Wild Imaginings: Discourses and Representations of Nature from the Alberta Report

Abstract

Alberta Report, founded by ultra-conservative Ted Byfield, was a weekly publication that espoused political and social conservatism and provided a training ground for a generation of conservative journalists. Byfield saw his magazine as way to combine his love of the news business with his desire to proselytize and he used the magazine as an opportunity to rail against various political initiatives and groups. Nonetheless, according to the Alberta Online Encyclopaedia, it was arguably one of the province’s most important publications in recent years. Byfield was an early champion of causes that have since become much more main stream such as: balanced budgets, back-to-basics education and tougher sentences for young criminals. Copies of AR were provided free of charge to schools, libraries and many businesses and were found in the offices of every provincial government department, banks and most other large-scale institutions. The result was that for 30 years AR had considerable impact on discourses about social values in Alberta. In this presentation I will provide an overview of some of the common discourses and representations of nature that were featured in AR over its thirty year run as a lens to provide a unique understanding of environmental politics in Alberta.