I’m allergic to sakuras. A quick Google search should yield a plethora of information about how the trees are not, in fact, the source of most allergies but an innocent bystander that takes the blame. But I only get swollen eyes and a stuffy nose when I stand close to them, and only when they are in bloom. I’m pretty certain that they are the source of my mildly allergic plight. You might read the above and assume I have a dislike toward the trees. After all, they make me, if

The year is 1885. After years of scandal, hard labor, and on the brink of fiscal ruin, the Canadian Pacific Railway had finally breached the great rock wall of the continent: the Rocky Mountains. In specifics, the Canadian Rockies — those jagged peaks that rise from the Earth in the manner of a sawblade, frozen in time, slicing across the great plains (The Canadian Encyclopedia, n.d.-b). Ascending up the Bow Valley, railway crews, during breaks from the grueling manual labor

I spend far, far too much time doomscrolling on social media. That cycle of constant novel stimulus that consumes an alarming percentage of my day really gets my dopamine flowing. I also like to think of myself as reasonably politically correct — enough so that my feed reflects my worldviews. I’m especially passionate about environmental issues: climate change, biodiversity preservation, and related topics. And it is right at the intersection of these three things — doomscrol

Andreas Kondos Sheppard As a boy, I used to frequently take road trips across the continental divide – that vast mountain gap marking the division of North America’s Pacific and Atlantic watersheds (1). Not only was this a place of remarkable ecological change, but so too was it of natural beauty. The checker-board clear cuts of my home in the Columbia Valley gave way to protected park land; first in glimpses, then stands, and finally, whole valleys of untouched, un-felled ti

You are a coral, a colourful marine invertebrate that is the backbone of many ocean ecosystems, hosting organisms in coral reefs. You absorb energy from waves, calming the wrath of the ocean before it hits shore. You provide food and medicine for the humans nearby. And now, you may be dying off forever.  Recent analysis from the Global Tipping Points Report indicates that human-caused global warming is pushing coral reefs past their survival limit (also known as their ‘tippin

As December approaches, many of us prepare for the holidays and celebrations such as Christmas, New Year’s and more. These holidays are deeply meaningful to many, and offer a great time for folks to rest, reflect and reconnect with loved ones! For others, December also represents a time filled with get-togethers, gifts, parties and a bit of retail therapy. It’s easy to get swayed into the holiday spirit as one walks along streets decorated by twinkling lights, excited to brin

Andreas Kondos Sheppard Imagine a river mid-flood. Not the catastrophic images of our modern era; just imagine what a natural river honestly looks like mid-flood. The vast, churning water, rich in brown, silty sediment. The embankments as they erode. The sound of the flow and its power, pouring over to the shallow marshes flanking its banks. Trees, knee-deep in water. Temporary ponds forming as water fills depressions in the earth. Somewhere upriver, weeks, months, or even ye

By Sukanya Aggarwal When people think of climate change in South Asia, they think of high temperatures and rising sea levels. But far above the cities and coastlines, another crisis is lingering, affecting over two billion people. The Himalayan region, often called the “Water Towers of Asia”, supplies freshwater to nearly two billion people. Its glaciers feed important rivers like the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong. In recent decades, some glaciers have melted quicker

Opinion Piece by Andreas Kondos Sheppard For how visible clear -cut logging is — the checkerboard scars across hillsides, the bald mountaintops, the flood-prone valleys once shaded by giants — the BC government seems deter- mined to obscure it. And not with cloud cover, fog, or clever strategic logging. No. The BC government obscures the truth — about the scale, the impact, and the contra- diction at the heart of its own forestry policy. In one hand, the province promises to

I haven’t seen a cow in years. You see cows everywhere in the Texas suburbs and plains (where I’m from), and you see a lot of steakhouses and barbecue spots in general, too. But you see just the meat in cities like Vancouver, where the product is more detached from its source, only sometimes labelled “from BC”. Seeing cuts of beef in Save-On without acknowledging the farms, cows, and farmers is like seeing AI without the data centers, pollution, and labor. AI, though it has t

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