With an uncontrollable wildfire burning its way toward Yellowknife in late July 2023, the senior civil servant in charge of the Northwest Territories capital, Sheila Bassi-Kellett, added a new routine to her day: every afternoon at 5 p.m., she would walk across downtown to meet with fire staff at the territorial Environment and Climate Change department.

One line of questioning dominated the discussion.

“What is [the fire] going to do? What are the winds gonna do? What are the weather predictions?” Bassi-Kellett would ask. 

“When it was at Boundary Creek, that’s when all bets were off,” she recalls.

The fire at Boundary Creek was still about 40 kilometres from City Hall, a distance that gave officials some comfort. But a different wildfire, a little more than 200 kilometres away on the southwestern side of Great Slave Lake, soon opened their eyes to the ferocious speed and power of this new era of fire. 

Driven by 90 km/h winds, the fire, known as SS052, made a mad dash southeast from Kakisa, moving 40 kilometres each day for two days in a row. “This fire more than doubled our worst-case forecasting for fire progression for the day,” Mike Westwick, a fire information officer for the territorial government, wrote in a summary of the fire. On the second day, it made it all the way to Enterprise, N.W.T., where it destroyed almost the entire town. 

The town of Enterprise, N.W.T., was almost completely destroyed by a wildfire on Aug. 13, 2023. At one point, the fire was advancing 40 km/day. Photos: Zachary Pangborn

“Everyone’s minds were blown about that Sunday south of the lake,” Bassi-Kellett says, referring to the day Enterprise was razed by the fire. With strong winds blowing the fire onward from Boundary Creek, wafting thick plumes of smoke through Yellowknife, one question was on everyone’s minds: could the same thing happen here? 

Within days, local and territorial states of emergency were declared and, on Aug. 16, the city was emptied of all but essential personnel.

Some new arrivals joined Bassi-Kellett and the other essential staff at City Hall. Among them was Coby Duerr, the commander of Canada Task Force 2, a government-run emergency response agency based in Calgary. The group deploys within four hours of getting the call, sending up to 75 specialists, equipment and supplies to the heart of a disaster — like the 2013 Calgary flood, the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alta., or, in this case, Yellowknife. 

Duerr’s team urged the city staff to limit their 12-hour days to seven-day stretches.

“They said, ‘Great, after seven days, who’s going to trade off with you?’ ” Bassi-Kellet recalls. “We all looked around because every member of my team that was here was fully deployed.” 

The fire edged closer to the community. The state of emergency allowed the city to compel contractors to bring heavy equipment to the city’s western edge to dig massive fire breaks, and volunteers worked alongside professional firefighters (local and imported from all over the world) within the city to set up sprinkler systems to quell embers. The sprinklers could be necessary in a season where fires jumped rivers more than a kilometre wide. 

Those firebreaks are still in place today, as the scars left by the season fade and its lessons crystallize. Reviews are ongoing at many different levels: individual ministries and local governments alike are examining what they could have done better. 

But there are only a few short weeks left until the snow melts and the next fire season begins, and with an extreme drought blotting out much of the West, 2024 is likely to be yet another bad fire year. Two-thirds of the entire Northwest Territories was evacuated during the 2023 fire season as an area the size of Switzerland burned. Another 86,000 people were under evacuation orders in B.C. and Alberta. As officials reflect on lessons learned from past disasters, one thing is clear: evacuations are increasingly a new normal in the West, in part because fires — and floods — are getting worse due to climate change.

With few tools to immediately curb these disasters, we need to reimagine what people, and governments, do when they’re in the path of a wildfire. 

“We are seeing a very clear trend and events like these are happening more frequently,” Duerr says. “They’re bigger in nature, and they’re lasting longer than they ever have before. This is something that we need to look at holistically across the country, and say, ‘How are we going to support these into the future?’ ”

Firefighters say climate change is driving longer seasons and more extreme fire behaviour, the likes of which few veterans have seen before. In some cases, it is making planned ignitions, such as this one outside Kamloops, B.C., a challenge. Photo: Jesse Winter / The Narwhal

After the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, an entire community learned to live with fire

Jody Butz knows the feeling of watching a besieging disaster launch its assault: Butz was the operations section chief of the Fort McMurray fire department when an infamous wildfire, known locally as The Beast, roared into the community in 2016.

That fire was Canada’s costliest disaster ever, causing the evacuation of 88,000 people in a matter of hours and destroying 2,600 buildings. But Butz, now the city’s fire chief, credits it with instilling a new seriousness in Fort McMurray when it comes to wildfire, something that even the partial destruction of the nearby community of Slave Lake, Alta., five years prior, hadn’t been able to do. 

“Never let a disaster go to waste,” Butz says — and he hasn’t. Today the community considers fire risk in a whole new way when it plans new developments, from location to building materials. FireSmarting, a practice of removing fuel — like wood piles or flammable vegetation — from buildings and their surroundings, has taken off in Fort McMurray. 

There’s also been a shift in mindset, which Butz boils down to this: “We live in the middle of the boreal forest, and the boreal forest is dependent on fire for its survival.”

What it’s like to flee a wildfire in B.C. 

Butz knows how high the stakes are, but now he has the benefit of being part of a community that also knows, intimately, the costs of fire; it was their homes and treasured belongings that were lost, and their loved ones they feared for as they fled. Now, he says he sees the community self-policing risky activities on social media, like all-terrain vehicle use during restrictions on backcountry access, or burning during fire bans. 

“Community members will jump on that, say, ‘Don’t you dare!’ ” he says. 

The community’s emergency leadership strategy has also changed. In 2016, there was no plan for evacuating the entire city, so it had to happen on the fly. Today, every individual community within the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (which includes Fort McMurray) has its own plan, created in consultation with its members. That’s not the case everywhere in Canada — and where there are thought-out local plans, implementation is the real test. 

Connor Corbett helped fight The Beast in 2016. Now a professional forester who works on wildfire resiliency, Corbett spent weeks last year travelling across northern B.C. talking to residents about wildfire preparations. One thing he heard again and again was that residents don’t feel they’re in the loop when a wildfire or an evacuation is coming. 

“Evacuation orders seem to come out of the blue,” he says. “A lot of people are often confused.” 

Despite these lessons, both surprise and confusion were defining elements of wildfire responses across the West again last summer. 

Evacuations are the new normal as few other options remain

Margaret Bell’s Yellowknife home had already been evacuated when she had to flee a second fire, this time as she visited her brother in Kelowna. She could see the fire growing across the lake in West Kelowna, the smoke plume undulating across the lake like a living thing. 

“It was eating the sky,” she recalls over the phone from Yellowknife. This was in mid-August, immediately following the horrors of the Maui fire, and as a result, she says, “My risk tolerance was at zero.”

In a split-second decision, she jumped in a car headed to Vancouver, where she caught a flight back across the smoke-filled mountains to Calgary. The city had procured hotel rooms for N.W.T. evacuees there, so she worked remotely on a borrowed laptop as she waited for her chance to return to Yellowknife. 

That would take three weeks from the time of the evacuation. That’s actually shorter than the norm, if B.C. is any indication: a Tyee analysis of B.C. evacuation data found nearly half of fire-related evacuations last 30 to 60 days.

Increasingly, evacuation may be the only option.

Following a wildfire that destroyed the town of Enterprise, N.W.T., crews surveyed what was left and doused embers. Photo: Zachary Pangborn

That’s in part because firefighting itself is already doing as much as it can to reduce risks, according to David Andison, a fire ecologist. Firefighting and fire management has come a long way in the past century, from a system of fighting every single fire — which built up fuel on the landscape and is part of the reason for today’s bigger, hotter fires — to one that looks more holistically at the potential losses and harms alongside the natural benefits of fire for ecosystems. 

But the flipside to that improvement is there isn’t a whole lot more that can be done to optimize firefighting itself, Andison says in an interview. 

“Any improvement we’re going to make now is going to be incremental,” he says. “We’ve kind of boxed ourselves in.”

Higher adoption of FireSmart techniques, with a few simple changes to fence design, yard layout or even cleaning the gutters can reduce the likelihood of losses by significant margins. Fire breaks, like those dug outside of Yellowknife or burned into the landscape ahead of an approaching fire, can help slow it down. 

