Mark Mann

A new era of human fungi relations is dawning. Peter McCoy wants you to join the revolution.

Growing up in Tobago, Terry Dennis spent all his time outdoors. But after emigrating to Québec, he lost his close connection with nature, until a mentor helped him revive his spirit of exploration

Beau Miles sings the body exhausted. Aching, chafing, stinking, swelling, limping, bruising — these are the reliable landmarks of an adventure-filled life, and the popular Australian YouTuber knows them all intimately. At 41, he’s spent the better…

Ultra running changed Jeffrey Binney’s life. Now the plus-sized running influencer is helping others feel more confident, both on and off the trail. From BESIDE Issue 13 Jeffrey Binney’s first stage was a big metal livestock fence. He would straddle…

Looking at satellite images of the earth, you’d be forgiven for concluding that there’s nothing much left to explore out there. The world’s land masses have all been pretty well mapped, measured, and photographed, zoomable to the last pixel. So where…

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Jennifer Osborne sometimes thinks about this line from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest when she reflects on taking photos in fire zones. “You’re like, ‘This is the most terrifying thing I can imagine,’”…

Trace them back far enough, and you’ll find that many farm stories start in the city. After all, that’s where most of us are, and so that’s where we have our wild ideas. This one begins in Toronto in the summer of 1983, when a 32-year-old artist…

A strange sort of ambiguity reigns over the photographs of Ben Zank. Each one is a meticulously crafted visual joke, and yet despite the careful staging, they have a spur-of-the-moment quality. This aspect of cultivated spontaneity drew us to his…

This is part of the Dossier Black Lives, Green Spaces. Intersectional environmentalism is an idea whose time has finally come, and few people are doing more to popularize and advance the concept than Leah Thomas. “Social justice… is not an optional…

Following her mother’s murder, Amber Tamm Canty found healing and purpose through farming. Now, with thousands flocking to her cause, she’s aiming to change the landscape of food security in New York, starting with Central Park. The harvest that…

Floral designer Sophia Moreno-Bunge’s wild-foraged arrangements celebrate the magnificent strangeness of plants. We tend to forget how weird plants are. Call it plant-blindness: all those sinewy sculptures, all that colour, but we hardly remember to…

If the weeds and invasives of Montréal had a god, it would be the Falaise Saint-Jacques. Nine storeys tall and three kilometres long, the narrow forested escarpment hunches over Highway 20 at the entrance to the city, absorbing the dust and roar of…

Every five or six years, the painter Margaux Williamson quits painting. In these moments, she thinks she might not go back. But something always comes shuddering darkly up – an instinct, a distant possibility – and she’s compelled to dive back in…

When we meet on St. Catherine Street in Montreal on a chilly Thursday afternoon in October, Bridget Moser tells me she has recently been crying in her hotel room. A parrot on a TV show had died. “It was really sad,” she explains, laughing, but also…

Brett Ryan was weeks away from marrying the woman of his dreams. He had a waterfront condo, a good job and a bright future. Or so everyone thought. When his mother threatened to expose his lies, he decided she had to die In 2007, when Brett Ryan was…

Rob Buren was living his dream life, until the Sunday morning when his spine snapped. The Microsoft marketing manager; his wife, Sabrina; and their two sweet daughters: Zara and Chloe lived in a two-storey house on the west side of Oakville, Ont.…

Jim Estill put up $1.5 million to bring 58 families to Canada. He found them homes, gave them jobs and even bought one man a dollar store. How the mild-mannered CEO of an appliance company became the Oskar Schindler of Guelph Jim Estill put up $1.5…

When Guillermo del Toro was a child in Mexico, he made a pact with the monsters that crowded into his room at night: If they let him go to the washroom, he'd be their friend for life. The deal worked. The monsters disappeared, and the now-acclaimed…