This week’s issue of The Quick Fox is brought to you by a Canadian news event: the anti-pipeline uprising of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their allies across the country. This protest pulls on a lot of things that are pretty fundamental to Canada’s political and physical infrastructure: resource extraction, the train system, Indigenous rights and sovereignty, the Indian Act.
I have been following what’s happening in British Columbia pretty closely as a private citizen, but as a journalist I don’t have much to say. This analysis piece by Amber Bracken unpacks the legal issues in a way that might be accessible to an international audience. If you’re following this story, APTN (Aboriginal People’s Television Network) and CBC Indigenous are good places to start.
To tie this back to our usual theme: the basic argument for the pipeline is that it would allow oil from Alberta to reach a port in Vancouver and be traded on the international market, not just with the Americans. However, running a pipeline through unceded lands and the potential for an oil spill—to say nothing of the fact that producing more oil and selling it elsewhere would completely blow our already-blown carbon budget—has conservationists and people concerned with the survival of our species and all the other species understandably up in arms.
(Last spring, I wrote here about why the pipeline makes little economic sense but could have huge political ramifications.)
Anyways. It’s important, and what happens here is globally important, and it’s worth following.
Roundup
Things I read this week, sorted by the amount of time I suspect it will take you to get through them.
Shortish
It’s illegal to take drone photos of cattle feedlots in Texas. Press groups say that violates the First Amendment (Texas Observer; Christopher Collins; Texas, USA)
Yukon farmer saves his cows from collapsed barn (CBC News; Dawson City, Yukon, Canada)
South Africa: wild animals at risk of ‘genetic pollution’ (The Guardian; Tony Carnie; Durban, South Africa)
Confused by almond milk? FDA commenters sure aren’t (The Counter; Sam Bloch; United States)
Longish
A growing presence on the farm: robots (The New York Times; Knvul Sheikh; Farmer City, Illinois, USA)
Bats, snakes, or pangolins? Inside the hunt for the animal behind the coronavirus outbreak (Wired UK; Sabrina Weiss)
Please read me
My most recent work.
No matter how badly you want an asteroid to hit Earth, it’s not happening this weekend
Coronavirus shows our health agencies are ill prepared for fake news
The novel coronavirus finally has a name—two of them, actually
The last word
A Canadian journalist whose work I really like, Anne Kingston, died at the age of 62. In the past year, she covered many things: politicians’ lukewarm waffling about the US migrant detention centres, this country’s epidemic of violence against women, and an issue I’ve written about here before—the chronic wasting disease epidemic that affects deer and their relatives. Across her career, she covered many more stories, especially on issues pertaining to gender. She’ll be missed.
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All images in CREATURE FEATURE are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, in responsible pet ownership conditions, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.