But even if the fire is stopped, smoke is an increasing concern for people who are caught downwind. 

“The more research that comes out, the more it points to: smoke is really bad for you. Really,” Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., says. “It’s even worse than we thought. And it’s even worse than we thought five years ago.” 

A 2020 study found short- and long-term exposure to wildfire smoke could be responsible for upwards of 2,500 premature deaths every year in Canada, and as much as $20 billion in health care costs. 

That all points more and more to evacuation as a means of avoiding human costs from fires, placing an ever greater burden on evacuees — and on the governments charged with supporting them. 

Flames silhouette Skwlāx Mountain where the Adams Lake fire jumped across Shuswap Lake, near Chase, B.C. A bridge was kept in tact for crossing by being doused in water. Photo: Mike Graeme / The Narwhal

Wildfire evacuations come with costs, risks and confusion

After fleeing Kelowna, Bell got used to her new Calgary digs: a hotel in the middle of nowhere, packed with stressed-out evacuees, some of whom responded to the situation with copious alcohol, rising tempers and violence. 

“I’m hearing women screaming for help,” she says. “People are now stuck in very close quarters to each other, and they don’t have the resources or the safety that they may have been able to escape to if they’re in a domestic abuse situation.”

(Researchers and the World Health Organization have found domestic violence can increase during emergencies, particularly when there is no protocol in place to protect people fleeing abuse.)

She went back to Kelowna, where the fires were now under control, and waited it out. 

On the frontlines of B.C.’s wildfire fight

In Yellowknife, skies were clear: the wildfire’s terrifying advance that had driven the need to evacuate in the first place had been halted 15 kilometres from the city by a lucky bout of rain. It was time to figure out how to safely bring people back, in an orderly fashion and to start thinking about how to do things better next time. 

When The Narwhal reached her in March, Bassi-Kellett was still working on the latter, but she has since stepped down from her role, citing the impact of the extreme workload on her family.

“Two mass community evacuations from forest fire is enough for my career, that’s it,” she jokes. The other evacuation happened in 1995 while she was working in Tulita, N.W.T., northwest of Yellowknife about halfway to the Arctic Ocean.

Bassi-Kellett spent a lot of her final year on the job trying to make things better for the next fire emergency, because anxiety — over fire risk and the possibility of another evacuation — is lingering in the city like the smell of smoke in your hair after a bonfire. 

“I always think the best way to tackle anxiety is to control as much as you can,” she says.  

Several Indigenous governments have called for a public inquiry into the 2023 wildfire response at the territorial level, including the Tłı̨chǫ Government and Dene Nation. A majority of members of the territorial legislative assembly voted in favour of a public inquiry in February; the government hasn’t promised anything, but did hire a consultant for an independent review of the fire response, along with reviews at the Ministry of Municipal and Community Affairs and the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

Under smokey skies, cars lined up for hours at the Big River Gas Station in Fort Providence, N.W.T., along the only highway out of the territory, during wildfire evacuations in August 2023. Photo: Jeff McIntosh / The Canadian Press

The city hired KPMG to conduct its own independent review, and a new wildfire protection plan is being drafted with the help of the territorial government, with everything from fuel (read: tree) management to what to do with the sprinkler systems that are currently rolled up in shipping containers. The sports centre is being improved with better air quality management so people who can’t exercise outdoors have an indoor option. 

Communications are also being overhauled, with new information on the city’s website, which Bassi-Kellett admits was “lacking” last year. Others have put it in more disparaging terms, including the popular Instagram page, YellowknifeMemes, which posted a nonstop flood of images mocking confusing government messaging during the evacuation. In one meme, a viral interview clip of Jennifer Lawrence sobbing “What do you mean?” over and over is superimposed on a typically convoluted message from the City of Yellowknife regarding re-entry plans.

Bassi-Kellett wants to make sure that next time, people are getting the best information about the threat and how to prepare as quickly as possible, rather than the tangled web of information about different jurisdictions they received last year. 

“I’ve heard from enough people that said, ‘You know what, if I’m Citizen X, I don’t really give a shit about oh, well, the [territorial government’s] mandate is this and the city’s mandate is that.’ ”  

Across the West, governments and communities look to the future to prepare for more intense wildfires

Inter-jurisdictional wrangling is also evident in B.C. and Alberta. 

In the latter, the Rural Municipalities of Alberta association is lobbying the provincial government to standardize the level of service for evacuations — taking some of the guesswork out of providing service to evacuees, like those who flooded into Alberta from the Northwest Territories last summer. 

In B.C., a new Emergency and Disaster Management Act puts more responsibility on municipalities to prepare for and respond to emergencies, and the Union of BC Municipalities is asking for more funding from the province to implement the new act. 

Art Kaehn, a union area director with the Regional District of Fraser Fort George, lives in Hixon, B.C. Soon, “it’ll be flood season,” he says, “and then we’ll flip right into wildfire and then we could flip back.”

Even if a fire is stopped, smoke is an increasing concern for people who are caught downwind. “The more research that comes out, the more it points to: smoke is really bad for you. Really,” Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., says. Photo: Mike Graeme / The Narwhal

Those disasters routinely take up all the resources the town has, drawing in every available staff member to manage the emergency rather than their usual duties — sanitation or running facilities, for example. 

Duerr, with Canada Task Force 2, says the organization is already well into its preparations for the demands that will come this year.

The western drought is persisting with no end in sight. But a bad season this year is not yet certain: June rains could still saturate the ground and prevent another bad year, Flannigan says. 

Regardless of how bad it gets, he thinks it’s extremely unlikely that 2024 (or any other year for a decade or two) will be another 2023, which shattered records in the West. But that’s not to say it will be good. Climate change is “loading the dice,” he likes to say, for more and more disastrous years.

“If it’s cool — relatively cool — and wet, we’re not going to have a problem,” he says. “If it’s hot, dry and windy? Hey, we have a real problem.” 

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.

In the wilderness north of Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, mining companies are eyeing a potential treasure trove of critical minerals as demand for lithium, nickel, graphite and copper has risen sharply to meet the needs of the burgeoning electric vehicle and solar power industries.

The cost of mining in this and many other roadless parts of northern Canada used to be prohibitive. That changed last December, when the Canadian government announced its highly anticipated critical minerals strategy, which offers mining companies generous tax breaks, $3 billion in additional funding incentives, and a promise to fast-track the federal environmental impact review process.

While the strategy is being touted as a way of helping the world transition to a post-carbon economy, some environmentalists fear that it will result in drained wetlands, diverted streams and the disturbance of carbon-rich peatlands. Over the past three decades, the mining industry has walked away from these and many other environmental liabilities, leaving Canadian taxpayers with cleanup bills amounting to more than $10 billion.

Will benefits of mining outweigh costs to biodiversity and Indigenous people who live there?

“In this transition to renewables, two clear storylines have emerged,” says Teresa Kramarz, a professor and co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the United Nations Development Programme’s Advisory Group on Energy Governance. The first, she says, is the political urgency to rapidly decarbonize, while the second is the enormous business opportunity presented by mining for critical minerals needed for a clean energy revolution.

The blending of these storylines concerns Kramarz, as well as many other scientists and environmentalists, because the overall benefits of mining might not outweigh its costs to biodiversity and to Indigenous people who live in mineral-rich regions.

Nor is there any guarantee that reserves of minerals like lithium are large and accessible enough for Canada to compete with reserves in South America and China, which are much larger and are subject to less environmental oversight.

A caribou walks near the former Lupin gold mine in Nunavut. The mine — now in care and maintenance — sits along the migration path of the Bathurst herd, whose population has crashed due to a number of factors including mining disturbance. Fortune Minerals is now exploring along the Bathurst herd’s migratory route north of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. Photo: Pat Kane / The Narwhal

“The critical minerals strategy is one important step and welcomed, given the need for Canada to strengthen supply chains to support the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources,” says Justina Ray, senior scientist and president of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. “But the strategy doesn’t fully appreciate the global [ecological] significance of mining regions such as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the second largest peatlands in the world.” While peatlands account for only three per cent of the Earth’s land, they store approximately 30 per cent of the planet’s soil carbon. A quarter of the world’s peatlands are found in Canada. What’s needed, says Ray, “is a regional assessment led by federal, provincial and Indigenous leaders to determine whether the trade-offs are worth the cost to biodiversity.”

