Stephen Legault's Blog, page 5

I can see September from here

Today is the last day of the school year.

Tomorrow is the first day of summer. Of real summer. Mind you, we may be waiting a while longer in the Rocky Mountains for weather that resembles the season.

Despite all the warning signs that summer may actually be upon us, I can see September from here.

This morning I walked Rio to school for what may be the last time. Next year he’ll go to Lawrence Grassi Middle School, and though he says he’ll let me, I doubt I’ll be walking him to school very much. It’s too far, and Grade 5 is no place for a dotting father. I know it even if he doesn’t it.

It feels as if it was just a few days ago I walked him to Kindergarten for the first time. He was wearing his prized Scoobie-doo shirt and rode his scooter. I had just moved into my place in Fernwood so I drove up to the old house, parked, and Kat and I walked him there together.

I celebrate every single minute that I get to share with him on this earth. He is a gift. He is my heart’s delight.

Silas will still be at Elizabeth Rummel for three more years, and I bet that he’ll let me hold his hand for at least one or two of those, while he pontificates on the astrological projection of stars and the diet of duck billed platypuses as we toddle down the road. It will be just the two of us in September.

It’s all about letting go. From the very first moment it’s about stepping back, about yielding to time’s swift passage, about allowing them to grow and move on.

A few days ago I was in Burlington, Ontario, where I went to middle and high school. I was there for my father’s retirement party. I was the great surprise; the look on his face as I walked into the party was well worth the cross Canada flight. After 63 years of near daily work, he had sold the business he built with his own bare hands. Being with him at that moment was one of the greatest moments of my life; to give the gift of respect and recognition to this man who had worked so hard that my sister and I could live so well was very important to me.

We celebrated that passage together.

Just as Rio, Silas, Jenn and I will celebrate this passage too.

We let go. We accept change because to struggle against it would be foolish, ineloquent, and all-too-human.

The fact that we cannot see the simple truth that every single moment is ephemeral is part of the root of all suffering. That life is all magic-and-saying-goodbye evades us.

Summer comes, ready or not. The boys will be with us for four weeks of it. A week of that will be spent on the coast, camping with Jenn’s mom and dad, Ann and Paul, at Rathtrevor Provincial Park. Another week will be spent in Salmon Arm for the Legault family reunion. A weekend backpacking, and another just enjoying our home in the mountains.

I’ve made my choices and part of the result is that a summer too short to start with is cut in half.

Labour Day will be upon us, and the new school year – the real measure of any parent’s life – will begin again. I can see if from here. Book bags and lunches once more and walking Silas to school, not because it’s necessary (the kid could find his way back and forth across Canmore with his eyes closed) but because for 15 minutes I get to hold my son’s hand and listen to his stories. Maybe Rio will walk with Silas and me as far the Cougar Creek before he rides his bike into town and the next stage of the adventure. I’ll be glad for those opportunities. And I’ll celebrate every single new day that dawns with my family.

I can see September from here. It’s just far enough away that I can live each moment between now and then fully in the present, in awe of the wonder and the magic; aware that every moment is precious, made more so by the need to say goodbye.

Review: The DROP by Michael Connelly

Let’s get one thing clear right from the start. I’m a big fan of Michael Connelly. I would read just about anything he wrote. Recently, while on one of my regular drives from Alberta into Montana, I listened to Chasing the Dime (2002) and came away believing it was impossible for Connelly to write a bad character. I consider Connolly to be one of the best mystery writers alive today.

All of that said, The Drop (Little, Brown and Co, 2011) disappointed me. Not a lot, but a little, and for a master the caliber of Connelly, that’s enough.

