Amazon of the North

Photographer Eamon Mac Mahon’s eye captures some of the most amazing parts of northern Canada. Virgin territory ready to be raped of natural resources. Forever to be blemished by man’s constant need for progress in material possessions.

Stretching from Newfoundland to the Yukon, the boreal forest is our Amazon. It acts as the lungs of the world, our largest terrestrial carbon storehouse. Thousands of species, some of them endangered, make their home there. The first great human threat was the fur trade, which led to the beaver’s decline. Human settlement, agriculture, and forestry followed. Today the greatest menace is mining activity, including oil and gas exploration and extraction. In Alberta, the amount of land cleared each year for seismic lines, a vast network of exploratory roads, already compares with that cleared for logging; unlike logged areas, seismic lines rarely recover. There is no economic incentive for rehabilitation. Natural gas extracted via these roads fuels one of the largest industrial projects in history, the Alberta oil sands.


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