Most of the critical minerals reserves are located in remote regions of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and northern Quebec, and in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of northern Manitoba, Ontario and western Quebec.

The mine that Fortune Minerals is exploring in the 3,700-square-mile mineral region north of Great Slave Lake lies within the migratory path of the Bathurst caribou herd, whose numbers have crashed from a high of nearly 470,000 in the 1980s to 6,240 today, due to a number of factors including mining disturbance, overhunting and climate change.

History of mining in northern Canada contains harsh lessons

In the so-called Ring of Fire region, in the 124,000-square-mile Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands, mining activity could accelerate the thawing of permafrost that stores nearly 35 gigatons of carbon and degrade the habitat of caribou and the nesting grounds of millions of birds. The Lowlands, according to Jeff Wells, vice-president of boreal conservation for the National Audubon Society, are “astonishingly important.” No other place on the planet has as many red knots, semipalmated sandpipers, dunlins and other nesting shorebird species. The Lowlands also are possibly the most important refuge for woodland caribou, which are now functionally extinct in the United States and disappearing quickly across Canada.

Politically, the critical minerals strategy is a win-win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. It speaks to the Conservative Party’s demand for more mining jobs and regional economic development while addressing the left-wing New Democratic Party’s demand for climate action.

If the past history of mining in northern Canada says anything about the future, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned, especially with the Ontario, Manitoba and Northwest Territories governments signalling their desire to speed up mining for critical minerals.

At the former Giant mine site, core samples are left in place as a matter of record. Remediating the site is expected to cost $4.38 billion, take until 2038 and even then, hundreds of thousands of tons of arsenic trioxide left at the site will likely have to be frozen and stored underground in perpetuity. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Just a few dozen miles from Fortune’s play in the Northwest Territories, the Colomac gold mine’s tailings ponds once overflowed with cyanide and ammonia, triggering a mining inspector to complain of burning eyes and a sore throat just minutes after arriving at the site. After low gold prices finally shut the mine in 1997, Colomac’s $1.5-million security deposit, posted to cover environmental liabilities, didn’t come close to covering the $135-million cleanup that was performed at taxpayer expense.

The final cost of the remediation at Colomac, whose initial phase included construction of a five-mile fence to keep caribou out of contaminated areas, is dwarfed by the resources that continue to be poured into two ongoing remediations.

The Faro zinc mine, which operated in the central Yukon between 1969 and 1998, was once the largest open-pit lead-zinc mine in the world. Today, it is one of the most complex abandoned-mine remediation projects in the country, if not the world. Its 77 million tons of tailings and 353 million tons of waste rock contain high levels of heavy metals, which authorities fear could potentially leach into the mountainous headwaters of many fish-bearing streams. The remediation, which began in the early 2000s, is expected to take between 10 and 15 years at an estimated cost of $500 million or more.

The remediation of the Giant gold mine, on the shores of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, will cost an estimated $4.38 billion and won’t be completed until 2038. Even then, storing the gold mine’s 261,000 tons of highly toxic, virtually indestructible arsenic trioxide — in frozen underground mine chambers — is anticipated to require perpetual maintenance because groundwater that flows into the mine and rapidly thawing permafrost are undermining its stability. The mine may have to be refrigerated permanently, according to engineers working on remediation options. Since 2016, all 20,000 Yellowknife residents have been warned by the government to avoid drinking water, swimming, fishing and harvesting plants and berries in and around several lakes due to their high arsenic levels.

Since 2002, when the Auditor General of Canada issued a scathing report on 30 abandoned mines in the north, federal, territorial and provincial governments have become more diligent in reviewing mining plans and demanding security deposits to cover the cost of cleanups. But the liabilities continue.

Plans for battery plants in Ontario bolster Canada’s critical minerals strategy

This past May, for example, the Yukon government took over the Minto copper and gold mine on Selkirk First Nation territory after mining inspectors repeatedly warned of the potential for contaminated water to flow into the salmon-bearing Yukon River system. The action was taken less than a year after the owners of the Wolverine Mine, which contains reserves of gold, silver, zinc and copper in the southeast corner of the territory, reneged on paying $19 million in security costs. By then, the Yukon government had already poured millions of dollars into environmental mitigation efforts after an underground portion of the mine flooded in 2017.

Tom Hoefer, executive director of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Chamber of Mines, says that abandoned mines in the Canadian North “should be a thing of the past” thanks to legislative changes that have addressed the issue of security deposits and created oversight boards that oversee land-use planning, wildlife management, environmental assessment and review, and land and water regulations.

“The driver, of course, was that Indigenous groups also didn’t want to see repeats of environmental messes on their traditional lands,” he said, noting that the law requires that half of the review board members in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut come from an Indigenous community.

The Faro mine in Yukon Territory is one of the most complex abandoned mine remediation programs in Canada, perhaps the world. It will cost the federal government an estimated $500 million and take more than a decade. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Canada’s critical minerals strategy has already attracted a lot of interest and is bound to attract more now that several battery plants, including one proposed by Volkswagen, are in the planning stages in Ontario. The Volkswagen plant will receive a package of subsidies amounting to as much as $10 billion over the next decade.

In addition to fast-tracking the regulatory review process, the federal strategy will give mining companies a generous tax credit, equal to 30 per cent of the capital costs associated with establishing a mine. Priority will be given to mines that produce lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper and other critical metals. To entice companies to invest and explore, the government has earmarked $60 million for geoscience and exploration aimed at discovering potential new deposits.

The Canadian government has funded this kind of geo-mapping before, in the hopes of encouraging oil and gas companies to develop energy and mineral reserves in the northern regions of the country. Between 2008 and 2017, more than $75 million was spent helping private companies find new sources of fossil fuels and minerals, but not a barrel of oil or a gigajoule of gas found its way to market. What northerners got instead was tens of thousands of miles of seismic lines — narrow corridors cleared of vegetation — running through formerly frozen peatland that are now releasing untold volumes of greenhouse gases as they thaw.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford pledges to mine in the Ring of Fire, even if he has to “hop on a bulldozer myself”

Provincial leaders tend to be supportive of the new mining projects. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said, “If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads in the Ring of Fire.” Based on the increased value of critical minerals already established to be in the ground, George Pirie, Ontario’s minister of mines, estimates the mining value of this area at a trillion dollars.

But according to Jamie Kneen, the national program co-lead of Mining Watch Canada, there is little data to back up such claims. He fears that Canada will be left with a lot of holes in the ground and many more environmental liabilities if technological developments come into play and make the critical minerals strategy obsolete.

The federal government was forced to step in and pay for the cleanup of the Faro mine when its owners declared bankruptcy in 1998, leaving behind 77 million tons of tailings and 353 million tons of waste rock contain high levels of heavy metals. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Charles Kazaz, a Montreal-based lawyer for a firm that advises clients in the mining sector, concedes that demand could drop, but he considers the critical minerals strategy unique for addressing both economic development and climate-change targets. “Canada needs to be aggressive and act fast in order to catch up with the rest of the world,” he says.

Without the strategy, he says, Canada might miss an opportunity because of foreign investment restrictions that prevent countries like China from partnering in critical-mineral development in Canada, and by the constitutional requirement that the government and industry consult with and accommodate Indigenous communities before mines or access roads can proceed.

Indigenous communities are divided over whether to support development of resources within their territories. The recent federal decision to greenlight Nemaska Lithium’s project in northern Quebec is a case in point. The Nemaska Cree band council embraced the mine on the basis that it would provide the community with jobs and royalties. But some Cree, including Thomas Jolly, a former Nemaska chief, don’t think it is worth the risk of contaminating the Rupert River watershed. Neither does Jolly accept the argument that the Cree should agree to the mine to help the world deal with climate change.

“Who is responsible for the climate crisis?” he asked. “Is it up to us to pay and suffer for what they [southerners] have done?”

