Business leaders should help build up capacity through mentorship and coaching, then start looking to spend at Indigenous suppliers
Jeff and William approached me in the fall of 2019 about helping with their ecotourism business. They started the business in 2014 and wanted help growing it and getting more clients. They felt if they could share their traditions and culture with the world, they could provide meaningful jobs for the youth of their community.…
Think of Venice as a metaphor for humanity’s tepid response to the swelling climate crisis
In the last week of September, I spent an interesting hour talking with an Italian doctoral student in ecology on the banks of the Venice lagoon. She wanted to know why I had come to Venice and what I knew of its insular yet urban environment. “Did any aspect of the Venetian lagoon’s environment draw…
In shoulder season on the Gulf of Mexico coast in Texas, you can catch your fill of fish, enjoy the locals – or you can just sit back and relax
Padre Island is a long spit of sand dunes guarding mainland Texas from the destructive tornadoes and winter storms that pound in from the Gulf of Mexico. Between this narrow barrier island and the mainland lies Laguna Madre, a shallow hyper-saline sea renowned for sensitive sea grass – and world-class kite surfing, birding and fishing.…
How many of us think of the Venetian lagoon and its imperilled circumstances when we imagine a trip to Piazza San Marco?
Venice has been a feast of art, archaeology and escape for tourists since it began to attract them in the 15th and 16th centuries. But it is under attack. One of the world’s first cities to be founded almost exclusively on the conduct of financial transactions, its promotion of mercantile capitalism led the way to…
Living with your environmental choices and the ones others make for you while on the road
We must reckon with the environmental impacts of our personal travel decisions in this time of climate crisis. For us, it was our current trip – to hike in northern Italy with friends, just after my wife’s retirement and, coincidentally, climate activist Greta Thunberg’s trip to New York from Sweden on a sailboat – that…
The wonder of Assiniboine’s infinite blanket of brilliant white snow is like a dream you can’t wait to return to
MT. ASSINIBOINE, B.C. – We have always been told that silence is golden. It turns out, it is not. Silence is pure, blinding white. It surrounds you with countless tiny crystals of powder-dry snow, trillions and trillions of little sound baffles that snuff out any sound other than the crunch of your own footsteps, the…
When Capt. James Cook first arrived in this region, the Mowachaht were also surprised that the white men lived without women. “How was that, people wondered?”
In early March of 1778, Capt. James Cook sailed the Royal Navy sloops Resolution and Discovery into Nootka Sound looking for water, solid timber to replace some broken masts and spars, and new lands to claim for King George III. At this point during his celebrated third expedition of discovery, the ships and crews had…
Nuchatlitz offers a shallow lagoon system, dotted with islands, encircled by rocks and pinnacles with names like Danger Rock, Nuchatlitz Reef and Blind Reef
The route to Nuchatlitz Provincial Park is as involved as the destination is rewarding. First you have to drive to Zeballos, a somewhat forgotten mining and logging village on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, home to about 300 well-defined West Coasters. Then you pay the Cedar Lodge boatman $200 each for a (return) tin…
We're heading out on a lengthy kayaking expedition once again, 20 years after our paddles last broke water and we slept under canvas on a remote beach
Chaos reigns in our front yard. Our two old kayaks have been pulled out from their slumber under the house and their hatch covers pulled off under a blinding summer sun. Spiders are creeping out of bow and stern lockers. The old Kevlar paddles have been found in the garden shed, along with ancient plastic…
From the hospitality to the extraordinary food to the sublime experience among the butterflies, this is a place of exceptional grace
When you drive up the paved road into Macheros village in Donato Guerra, Estado de Mexico, you enter a high altitude (2,600 metres) ejido (essentially a Mexican communal farm) that has a unique relationship with about 400 million monarch butterflies. There's a lot to unpack in that one sentence. To start with, the mariposa monarca are…
Jeff and William approached me in the fall of 2019 about helping with their ecotourism business. They started the business in 2014 and wanted help growing it and getting more clients. They felt if they could share their traditions and culture with the world, they could provide meaningful jobs for the youth of their community.…