The Drop is the most recent book in the Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch series, one of several protagonists that Connelly deftly weaves murder mysteries around. In this the 18th book in the Bosch series (Connelly has published 31 books as of 2011) Bosch is working the Open-Unsolved desk for the Los Angeles Police Department. He gets a cold hit on a DNA sample that links a long unsolved sexual assault and murder to a man who was only 8 when the crime was committed. Something is askew, but Bosch tracks the man down and learns that he is a serial child rapist out on parole with a deeply troubling past. At the same time, Bosch’s nemesis (who was deputy commissioner on the LAPD for many years, and tried to deep-fry Bosch’s career on more than one occasion) Councillor Irvin Irving’s son is found dead, supposedly the result of the sudden stop after he jumped from the top floor of a ritzy LA hotel. To everyone’s surprise, Bosch is asked by Irving himself to investigate. Did the man fall, or was he dropped?

Both investigations proceed on parallel tracks, and the investigative technique, personal drama and petty politics of the police force are, as usual, superb reading.

Where The Drop disappoints is that the two investigations never converge except in the form of some talk about “high jingo” between the LAPD and Councillor Irving. And while both stories are told masterfully, I was a little disappointed that they never hooked up in the end. It was like watching two friends flirt all night in the bar, and then shake hands and head for separate cabs. I felt as if Connolly had two short novels he wanted to write, or maybe a pair of longish novellas, and someone talked him into writing them together, in the same book.

In the end, everything except for the final few pages was classic Connolly: tight dialog, fantastic character development, perfect pacing and in this case two really well plotted mysteries. I just wished I had skipped the last chapter. Then I wouldn’t have had any lingering disappointment.

Harry Bosch isn’t getting any younger. The double-entendre of the title is that Bosch has just a few years left before he is forced to retire; he’ll get the drop. While Connolly has other terrific characters (I’m partial to Jack McEvoy in The Poet and The Scarecrow) I expect there will be a few more novels featuring Bosch. I hope so. I’m looking forward to watching him solve a few more mysteries, one at a time.

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Put it in the basement

Our basement is packed full of the things that we don’t want to deal with.

There’s a lot of useful stuff there too. Its where most of our outdoor sports gear lives, and our tools, and a pantry full of food; but there’s also a cat-carrier there (we have no cat) and boxes of 35mm slides – not the ones that are half decent enough to show people, but the ones I’ve never shown anybody, but can’t bring myself to throw away, because maybe there is an award winning shot among them. I’ll never know, because there are thousands and thousands of them, and life is too short to rummage through them all.

Jenn and I talk regularly about moving things out of our lives. Cleaning out the basement has become something of a metaphor for cleaning out our minds.

A few nights ago, after a mountain bike ride on the benches above Canmore, we sat in the back-yard and watched the sun dip towards Mount Rundle. It was a beautiful evening. Jenn noted that the bar-b-q cover looked as if it needed replacing: a few long hard winters have taken its toll and it was looking ratty. She said that she had a list of such things that needed replacing and intended to check things off that list and when she was done she wouldn’t have to waste so much mental energy keeping track of things.

I couldn’t agree more, and at the same time, realize the futility of such an endeavour. I too keep a great-long-list of things that must be done both in my head, and on paper. This list, along with the mental inventory of my possessions stacked on shelves and in the crawl space beneath the stairs in the basement takes up a lot of mental space.

The problem is that as I clean out the basement, or systematically work my way down the list of things to do, I never reach the end. So far at least I haven’t ended up with an empty basement, or even one that is perfectly neat and orderly; not so long as I keep carrying things down the stairs and putting them on the work bench to deal with some other time.

I never finish the list of things that need to be done – such as buying a new bar-b-q cover or painting the window sills or repairing the damaged foundation plaster – so long as I keep adding things to the list. And I will always be adding things to the list. There will always be things that I have to tote down to the basement to deal with when there is more time. Sometimes we have to tuck things away and deal with them when we are better able to face them.

I know that I can’t hope to have the blank mental space that I equate with peace until I find a way to stop the wheels from spinning, even if there is a long list or a crowded basement. Peace doesn’t come from checking off everything on that list and then never adding another thing to it; peace is a result of learning to live with the list and not allow it to dominate my thoughts every minute of the day.

Meditation helps with this. When I sit down for my brief mediation sessions, I know there are endless projects waiting for me on the workbench at the bottom of the stairs, and countless emails in my inbox, but the practice is to clear the emotional space around this reality. The kid’s train set needs to be fixed and there is a cat carrier that needs to be donated to the SPCA and I really should find a moment to have a look at my anger issues and to understand why every time the phone rings and it’s my mother I get anxious. I need to write a grant proposal and the last chapter of my next novel needs work. A lot of it. The list is endless. Meditation provides me with a reprieve, while sitting or walking mindfully, and throughout the day.

Peace doesn’t come from having an empty basement and a blank to-do list; it arises from our willingness to accept that that life is full of incomplete undertakings and that is part of the joy of being alive. Once all the lists are complete, when there is nothing left to traipse down to the basement to fix, unpack, repack and haul out the door, the journey will be over. And the journey is all we have.

* * *

Read another similar post here: Lighten Up.

Follow me on Twitter for updates and new posts: @stephenlegault.

First, it gets bigger

Before it can get smaller, it must first get bigger.

That’s got to be one of the laws of editing.

Last week I finished another draft of The Glacier Gallows, the fourth book in the Cole Blackwater series. It tips the scales at 100,479 words. At the end of the first draft it was 91,400 words. Between drafts one and three I found 9,000 words-worth of things I hadn’t said.

I also cut a bunch of pointless shlock out during this draft; I think it’s safe to assume I added at least 11, or 12,000 words during the 2nd and 3rd draft.

I know full well they won’t last. More shlock will need to go. My last two novels have been about 95,000 words each, so I’ll soon be taking the ole’ editorial chain-saw to at least 5, or 6,000 innocent verbs, nouns, pronouns and what-have-you. If I don’t, someone else will.

When I write a first draft, I don’t worry too much about filling in the holes in my plot. If something doesn’t add up, I make a note in the draft and keep going. In many ways it’s like hand building with clay; I don’t worry too much if there is an arm missing in the sculpture as long as the torso of the work holds up. I can come back and ad an appendage later.

This works for me, more or less. I know other writers who couldn’t live this way. I recently did a reading with another TouchWood author, Cathy Ace, where she confessed that her novel The Corpse with the Silver Tongue emerged pretty much fully formed in the first draft. I didn’t let on at the time but I was dumbfounded by this. My novels emerge looking more like something a hobo cobbled together at the city dump and then dragged through the streets for a few weeks during the monsoon season.

First drafts, at least for me, are for getting the idea down. I use them to create a framework that I can build the rest of the story around. It also happens to be where most of the dialog develops. During that first draft flow – where I’m not troubling myself with things like past-progressive tense, which I’ve recently discovered I use all the damn time – I can allow the characters to have their conversations in my head and capture what they are saying without worrying about trifling matters like spelling.

During the second draft of The Glacier Gallows I read through the armless sculpture of a novel and made pages of notes on where the holes in the plot were and where inconsistencies occurred. It probably sounds asinine to most people, but I’ve got to work hard to keep track of my own characters. I mix up names of some secondary characters and find myself reluctantly making a chart about half-way through the second draft to keep everybody organized.

The third draft is where I start working on style. Why, you ask, not do it all at once? Capacity: I lack the mental capacity to work on the content of the novel – the guts of the mystery – and check to see if I’ve used the word “said” too many times, or if I’ve transposed from and form or written “Cole was standing by the table” instead of “Cole stood by the table,” which I am told by my 10-year old is a stronger sentence.

The truth is, I get caught up in the story and forget to read for grammar and style.

I also, almost inevitability, miss holes in the plot, which troubles me more than just about any other matter. The sculpture might have both of its arms now, but it can’t tie its own silly shoe laces for lack of fingers.

With the third draft under my belt I’ll now and start shaving off the unnecessary bits of the story that only get in the way. How many times do I need to explain Cole’s investigative thinking to the reader? I know there is a chapter where he takes a flight from Calgary back to his old stomping grounds of Ottawa and spends the whole time contemplating the mystery. I’m pretty sure there are four pages – about 1,300 words (and a fair amount of beer drinking) – that I can chop there. There’s likely a lot more.

So I build the story up, and then shave it back down. There is likely a much more efficient process for writing, but this is the one I’ve used now for 10 books (5 published, 4 on deck and 1 sad, lonesome book lost and alone, searching for a publisher) and it works for me. Every writer has their own process and mine is to make things bigger before I can make them smaller again.

Looking into Glacier National Park, Montana, from the Bison Lakes, Badger-Two Medicine region of the Lewis and Clark National Forest.

Best Father’s Day ever

Yesterday was the best Father’s Day ever. What made it that way wasn’t anything extraordinary. It was perfectly normal. My children made me really great cards, written in their own hand and using their own words. They collaborated with Jenn to buy a badminton set which we set up in the backyard. I already know that we’ll spend hours playing together there. Both children were beaming while we played. In the afternoon all four of us went for a mountain bike ride. We dubbed it a skills-building ride, and Rio and Silas did amazing.

Rio was brave and calm taking some steep downhill runs. He whooped and hollered as we rode across a narrow single track that swoops through aspens. After he had navigated a stretch of trail that is particularly tricky, with an off balance fall line and a lot of loose rock, he told me that by being calm he was less likely to bail and hurt himself. I’ve been trying to learn that lesson for years.

Silas was his usual hard-charging self, muscling up the hills without complaint and ready to do anything his older brother could.

I must have had an ear-to-ear grin on as we rode the last stretch of our circuit through the aspens because Jenn said, “you’re pretty happy right now.” Of course I was; I was with my family, doing something I love.

We finished the day with one last badminton match; Rio in his PJ’s as the sun dipped toward Mount Rundle. It was a perfect day.

I told the boys as we read a chapter of Watership Down (we have estimated we’ll be reading it for the next year, which is alright with me) in bed: this was the best father’s day ever.

Rio, from the top bunk, called down: you say that every year.

I do. And every year is the best.

Year after year I get everything an adoring dad could want: more love than I know what to do with, the presence of mind to appreciate and be grateful for it, and the good health and emotional maturity to be fully present to its richness.

I suppose there was only one thing that I want for Father’s Day that I can’t have: I want this to last forever.

Gone Dark

Finding Home

Today is the 20th anniversary of my migration west.

The mental and emotional migration west started a few years before when I contemplated running away from home as a teenager. Being a fan of both Led Zeppelin and John Muir, I called Yosemite National Park and requested some pamphlets and maps of the park (going to California with an aching…).

But I didn’t run away. Not for a few more years. And when I did it was only after I’d secured a job, not in Muir’s Sierra Nevada, but at Tom Wilson’s Lake Louise.

When I got the job I didn’t even know where the place was.

It went like this: I was studying Parks Management at Sir Sandford Fleming College and knew that I wanted to work outside, preferably in the wilds, possibly in the mountains. Somewhere. But I was in south-central Ontario, and had never been west of Wawa; what did I know from mountains?

After my first summer at SSFC I got a great job, possibly my best job ever, at a small provincial park called Murphy’s Point. It was on the Frontenac Axis which is an arm of the Canadian Shield that reaches down through the southern lowlands around Kingston, Ontario and connects New York states’ Adirondack Mountains with Algonquin. Murphy’s Point was on this spine of rocky uplands and it was magical. Sometime, when nostalgia strikes again, I’ll write more about it; suffice to say, early mornings in a canoe watching loon chicks hatch and snapping turtles patrol the shore left an indelible impression on my 20-year-old heart and soul. I fancied myself a modern Henry David Thoreau, minus the pencil business and the theodolite.

The following spring I cast my lure wide looking for more permanent employment. I sent out more than eighty applications to provincial and federal parks across Canada. I got two bites: St. Lawrence Islands National Park, just an hour from Murphy’s Point, and Banff. Some considerable distance further away.

My interview went well for the position in Banff. I had studied hard, practically memorizing everything on the Park in my college’s library. This consisted mostly of old Park Management Plans and Parks Canada policy documents. I drew heavily on my experience at Murphy’s Point during the interview and a few weeks later I was offered the most junior position possible in the Park’s interpretive service. I’d be stationed in Banff, and would work at the Parks information centre, pointing tourists to the bathroom. If I did a good job of it I might get to lead a hike or two by the end of the summer.

I was ecstatic. This was my ticket west! I continued to study for the job. My father bought me a copy of Ben Gadd’s Handbook of the Canadian Rockies and it became my bible. Then, three days before I was to fly to Calgary I took a call from someone identifying themselves as Mike Kerr. He said he was my boss. He asked if I would mind working in Lake Louise instead of Banff.  I would lead hikes and do campground talks instead of telling people how to get back on the highway. I said an enthusiastic yes.

The first thing I had to do after hanging up the phone was figure out where the hell Lake Louise was.

I knew it was in Banff, but I had spent all my time studying the Hot Springs and the Cave and Basin and the history of Canada’s first National Park. I found Lake Louise on a large scale map in the Management Plan but failed to note that the TransCanada Highway ran straight to it.

I’m going to be living on a lake again, I thought. I can get up early and canoe with the loons.

How right I was.

My dad drove me to the airport at 4 a.m. on May 4th 1992 and I remember waving goodbye. And then I was gone. Doug Brown, another park interpreter, met me in Calgary. On the way out of city he asked if I wanted to stop and get something to eat. We were going to arrive in Banff just as a meeting of all the Park’s interpreters were being held at a popular picnic site outside of the town of Banff so we stopped at a Subway I bought two foot long sandwiches: I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get groceries in remote Lake Louise.

Then it was on to the mountains. I fell asleep. I recall waking somewhere around the Morley flats and being gob-smacked as the sheer face of Mount Yamnuska pressed into the sky; then I drifted off again. It would be another week before I ventured into Calgary for a training session and got to experience the Eastern Slopes rising up from the foothills in all their magnificence once more.

We arrived at Cascade Ponds and I met my fellow interps (including Joel Hagen and Nadine Fletcher, who I have remained friends with ever since.) For whatever reason I had chosen to dress in my Toronto clothing that morning: black dress shoes, fashionable jeans, a dress shirt and my impracticable oilskin coat. Everybody else sported fleece and hiking shorts. I didn’t wear those clothes until I got on the plane the following September.

I tried to stay awake as Charlie Zinkan told us about the important role we would play in presenting the park to the millions of visitors that came to Banff every year. (So important, in fact, that the following summer half of the interpretive positions in the Park were cut.)

What I was really inspired by was the luminous form of Cascade Mountain rising up behind the Superintendent. I asked my new friends about the mountain names and wondered how I would ever remember them all.

Then, at last, it was onto Lake Louise. That’s when I learned the awful truth about my new home. Two million people would visit Lake Louise that year, and all but one or two who couldn’t find their way out of the shopping mall parking lot would venture to the lake shore. Dreams of another summer in peaceful contemplation of nature were replaced with the reality of motor homes belching diesel fumes. Worst of all: someone had built a seven-story hotel where my log cabin was supposed to be.

Memories of my home on the shore of Loon Lake were dashed when I saw Charleston Residence where I would live for the next three summers; a massive log structure owned by the ski area and used in the winter to house the grunts who operate the ski lifts and work in the concessions. In the summer Parks rented a few dark rooms with ski-wax stained floors for their transient staff. It was year round party central. The upshot: I met lifelong friends Jim, Jack and Josh there.

Despite these annoyances, it was a glorious summer. It was magical. I lead hikes and did campground talks about grizzly bears. I got firsthand experience in that subject matter when I was bluff charged by a notorious female grizzly named Blondie just a few weeks after I arrived. I climbed my first mountains and took up rock climbing to overcome my fear of heights. I logged nearly a thousand kilometres on trail and off in the backcountry and up and down the Plain of Six Glaciers. I fell hopelessly, madly, bottomlessly in love with the mountains.

I struggled to square my love for the backcountry wilderness with my disdain for Lake Louise itself. The scenery was magnificent; it was the scene that drove me bonkers. People bustled for a snap-shot of the lake, or of the penitentiary-like facade of the Chateau Lake Louise, and then blasted off for the next appointed attraction. It was a zoo. It was loony. It soured my disposition and I my outlook on National Parks. From time to time it made me grumpy.

Twenty years later I don’t like it any more than I did in 1992, but age and miles have taught me some patience and compassion, and I no longer grow frustrated when I stroll into that picture-postcard scene. People come to appreciate nature in their own way, in their own time, at their own speed. Who am I to judge?

Before I had left Ontario for Banff and Lake Louise I’d secured a job for the following winter as a “sustainability consultant” at my college. The summer tourist season drew to a close and on September 4th I put on my city clothes, tucking my hiking shorts and fleece deep in my pack, and Jim drove me to the airport. I remember watching the mountains grow distant as we drove over Scott Lake Hill. I thought: I’ll be back. I’ve found home.

And I had.

For the next four summers I was employed by Parks Canada. Just before Christmas in 1996 they grew tired of my grumpiness and my relentless activism on behalf of Banff and Canada’s National Parks and told me that I wouldn’t be offered a job the following summer. I didn’t leave; not for good. I just did what everybody else who had been canned by Parks for being too pro-nature did: moved down valley and got a new job.

I’ve come and gone a great deal over the last twenty years. For more than five years I lived on the west coast. While still the “West” it never felt like Alberta, like the Eastern Slope, like home. During that time I drove back and forth dozens of times, missing the feeling of peace that the mountains provided. Having been back in the Rocks for more than a year now, I know for certain I am home once more.

There will be more coming and going. But for twenty years this place has been my heart’s true home; every day here is a gift. Every sunrise is a delight and every eventide perfect. I wake and am grateful for the blessings in my life; principal among them is the opportunity to call the Rockies home.

Now my children are coming to love the mountains as I do. When I walk with Rio and Silas in the mountains, and they take my hand or run ahead on the trail, skipping, or crouch down on the fragrant earth to admire some wonder I become dizzy with gladness. My love for this landscape is now inter-generational.

Rio, Silas and Jenn at Buller Pass, Kananaskis Country, 2011

I recall during my fourth summer based out of Lake Louise meeting a pair of horse wranglers and guides deep in the backcountry along the Red Deer River. They were towering men, more imposing from the saddle, and as we chatted one of them looked down and asked: “So, just how far east are you from.”

In a rare moment of quick wit I responded, “We can’t all be born in the place we call home.”

You might not come from the place you call home, but you can be born when you find it.

And so, I have.

1st anniversary: Stephen Harper’s war on nature

I was wrong.

One year ago I wrote a blog post in which, among other things, I advocated trying to find a way of using the ancient Chinese philosophy of “capturing whole” to minimize the damage a Stephen Harper majority government might do to the environment.

Here’s what I said:

We’re going to have to, as Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, suggests: “capture our opponent whole.” That means moving carefully to make it so our values, our vision, our passion, slowly becomes their own. We must find what they respond to – be it positive reinforcement or public accolades, as difficult as that may be to stomach – and exploit them as an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.

If we do not, we’ll find ourselves on the outside looking in, and watching all that we cherish about this beautiful nation slipping from our grasp. And we will only have ourselves to blame for its loss. Every moment in life is a choice. This choice is clear: accepting the reality of a polarized politic and gaining what we can, or raging against it, and losing it. It’s that stark a dichotomy.

Reading those words now, today, on the first anniversary of the Conservative’s majority government election victory, makes me feel both naive and foolish.

The first year of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has been the worst 365 days for Canada’s environment in our nation’s history. It’s been that bad. If Stephen Harper and his Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver have their way it’s going to get a lot worse. While I still hold with the philosophy of capture whole – of defeating your opponent without a fight – I must remember one critical disclaimer from the Art of War: avoid a fight if you can. If you can’t, fight hard, and fight to win.