In 2018, 360 shipping containers near the shore of Great Slave Lake hold a mine’s deconstructed roaster, where gold was separated from rock. That process produced arsenic trioxide, leaving the building so contaminated that it was deconstructed inside of a “shrink wrap” tent. The containers will be buried underground during the remediation process. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

The Cree communities that live in and around the Ring of Fire, where several mines are already in operation and where at least 15 other companies have more than 26,000 mining claims, are working with conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, the Wildlands League and MiningWatch Canada to make sure that no environmental shortcuts are taken, as federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has promised.

Kramarz, at the University of Toronto, remains skeptical. Like other scientists, she isn’t downplaying the need to aggressively deal with climate change. But she believes that enthusiasm for exploiting critical minerals to speed a transition to carbon neutrality ignores significant costs.

“If that’s the narrative,” she says, referring to industry exuberance, “then it would be good to not forget that there are environmental concerns that need to be thoroughly understood and mitigated.”

Updated on Oct. 10, 2023, at 1:32 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the cost of cleaning up the Colomac mine in the Northwest Territories from $53 million to $135 million. The starting operational date of the Faro mine has also been revised from 1968 to 1969.

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.

Almost three years ago, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report and among its findings, the report identified resource extraction as a site of gender violence.

The relationship between extraction and gender violence has been observed in extractive sites around the globe. And in Canada, this gender violence is shaped by extraction and settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands and livelihoods.

What is it about extractive projects that creates the conditions for gender violence?

In Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North, I analyze the gender impact of Canadian diamond mines. As a settler researcher who grew up in southern Canada, I partnered with the Native Women’s Association of the Northwest Territories and spoke with Dene, Métis, Inuit and non-Indigenous northern women about their experiences with the mines.

In Canada, the first diamond mine opened in the Northwest Territories on Dene land in 1998. Since then, three other diamond mines have opened there, and Canada has become the third largest diamond producer in the world.

The Canadian diamond industry was established amid international concerns around conflict — or blood — diamonds. Canada’s diamond industry lauds itself as an ethical alternative to diamonds from elsewhere, but these gems are mined on Dene land and, in restructuring the lands and livelihoods of northern communities, the diamond industry brings with it a new, and newly gendered, colonial violence.

A pillar of settler development

Resource extraction has long been a pillar of settler development in northern Canada.

Regionally, diamond mines were established on the heels of the longstanding gold industry, and they have reproduced some dynamics of past settler extractive projects. But the diamond mines have also brought with them new characteristics with unique gender impacts.

Unlike mining towns that sprouted up throughout the north in the 20th century, diamond mines are organized through a fly-in/fly-out structure. This means that workers fly in for prolonged mining shifts, and fly out for their time off.

Rough cut diamonds from Diavik. Photo: Rio Tinto

Fly-in/fly-out or drive-in/drive-out has become the preferred extractive model in Canada and elsewhere. By making long-distance commutes part of everyday operations, the FIFO/DIDO model is an intensified expression of the home/work divide, where home is gendered as feminine space and work as masculine space.

For many women workers I spoke to, the separation of work from home meant that work in the diamond mines was not accessible. This was because workers live away from home for extended periods of time, and weren’t able to care for kin and community.

This “caring divide” exacerbates existing tendencies for hypermasculine mining cultures, or what the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report calls “man camps.”

Women who had worked at the diamond mines shared stories of intense visibility. These experiences ranged from a general feeling of greater scrutiny from other workers, to overt sexual harassment. While the women I interviewed held a variety of positions at the camps, it was women who worked in housekeeping and positions at a lower pay scale with higher degrees of precarity who described the most explicit and pervasive experiences with gendered discrimination and violence.

Heavy care burdens

The fly-in/fly-out structure has led to intensified pressure on people, usually women, at home. While mine workers and their families spoke about the financial benefits of mine employment, many female spouses likened the experience of having a spouse at camp to single parenting.

One Dene woman I interviewed said, “I feel like I live in a community where families are fragmented on purpose. We choose to remove half of the caregivers half of the time. How can this not have a significant impact on raising a family or being in a marriage?”

These heavy care burdens are coupled with new financial inequality within households, with mine workers often bringing in significantly higher wages than other family members.

Diavik, pictured here in winter, is near the first diamond mine to open in the Northwest Territories, Ekati mine, which is also located on Lac de Gras. Photo: Rio Tinto

The women I spoke with shared concerns that inequalities in both caring labours and finances were shaping conditions for interpersonal violence, and making it more difficult for women to leave violent situations.

When women shared their stories of the diamond mines, they did not express the impact as an isolated or unique phenomenon. Instead, I heard stories that wove the experiences of the diamond mines into ongoing processes of settler colonialism, including the intergenerational trauma of residential schools.

Diamonds carry with them heavy imagery of romance and commitment, symbolizing a love that is, as diamond company De Beers puts it, “forever.”

However, while a century of marketing has made diamond rings a symbol of heteronormative happy endings, when I spoke with northern women about their experience with the diamond mines, I heard a different story.

As one research participant said, “Diamonds are said to be a girl’s best friend. I’m not sure which girls they are because it’s certainly not anyone in here.”

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.

Melaine Simba will never forget the months she spent inside her home on Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation, south of Yellowknife, with her windows tightly shut to prevent wildfire smoke from seeping in. It was the summer of 2014 and she was following public health orders to stay inside during the Northwest Territories’ worst wildfire season on record.

“There were fires all around us,” Simba told The Narwhal. “I couldn’t go outside, and I couldn’t take my son outside.”

“It was just so hard to breathe in that smoke with all the falling ash.”

According to a new study published in the journal BMJ Open, the wildfires caused extremely poor air quality during the more than two months of unrelenting smoke exposure. This led to a sharp increase in respiratory illnesses, with vulnerable populations, such as children and Indigenous people, disproportionately affected. 

The study also found that public health advisories asking people to stay inside during the wildfires were “inadequately protective,” possibly because people grew tired of the long period of isolation. With climate change contributing to longer and more intense wildfire seasons, the study authors say there’s an urgent need to be far more prepared in the future.

“A really big take home of this study is that climate change is bad, and it is going to get worse,” Courtney Howard, the lead author of the study and an emergency physician in Yellowknife, told The Narwhal, adding that smoke exposure levels during the wildfires were believed to be some of the worst ever studied globally.

“We are going to need new, proactive approaches as we go into a warmer, smokier state on this planet.”

Warmer temperatures caused by climate change can spur drier conditions, increasing the risk of wildfires. In 2014, moderate to severe drought conditions and lightning strikes were the catalyst for 385 fires that impacted 3.4 million hectares of forest in the Northwest Territories.

According to the federal government, temperatures across the North are warming more than twice as fast as the global rate. In Yellowknife, between 1943 and 2011, the annual average temperature in the city increased by 2.5 C. 

Particulate matter increased fivefold during the wildfires

The average level of particulate matter (PM 2.5) in the air was five times higher than normal during the 2014 wildfires, compared with the two previous years and 2015. PM 2.5 — inhalable particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter — is associated with a range of respiratory conditions.

The study found this increase in particulate matter was associated with an increase in visits to the hospital for asthma, pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Asthma-related emergency room visits doubled, with the highest rates found in women, people older than 40 and Dene. Visits for pneumonia increased by 57 per cent, with men, children and Inuit particularly affected. And visits for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease increased by 11 per cent, with men, the Inuit and Dene populations and people over 60 showing the greatest risk. 

While the results suggest that Indigenous people were more affected, Howard said it’s difficult to say for sure because they may have been more likely to go to the ER due to lack of access to medical clinics. 

The demand for medicine that helps alleviate the symptoms of asthma surged, too. The dispensation of salbutamol, the agent found in puffers, increased by 48 per cent.

Yellowknife emergency physician Courtney Howard was lead author on a study on the health effects of the 2014 Yellowknife wildfires, published in the journal BMJ Open in February 2021. Photo: Pat Kane / The Narwhal

“In fact, one of the pharmacies ran out over the course of the summer,” Howard said. 

Supply chain problems “demonstrated a lack of resilience,” she added.

The study also sheds light on systemic issues that contribute to worse health outcomes in vulnerable populations, including Indigenous people.

