Jimmy Thomson

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…

Joella Hogan is exploring her entrepreneurial drive in her traditional territory, but a new mine is complicating matters for the small community of Mayo, Yukon. Part two of our series on northern entrepreneurs The signposts on the road to Mayo,…

A five-part video series on the unique challenges facing northern Indigenous entrepreneurs, coming Tuesday Canada’s North can be a difficult place to live, and a much harder place to make a living as a business owner. The odds are stacked against…

Nooks Lindell moved from his home in Arviat, Nunavut, to Ottawa as a child. The subsequent loss of his Inuit identity haunted him into adulthood. Returning to the North, he began rediscovering his culture through art and design — a hobby he parlayed…

It’s an expensive and sad reality that the universal sound of the North isn’t the howling of sled dogs, the mesmerizing joy of throat singing, the squeaking of boots on super-cooled snow. The real sound—the one that’s consistent from Burwash Landing,…

The green ribbon that makes up 75 per cent of Canada’s forests is among the largest intact wildernesses on the planet. Environmentalists call it 'one of the last great conservation opportunities.' What do we need to do to save the boreal? As the…

YELLOWKNIFE — It’s an expensive and sad reality that the universal sound of the North isn’t the howling of sled dogs, the mesmerizing joy of throat singing, the squeaking of boots on supercooled snow. The real sound — the one that’s consistent from…

Plant life in the tundra may be moving slowly, but for some species it’s a race to keep pace with our changing climate The changes in the treeline are so gradual, one could easily mistake them for an optical illusion. Step by step, as I climb out of …

Digging and scraping their way along river beds, a growing gold rush of placer miners is disturbing the territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation — all under the rules of a bygone era that leave both Indigenous and colonial governments out of …

Federal court’s rejection of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion shows a new way of evaluating major industrial projects is not only an essential step toward reconciliation, but necessary for industry Hans Matthews spent much of 2012 criss-crossing …

Far from the giddy days following the Paris Agreement, Canada’s carbon tax has recently run into strong headwinds — despite recent polling that shows a majority of the public is on board. The tax is set to come into effect in January, but Ontario’s …

Unknown in origin, foreign plastic particles are making their way to remote beaches in the Arctic, spurring new collaborative monitoring There isn’t an ocean beach in the world that has been tested and not found to contain tiny plastic fibres, beads …

Cascading down every stream and river, and swirling in every tide, is a wealth of information. Scoop up a handful of that water and it can tell you what fish are spawning upstream; what larvae are digging in amongst the pebbles to moult; perhaps even …

The fish that usually define the West Coast are moving north, raising big questions about how a warming climate is affecting northern ecosystems Salmon used to be infrequent visitors to the Mackenzie River and communities of the Arctic, but more …