The New York Times
William Romaniuk stopped his tractor at the edge of his field and sniffed. A breeze came off the North Saskatchewan River, rippling across rows of ripe wheat, but a caustic scent flooded his nose. An oil well between his crops and the river was leaking, and enough gas was flowing out of a pipe below the rusty pump jack that the farmer could smell gas and see it swirling in the air.
The site had been drilled in 1950 but hadn’t run since 2015. It was now spewing a blend of toxic, egg-smelling hydrogen sulfide and, quite likely, a much larger dose of odorless, flammable methane.
“They said, ‘don’t get too close to it,’” Mr. Romaniuk said, referring to the owners of the well. He put the tractor in gear and skirted the edge of the site, hoping he wouldn’t spark an explosion as he hurried to harvest.
Canada has committed to reducing its planet-warming carbon emissions and has singled out the oil and gas industry as the source of almost half of the country’s annual emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that can have 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide over 20 years. Alberta, the heart of Canadian hydrocarbon extraction, has set a goal of a 45 percent drop in the industry’s methane footprint from active infrastructure by 2025. But the inactive wells — the ones no longer producing oil or natural gas but many still lingering in suspension like zombies — may be as big a threat to the planet.
After decades of booms and busts, an enormous backlog of these inactive wells has built up, and it grows about 6 percent each year. There are now 97,920 wells, like the one on Mr. Romaniuk’s land, that are licensed as temporarily suspended, compared to the province’s 160,000 active wells. The inactive wells are unlikely to be switched on ever again but have not yet been decommissioned. No one knows how many are leaking methane and other pollutants.
Read the rest in The New York Times.
National Geographic
Within hours of his inauguration on January 20, President Joe Biden walked into the Oval Office, pulled his chair up to the Resolute Desk, and signed a broad executive order to tackle the climate crisis, including a clause that revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction in the United States.
On paper, at least, the controversial project was dead. TC Energy, the pipeline’s owner, suspended operations on Keystone that day; opponents made celebratory announcements.
The Keystone XL, which is designed to deliver 830,000 barrels a day of crude oil from the Alberta oil sands to refineries in the U.S., has been declared dead before. In 2015 President Barack Obama rejected the initial permit application—but President Donald Trump reversed that decision. Along the way the pipeline has been repeatedly stalled by legal challenges.
In the face of Biden’s order, TC Energy has not yet announced whether it plans to concede and scrap the project, though it does seem likely. Conceivably it could decide to wait for more favorable political conditions that would allow it to resume construction. Its best option might be to seek compensation for its losses from the U.S. government. (The company did not respond to requests to comment on this story.)
If the pipeline were ever completed, its impact would resonate for generations, environmentalists have long argued, in the form of added carbon emissions from all the oil it would carry to market. But even if, as now seems more likely, the Keystone XL never carries any oil, its impact will still linger—in the form of assets stranded along its 1,200-mile path.
The result of a decade of stop-and-go progress is a patchwork of infrastructure strung over almost that entire route, from the starting point in Hardisty, Alberta, where a pumping station was completed in December, to the junction in Steele City, Nebraska, where the XL is supposed to join the existing Keystone pipeline that already runs to Texas. There are now more than 90 miles of Keystone XL pipe in the ground, a string of temporary work camps under construction, and roughly 48,000 tons of pipe sitting in yards all along the route. There is also a less material but still valuable asset: a chain of perpetual land easements, laboriously assembled by TC Energy lawyers, stretching nearly the entire length of the route.
After Biden’s order, all of that effort is in a state of suspension. What will become of it?
Read the rest in National Geographic.
The New York Times
As my altimeter clicked past 27,000 feet for the day — into the range of the low oxygen “death zone” on Mount Everest — and my eyes blurred with sweat and sunscreen, a white Ferrari accelerated past me into a curve.
I was drunk with fatigue, but the car was real, as I slowly cycled up the road to Mount Seymour Resort, below Dinkey Peak, in North Vancouver, British Columbia. I was far from the world’s tallest mountain, but straining to finish what is known as the Everesting Challenge.
