Landscapes & Letters
Paul McCarney
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Hunting is wonderfully complex. It is a social activity that brings us together with friends and family. Hunting is also deeply embedded in conservation politics. Regulated hunting is an important tool of wildlife managers and hunting organizations play an important role in lobbying for conservation outcomes. Therefore, hunting is also a social-political act. When we hunt, we are an embodied expression of that social-political act. What political statements do we make through… Read More
The environmental author Edward Abbey once said, “Hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about. Such a storm of conflicting emotions!” As we move our way through the hunting season, we will be acquiring new stories to tell about this year’s successes and adventures. We will take and post photos on social media as a way to tell those stories. Many of us will grapple with the images and… Read More
Canada has less than two years to meet its target to protect 17% of terrestrial and inland waters and 10% of ocean areas by 2020, commitments made under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Icons of the conservation movement, such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, are widely credited for convincing the public to care about protecting natural spaces in the late 1800s. Today, 47 National Parks protect 328 198… Read More
There is no question that two centuries of rapid expansion of human settlement and industrial development on this continent have been tough on grizzly bears. They continue to face declining habitat and the impacts of policy decisions that are polluted by human interest and partisan priorities. The British Columbia government made two announcements in 2017 concerning grizzly bear management in the province. In August 2017, the B.C. government announced that it would… Read More
In a sense, each and every one of us is a trophy hunter. In two ways, actually. I have somewhat deliberately avoided this topic. For one, I didn’t want to belabour the debate about trophy hunting. For another, while often presented as straight-forward and simple, the nuances of trophy hunting become quite complex, so it takes a deliberate open-mindedness to discuss it. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen that openness in much of the… Read More
I recently changed the declination setting on my compass from 11° 22.26′ West to 22° 49.56′ West when I moved from Peterborough, Ontario to Nain, Nunatsiavut, Labrador. If you have ever used a compass to follow directions or navigate to a point on a map and you are unsure what I’m referring to here, you may have found yourself slightly off your target.
It is a generally accepted truth among hunters that heavy winters with deep snow are bad for deer, making it especially difficult for them to evade predators like wolves and coyotes. As I was looking for some recent science that might be interesting to hunters, I came across a new study about boreal woodland caribou that sheds some new light on the effects of snow depth and wolf predation on calf recruitment…. Read More
My last post suggested that we should be conscientious about the perspectives of our audiences when we communicate about hunting. When thinking about how we frame and present our roles as hunters, one approach positions hunters as an isolated group and therefore better off taking an offensive position to protect our interests. In contrast, I believe it is valuable to actively cultivate collaboration and dialogue with many different social communities to create a diverse… Read More
I’m writing this from Kugaaruk, a community of about 800 people in Nunavut’s Kitikmeot Region. Kugaaruk is on the southeast side of Pelly Bay, which at its north end opens up into the Gulf of Boothia, in the Canadian Arctic. The community itself is right at the mouth of the wide Kugaaruk River and is surrounded by an amazing topography of rocky hills and islands. Right now, the ice in the bay… Read More
