Jimmy Thomson

A petite Iranian woman stands before a roomful of hundreds of experts, in an Egyptian auditorium, wearing a flowing purple dress her mother sewed for her. International delegates at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity summit listen…

Ghanimat Azhdari was born into a nomadic tribe in Iran and was a PhD student at Canada’s University of Guelph, where she was working with Indigenous communities in the boreal forest to map cultural sites. This week, she died along with 175 others…

Our nine-passenger Cessna drops 2,000 feet out of the sky as pilot Andy Brock descends into the East Arm of Great Slave Lake. Seen up close, the blurry and distant landscape resolves into full relief. What had been a low, rolling landscape of bogs…

In the North, where food prices are notoriously high, beluga whales are a staple community resource John Noksana, Jr., learned the many skills of harvesting beluga whales in his teens. He’s spent the intervening decades perfecting them. “I can…

“Finding myself in India,” wrote the social media influencer Jack Morris on an Instagram post in March, captioning a photo of himself in a mock meditation posture and topping it off with an ironic laughing-crying emoji. Morris’s account, which is…

In remote areas from the B.C. coast to Nunavut’s far north, Indigenous guardians and coastal watchmen are increasingly relied on to monitor landscapes, conduct search and rescue, gather environmental samples and document the impacts of climate…

The owners of one of the world's northernmost mines is telling investors it has plans to increase shipping capacity 50 per cent higher than what it’s telling the public. That could have major impacts for the narwhals who — until recently — enjoyed…

Canadians are more concerned than ever about the environment — it's emerged as a top issue in the upcoming federal election. So what are the country’s leadership hopefuls promising? Environmental issues are top-of-mind for more Canadians than ever…

MMG Limited, a mining company controlled by the Chinese government, praised the public investment in Arctic infrastructure as biologists sounded the alarm about impacts on a dwindling caribou herd A proposed road connecting Yellowknife to the Arctic…

Jean Polfus had a moment of clarity sitting around a long oval table in Tulít’a, a community on the Mackenzie River in central Northwest Territories. It started with confusion over a pair of Dene words. Goecha gots’anele. The words refer to a process…

As U.S. President Donald Trump slashes science budgets south of the border, a coalition of Canadian organizations is campaigning for Canadians to put science on the agenda of this fall’s federal election Cue the lab coat-clad politicians with their…

Last week, the Alaskan government issued a waste management permit to Constantine North, allowing the company to discharge waste water from an underground tunnel at its Palmer project, upstream of Haines, Alaska, and alongside B.C.’s…

From tracking wildlife populations to reporting industrial pollution, more than 40 Indigenous Guardian programs across Canada are proving their value The federal government has boosted its investment in Indigenous-led conservation projects across the…

An area four times the size of Vancouver Island is home to smoking vents, volcanic islands just under the water and a staggering abundance of life One morning in 1984, a pair of ships bobbed together in the swell 250 kilometres off the coast of…

From grizzly bears in areas undocumented by Western science to a possible new fast-running subtype of caribou, traditional knowledge is enriching scientific information about our natural world Jean Polfus had a moment of clarity sitting around a long…

The embattled oilsands pipeline has become a proxy battle, pitting the urgency of the climate crisis against near-term economic concerns The Trans Mountain pipeline has become an ant under a magnifying glass: the project has so much energy focused on…

Bernice Clarke puts whale oil in her soap to celebrate her Inuit heritage, and it’s helping her reassert her identity and understand the medicines of her ancestors. But is it understood by the wider world? This is part five of Land Crafted: a…

Misty Ireland invented a way to smudge indoors — even in hospitals — but now she has to face another taboo: a tradition that frowns upon selling medicines Smoke swirls up from the abalone shell in Amanda Baton’s hand. It hangs in the sunlit living…

Tania Larsson is a skilled Gwich'in jeweller based in Yellowknife, N.W.T., working to put her culture's adornment in the international spotlight This is part three of Land Crafted: a five-part video series exploring entrepreneurship in northern…