The Call of the Rockies

When I can, I try to take advantage of the warm weather to spend some time in the country generally west of Calgary. From my office window, the mountains stand like silent sentinels, always there (if not visible), but always changing, and their attraction is almost physical. I like to think of them as some of the spirits of this place, part of the spiritual landscape of Calgary. To the casual observer, they form an undifferentiated wall, though a couple, like the pyramidal Mount Glasgow (after a battleship), and the black silhouette of Devil’s Head (a.k.a. Devil’s Thumb), are easily identifiable. Changing lighting and weather conditions from morning to morning will bring out their 3D quality, concealing some and revealing others. Alas, due to some combination of heat, humidity, and cloudiness, they’ve been hiding behind the veil lately, but they will return. Two useful resources I’ve come across to identify them are Dave Birrell’s Peakfinder website at http://www.peakfinder.com, and Birrell’s book (with art by Ron Ellis), Calgary’s Mountain Panorama, available at MapTown.

An Inconvenient Truth

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” Saturday night. The film is probably the most significant documentary since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”. Al Gore has finally stepped aside from his wooden Vice-Presidential image to speak out on an issue he’s passionate about. He’s America’s answer to David Suzuki, travelling around his country (and indeed, around the world) raising consciousness of the reality of climate change. Using a combination of satellite photographs, then-and-now photographs of glaciers, and graphs based on the latest scientific research into historical climates, he effectively demonstrates the correlations among CO2 levels, global temperatures, ice-cap activity, and ocean temperatures. The influence of human population growth and industrial activity, particularly in the last century, is undeniable, and he attacks the right-wing media for denying the consensus of the scientific community. (And it goes on… Sunday’s Calgary Herald, part of that “impartial” CanWest Global syndicate, ran an article that continues to spread the conception that there’s doubt in the scientific community.) Gore uses computer animation to show the effects on major coastal areas in the U.S, the Netherlands, China, and Bangladesh of the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and/ or the Greenland Ice Sheet. He even manages to throw in a couple of animated clips (humorous and not-so), one of which came from Matt Groening's “Futurama”! Visit http://www.climatecrisis.net/ for more information, and especially check out the e-card section under “Downloads”. And remember that the Bow Glacier, the source of the Bow River, is similarly retreating, as are the Columbia Icefields. Tell your friends; it’s a must-see for anyone concerned with the environment, or anyone who expects to be living 50 years from now… your children, for example.