“Climate-related health effects impact all populations but are likely to disproportionately affect communities living at the frontlines of rapid climate change, as well as those experiencing systemic racism, socioeconomic and health disparities, and/or the enduring effects of colonization,” the study states.

‘Some people were visibly traumatized by this event’

Protracted periods of isolation, a lack of exercise, fear and stress during the wildfires also had negative impacts on people’s mental health and way of life, according to a 2018 report that Howard was also involved with. 

“Livelihood and land-based activities were disrupted for some interviewees, which had negative consequences for mental, emotional and physical well-being,” the report states.

During the summer, Indigenous people across the territory fish, hunt and visit old villages and the gravesites of relatives, Jason Snaggs, the chief executive officer of Yellowknives Dene First Nation, told The Narwhal. The wildfires prevented people from taking part in these cultural activities, he added. 

“This leads to depression, and you have sort of a compounding effect, in terms of colonialism, the effects of residential schools, intergenerational trauma,” Snaggs said.

“Some people were visibly traumatized by this event.”

Sheltering in place can lead to increased rates of family violence, including violence against Indigenous women, Snaggs added.

The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires might have caused similar increases of family violence, as is evidenced by the 300 per cent increase of calls to a local family crisis centre. Photo: Jason Woodhead / Flickr

During the 2016 wildfires that tore through Fort McMurray, Alta., calls to a local family crisis centre increased by upward of 300 per cent, according to Michele Taylor, executive director of Waypoints, an emergency shelter for women and children. 

Howard said the 2014 wildfires were a seminal event in people’s understanding of climate change in the region.

“At the time, ecological grief and eco-anxiety hadn’t really shown up in the evidence base,” she said. “Looking back at our analysis, I think we can easily apply those terms to what we found and say it was a trigger for ecological grief and anxiety for a lot of people.”

Communities need to prepare long before wildfire season 

Howard said communities — particularly Indigenous communities — need to be better equipped to withstand wildfires.

Some homes in Indigenous communities are overcrowded and aren’t built to the same standards as those elsewhere in the territory. Howard emphasized the need to address this problem first and foremost.

The BMJ study recommends governments install ventilation systems in old and new homes ahead of wildfire season. Doing so would ensure residents have access to clean air without having to leave the house. 

“Our infrastructure decisions need to be based on the temperature and precipitation patterns that we’re anticipating for the coming century as opposed to the ones we had in the last one,” Howard said.

Satellite imagery near Great Slave Lake shows the spread of wildfire smoke in the Northwest Territories during the 2014 wildfires. The centre of the photo shows a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, sometimes called fire clouds, which are an atmospheric phenomenon generated by extreme heat and rising smoke, usually from wildfire or volcano eruptions. Courtney Howard, lead author of a new study on the 2014 wildfires, says smoke exposure levels during that period were some of the worst ever studied. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

The study also recommends primary health-care practitioners identify people who may grapple with respiratory illnesses and ensure that air filters and puffers are readily available prior to wildfire season.

“That will allow people to manage their symptoms at home and never get to the point where they’re stuck in the emergency department,” Howard said. “The sooner particularly vulnerable people have access [to air filters and puffers], the better.”

In 2014, the City of Yellowknife waived user fees for a multi-purpose recreation facility so residents could go there to breathe clean, filtered air and exercise, Howard said. But not everyone in Yellowknife is afforded the same level of access. N’Dilo, which is part of Yellowknives Dene First Nation and is located in Yellowknife proper, only has one space people can gather in during a wildfire — a 45-year-old gym that isn’t equipped with a filtration system to keep air clean.

The study suggests that public health practitioners use satellite-based smoke forecasting to determine whether clean air shelters are needed in advance of wildfire season and, if necessary, make more available. 

The 2018 report — which documented the experiences of 30 community members from Yellowknife, Dettah, N’Dilo and Kakisa who lived through the wildfires — found there was a consensus among participants about the need for improved communication and coordination at the community and territorial levels as wildfires intensify.

Howard said residents and health-care providers need to proactively prepare for wildfire season every year.

 “We need to be viewing wildfire season the same way we view cold and flu season.”

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.

The Government of Northwest Territories has been charged $10,000 for destroying the nests of at-risk bank swallows, a regional wildlife enforcement director with Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal.

“To me, this demonstrates the Government of Canada’s desire and need to protect the species that are listed under federal legislation,” said Trevor Wyatt of Environment and Climate Change Canada. “This is one of the concrete ways we have to deliver this commitment.”

The charge, laid in a territorial court on Jan. 28, falls under the federal Species at Risk Act, which seeks to protect wildlife species vulnerable to extinction as well as their habitats. The $10,000 fine will be paid into Canada’s Environmental Damages Fund, which is used to support the natural environment.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada — the advisory body that determines which wildlife requires an at-risk categorization — recommended bank swallows be listed as threatened in 2013, which the federal government did in 2017. This is the first charge of its kind in the North, since the bird was listed.

Bank swallows, which are found across the country — from Nova Scotia to Yukon — have experienced “severe long-term decline,” with populations plummeting by 98 per cent over the last 40 years, according to the committee’s 2013 assessment of the species. The small song birds, known for their aerial acrobatics and extremely social nature, can be identified by the distinctive dark breast band above their white bellies.  

Ongoing habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use are cited as being key factors lessening bank swallows’ chances of survival.

The incident in the Northwest Territories took place in 2018, when the territorial government’s infrastructure department hired a contractor to level the slopes of a quarry near Edzo, N.W.T., to deter migratory bank swallows from nesting. However, the contractor’s work took place too late in the season and the nests of about 12 bank swallows were destroyed, according to an agreed statement of facts. 

Trevor Wyatt of Environment and Climate Change Canada believes similar incidents can be avoided in the future if the territorial government takes more time to educate people who work in threatened species’ habitats. Photo: Karel Bartik / Shutterstock

Crown prosecutor Morgan Fane told The Narwhal the case represents “a cruel irony.”

The territorial government was charged because it failed to ensure the mitigation work happened before the time of year when the birds are busy making their nests, Fane said. “In this instance, they were doing the right thing, they were doing it for the right reason, and had they followed through and ensured that the contractor was doing what was asked of them, then [the destruction of the nests] would have been avoided.”

According to the agreed statement of facts, work was conducted around the time bank swallows make their nests, which tends to occur between mid-April and late August.

Steve Loutitt, deputy minister of the Government of Northwest Territories’ Department of Infrastructure, apologized to the court.

“This was an unfortunate event where the Department of Infrastructure intended that any necessary work be done early to prevent any interaction with bank swallows during the nesting season and due to a lack of oversight on the ground, the work was not done in a timely manner,” Loutitt said, according to a written statement shared with The Narwhal. 

Case boils down to ‘lack of education’ on the birds’ status

Wyatt said the case hinges on the territorial government’s failure to educate the contractor it hired about the threatened species and their habitat.

“We’re going to encourage the territorial government to take the extra step to educate the users of their gravel pits, so that they can recognize the habitat that they’re trying to protect,” he said.

“I think there’s various parts of the country that are more aware of the actions under the legislation than others are.”

Bank swallows use geological formations with vertical slopes like riverbanks for nesting. The birds are attracted to human-made structures like quarries, which can prove precarious nesting sites, especially when they are active, Wyatt said.

The case highlights a lapse in communication, lawyer says

The company hired by the government to do mitigation work wasn’t made aware of the bank swallow’s nesting season to ensure work was done before the birds showed up.

“The Department did not exercise due diligence in ensuring the work was completed prior to mid-April 2018, or in any event prior to the arrival of bank swallows,” the agreed statement of facts states.

While the territorial government presented the contractor with an educational brochure intended to prevent possible impacts to the birds, no formal training was provided to identify their nests, according to the document.

The territorial government should have done more to verify the birds’ nests were avoided by calling the contractor or visiting the site, Fane said. 

“Entities who are operating in the field can have procedures and best practices on paper,” Fane said. “What is required of these actors is to ensure that their policies as written are being effectively implemented.”

Loutitt told The Narwhal in an email the territorial government is preparing to implement a migratory bird management plan, which will record the department’s interactions with different species of migratory birds and “provide clear guidance for employees in order to minimize the risk of harm to migratory birds, nests and eggs.” That plan will inform staff training sessions.

