Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast

“To protect the Arctic is to protect the rest of the world.” So says Lisa Koperqualuk, Vice-President of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, in this fascinating episode about the challenges faced by Inuit communities in the Arctic today. Koperqualuk discusses the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, the need to regulate Arctic shipping, the importance of speaking Inuktitut, and her experiences grow...

Musician and politician Charlie Angus is our guest this episode, talking about his new book, Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower. It is a fresh look at his Northern Ontario hometown of Cobalt and its silver mining boom in the early 1900s, which he says changed not only Canadian mining, but how mining has been carried out around the globe ever since — and not always for...

We’re thrilled to have Perry Bellegarde on the podcast, the new Honorary President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society You likely also know Bellegarde from his time as a transformational National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations from 2014 to 2021, where he helped push key legislation through parliament, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the Indig...

It’s hard to think of a person who has written with more passion about Canada, and in as many different mediums, as Dave Bidini. You might know him as the songwriter and frontman of the Rheostatics – that most Canadian of Canadian bands — or for his best-selling books On a Cold Road, The Tropic of Hockey, Keon and Me or Midnight Light, or from his award-winning journalism and documentaries, or for...

Today we’re lucky to be talking to Dr. Daniel Pauly, professor of marine biology at the University of British Columbia, the leading expert on the declining state of the world's fisheries and something of a philosopher. Fish is the last wild catch: the last animal food source we hunt and eat en masse from the wild. But Daniel Pauly warns that we are rapidly approaching the end of fish due to indust...

With this December marking the 100th anniversary of Agnes Macphail becoming the first woman elected to the Canadian Parliament, Explore welcomes one of the most prominent female political figures of our present day to the podcast. Before stepping back from public life in the fall of 2021, Catherine McKenna was a federal Minister of Industry and Minister of the Environment in the government of Just...

We're thrilled to welcome Emily Choy, the newest RCGS Explorer-in-Residence, to the Explore Podcast. Based out of McGill University, Emily is an award-winning expert on the impacts of climate change on the Arctic, with a focus on a sea-bird called murres. Emily describes her summers on Coats Island in Hudson's Bay, studying a colony of 30,000 murres that nest high on the island's barren cliffs. Lo...

Viola Desmond was arrested 75 years ago this month for refusing to leave her seat in the “whites only” section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. This brave stand by a Black Nova Scotian against the segregation rules of the day in Nova Scotia would inspire future generations to break down the racist structures that had been suppressing Black people in Canada for centuries. George Elli...

The UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow is being described as a critical moment in human history, as our ability to reverse global warming reaches a point of no return. Harvey Locke is in Glasgow, leading the charge against biodiversity loss, and linking it firmly to climate change. As a leader of the "Nature Needs Half" movement, Locke and a growing number of experts believe that the way to rever...

It's bird migration season. Geese are flying south, loons making their last mournful cries on northern lakes and bird feeders are getting set up in backyards and on balconies. To celebrate our avian friends, we’re thrilled to have Patrick Nadeau joining us. He is the new President of Birds Canada, which is the largest organization for citizen science in Canada. This episode is about birds and you,...

October ... The nights grow longer and darker. It's time for Hallowe'en, time to gather around fires and tell ghost stories. And that is exactly what RCGS Explorer-in-Residence Adam Shoalts has in store for us in this episode. He joins us to talk about his new book, The Whisper on the Night Wind. It's a wilderness tale of the supernatural, an investigation into a century-old legend of a strange, d...

September 30, 2021 marks the first ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. It's a federal statutory holiday, a time to reflect about the brutal impact of the Indian Residential School System. Hundreds of thousands of First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were forced to attend those institutions from the 1830s to the 1990s, and the impact of that has resonated through families,...

Commander Chris Hadfield is arguably Canada’s most famous astronaut. There was even a time, during his 2013 mission aboard the International Space Station, when he was quite possibly our most famous Canadian, appearing as a guest on talk shows and capturing the imaginations of millions with his viral dispatches from life in orbit. A veteran of multiple missions to space with the Canadian Space Age...

“Colombia is a place where magic seems to happen every moment and I would argue that only a people like the Colombians, with their enduring spirit of place, their indescribable capacity for joy, could have endured the agonies of the last 50 years.” Wade Davis says his latest book Magdalena: River of Dreams is a love letter of sorts. Colombia, he says, is “a nation that allowed me to dream, that ga...

One last trip into the HBC vaults at the Manitoba Museum with curator Amelia Fay.

On this episode of Explore, we take another fascinating dive into the Hudson’s Bay Company Collection at the Manitoba Museum. It contains over 27,000 items, far too many for us to pour through on our podcast, so we asked curator Amelia Fay to take us down into the vaults and talk about some of her favourite items, as well as items that speak to the long 350-year history of the HBC and its impact o...

Amelia Fay, Curator of the HBC Collection at the Manitoba Museum and Archives

RCGS founding president Charles Camsell on his 19th century childhood at an Arctic HBC post

How The Métis Nation was born from the Fur Trade and the HBC

The impact of legendary HBC Governor Sir George Simpson

Adam Shoalts on early HBC Explorers and their impact on mapping Canada

A look at the impact of the Hudson's Bay Company as it turns 350 years old, by visiting the first ever HBC Trading Post, in the Cree community of Waskaganish.

Astronaut David Saint-Jacques knows a thing or tw…

Take a listen to some of the most surprising, thr…

For many Canadians, Charlotte Gray hardly needs a…