PETER MELLGARD

True North: The Fight for the Canadian Wilderness

In Canada’s wild places, a fight is being waged. On one side are mining, oil, and lumber companies. They have powerful friends in government. On the other, environmentalists and indigenous First Nations communities. The fight is an existential one — what is Canada? A place to extract resources, doing unknowable damage to the environment? Or one where people live on and with the land, inflicting limited harm, a sustainable paradise? Perhaps it is both?

Several stories will investigate this fight from different angles: the government’s crackdown on environmental groups; the Mt. Polley disaster; and proposals to build oil pipelines to ports on the Pacific.

Peter Mellgard is a reporter and editor on the foreign desk at the Huffington Post, based in New York. In 2014 he was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow at Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich.