Essays

Long-form writing on place, economy, and environment.

Fire Country

Fort McMurray showed what happens when fire reaches the wildland-urban edge. The WUI keeps expanding. The fire climate is changing. The two trends are running toward each other.

Physical Geography

Environmental Geography

The Insurance Geography

Insurance does not prevent disasters. It prices the geography of risk and decides who can afford to live where. In Alberta, that pricing is changing — and the changes tell you something important about where the hazards are.

Physical Geography

Economic Geography

Watching Water

Snowpack satellites, radar altimeters, and gravity sensors now make it possible to watch Alberta’s water budget from orbit. Here is what they are telling us.

Monitoring

Physical Geography

Capital Country

Canada has $1.8 trillion in growth waiting to be unlocked. Where it lives, what is blocking it, and why the province that anchors the largest sector is generating the uncertainty that kills long-horizon investment.

Economic Geography

The Warehouse Province

Alberta produces raw materials and exports them in bulk. Everything else arrives by truck. This is the infrastructure that makes that possible — and what it costs when it breaks.

Economic Geography

After the Burning Strait

What changes when closure becomes a governed corridor

Economic Geography

Avalanche Country

The eastern slopes have always slid. What is changing is the season, the trigger, and the kind of instability now arriving from a warming mountain climate.

Physical Geography

The Classroom Arithmetic

Alberta’s education system is building schools for yesterday’s growth while a demographic pulse rolls toward secondary school

Urban Geography

Storm Country

Calgary sits where Arctic, Pacific, and continental air collide — and the bill is climbing

Physical Geography

Alberta Calling

How a province that spent a decade recruiting the world is learning to blame it for showing up

Economic Geography

Urban Geography

Hidden in Plain Sight

Calgary’s 8,000 hectares of urban nature: what the livability rankings capture, what they miss, and what happens when a city keeps adding people

Urban Geography

The Ideology of Extraction

Commodity, class, and the collapse of distance — from the Banda Islands to the Strait of Hormuz

Historical Geography

Economic Geography

Rockets and Feathers

Why Alberta pump prices spike overnight but fall for weeks — and whether this week’s crude crash will actually reach the forecourt

Economic Geography

Alberta’s Pipeline Geography

A Connected Province and the Infrastructure That Makes It So

Economic Geography

The Checkout Problem

Alberta grows the food, drills the fuel, and still pays some of Canada’s highest grocery prices. This is why.

Economic Geography

Two Front Doors and a Mountain

Alberta tourism through flight patterns, spend trails, seasonal rhythms, and the places that arrival pressure is changing fastest

Economic Geography

Landlocked by Default: The Economic Geography of Alberta’s Connectivity Crisis

Economic Geography

The Burning Strait

A systems view of chokepoint activation, supply chain propagation, and the asymmetric geography of oil dependence

Economic Geography

Contested Ground

Global Energy Markets, War, Sanctions, and the Renewable Tide

Economic Geography

The Texas of the North

What the Comparison Actually Reveals — and What It Obscures

Economic Geography

A Trade Reality Check

What the Province Produces, What It Exports, and What It Needs From Everyone Else

Economic Geography

What Light Reveals

How a team of University of Alberta graduates put hyperspectral eyes in orbit — and made them free to use

Monitoring