Both the training sessions and migratory bird management plan are expected to cost roughly $21,500 once fully complete, a Department of Infrastructure spokesperson told The Narwhal.

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.

By Breanna Draxler. This story originally appeared in YES! Magazine and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

As COVID-19 continues its deadly sweep across the world map, Canada stands out. The country has markedly fewer cases than, for example, the U.S. As of April 20, Canada had roughly 37,000 cases to the United States’ 766,000. Despite the difference in response and scale, the virus is a major disruption to Canadians and their economy. And disruptions, as historic examples reinforce, create opportunities for positive change.

Courtney Howard is an emergency doctor in Yellowknife. She serves a patient population that, so far, has only seen five cases of COVID-19 but is living in one of the most rapidly warming climates in the world. Howard’s emergency department serves the entire High Arctic in the Northwest Territories, including many Indigenous and frontline communities experiencing climate change firsthand. This has huge consequences for health, including food security, cultural sharing, and mental health. She sees the response to coronavirus and the resulting investments as the perfect opportunity to address both new and longstanding threats to health.

The Canadian government, for example, has announced plans to fund the cleanup of abandoned oil and gas wells, which are a toxic risk to communities and would employ oil and gas workers who have been laid off. Such actions, Howard underscores, must support people’s health now, improve resilience to crises that may happen in the future, and decrease the risk of those crises occurring. 

Here she shares her experiences from the COVID-19 crisis and insights on how the outcomes can and should inform conversations on climate. Howard says prioritizing mental health is key to tackling both of these tough issues, which is why she conducted this interview while cross-country skiing.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: How does being an emergency doctor influence your response to crises?

A: I have gut-level reflexes around the need to act quickly in the case of fast-moving illness. I’ve had really discreet experiences of both having acted quickly enough and saved the patient, and having acted in a way that later I went back and said, “That patient died. Could I have done something differently? Could I have been faster? Could I have called in help earlier?” Those are by far the most difficult experiences of any doctor’s career. They’re the ones you remember in the pit of your stomach and keep you awake at night. And so eventually, you end up with an almost Pavlovian response to a time window.

Half of the doctors on my board right now, of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, are emergency doctors, and I think it’s because we really can’t sit still if we see that lives are at risk and it’s a time-dependent situation. And so, the need to act quickly within time windows and situations where the factors are outside of your control has been shown to be super key in COVID and it’s equally true in climate. 

Q: How so? Can you speak to how climate is going to exacerbate future crises and make them more frequent?

A: I was thinking today, imagine if the Australian wildfires had happened a couple of months later. Or this pandemic had started a couple of months earlier to coincide with the Australian wildfire season. We could have had two incredible crises at the same time. That could easily happen, so we need to look at these increasing weather-related disasters, wildfire-related disasters, and the increasing possibility of further infectious disease related pandemics.

Q: Can you talk more about the commonalities that the coronavirus has revealed?

A: It’s an event that at first seems unrelated to climate, but it has a lot of consequences for the conversation around climate and health. 

I have gotten involved quite early in a movement called “planetary health,” which is the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems upon which it depends. It turns out that only about 20 per cent of overall health status comes from the work we do inside health structures. What determines the rest are ecological determinants of health — things like soil, climate, water, biodiversity. You can think of those as a nest underpinning everything else, because that has to be stable for us to have the concentrated resources we need to be able to do things like build roads and hospitals and schools and homes. Those financial and economic systems give rise to what we term the social determinants of health, which are things like housing and income and education. Those have direct impacts on our health, and they also are the things we need to have functioning health care structures. 

The whole coronavirus outbreak is a giant wake-up call in terms of planetary health, because what it’s saying is, “Hey, there’s a lack of care at the intersection of humans and the natural world, and that’s what allowed a zoonotic virus to make a jump into humans.” 

Q: What about mental health; what is the impact there?

A: Before this started, I was doing a lot of work around eco-anxiety and ecological grief, so heading into this, a lot of people are really, really worried and grieving the changes that we’re anticipating and already seeing in the natural world.

From what I’m seeing online, and also what I’m seeing in the emergency department, people are really anxious right now, too. This is a time when the COVID crisis is demanding a lot of us in terms of buffering different worries and stresses and changes. We’re going to emerge from this really tired, and some of us will be traumatized, and some of us will be grieving. We’re going to look up and realize that “Oh, phew. Now we’re through that crisis, but the other crises didn’t go away.”

That’s the reality: Sometimes there are two emergencies happening at the same time, or more than two, and you have to deal with them both at the same time. Now, I think we are appropriately focusing most of our energy on this problem that needs us the most, but those other emergencies are in the background. And we need to realize that when we lift our eyes up from the COVID emergency, we’re going to be tired and we’re going to hope that those other emergencies are as optimized as possible.

Amid coronavirus pandemic, some B.C. communities brace for flooding as well

Q: What do you mean by optimized?

A: Given that we’re in this situation where the economy requires stimulus, this is a chance where we can help solve two crises at the same time. We absolutely need to do that. Every bit of public funds ought to be allocated with health in mind. That means attention to all of the determinants of health — the ecological determinants of health, the social determinants of health, and actual health systems. 

What I think is super important right now is making sure that the stimulus funds are going toward the things that both increase our resilience to future disasters and that make them less likely.

Q: How do we make sure that happens?

A: The book I’m reading right now is Joseph E. Stiglitz’s People, Power, and Profits. What he points out, with regards to the U.S. system, is that a concentration of wealth inevitably results in a concentration of political power. Power comes up every once in a while, as a word, but the concept of inequality and the different ways that that impacts our health in a really dangerous way is something that I think we need to talk more about, because, especially looking at the U.S. context right now, it’s really hampered the pandemic response. 

The thing is, a pandemic is something that shows that we’re all in it together. So if people can’t access health care and they can’t get tested, not only are poor people affected, but rich people too. There are all sorts of studies that show that inequality is bad for everybody’s health, not just the people at the bottom, but the whole society. One of the ways that is becoming clear is in terms of access to political power and decision-making power. We need to start talking more explicitly about that, because that will bring us closer to solving the problem. 

Q: You mentioned building resilience to deal with future crises. What might that look like?

A: Things like phasing out coal-fired power plants, that’s a win-win. We transition from coal to healthier energy supplies, and it reduces air pollution, which the World Health Organization has calculated is killing 7 million people a year. Compared to how many people have died of COVID so far, it’s a lot.

What we really need to focus on is this: We’ve been working with this “your house is on fire” narrative as a climate community for a couple years. I think that was appropriate for a time when people weren’t in crisis. But coming out of this [COVID crisis], people are not going to have the energy to talk about that. If we describe a path of safety in a compassionate and inclusive way, we can really make a huge contribution. 

Life after coal

Q: That is such a different visual than your house being on fire.

A: Yeah, totally. When people were complacent, I think that probably was appropriate. But right now, in the emergency department, I’m seeing stress-related headaches, stress-related stomachaches, stress-related neurological disorders. I’m seeing physical trauma, suicidality. And we’re only, what, a month in? We only have one case so far in the Northwest Territories, so that’s just the result of people being at home and worried. [Editor’s note: As of April 21, Northwest Territories has seen a total of five cases.]

Part of what I would invite people to do is to be really, really diligent about self-care practices right now, because if we bring a centred self to the table at this moment of incredible change, we’re going to be able to make decisions strategically, as opposed to out of emotion, and that’s going to help get the outcome that we’re hoping for. 

Essentially, we’re in a generational tipping point. Things have been disrupted, so now we have this opportunity: How can we apply the lessons that we’ve learned to saving lives this century and into the next?

Like what you’re reading? Sign up for The Narwhal’s free newsletter.

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.

By Katie Orndahl,  Northern Arizona University. This article originally appeared on Nasa Blogs.

I spent my summer searching for arctic spirits: barren-ground caribou who are, somehow, both omnipresent and elusive.

My journey, it turns out, would trace the migration route of the Porcupine caribou herd, linking boreal forest and arctic tundra ecosystems unlike any other northern mammal. The wild landscape I traveled forms the northern extent of the North American Cordillera, one of the last intact mountain ecosystems on Earth.

