wagons and carriages. Ships carried them across the Detroit, Niagara or St. Lawrence rivers and through the Great Lakes to port towns like Owen Sound.

“The American narrative is they made it to Canada and then they were free. Well, the story continues on the other side, and that’s what I discovered when I reached St. Catharines,” Johnston says. “They had extraordinary lives.”

Ontario towns such as St. Catharines, Windsor, Hamilton, Guelph and Chatham became cultural and economic hubs for these refugees, full of settlements, churches, businesses, newspapers, schools and abolitionist organizations. As one example, Chatham’s population was one-third Black and regarded as a “Black Paris” in the 1850s, according to Kristin Moriah, an associate professor of African-American literary studies at Queen’s University.

“This idea of being able to start your own businesses, to support the Black community, to really celebrate the kind of freedom you specifically had in Canada, makes that area very special,” she says.

These are the Railroad stops on Johnston’s walk: Tubman’s church in St. Catharines, monuments, early settlements that fostered economic independence and the museums dedicated to preserving these local Black histories.

Connecting the stories and places of the Underground Railroad is an intentional part of his walks, Johnston says, amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to round up undocumented immigrants, crack down on Black Lives Matter protests, scrub government websites of Black histories and end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“Democracy in the United States is backsliding, and here in 2025, in the second Trump administration, protecting and preserving civil rights is more important than ever,” he says. “That’s sort of the idea behind these walks: to encourage people, to meet them one-on-one in their communities, in the streets, to engage in conversations with them about some of the erosion of civil rights we’re seeing.”

In an era when so much political activism happens online and furiously, he finds intention in the slow act of walking — as people did during the Montgomery bus boycotts or on civil rights marches in the 1950s.

“It generated a lot of activity and forced people to engage. … The energy of that movement I feel is what’s been lost,” Johnston says. “We saw a little bit of it after George Floyd’s death, there was a spontaneous movement of Black Lives Matter, but then that dissipated and there was no leadership to really keep it moving forward. So this is my way of encouragement to get that movement back, to find that energy.”

On the road, he channels the same struggles, suffering and emotions as his freedom-seeking ancestors, but also meditates on his own life.

“I’ve enjoyed the ebb and flow of marriage, the delight in raising a child, the profound grief of losing a child and finally divorce,” Johnston writes on his website. His daughter, who passed in 2008, had severe disabilities. He wrestled with the way the world engaged with her, and in return what autonomy and access she had. 

“After all these experiences, I’ve learned one has to keep going in life because another horizon awaits you over the next mountain.”

Escaping enslavement required expert outdoor survival skills

Walking up the shoulder of Highway 6, Johnston follows the rough trajectory of Garafraxa Road, which first connected Guelph to Owen Sound. Garafraxa was one of many colonization roads criss-crossing southern Ontario, which cleared the first paths for British expansion and opened up new areas for settlement. 

It provided access to a region called Queen’s Bush, stretching from Waterloo, Ont., to Lake Huron. Though it’s now a paved two-lane highway, when Garafraxa was first surveyed in 1837 it would have been a boggy, densely wooded and miserable stretch.

“It required a huge amount of backcountry skills to be comfortable walking the trails, navigating as you made your way north,” Jacqueline L. Scott, a Toronto-based scholar on race and nature and contributor to The Narwhal, says. “You are working out your route as you go along, not knowing what’s around the bend or corner. You mostly hiked in the evenings because when you run into white people, you don’t know if they are friend or slavecatcher.”

It was a rough journey up this corduroy road, made of timber laid down in the mud. On one stretch dubbed “The Long Swamp,” wagons and oxen would sometimes slip off these bumpy, jolting roads and sink to their doom in the water and mud. In total, the 113-kilometre trip from Fergus to Owen Sound would have been a four- or five-day journey.

One person who escaped enslavement only to find themselves on this mucky route to freedom was John Little, who fled Tennessee in 1841. Little’s testimony is included in the 1856 collection The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. He recounted how he and his wife Eliza were on the run for three months before finally arriving in Windsor, Ont.

Six months later, “​​We heard of the Queen’s Bush, where any people might go and settle, colored or poor, and might have a reasonable chance to pay for the land,” he recalled.

With $18, two axes, a few kitchen tools, flour, pork, a blanket and bedquilt, he and Eliza “marched right into the wilderness, where there were thousands of acres of woods which the chain had never run round since Adam. At night we made a fire and cut down a tree, and put up some slats like a wigwam. This was in February, when the snow was two feet deep.”

