The forces of the conservative revolution are becoming increasingly fragmented, disoriented and acrimonious. So outrageous is the racial stereotyping becoming in even core elements of the US Republican Party that David Frum, heretofore unheralded as a voice of moderation, is intervening dramatically in an effort to turn back the tide of conservative extremism.

In Alberta an attack is gathering force on the most fundamental principles essential to the academic viability of universities. This attack has implications that go far beyond the jurisdiction most stereotypically associated with cowboy culture and the lucrative vastness of this province’s oil-and-gas resources.

The publicity attending a showdown in the early 1980s between logging interests and Indigenous peoples in British Columbia drew attention to the ecological ideals of the Fourth World. That showdown took place in Haida Gwaii, the legendary archipelago also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. The controversy attracted the attention of a science broadcaster who was then emerging as one of the most effective voices in the emerging global community of environmental activists. David Suzuki has described his production of a 1982 CBC documentary on the future of the Queen Charlotte Islands as a turning point in his development as a scientist, broadcaster and author. In making the film Suzuki developed lasting collaborations with a number of Aboriginal friends from the region, including Miles Richardson, Guujaaw and Patricia Kelly. As Suzuki describes it, “Guujaaw changed the way I viewed the world and sent me on a radically different course of environmentalism.”

In the days following the Bush presidency’s winning a second term, the regime’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, boasted that his side’s victory would confirm and entrench the far-ranging shift to the hard right that began in earnest with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Each 24 hours the news cycle groans these days with an overload of content. The stories laid out daily alternate between themes of menace and hope, import and emptiness, meaning and futility.