As I prepared, gathering groceries and loading the truck with scientific equipment and camping supplies, I heard whispers of the entire Porcupine herd moving southeast through the Richardson Mountains. Our small research team drove hurriedly north – hoping for a (figurative) collision course with hundreds of thousands of caribou at the Yukon/Northwest Territories border.

Anticipation ran high, but the border was eerily quiet. A gentle breeze blew and the sun shone through thin clouds. We climbed mountain after mountain, rocks clattering underfoot, to scan the horizon. Looking, hoping, wishing, we even tried to conjure up caribou in our minds to fill the vacant tundra. But the landscape remained still and the disappointment palpable.

We sampled vegetation and drove on.

The Firth River is a formidable obstacle for Porcupine caribou on their yearly migration. Photo: Katie Orndahl

At Imniarvik Base Camp we missed the herd again. Just a few weeks before, the rocky benches above Sheep Creek in Ivvavik National Park had swelled with thousands of caribou. The pulsing mass filled the spaces between spruce trees, blending together first as life personified, and then in death as the roaring Firth River canyon claimed frenzied victims attempting to cross.

Although no longer near, the caribou had made their presence clear – tracks, hair, droppings and browsed willows everywhere we looked. And this, it turns out, was the point. It is hard to be convinced of things we cannot see. As scientists it is our duty to make these things more tangible.

We felt the Porcupine herd’s presence in the things they left behind: tracks, dung, bones, antlers, hair, and signs of browse. Photos: Katie Orndahl and Aerin Jacob

I am a PhD student at Northern Arizona University. My collaborators and I study how millions of migrating caribou interact with their environment: the habitat selection choices the caribou make, as well as the impacts they impart on the landscape. We are particularly interested in how these interactions fit into a complicated web of processes: climate warming, carbon cycling, wildfire and vegetation change. We hope by including caribou we can “animate the carbon cycle” and fill in gaps in scientific understanding about climate change in the Arctic.

This brought me to the Canadian Arctic.

Fieldwork helps us map above-ground biomass of different types of plants in Alaska and northwest Canada. We identify species of shrubs, flowering plants, lichens and grasses/sedges, estimate the amount of ground they cover, measure their heights, and harvest them to weigh in the laboratory. This gives us closest to true estimates of how much plant matter (caribou food) exists in each place.

However, these measurements are small points on a large landscape. I am particularly excited about new technology that can help us map plant matter (“above-ground biomass”) across the entire region. This means future researchers can choose anywhere on a map and understand how much caribou food exists there. And, what’s more, we can link these maps with GPS data from the movements of collared caribou to understand the relationship between caribou density and on the ground vegetation.

The drone picked up signs of caribou, too. This drone image shows caribou trails weaving through spruce near Sheep Creek in Ivvavik National Park. Photo: Katie Orndahl

For this reason, at each location where we sample vegetation, we also use a drone to collect super high resolution photographs. Not only are these images beautiful, but they also act as a bridge between fine-scale field data and satellite images that cover the whole globe, but contain less detail. We hope drone images might also make future vegetation surveys more efficient.

Using an iPad, Katie (left) and Rachel (right) monitor the drone as it completes its flight in a cottongrass tundra. Photo: Aerin Jacob

This summer, we sampled cottongrass tundra as fluffs of wind dispersed seeds floated by, tall willow thickets that bruised our shins and hummed with mosquitoes, and barren ridgelines with little but lichen and resilient dwarf shrubs. Caribou use many different habitats—from the boreal forests of central Alaska to the flat plains of the Yukon North Slope—and our field sites reflect this variety.

At each site, the drone buzzed overhead on a pre-programmed flight, taking detailed photos I’ll use to classify plant cover and create 3D models of vegetation and topography.

Meanwhile, we scurried about on the ground, getting our hands dirty measuring vegetation cover and height, then meticulously harvesting and bagging vegetation.

Our field sites varied from luscious cottongrass … Photo: Katie Orndahl

… to bare rocks and hardy lichen … Photo: Katie Orndahl

… to thick riverside shrubs. Photo: Katie Orndahl

At each site, I thought about caribou.

Eventually, the midnight sun started dipping below the horizon and the arctic summer sputtered out.  As I made the long drive back to Fairbanks, I finally stopped obsessing about finding the caribou. Only then did they appear.

Hundreds of caribou flee pursuing wolves near the Yukon/Northwest Territory border. Photo: Laurence Carter

We crawled out of our tents early one morning to see 100 or so caribou nearby. Steaming coffee in hand, our field team watched as the animals we had talked and dreamed about for months grazed peacefully. A sharp intake of breath broke the silence. My colleague pointed into the distance as two small white dots appeared beside the unsuspecting caribou. Moving slowly at first, the wolves broke into a sprint and chased the caribou across the tundra. Kicking up their long legs, the caribou sped away in unison – up a ridge and through a saddle to the other side of the mountains. Defeated, the wolves slowed to a stop and slumped into the grass. This time, caribou won.

Our summer unfolded like a game of hide-and-seek. We found caribou in intricate tracks woven across the landscape, in bits of hair left behind in birch boughs and in willows stripped bare. We found caribou in satiated grizzly bears that gained strength from the unlucky few washed ashore on the Firth River banks. We found caribou in our data which will help us understand how they interact with the changing arctic environment. And finally, we found caribou in the flesh, outrunning two wolves, where the Yukon and Northwest Territories meet.

Rachel (left) and Kayla Arey (right) soak in our first caribou sighting as summer winds down in the Arctic. Photo: Laurence Carter

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.

Derek Michel lights up a cigarette near his tent on a small island on Christie Bay in the East Arm of Great Slave Lake. “I know every nook and cranny around here,” he says, taking a drag. “You do this as long as I have and the lake becomes your home.”

A fishing guide from the nearby community of Lutsel K’e, Michel is one resident hoping that the proposed Thaidene Nene National Park comes to fruition. It would be the first federally proposed park in the Northwest Territories to be co-managed by Parks Canada and a First Nation.

“To have tourists come here and have local people be the guides and monitors [for the park] only makes sense,” he says. “This is our home, so of course we should be the stewards of it.”

In the last federal budget, $25 million in funding was set aside for the Indigenous Guardians Program. Programs like these help Indigenous communities become stewards of their ancestral lands, as land/water monitors, park rangers and environmental advisors in addition to building capacity for community-led initiatives.

Dehcho First Nations Chief Herb Norwegian refers to these programs as putting “moccasins on the ground,” where community-driven conservation initiatives are built by the communities themselves, using traditional knowledge and science to protect their homelands.

In small, remote Northwest Territories communities like Kakisa, Lutselk’e, Jean Marie River and Fort Good Hope, people are getting back to the land as a way to create jobs, bridge the gap between elders and youth and cope with intergenerational trauma wrought by residential schools and other manifestations of colonialism.

Frank Hope, a Dene counsellor and motivational speaker, says that being on the land is a spiritual experience.

“This is a continual renewal and relearning to be like our ancestors who were resilient in surviving — and thriving — on the land,” he says.

Since the fall of 2015, I’ve been working with various NGOs and First Nations in the Northwest Territories to photograph Indigenous-led conservation programs, elder and youth camps and tourism initiatives in small, remote communities.

Through these images and stories, my hope is to show how people are reconnecting with their ancestral homelands and how crucial it is for the land and water to be protected so those who live here can sustain their culture, food sources and livelihoods.

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.

Residents of the Northwest Territories are demanding environmental reviews be conducted before companies are permitted to ‘frack’ for oil in the NWT. Despite controversy in Canada and other countries around the effects fracking or hydraulic fracturing has on water and climate change, the NWT’s first fracking project was approved last October without an environmental assessment.

“We can’t let another fracking project dodge an environmental assessment,” says Lois Little of the Council of Canadians NWT chapter.

“There is a lot of international concern about the environmental and social impacts of fracking,” says Ben McDonald, spokesperson for Alternatives North, a social justice coalition in NWT. “The moratoriums on fracking in the U.S. and eastern Canada are in place for good reasons.”