“Everesting” is straightforward: Pick a hill, any hill, and go up and down it until you attain 29,029 feet of climbing. Friends can support you, but you must do it under your own power and in a single effort — no sleeping.
The result is more than double the climbing of the hardest stages of the Tour de France. With most cycling events disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, Everesting has become a hot activity for the ultra-endurance set.
When I explained the plan to my brother, Chandler, he asked: “You’re going to ride your bike up a mountain on a road for 12 hours wearing Lycra? Why not just ride into the ocean and drown yourself?”
A fair question, I thought.
The feat is a contrived festival of suffering that plays out on a climb of no real significance and often little beauty. There is no starting gun or adoring crowds, though, if you’re as lucky as I was, your girlfriend will feed you handfuls of M&M’s as you limp through the final miles.
Which is precisely what Andy van Bergen hoped for when he created the challenge in 2014.
Read the rest in The New York Times.
The Globe and Mail
The walls of Leis de Buds flower shop were decked with fir boughs and potted poinsettias as masked holiday shoppers in Vancouver drifted through, carefully edging around each other in early December. Coronavirus cases had reached a record high in British Columbia and stricter public-health guidelines loomed on the horizon, making it hard to imagine what the world might look like in a week, much less by Christmas.
But Alyssa Sager was ready to forecast her business well into 2021. “When should we talk about Valentine’s Day?” she said into the phone, placing flower orders with a farmer. In order for April showers to bring May flowers, someone has to plant them in the fall, so the floral industry is always a few steps ahead of the season. As Ms. Sager’s store was selling wreath-making kits, she was angling for her share of spring blooms.
While many retail businesses are wondering if they’ll survive the year when COVID-19 has dampened the holiday shopping season, the floral industry has a relatively rosy outlook at the end of a chaotic 2020.
This past April, the picture was bleak. Half of all flowers are sold between Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day every year, but, as the world locked down in March, flower sales wilted, leaving mountains of carefully planned and tended blooms behind to mould. Canadian flower farmers lost an estimated $30-million to $37-million in the first month of the lockdown and may be down as much as $100-million for the year, according to Flowers Canada Growers, an organization that represents floriculture greenhouse growers.
Read the rest in The Globe and Mail.
The Globe and Mail
Marvin Delorme is holding a death certificate for a child named Marvin Delorme, issued on May 11, 1963 – less than two months after this Marvin Delorme was born.
“I just found this last night,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s heavy, heavy stuff.” Mr. Delorme’s parents had always told him he’d had a twin – but as the death certificate proves, it wasn’t a twin at all. His older brother had died, and Marvin had inherited his name.
Mr. Delorme was born in Muskeg River, Alta., to a band of Métis with Cree roots. Around 1968, his family was forced to settle in Grand Cache and, like so many Indigenous people of his generation, he was taken away to a residential school. So for much of his life, he knew almost nothing about his family. But a program at the Vancouver Public Library’s Britannia branch – located in the heart of the city’s most concentrated Indigenous population – is helping people like Mr. Delorme reconnect with their heritage.
The Connections to Kith and Kin program pairs skilled archivists with community members to help comb the often-overlooked mountain of Indigenous records maintained by Library and Archives Canada. These records are often more extensive and invasive than those kept on non-Indigenous Canadians, but the documents offer Mr. Delorme and others an opportunity to collect the broken links of their lineage and piece them back together.
Read the rest in The Globe and Mail.
National Geographic
On the edge of town, Ssebulime Kisakye is building a church. Behind the closed fish-processing factory, on a quiet beach covered in scraggly grass, he has erected a frame of raw timbers and a rough-hewn pulpit.
“It is important for my church to be here so that the lake can cleanse sinners,” he says, wearing a clerical collar and looking through the outline of walls at Lake Victoria. “These are people who have done bad things.”
But along the shores of this 26,600-square-mile lake, the second largest freshwater body in the world, separating the good from the bad and the saints from the sinners is a complicated task.