Wolves, bears and lynx roamed the bush, thick with old-growth maple, beech, elm, birch and ash trees. The land was so thick that often only three or four acres could be cleared and cultivated in a year.

Little was proud of their grit, producing thousands of bushels of produce and livestock out of nothing: “The man who was ‘a bad n—r’ in the South, is here a respected, independent farmer.”

Freedom seekers were indeed expert survivalists. Whatever food they could not carry, purchase, beg or steal they supplemented with foraged plants, fish and small game.

Tubman’s early life prepared her for the 13 missions she took back to Maryland to lead about 70 friends and family out of slavery. Her enslavers tasked her to harvest timber, trap muskrats and work the fields. Like a modern wilderness guide, Tubman navigated water and land, read stars, foraged for food and plant medicine — and did so all while keeping her fellow freedom seekers alive.

The idyll of a summer hike doesn’t capture the terror of fleeing for one’s life in midwinter, without the luxury of waterproof boots or Gore-Tex, Scott says. “When I look at what they had to do on that trek, it loses a lot of its romance. It’s not an outdoor adventure … to prove I can walk 500 kilometres in however many days, right? That’s an adventure quest.”

These traumas shape how Black folks relate to the outdoors today, Scott says. Off-leash dogs on a hiking trail can evoke the slavecatchers’ hounds. Police are still a common threat for Black people in nature, like birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was falsely accused of threatening a white woman in New York’s Central Park, or Ottawa cyclist Ntwali Bashizi, who had 911 called on him by a white woman that accused him of blocking her path in a park.

Canada can’t achieve its land conservation goals without nurturing future generations of racialized outdoors enthusiasts, especially when a quarter of Canadians identify as what Statistics Canada calls visible minorities, Scott says. “Why should we care when we’ve never felt like we belonged there or were invited to be there?”

Canada’s complicated history of enslavement, Black Loyalists and Indigenous displacement

Canada was the Promised Land, in both the aspirations of freedom seekers and our present-day mythologies. While that narrative should rightly be celebrated, slavery is, as Scott puts it, “as Canadian as our snow or maple syrup.”

Olivier Le Jeune was the first documented person of African descent to be enslaved in what is now Canada. Sold as a child, Le Jeune was brought to Quebec City during English occupation around 1629 to 1632.

Over the next 200 years, some 7,000 people, including Indigenous individuals, were enslaved in British and French colonies. It’s just a fraction of the 12 million African lives stolen in the transatlantic slave trade, but chattel slavery is very much part of Canada’s foundation.

Ships built in Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland carried captured Africans from as early as 1725 until the early 1800s. The worst, cheapest grades of cod fished from the North Atlantic were shipped south to the Caribbean to feed the enslaved on British plantations. 

Even after Britain abolished slavery, racist sentiments remained. The Ontario-based newspaper Provincial Freeman, published by abolitionist, educator and lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary, put it plainly in 1853: “Prejudice against negroes, so prevalent in various parts of the Province, as maintained by many persons of all nations … is one of the strongest pro-slavery influences that disgraces and degrades our fair country.”

Still, leaders like Shadd Cary were committed to the idea of Black settlement in Canada. “She really supported the British colonial project, and I think that she thought of it as a project that was directly in opposition to the evils of U.S. chattel slavery,” Moriah, of Queen’s University, says.

Viewed today, with an understanding of how colonization harmed Indigenous nations, this is an uncomfortable position. But Scott lays out the scant choices for a Black Loyalist, the name given to Black people who supported the Crown in the war against the United States. “You’ve fought for Canada because the fear was that if the U.S. won, the U.S. would reimpose slavery in Canada. … You know that freedom is hanging by a thin thread. Your reward is to be given land grants. … But it’s Indigenous land grants that you’re given.”

“And so the intertwining of that complex history — freedom for one group, the promise of freedom, of economic prosperity — it’s based on taking away the land from a different group,” Scott says. 

Canada’s promises to Black Loyalists were hollow. Most weren’t awarded the land they were owed, while others received “the worst land grants, smaller size, in the middle of nowhere, so far from the roads and later far from the railways, so it was economically unfeasible,” to earn a living there, Scott says.

Many lost their homes after white labourers, resentful of perceived wage undercutting, instigated the first recorded race riot in North America in Shelburne, N.S., in 1784. Disillusioned, more than 1,000 people, representing a third of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalists, left for Sierra Leone just eight years later.