The Council of Canadians, Alternatives North along with Ecology North have launched a petition calling on the NWT government to refer fracking projects to environmental assessments that include public hearings from now on. Signatures will be collected until March 7th when the petition will be delivered to the NWT legislative assembly. Two hundred and fifty NWT residents have signed the petition.

“A full, thorough environmental assessment would provide all levels of government with information on the possible impacts of fracking on the NWT and create a venue for all voices to be heard,” says Christine Wenman, a water management campaigner with Ecology North, an environmental organization based in Yellowknife.

NWT Canol shale oil play could rival Bakken shale

The central NWT region called the Sahtu is home to the Canol shale, a shale oil play that could rival the booming Bakken shale oil industry in North Dakota. Shale oil (not to be confused with oil shale) is oil locked in the pores of rock-like shale underground. The Sahtu itself is an area of pristine wilderness accessed by ice roads and many residents live off the land.

The Sahtu Region

The method commonly associated with shale gas development – fracking – is employed by industry to release the oil trapped in the shale. ‘Frack wells’ are drilled vertically between two hundred to two thousands meters to penetrate the shale and then horizontally through the shale up to three kilometers. Pressurized water laced with chemicals is shot down the well to break apart the shale and force the oil to the surface.

Improperly constructed or cracked frack wells have contaminated water tables with methane (natural gas is mainly methane) or fracking chemicals, some of which are toxic.

“No one has done any mapping locating the underground waterways or aquifers of the Sahtu. We are playing in the dark here,” Little told DeSmog Canada.

Many of the proposed fracking operations in the Sahtu would take place along the Mackenzie River, the main artery of the Mackenzie River Water Basin, one of the world’s largest watersheds and Canada's 'Serengeti.'

“An EA (environmental assessment) would be a sober second thought about fracking in NWT before its too late,” NWT MLA Bob Bromley told DeSmog Canada in an interview. Earlier this week Bromley expressed his suspicions that NWT government employees were being discouraged from signing the petition for environmental reviews of fracking projects.

Canadian oil and gas on pace to be No.1 contributor to climate change

“There is a fundamental problem in developing the Canol shale when we know the impact producing more greenhouse gases will have on climate change,” says Bromley.

Methane once unlocked from shale during fracking operations can escape into water tables and the atmosphere. If it makes it above ground, methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.

Over twenty year period methane has eighty-four times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide according the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest findings. This global warming potential is thirty-four times greater than carbon dioxide over one hundred years.

A DeSmog Canada exclusive revealed last year Canada is most likely already under reporting escaped methane emissions or fugitive emissions from the oil and gas sector. Even with these inaccuracies in calculating fugitive emissions Environment Canada projects the oil and gas sector will be Canada’s biggest contributor to global warming by 2030. Canada’s overall greenhouse gas emissions are expected to increase 38% by 2030 as well.

Source: Canada's 6th National Report on Climate Change 2014

“Pursuing fossil fuels projects takes us in the wrong direction. Fossils fuels belong with the dinosaurs,” Bromley told DeSmog.

The Bakken shale oil industry in North Dakota burns off or flares around 30% of the natural gas byproduct that comes with fracking on the Bakken shale. An estimated $1 billion worth of natural gas was flared in 2012 alone. This is equivalent of adding one million more carbon dioxide emitting cars on the road.

Social impacts of fracking already emerging in the Sahtu 

Divisions are already emerging in the five Sahtu communities over developing the Canol shale. Sheila Karkagie of Tulita in the Sahtu received a death threat last January for her strong stance against fracking.

“I was scared and I was hurt,” Sheila Karkagie told CBC in an interview about the threat. “I'm fighting for my dad's land, because this is his land, his trap lines, his everything; our means of living, our backyard, our everything!”

The death threat came via telephone after Karkagie publicly stated past members of the Tulita Land and Financial Board are in conflict of interest for approving ConocoPhillips fracking project – NWT’s first fracking project – and then accepting contracts with oil and gas companies afterwards.

“We are seeing divisiveness in communities where it seldom existed before,” says NWT MLA Bromley.

“The lack of a thorough public process on the issue is causing stress, anxiety and pitting people against each other in the Sahtu communities,” Lois Little of the Council of Canadians told DeSmog. The Council of Canadians, one of the Canada’s foremost water advocacy groups, released a ‘Fractivist Toolkit’ earlier this month to assist Canadians confronting fracking in their communities.

The petition for environmental assessments of fracking projects in NWT can be found on the NWT legislative assembly’s website:

http://epetition.lant.public-i.tv/epetition_core/community/petition/2614

Image Credit: Transnational Institute, Council of Canadians, Environment Canada

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.

With Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project still in the assessment phase and the Keystone XL pipeline proposal awaiting approval from down south, the government of Alberta is considering the possibility of sending its tar sands bitumen north via a pipeline through the Northwest Territories.

With a view to exporting the estimated $30 billion worth of oil left in the ground every year due to the transportation bottleneck, Alberta has hired Calgary consulting firm Canatec Associates International to determine the feasibility of transporting tar sands crude to the Arctic before sending it on tankers to Asian and European markets. The province has already invested $50,000 in the process.

This northern pipeline would move oil through the Mackenzie River Valley to Tuktoyaktuk, a town off the coast of the Northwest Territories.

A pipeline north through the Arctic Sea could prove more dangerous than any of the pipeline projects currently proposed to travel across Canada or down to the American Gulf coast. Shallow waters off the Alaskan coast would pose significant challenges, requiring either dredging of the waters or extending the pipeline offshore so tankers could load up.

With no deepwater port in the Arctic and little in the way of spill response infrastructure, an accident would be even more devastating to the fragile northern ecosystem.

The history of industrial disasters in the region—most infamous among them the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill—paints a clear picture of what’s at stake.

Royal Dutch Shell demonstrated earlier this year the risks associated with drilling in the Arctic when its Kulluk rig, working out in the Beaufort Sea, came loose from its escort tugboat on route to Seattle and ran aground on Sitkalidak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. The company also suffered embarrassment when a routine spill response test failed after an underwater spill containment dome was inexplicably 'crushed like a beer can' during the exercise.  

The US Environmental Protection Agency also deemed that both the Kulluk and a second drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, were in violation of air pollutant permits during the 2012 summer drilling season. Both vessels allowed the release of excess nitrogen oxides into the air.

After conducting an emergency review of Shell’s operations, the US Interior Department demanded the company demonstrate to both government and an independent third party that repairs had been made and adequate safety measures were in place. A spokesperson for Shell indicated the company would work to renegotiate the terms of its permits rather than work to meet the standards the EPA has set for it.

The Interior Department also placed blame on government agencies such as the Coast Guard for failing to anticipate problems, an assessment that has left some to question Canada's preparedness as the Alberta government looks northward.

At the moment, no rigorous spill-response legislation is in place to protect the Arctic waters. However, in February, Greenpeace obtained a leaked copy of the Arctic Council’s long-awaited spill response plan, set to be adopted at the Arctic nations meeting this month.

Ben Ayliffe, head of the Arctic Oil campaign for Greenpeace International, says the document requires so little of the countries who share the Arctic waters—Denmark, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the United States and Canada—as to be all but meaningless in terms of policy.

“No oil company has ever proven it can clean up an oil spill in ice. The agreement offers nothing whatsoever in terms of identifying how a company would stop and clean up a Deepwater Horizon-style disaster,” Ayliffe said in a press release. The document also failed to address how oil companies would be liable for damages should an oil spill occur. According to Ayliffe "serious questions" remain concerning how much input oil companies had in drafting the agreement.

The oil industry, long criticized for its disproportionate contribution to climate change, is now ironically reaping the benefits of new arctic drilling and oil transport opportunities emerging in the wake of unprecedented ice melt. With global temperatures steadily rising, routes in the far north that were once frozen year-round will soon be open during peak season.

A study by climate scientists at UCLA titled “New Trans-Arctic shipping routes navigable by mid-century” suggests rapid sea ice melt is causing major changes to Arctic geography. The two scientists combined multiple climate projection models and climate change scenarios and compared them to shipping routes.

The results predict new routes through the Northwest Passage, the Northern Sea Route and straight across the North Pole will be available between 2040 and 2049.

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.