The sinners Kisakye has in mind are the fishermen who, enabled by corrupt officials, caught so many fish, mostly Nile perch and Nile tilapia, that the fish plant here had to close in 2014. Some of those fishermen were refugees just trying to scrape out a living.
Ecologists, meanwhile, might blame other sinners for the current state of Lake Victoria: the British colonial authorities who, in the 1950s and 1960s, first stocked the lake with invasive perch and tilapia. They succeeded in creating a valuable commercial fishery—fish are Uganda’s second largest export, after coffee—but also a spectacular decline of native fish, one that has become a textbook example of human-caused extinction.
And finally, there are the latest characters in Lake Victoria’s drama: the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), dispatched in 2017 by President Yoweri Museveni to eradicate illegal fishing. Fish stocks do seem to be increasing again—but some poor fishermen have lost their livelihoods, and it’s alleged that some even lost their lives or their homes to violence perpetrated by the soldiers.
Nevertheless, in Kasensero, the mood is hopeful now. Fishermen who had predicted the end of their business when I first visited in 2015 are hailing a new beginning.
Read the rest in National Geographic.
The Tyee
“There are 8,000 people here,” said Jacob Callender-Prasad, smiling as he surveyed the crowd he’d helped gather around the Olympic Cauldron in Vancouver’s Jack Poole Plaza to protest racism. Chants of “Black lives matter” echoed off the downtown buildings.
Callender-Prasad watched the energy levels swell and then continued on a walk around the perimeter with a team of volunteers, working to keep protesters off a patch of decorative grass on the roof of a Cactus Club restaurant.
The protest began at 4 p.m. with a moment of silence for victims of racial violence, including George Floyd, a Black American who was killed by a white police officer on May 25. Passions ran high through the afternoon, but organizers called for peace and the demonstration remained calm as speakers shared their own experiences with racism in Canada.
Read more in The Tyee.
The Globe and Mail
From the edge of the highway south of Juarez, the Sonoran Desert runs all the way to the horizon, impeded only by a few scraggly scrub bushes. Just to the north in Texas is the big sky country of cowboy poetry. But here in Mexico, with an SUV bearing down in my rear-view mirror, the open country suddenly felt like the kind of place that travel advisories are imagining when they talk about non-essential trips – especially ones done in a Subaru with American plates. I locked eyes with my dog, Tempo, in the passenger seat as the SUV flew past. Then a pickup blew by and another SUV barrelled around us and I realized that the only dubious thing on the road were the speed limit signs, which were clearly not meant to be respected. I turned up the AC and accelerated into the desert sun. I had a lot to learn about Mexico.
It would be generous to call my plan to drive south “half-baked.” I was living in Colorado and suffering from the kind of heartbroken angst that makes you think that a long time on the open road will help clear your head. When my friend Diego’s dog had puppies in the spring, he gave me one and then moved home to Mexico City. I figured that Tempo would want to see her parents, so I put on my cowboy boots, tossed a couple cameras in the car and we started driving. Fortunately, Mexico met me with her arms wide open.
Read the rest in The Globe and Mail.
National Geographic Traveler Magazine
In the northeast corner of Cusco Cathedral, tucked behind the altar, past gilded alcoves and towering columns, Jesus and his disciples feast on guinea pig.
Marcos Zapata, a Cusco native, painted the scene in 1753. The Spanish had conquered his people and razed the Inca palace of Kiswarkancha, building the cathedral on the ancient foundation. But, with a massive oil painting, Zapata brought the heritage of his people back to the table.
Walking out of the cathedral into the historic heart of Cusco, I brie y felt the pull of the past. The Inca name for the city trans- lates as “navel” or “center.” Their 11,150-foot-high capital, ringed by the tall peaks of the Andes, has been continuously inhabited for some 3,000 years. But the past faded as a set of signs around the edge of the colonial Plaza de Armas—KFC, McDonald’s, Starbucks—brought me jarringly back to the present.
Generations of travelers have come to Peru’s Sacred Valley, which stretches from Cusco northwest to Machu Picchu, to see the intricate stonework the Inca left behind. In their wake fast-food joints and restaurants catering to a Western palate have sprung up. Peruvian farmers have taken to planting white spuds instead of the heirloom potatoes in a rainbow of colors that their ancestors cultivated.