It’s time to fight: to fight smart, to fight clean, to fight fair, but to fight to win. What we’re fighting for is far more than we could have imagined one year ago today. We’re fighting for the soul of Canada: our National Parks, our magnificent wilderness, our wild creatures, our natural heritage: our future. That might sound like hyperbole, and maybe it is. Looking at what we’ve already lost after one year of the most neo-conservative government this country has ever seen, I believe a fair statement. Apparently my friend Tzeporah Berman thinks so as well but then, like me, she’s a radical environmentalist too.

Lets consider for a moment the damage that this government has done in 365 days. As Elizabeth May points out in her widely circulated story “How the conservatives stole the environmental protection in broad daylight,” they have waged an all out war on nature, and on those who protect it. They started by withdrawing from the Kyoto Accord, something that must have burned Prime Minister Harper’s gut during his five years in a minority government. Then they attacked environmental groups, focusing their wrath on those who were opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline, but tarring them all (pun intended) with the same brush: radicals, suckling at the teat of US based lefty-foundations.

Never mind that much of the money used to promote the whole-scale sell off of Canada’s petroleum resources, in the tar sands and everywhere else, comes from the US, Europe, and China. If you take foreign money to continue to narrow Canada’s economic development and destroy the environment, you’re a patriot; if you take money to advocate for the protection of the environment, First Nations cultures while diversifying the economy, you’re a radical, bent on destroying Canada.

Now the Conservatives want to re-write of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, making it easier for industry to win approval of mega-projects like those in the tar sands, and gut the Fisheries Act to remove the scant protections we currently have for nature. Rumour is that the Conservatives have their sights set on the Species at Risk Act, a law that is particularly close to my heart as I dedicated more than five years of my life to its passage.

Budget cuts are a convenient way to disguise the Conservative war on nature. Stephen Harper and his Ministers have cut positions that monitor and clean up oil spills, research the impacts of climate change on the arctic, and most recently, present and safeguard our national parks.

And this is only the first year.

But it’s not. Not really. Stephen Harper is the wiliest and most strategic Prime Minister Canada has seen in a generation. He’s a patient man. He waited. Five years of minority governments and he waited. It must have tried his considerable fortitude not to push ahead with his offensive, but he waited. And when he seized – stole — complete power in May of last year he was able to reshape Canada in the image crafted by the elite, far right wing of Canadian politics who funds his party.

It was almost as if the Prime Minister himself was a student of The Art of War: his war on nature could serve as a text book example of how a superior army confronts an inferior force. His opening attack, delivered by Joe Oliver, and escalated with Senate hearings and the allocation of an additional $8 million to Revenue Canada for “education” and other Orwellian indoctrinations of Canadian environmental charities, is a perfect example of how to use a strategic strike to weaken your opposition in advance of an all out assault.

If I wasn’t so livid I might almost be in awe of the man’s strategic prowess.

What to do? As I said a year ago, and I still believe, there is no time for hand wringing. Capturing whole isn’t going to work either; there is no room to “exploit an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.”

Many are already acting. Dr. David Suzuki left the board of directors of the organization that he founded a quarter century ago so he could speak with impunity. Forest Ethics, one of the most ardent and outspoken organizations in the environmental community has made the calculated move of splitting in two: one organization will continue to undertake charitable work while another will go head-to-head with those who are destroying Canada’s environment. I say power too them.

But there is more work to be done. The Conservative war on nature has just started. And while I no longer believe we can find a way to capture this enemy without a fight, we must be very careful in how we confront them. They hate us and what we stand for, and they will use every resource at their disposal to eliminate us as an opponent so that their greed and nepotism can endure.

If Stephen Harper is a smart strategist, we must be smarter. If it appears as though his Conservative government has torn a page from the Art of War and is using it against Canada’s environment and those millions of Canadians who stand to defend it, we must learn how to beat them at their own game.

Over the coming months I’m going to continue to write on this topic, and I invite you to do the same. Post a comment, write an essay, send a tweet: if we’re smart and if we work together, we can stop this war on nature in its tracks and reclaim the soul of this great country.

