The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

BONNET PLUME LAKE, YUKON—Sketching peaks shrouded in morning mist, Joyce Majiski squints up at bands of red blue and green all around her, searching for signs of our planet’s ancient enduring heartbeat.

In one of Canada’s last wilderness watersheds, a vast expanse where humans are still outsiders, the artist biologist and former river guide can hear the murmur of water spilling down a steep creek bed on the far side of this placid lake.

It’s fed by patches of melting snow that wind through scree deposited by a glacier that disappeared when the planet warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, leaving a bowl (“cirque”) carved out of the mountainside.

We are sitting on the edge of Bonnet Plume Lake, 1,153 metres above sea level, where the loudest sound is a late summer breeze.

The peace belies an epic conflict playing out across Canada’s North, where aboriginal people and environmental activists are pushing back against building pressures from a warming climate and the global demand for more resources. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

I don’t know where I am. I don’t know the people around me and I can’t pronounce the word palladium. Actually, I’m not even sure what it is. A mineral, I suppose, because Harry Barr, of Pacific North West Capital Corp., seems really excited about it.

Palladium’s price, it seems, has soared, making the River Valley exploration project, just outside of Sudbury, a possible financial gold mine. The mining exploration company specializes in platinum group metals, which includes platinum, palladium, ruthenium, rhodium, osmium and iridium.

These metals can be as rare as gold. And as profitable.

Standing around River Valley, an exploration site owned by Pacific North West about 100 km from Sudbury, I realize what this article has turned into. Far from an introduction to mining, it’s more like one of those “What doesn’t belong” games. And the answer, in case you haven’t guessed, is me. Read the rest of this entry »