Fried chicken and fries may be delicious but so is guinea pig. This was one of the main things I learned from my first trip to Peru in 2018 when I’d stayed in a Quechua village a few hours’ drive and a short hike from Cusco, working on a National Geographic Society–sponsored project to study shifting trends in indigenous Andean food with National Geographic Explorer Rebecca Wolff. Everything I ate in each dirt-floored Quechua kitchen was memorable, from fire-seared duck to heirloom potatoes roasted in a sod huatia oven to simple barley soups spiced with ají chiles. Now I was back in the Sacred Valley to get a fuller taste of the Inca’s living culinary heritage—which Zapata knew could not be vanquished.
Read the rest in National Geographic Traveler.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
“Get yerself a wee cheeky snifter,” said Robert Mitchel, the Easter Elchies Estate ghillie, dressed in his tweed and accompanied by his dogs by the banks of the Spey.
The dram, the Macallan Amber, had the classically sweet and unpeated notes of Speyside mixed with the dried fruit and old leather that come from years spent aging in sherry barrels. “The style of Macallan has always been rich, dark, spicy notes from European oak,” Stuart McPherson, the Macallan’s master of wood, told me, which makes for an excellent spirit to lift the chill while you fish for salmon from the Spey’s swift current. But I had to pause and wonder how the flavor of Spanish fortified wine ended up in my drink in the heart of the Scottish Highlands.
It turns out that flavor profile is essentially an accident of history.
Read the rest in Parts Unknown.
Roads and Kingdoms
“They say that people in America like mezcal a lot,” says Fortunato Angeles, leaning on a wooden tank of fermenting agave. “I like the work because it puts food on the table.”
Four generations of his ancestors have distilled the smoky spirit from ripe maguey, or agave, toiling under the Oaxacan sun in southern Mexico to provide the fuel for festivals and family celebrations in the village of San Juan del Rio.
Angeles rubs a drop of his juice on his palms, cupping them around his nose to check the quality of his product. The first whiff of the potent spirit is pure alcohol, but then richer, caramel and fruit flavors bloom.
“It’s the work I learned when I was a little boy,” says Angeles, looking out from the palenque, or mezcal distillery, where he roasts, crush, ferments, and distills alongside his uncle, Arnulfo, and two other maestro mezcaleros.
Mountains stretch out to the horizon, steep slopes breaking in every direction around Angeles’ hometown, which is nestled in a deep valley. All of the land is communally owned, divvied up by a town council into small plots where residents practice traditional milpa subsistence agriculture rotating maize, beans, chilis, squash, and agave.
Read the rest in Roads and Kingdoms.
Punch
What does a place taste like? If you were to choose an alcoholic beverage to help answer this question, wine would be the logical choice; it’s a query, after all, that’s central to its culture. But in the stretch of the Italian Alps, from Piemonte to Trentino-South Tyrol, you might consider amaro.
“The beauty of the alpine amari is the uniqueness of the herbs that grow there,” says Jeff Porter, beverage director for the B&B Hospitality Group, which includes the iconic New York Italian restaurants, Babboand Del Posto.
Taken as a group, the bitter liqueurs that come from northern Italy tend to be lighter and more intensely herbal than the richer, sweeter and citrus-forward amari that come from the country’s south. Transportive, with levity to their flavors, these liqueurs are unique expressions of their place.
Read the rest in Punch.
Roads and Kingdoms
am lost in Juan Aldama, a small town where fine dust blows through sun-scorched streets in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua. Fortunately, an old woman eventually takes pity on me as I walk in circles. When I ask for the maestro sotolero, she leads me around the corner to Gerardo Ruelas’ house.
We walk through an unmarked door, past a bar with a tiny deer head on the wall, and into the kitchen. There I find Ruelas, who pours me a cup of Nescafé and begins describing sotol, the liquor that has brought me to his door. But as I struggle to understand his rapid-fire mumble of Spanish, he decides that coffee is not up to the task of easing our conversation, and pours me some of the spirit itself, a blend Ruelas has named “Elixir.”
