About yourYukon
By Claire Eamer
In the fall of 1996, I sat down with George Mackenzie-Grieve and Joan Eamer of Environment Canada to talk about a freelance writing job – a newspaper column to tell Yukoners about Yukon science. It would be called yourYukon.
George and Joan had already discussed the idea with the Yukon News, and both the editor and the publisher were enthusiastic. The Yukon News would provide space if Environment Canada provided the articles.
There was enough money in the Environment Canada kitty to pay for six months of weekly columns. That, we agreed, would probably exhaust the available topics anyway.
The editor of the Yukon News and the local Environment Canada people set the ground rules. The column would be straight public information, not publicity for anyone's program or policy. We'd concentrate on the science behind the headlines, the sort of basic background information that rarely makes it into news stories. And any science story was fair game, not just science involving Environment Canada.
I thought it sounded like a great gig. One of the things I love about science writing is the chance to satisfy my own curiosity about all kinds of science and technology. This would give me six months of happy question-asking!
So we started the column. Environment Canada paid for my time, the Yukon News ran the column in its Friday edition, and internet space was provided on Taiga Net, a group site focused on northern science and environmental management.
After six months, we still had plenty of ideas for columns, and Environment Canada's Yukon office had managed to scrounge a little more money. So we kept going.
We kept going, in fact, for another decade – through half a dozen writers, a couple of editors, a lot of web space, and 466 columns. We never did run out of story ideas.
Unfortunately, however, we ran out of money. After years of scrounging funding for a few months at a time, the local Environment Canada office finally exhausted its resources. The last yourYukon column ran at the end of March 2006.
Now, yourYukon is back – thanks to members of the Yukon's Biodiversity Working Group.
The Biodiversity Working Group (BWG) is a loose association of scientists, environmental managers, and people with an interest in the continued health and vigour of the Yukon's natural heritage. For some time, its members have been trying to find sources of funding to revive the column.
This spring, the BWG succeeded. Yukon Environment and Yukon College were the first organizations to step forward, and others are following. The Yukon News has agreed to provide space in its pages again, and the new series of yourYukon will be posted on a redesigned website, along with the archived columns of the first series.
The new yourYukon column will show up in the Friday edition of the Yukon News every other week. We'll bring you stories about plants, animals, weather and climate, rocks and rivers, lights in the sky and secrets from beneath the earth. And we'll tell you about the people who spend their time trying to understand your Yukon and theirs.
The ground rules haven't changed. This is a column about science and the Yukon, not about programs or agendas. Sometimes the topic will be related to the day's news. Sometimes the column will talk about the basic science that underlies topics in the news. And sometimes it will just explore fascinating questions about some aspect of the Yukon and its environment.
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