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magazine / jf06
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January/February 2006 issue |
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Women on top of the world
Northerners may have been noticeably absent during recent meetings of The
Royal Canadian Geographical Society, but that’s only because it has been a particularly
busy year for the Society’s Northern representatives. In April, Ann Meekitjuk Hanson,
a member of Canadian Geographic’s editorial advisory committee, was named Commissioner
of Nunavut, and in September, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, of the Society’s board of governors,
became the first recipient of the Governor General’s Northern Medal.
Within the past year, Watt-Cloutier has travelled to New York City to receive a Champions
of the Earth award from the United Nations and to Oslo to receive the Sophie Prize, a
Norwegian environmental award. These were great honours for a woman who spent the first
years of her life living on the land in northern Quebec, but Watt-Cloutier is particularly
proud of the Northern Medal because it came from Canada.
As chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference since 2002, Watt-Cloutier represents the
political, cultural and social interests of the 155,000 aboriginal people who inhabit
the world’s northernmost regions. Every honour leads to more speaking engagements,
which leads closer to her goal — an immediate cap on greenhouse-gas emissions before
the hunting culture that sustained her Arctic ancestors is lost to the big melt. "Public
opinion becomes public policy," she says between meetings in Iqaluit, where she
now lives. It’s no wonder Watt-Cloutier has a hard time making it to meetings of
the RCGS, which she joined in 2004.
"My goal for this project has always been to get people to express how important
the mountains are to them," says Taylor. "When you have a physical connection
to land, you are further motivated to protect and conserve it."
Hanson, who provides the Iqaluit weather report when she calls in for meetings of the
editorial advisory committee, has also had to skip a few. One of her first duties as
the federal government’s senior representative in Nunavut was a trip to Kimmirut,
the town that now occupies the land on which she grew up. There, she delivered a Governor
General’s Academic Medal to Petanie Pitsiulak, one of just six students to graduate
in that community last year. Student visits are exciting for Hanson, who remembers when
the first federal day school opened in Iqaluit. "Students today are doing something
we didn’t do when we were going to school," she says. "They’re
being taught their own language, their own culture, their own way of life."
Sara Minogue
Service with a smile
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| James Maxwell and Denis St-Onge |
In October, James Maxwell (right, at left) and Denis St-Onge received The
Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Camsell Award, in recognition of outstanding
service. St-Onge became president in 1992, the year the prize was first awarded. He was
also crucial in the development of géographica, the Society’s French-language
magazine. As executive director in the 1990s, Maxwell helped establish the Canadian
Council for Geographic Education.
Capital performance
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| Hosts Cat (ABOVE, at left) and Sid embark on a tour of
capitals, including Victoria (ABOVE). |
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Season five of "CG Kids" sees
Eldon the puppet running for prime minister and visiting every provincial and territorial capital
to drum up support. As they travel the country, the show’s correspondents, Sid and new
host Cat, discover what makes each city capital material. They also fit in some activities,
participating in a shoreline cleanup in Victoria and bungee jumping, dirtsurfing and parkouring
(a type of urban acrobatics) in Edmonton. In Yellowknife, they see the aurora borealis, and
Eldon, mistaking the display for a light show, wants to find the manager so that he can book
the performance for a resort he’s planning to open on the moon.
Each episode showcases the geography of the area, with some humour thrown in. The new season
will begin airing on TVOntario
and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in January and on Discovery Kids in February.
Cover appeal
Visitors to the CG website cast more than 35,000 votes in our Best Cover of 2004 contest.
They chose Cougar attack! (May/June 2004) as their favourite.
Visit www.canadiangeographic.ca/contests/best_covers before
Feb. 17 to pick your favourite cover of 2005.
Tree of life
Growing up in Moncton, N.B., Ben Phillips spent his summers hiking the coastal trail of Fundy
National Park among dense pockets of red spruce protected from logging because of the area’s
rough terrain. Then, last August, Phillips, an environmental studies and geography student
at Mount Allison University, returned to determine how historical climate changes have
affected the remote woods.
In the course of his fieldwork, funded in part by The
Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Phillips discovered the world’s oldest red
spruce. And while the 445-year-old tree is 40 years older than the previous record holder,
in New Hampshire, it isn’t exactly a towering giant. "It’s a scraggly,
mangylooking tree," Phillips says, "and it is smaller than many of the other
trees around it." He knew it was significant because of its shimmering bark, the product
of a resident organism that gives spruces of a certain age a greenish white glint.
For now, Phillips is keeping the location of the ancient grove a secret. "The only
reason it’s still there is because it’s been undisturbed," he says. His
unique knowledge has led to several TV and newspaper interviews. A group of elementary school
students in Moncton, however, was less impressed. "I took some tree cookies [cross-sections]
to show them how we count the rings, and they said, ‘You have to do that all day?’" Phillips
sighs. "But I don’t find it bad at all. Every tree is different and has its own
personality tied up in its rings. I hope to do this for the rest of my life."
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