The drink is dank on the nose and definitely herbal, but it goes down gently, a little sweet, friendlier than most aperitifs but somehow with more of an alcoholic punch. The most prominent flavor additives: marijuana and peyote.
How can that possibly be legal, I ask Ruelas. He shrugs, saying it is tradition. I silently hope that neither of those ingredients share more than their flavor with the drink.
Read the rest in Roads and Kingdoms.
Roads and Kingdoms
As a cool evening fell over Tequila’s central square, kids kicked soccer balls, old couples chatted on benches and I sipped a horchata in the corner, considering the limited options left to me following an afternoon of failure.
I was working on a story about the agave market and had spent weeks talking with industry experts and analyzing historic trends, but I wanted to put agave farmers at the center of the conversation and so I had given myself a day and a half in Tequila to interview and photograph a few of them. I had a list of contacts going in and a few strategies to round up more. I had imagined dropping my bags and running off into vast fields of agave tequilanato take photos in the golden evening light, but instead I was spinning my wheels.
I had been having good conversations and had learned interesting things, but I wasn’t shooting good pictures and I hadn’t found the characters to put at the center of my narrative. I needed agave farmers.
Read the rest in Roads and Kingdoms.
American Way - 2020 Tourism Industry Association of Ontario Travel Media Story Award
Nearly 500 years ago, Explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up theSt. Lawrence River to what is now Quebec City and put the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) word for village, kanata, on a map to claim the area for France. At that time, 500 miles southwest, the site of Toronto was already a lively center of Indigenous trade, the home, over the centuries, to various Indigenous tribes, including the Chippewa, the Wendat and the Missassaugas of the Credit.
Today, when you walk into Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, you are confronted with Indigenous artist Kent Moneyman’s vivid yet haunting painting, The Academy, which depicts native and colonial artists sitting in a wigwam studying and painting idealized Grecian figures entwined with large serpents. The contemporary piece is emblematic of Moneyman’s provocative work and hints at the long, complex and often tragic history of European influence own his Cree ancestors.
Monkman is already one of Canada’s most well-known artists - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently commissioned one of his works to hanging in the foyer. But there is now a growing cadre of native artists producing striking piece and making Toronto the gravitational center of the contemporary Indigenous art world.
All this comes at a time when western culture is reexamining its histories - Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recently committed to reconciliation between the Canadian government and First Nationas, and similar topics have become a focus of international dialogue.
Here, we meet some of Toronto’s indigenous creators brining their point of view to a global stage.
Read the rest in American Way.
National Geographic
The windshield of Augustin Güendulain’s truck is cracked in the shape of an agave. The pickup is bent and battered bow to stern from years of abuse on Oaxacan backroads in the service of making mezcal, and, when I met him at a gas station in Miahuatlan a couple hours south of Oaxaca City, Güendulain had to fill a visibly low tire before I climbed into the bench seat.
There was a shot glass rolling around in the hole where the radio had once been. The crack is from a friend’s head: too much drinking and the truck had slipped off the road. Everyone survived and the truck still runs though. Güendulain laughed quietly as we rolled into the hills.
Many Americans have their own skull-jarring memories of drinking the worm at the bottom of a liter of firewater, but artisanal versions of mezcal have started to populate premium spirits menus around the world: no worms, smokey tasting notes, boutique pricing. If you’ve recently been to a bar where mustaches and unique cocktails predominate, you’ve probably seen a margarita with tequila replaced by it’s authentic, smokier brother mezcal.
It’s traditionally a farmers’ drink, made in small batches to be sipped out of votive candle holders at festivals. Güendulain’s family has been making it for five generations. They’ve always sold to neighbors, often in recycled bottles, but the boom in international sales of mezcal has encouraged the family to think about new markets. Güendulain has joined a collective of 35 maestros mezcaleros who share the costs of maintaining a label. He’s also carefully watching after his family’s agave.