Some who lived along Johnston’s route were left disappointed, too. On Highway 6, near Williamsford, Ont., Johnston stops at an intersecting dirt road. Here, where a stream meets old Garafraxa Road, some 50 families of Loyalists and freedom seekers settled in what became the Negro Creek Settlement.

Black settlers were among the first non-Indigenous residents of the Queen’s Bush, as early as the 1820s. Their presence predated county surveys in 1851 that carved up plots of land. Though they had done the hard work to clear their land, many of these families could not afford to buy it. Without titles, land agents regarded them as squatters. Other families could not afford the land payments.

What followed were threats, evictions, harassment and coercion to sell or simply walk away. By the early 1850s, families migrated out of the area. Only a handful were established enough to hold onto their plots. By the 1960s, the community cemetery had been desecrated. All that remained were the signs for Negro Creek Road.

In 1995, perceiving the name to be politically incorrect, Holland Township announced the street would be renamed Moggie Road after an early white settler. Descendants of early Black settlers marched in protest, calling it an erasure of their families’ presence, and filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Nearly two years later, the town backed down.

This spring, community members intend to break ground on a memorial park on two acres of land donated by Jim Douglas, a descendant who still owns his family’s 300-acre parcel. Descendants continue to gather their histories in an online archive.

Johnston’s route doesn’t quite reach the town of Priceville, Ont., just 34 kilometres away, where Black residents were also pushed out violently. Eventually all that was left was a cemetery, which was razed in the 1960s for a potato field. Some tombstones were hidden in a stone pile near the local school, while others lined the floor of a barn and the basement of a farmhouse, as revealed in the 2000 documentary Speakers for the Dead.

Local white kids played baseball using a piece of a broken headstone for home plate. “I think it said Margaret,” one resident tells the camera with a laugh. “Pitch it to Maggie!”

In Dresden, Ont., an emotional meeting with descendants of early Black settlers

As 2025 drew to a close, Johnston was called again by the ancestors to walk. He set off from Detroit on Boxing Day, bound for the Black settlements of southwestern Ontario.

His trip landed during a cold snap. Some freedom seekers chose — or seized the opportunity — to leave in winter, when the long dark nights provided more cover. In freezing temperatures, they would have been able to walk over the frozen Detroit and St. Clair rivers.

“One of the things I did not fully understand was the psychological journey for these people coming across,” Johnston says. “They were happy to be free, but the psychological weight of the cold as I experienced in the last week dampened my spirit a little.”

On his route were sites with rich Black history: Chatham, Amherstburg, North Buxton and Dresden.

The Dawn settlement in Dresden was founded in 1841 by the abolitionist, preacher and Underground Railroad conductor Josiah Henson. Enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky, he had been permanently disabled by beatings that left him unable to lift his arms above his head. After discovering his enslaver had cheated him out of an agreement to buy his freedom, he escaped at the age of 41 with his wife and four children.

Henson, who advocated for economic independence and self-reliance, built a co-operative farm, church and vocational school to teach residents the skills to work at nearby sawmills and gristmills. His life was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s often-misunderstood anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and his home sits on what is now Freedom Road.

On those 200 acres, Dawn’s early residents began the task “of settling upon wild lands which we could call our own; and where every tree which we felled, and every bushel of corn we raised, would be for ourselves; in other words, where we could secure all the profits of our own labor,” Henson wrote in his 1849 autobiography.

A century later, the area became a part of Black history as the site of Canada’s first racial discrimination trial. Many businesses in Dresden refused to serve Black customers, most notoriously Kay’s Café and Emerson’s Soda Bar Restaurant.

Hugh Burnett, a Dawn descendant, and his neighbours formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and lobbied town council and then the provincial government to pass anti-discrimination legislation. They succeeded in 1954, but some local businesses refused to comply. Two years later, after sit-ins and two drawn-out provincial trials, the owner of Kay’s Café finally served his first Black customers in 1956.

“It has been stated you can’t make a law to make one man love another — I think they knew very well the law would not do that — but it would eliminate the act of discrimination,” Burnett said in a 1954 National Film Board documentary.

On the final day of his walk, Johnston was greeted at the foot of Freedom Road by several dozen Black residents, many of them descendants of Dawn settlers. They walked arm-in-arm toward the museum, singing a gospel hymn.

Retracing Ontario’s Black history ‘touched me to my core’: Johnston

For those who made it to the end of the Underground Railroad, life was bittersweet. Though many freedom seekers found a piece of their Promised Land, the pains of dispossession, prejudice and slavery were ever-present.