The day after Earth Day

This is the day that matters.

Even Joe Oliver, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, Stephen Harper’s puppet in his war on nature, can appear green-tinged on Earth Day. Today is the day where what we do counts.

Really Alberta?

My family and I moved back to Alberta about sixteen months ago. Every morning I wake up and am grateful to be back living in the mountains. Alberta is an extraordinary place, filled with extraordinary people, but I will confess that on the eve of a provincial election, I have no ungodly idea what makes Albertans tick.

According to a poll published in today’s Globe and Mail online edition, the upstart Wildrose Party has a nine point lead over the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. Because Canadian political alliances can be confusing, the Wildrose party is backed by the federal Conservative Party, while the provincial PC party seems to have been cut adrift by the mother-ship.

When I moved back to Alberta, and back into the conservation community, I knew what I was getting into. For nearly twenty years I’ve had to go toe-to-toe with the likes of former Energy Minister Steve West, and former environment Minister Ty Lund when they were in Ralph Klein’s cabinet. Being an environmentalist in Alberta was, as author Sid Marty has written, like being a boy scout in Hell.

Hell is going to look pretty good if Danielle Smith is elected on Monday.

But this is what Alberta does; it lurches from one government to another, about once a generation or so. If as the pollsters predict Alberta changes government on Monday it will only be for the fourth time in our 107-year history that this has happened. The Wildrose will form Alberta’s fifth government, and if they do, Alberta’s willingness to protect land, water, air and its ability to combat climate change will be in considerable doubt.

A part of me thinks: it can’t be any worse than the Progressive Conservatives. Premier Alison Redford has been a tremendous disappointment in this regard. While she has talked tough on education and health care, she has been a dismal failure when it comes to protecting the underpinning of our physical health and our economic system: our ecosystems. She’s cow-towed to the oil and gas sector on the tar sands and despite overwhelming opposition to logging in the Castle Wildland in south western Alberta, bowed to pressure from the local MLA Evan Berger, going so far as to put him in Cabinet to satiate the party’s good-old-boy right wing.

I know it could be much worse. Alberta’s protected area’s network is held together with spit and bailing wire. We have scant protection for our parks from industrial tourism, OHV use, logging and oil and gas development; the land base outside of our parks is fair game to just about anybody with a big idea and a few bucks in their pocket. As the party of extra free enterprise and with a Libertarian leaning, Wildrose cannot be counted on to protect these assets that are the cornerstone of our Province’s natural beauty, ecological health, and economic future.

Add to this Danielle Smith’s defence of candidates who are homophobic, xenophobic and want to take our province back decades in its relationship with the rest of Canada and the world, and it would appear as if politics in Alberta are about to go from bad to catastrophic.

When the federal Conservatives won their much sought after majority, I quickly posted a blog entry suggesting that things weren’t so bad, and that all we needed to do as environmentalists was to burrow into the belly of the beast and work from within to convince Stephen Harper’s government to protect Canada’s environment.

I was wrong. Sometimes this tactic espoused in The Art of War and other Taoist manuals works, but sometimes all that happens is you find yourself surrounded by a rotting pile of entrails while the beast is off devouring what is precious to you.

If Danielle Smith wins election on Monday, I won’t be making any entreaties for Alberta’s environmental community to try and “capture the enemy whole” (as Sun Tzu might advise). On the contrary: my advice will be to use whatever advantage we have to safeguard what we hold dear. Capturing whole only works if both opponents are on roughly equal footing and if both are honourable in their undertakings. As Stephen Harper has demonstrated over the last year, this is far from the case. And what is Danielle Smith’s Wildrose but another guise for a political movement bent on eviscerating Canada and Alberta’s environmental laws, protections and safeguards in the name of smaller government and more free enterprise?

Really, Alberta: just as I was starting to think I understood you. In addition to having good common sense fiscal prudence, I thought that maybe we were on the cusp of having a government that reflected the majesty and beauty of this province. But it looks like I was wrong.