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A new global tinderbox: World’s northern forests
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on October 2nd, 2015
Yale Environment 360: Ted Schuur has spent the better part of his career making the connection between climate change and wildfires that are burning an increasing amount of land in Alaska and in sub-Arctic and Arctic forests around the world. So the Northern Arizona University scientist wasn’t all that surprised this summer to find his field stations in the interior of Alaska Alaska Fire Service Alaska experienced its second-worst fire season in recorded history this summer. surrounded by fires on three sides. At the...
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In Canadian Peaks, Scientists Track Impacts Vanishing Ice
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on August 27th, 2015
Yale Environment 360: In the summer of 1955, a floatplane flew a small group of American climbers to the edge of a massive icefield straddling the Continental Divide along the Yukon/Northwest Territories border in northern Ed Struzik is a fellow at Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies, Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy. Canada. When the group saw the cluster of jagged peaks and sheer rock walls they were searching for, they were stunned: Emerging from the edges of the Brintnell/Bologna icefield...
Canada: The case for a moratorium on tar sands development
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on September 5th, 2014
Yale Environment 360: In a widely publicized commentary in Nature this summer, aquatic ecologist Wendy Palen and seven colleagues were sharply critical of the way that Canada and the United States have gone about developing Alberta’s vast tar sands deposits and the extensive infrastructure of pipelines and rail networks needed to transport those fossil fuels to market. Rather than looking at the cumulative effect of this massive energy Simon Fraser University Wendy Palen development on the climate and the environment,...
Fracking the Arctic
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on August 18th, 2014
Yale Environment 360: Among the dozens of rivers that flow unfettered through the Canadian North, the Natla and the Keele may be the most picturesque and culturally important. They are especially significant to the Dene people of the Sahtu region, which straddles the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories. Both of the rivers flow crystal clear out of the Mackenzie Mountains along the Yukon/Northwest Territories border before coming together in their final course to the Mackenzie River.
For hundreds--if not thousands--of...
Canada’s great inland delta: A precarious future looms
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on November 15th, 2013
Yale Environment 360: Along the banks of the Quatre Fourches River, 125 miles downstream of Alberta’s massive tar sands development, Joe Wandering Spirit once lived in a single-room cabin with a crazy cat and a team of sled dogs that he kept tied up outside year-round.
As Wandering Spirit knows, living in the heart of the Peace-Athabasca Delta -- one of the world’s largest inland freshwater deltas -- has never been secure. In this 2,200-square-mile expanse of waterways and wetlands, seasonally meandering rivers and...
With Tar Sands Development, Growing Concern on Water Use
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on August 5th, 2013
Yale Environment 360: Opposition to the mining of Alberta’s tar sands — and the Keystone and Gateway pipelines that would carry their oil to the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean — has largely been focused on the project’s greenhouse gas emissions and threats to pristine environments along the pipeline rights-of-way. But another serious issue is coming to the fore — the massive amounts of freshwater being used by the industry. In 2011, companies mining the tar sands siphoned approximately 370 million cubic meters of water...
Canada: A Vast Canadian Wilderness Poised for a Uranium Boom
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on January 30th, 2012
Yale Environment 360: Until her semi-nomadic family moved into the tiny Inuit community of Baker Lake in the 1950s, Joan Scottie never knew there was a wider world beyond her own on the tundra of the Nunavut Territory in the Canadian Arctic. She didn’t see the inside of a school until she was a teenager and didn’t venture south until she was an adult.
But that all changed in 1978, when a Soviet satellite carrying 100 pounds of enriched uranium for an onboard nuclear reactor crashed into the middle of the wilderness...
Killing Wolves: A Product of Alberta’s Big Oil and Gas Boom
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Ed Struzik on October 27th, 2011
Yale Environment 360: In the spring of 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured several wolves from west central Alberta and set them loose the next year in Yellowstone National Park, hoping they would fill in the missing link in the park’s complex system of predator-prey relationships.
Wolves hadn’t been seen in Yellowstone in 70 years. Beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, and despite fierce opposition of some local ranchers and hunters, these and other wolves brought in from Alberta and British Columbia...