“I reached Canada about a year ago. Liberty I find to be sweet indeed,” Henry Atkinson recalled in 1856, after escaping enslavement in Virginia. “I found an opportunity to escape, after studying upon it a long time.”

“But it went hard to leave my wife; it was like taking my heart’s blood: but I could not help it — I expected to be taken away where I should never see her again, and so I concluded that it would be right to leave her. I never expect to see her again in this world — nor our child.”

After the American Civil War and emancipation in 1865, this yearning drew many freedom seekers back to the U.S. in the hopes of being reunited with their families, Moriah says. Having achieved economic success in Ontario settlements like Elgin (in what is now North Buxton) which grew to 1,000 Black residents at its peak, families chased opportunities in bigger cities like Detroit or Toronto. Today these clans are transnational, slipping between countries with family, friends, school and work on both sides.

The magnitude of these many journeys hit Johnston when he first arrived at the border divide in Niagara Falls.

“I’ve been tracing the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, from the banks of the Choptank River in Maryland on the eastern shore all the way to St. Catharines,” he says. “Harriet Tubman rescued her brothers in Christmas of 1854. They made that journey to St. Catharines in one month. It has taken me five years.”

“Just looking back and seeing how extraordinary that journey was that they made, and the sacrifice that many people made — many people left their families and they weren’t going back,” he says, pausing as he tears up.

“I had the privilege of knowing I was going back home to my family and friends. It touched me to the core of my bones just what that walk meant to them.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Standing on the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alta., the wind picks up with an icy bite. 

It will be a lot warmer down there, our guide tells me, pointing to a moulin, a hole in the glacier formed by meltwater.

Trusting my rope, I, like the others, lean back and descend 35 metres down until my spiked feet land inside a sculpture of perfect blue ice. 

Every spring and fall since 2022, photographers Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon, with mountain guide Dylan Cunningham, venture to the Columbia Icefield. Their mission is to capture the vast glacial expanse straddling the Alberta and British Columbia border before it’s gone.

“This is the beauty,” Elzinga says. “But this is what we’re potentially going to lose.”

Glaciers in Western Canada are melting faster than ever, and the last four years have been particularly devastating. From 2021 to 2024, glaciers receded twice as fast as in the last decade due to low snow, high temperatures and wildfires darkening glacial ice as ash and soot on the surface absorb heat, according to recent research published in Geophysical Research Letters. 

On our current trajectory, Environment and Climate Change Canada predicts glaciers in the Canadian Rockies are likely to all but vanish by 2100, according to a statement emailed to The Narwhal. The consequences are far-reaching, impacting everything from water security to infrastructure to ecosystems and contributing to sea level rise. 

But below the surface of the Athabasca Glacier, encapsulated in its water-sculpted walls, that’s easy to forget. The ethereal blue seems endless, engulfing our senses and filling our peripheral vision.

It’s inescapable — a feeling Elzinga and Vernon strive to replicate with their photography. 

Vernon made sure everyone touched the ice with their bare hands to experience the smooth texture. 

Capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers 

For three decades, Elzinga and Vernon were in the same social circles in the mountain community of Canmore, Alta. But it wasn’t until 2021, when Vernon got a call from Elzinga asking to collaborate on a glacier project, that the pair got to know each other. It was a natural pairing.

“When we came together there was such a common language,” Vernon says. 

Their goal too, was shared. In a world inundated with images, they want to take photos that grab people’s attention at a scale that’s difficult to ignore. 

“We wanted to have our images so big that if you stood back at this distance,” he says, holding his arm out wide, “it still smacked you in your face, commanded your presence.

That shared vision led to Meltdown — a photography project exhibited in large scale at galleries and museums capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers before they are gone. It’s part of a larger initiative by an educational non-profit called Guardians of the Ice which Elzinga cofounded. The group aims to raise awareness of the consequences of losing Western Canada’s glaciers by marrying art and science.

For Vernon, it’s a bit of a shift from his other life behind the camera on the big screen, where he has a long history as a cinematographer, including documentary films and Academy Award–winning movies. 

Elzinga, meanwhile, is an accomplished alpinist who has spent a lifetime guiding and exploring in the mountains at high altitudes. In 1986, he led an expedition when the first North American woman summitted Mount Everest.

While both Elzinga and Vernon have accomplished much in their careers, they brush it off when we talk. The current mission takes centre stage — they are living and breathing glaciers.