Mezcal production has roughly doubled since 2011, adding pressure in many new ways to what has long been an informal, almost moonshine, business. Though the shift has opened financial opportunities for some of Mexico’s poorest regions, the legacy of informality has left certain elements exposed, most vitally the future of agave.
Read the rest in National Geographic.
National Geographic
As soon as a boat lands on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kasensero, Uganda, the town’s fishmongers are leaping over the gunwales with fists full of cash. They grab the meatiest catches first and slap the smaller ones on a 20-inch long wooden block, their tails carefully smoothed to stretch out their length. If the smaller fish make the cut, they are auctioned immediately. If not, the fishermen call Paluku Thophile and his wife, Katungu Mwasimuke.
The processing factories that send fillets and cans abroad won’t accept small fish—they’re illegally immature and have little meat between their bones anyways—but Paluku and Katungu have a connection to other buyers who are less particular.
Seven years ago, the family was forced to flee from the seemingly endless stream of conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, hopping the border from their home near Virunga National Park into eastern Uganda. At first, they struggled to settle in Kampala, the chaotic capital, and then on the Ssesse Islands in the middle of Lake Victoria, but they could not build roots as outsiders. Finally, they found Kasensero, a rough and tumble trading town that has welcomed the gregarious couple along with anyone else who shares the dream of getting rich.
Read the rest in National Geographic.
Punch
Last year, while drinkers in cocktail bars, clubs and frat house basements mixed, shot and sipped more than 273 million liters of tequila, the price of agave quietly quadrupled.
But this is nothing new. In the modern agave market, price swings are endemic. In the 1980s, as premium tequila entered the global market and distillers scrambled to grow their share of the success, prices shot up; in 1999, they spiked again due to an unexpected frost during another boom in consumption; and last year, the exponential growth of the premium tequila market overlapped with the explosion of the agave syrup sector.
In general, peak prices draw a flood of new farmers into the field like prospectors for green gold. But the market always adjusts; six to seven years later, when that glut of new agave comes to maturity, prices on the open market plummet again, cutting margins for agave farmers dangerously low, and driving many out of business.
Read the rest in Punch.
National Geographic
After I madethe groundbreaking discovery that I could work from anywhere in the world that had coffee and Wi-Fi, I packed my bags for Telluride.
Deep in the southwest corner of Colorado, this quintessential destination packs all the perks of ordinary mountain towns—ski slopes, scalable peaks, serene corners of urban escape, and historic neighborhoods—into an intimate locale. Visitors can experience all the highlights without driving anywhere.
Tucked up a San Juan Mountain box canyon, Telluride features a ski lift that drops into town and a spiraling network of single-track and old mining roads in all directions. Such mobility allows me to pack in a full day’s work and, as soon as I’m done, to hit the trail running, biking, skiing, or backpacking with almost no transition time. Not to mention, with proximity to desert oases like Moab, Indian Creek, and Canyons of the Ancients, I can easily change scenery entirely with just a short drive.
Read the rest in National Geographic.
Punch
Ofter decades of decline, vermouth seemed stuck with a reputation as a drink for grandparents, or as a component in cocktails like the Manhattanor the Martini. Then, starting right around the turn of the millennium, old companies began reviving ancient recipes and pioneering brands sprung up around the world, causing a swell of new options to arrive on the market.
Over the last few years, countless journalists, bartenders and industry insiders have declared a new golden age of vermouth. I recently hopped between three historic vermouth cities—Turin, Italy; Chambéry, France; and Reus, Spain—to talk with the producers of three leading brands about how they’re handling the market surge.
Read the rest in Punch.
Saveur
The roads through Valtellina switchback just as aggressively as others elsewhere in Italy, though the jagged Alps on all sides let you know that you're not winding through another Tuscan hill town. Bormio, at the head of the valley, is the site of a World Cup ski race and a luxury destination near Lake Como, but the Alpine region has historically stayed isolated from its southern neighbors and their flavors. While other Italian dishes spread far and wide along rich trade routes, you have to swerve past tractors to find a local Valtellinian specialty that has remained hidden in the mountains: pizzoccheri.
Read the rest in Saveur.