Vernon first became aware of the impact of glacier melt when volunteering with a Calgary-based non-profit focused on water security. His work there took him around the world, to Zambia, Ethiopia and Congo. When Elzinga approached him for Guardians of the Ice, Vernon saw an opportunity to have an impact on water security locally.

“Imagine 50 years from now when we don’t have our glaciers. … Those folks aren’t going to have the water,” Vernon says, pointing to downstream Alberta communities. “That’s our food production.”

Water from glaciers in the Columbia Icefield joins rivers, streams and eventually the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans. As glaciers retreat, declining meltwater supply may impact freshwater availability as early as 2050, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Elzinga, who studied photography in university, dreamt of photographing mountains since the 1980s but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision. Elzinga and Vernon use a high-resolution camera capable of aerial mapping and space quality imagery to capture the detail and scale of their photography.

The team uses a Phase One camera, a high-resolution camera that allows Elzinga and Vernon to capture the scope of the mountains and glaciers without sacrificing fine details.

Elzinga and Vernon use a technique called photo stacking which combines multiple images to increase the quality of their photos. The technique has been useful for capturing moulins, in particular.

Witnessing glaciers disappear

Before everyone ventures into the moulin, Elzinga and Vernon stand to the side of the opening, looking at their phones. They wait for Cunningham, the mountain guide who supports their work, to text photos to the pair so they can preview the spot and make sure the imagery is what they’re looking for.

Together, Elzinga and Vernon have the mountaineering experience required for the project, but they’re now in their 70s, so they enlisted Cunningham to focus on safety and technical requirements while they focus on the art. 

“We get wrapped up in the minutia of what’s in our eyes,” Elzinga says.

Today we’re also joined by alpine guide and long-time climbing partner of Elzinga’s, Ian Welsted, who volunteered his time to facilitate bringing a reporting team on the shoot. While Elzinga and Vernon take photos, Welsted explores the darker reaches of the moulin.

Behind the camera, Elzinga and Vernon can work together almost wordlessly, an important skill when conditions get rough, they say, like the cold winds and snow when I visit. 

While finding the exact image is a know-it-when-you-see-it scenario, the areas photographed are very intentional. 

A few days after the photoshoot, at Vernon’s home base in Canmore, Alta., he unfolds a map with mountain peaks marked one through 12, the starting point four years ago, when the duo was planning where to photograph. 

The mountains flanking the icefields are known as the “guardians of the ice,” he says, the origin of the non-profit’s name.“Now all that glacier is gone,” Vernon says, pointing to different spots on the map. He points to another area — “gone.” And another, gone.

 Features the photographers planned to capture had vanished or receded remarkably year over year, like the Columbia Glacier, which they estimate to have receded 100 metres from one photograph to the next.

The art of changing people’s minds

While Cunningham has always felt a responsibility toward the environment, working with Elzinga has had a “profound” impact on his outlook, he says. 

When Cunningham gets cynical about climate change, Elzinga’s optimism has the power to pull him back.

“You can’t think that way,” Elzinga will tell him. “We can solve this, we’re making a difference, and we’re going to keep pushing.” 

Giving up isn’t an option for Elzinga.

“It’s really easy to look at this stuff and be overwhelmed by it,” he says. “My attitude is, well, at least you’ve got to try and do something.” 

The non-profit supplies Alberta Tomorrow, a free educational platform, with their materials from the icefields, and plans to expand to the university level as well as experiment with other mediums, like virtual reality. 

Elzinga hopes that awareness will then ripple through every aspect of people’s lives, including the ballot box. “It’s at government levels that you can get policy change,” he says. 

The climate crisis is like a virus, Elzinga says. Even if people are aware of it, they can’t really see it. And as the urgency increases rapidly, maybe art can help show people what’s at stake. 

Among the photographs displayed in the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre, where Meltdown is exhibited across from the Athabasca Glacier from May to September until 2027, a wall titled “no action too small” encourages visitors to be mindful of their environmental impact through pledging to take small actions such as eating less meat or divesting from fossil fuel. 

Not everybody who sees the images will make choices for the planet, but some might, and for Vernon and Elzinga, that’s what counts. 

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, what I do is not going to make a big difference,’ ” Elzinga says. His comeback is to flip the concept of a drop in the bucket on its head. 

“A lot of raindrops go into a rain barrel and then eventually that rain barrel is overflowing.”

As he sees it, if 75,000 people see the images at the gallery, not everybody will make a change — but the percentage of them that do, he says, will “go out and within their circle, they can make a difference.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.