The Big Life — and Looming Death — of a Rocky Mountain Defender

Drew Anderson profiles Karsten Heuer, a conservationist who has dedicated his life to putting preservation before profit in Alberta, Canada.

In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree.

He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived.

His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.

He was alone in the mountains he loves.

“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”

An immensity looms. The bulk of the mountain, the heaviness of what’s to come for Heuer, Allison, their son and their close friends and colleagues.

Bow Valley Engage continues to fight against the massive Three Sisters development. Heuer and his collaborators are awaiting a judicial ruling on an Alberta government decision to skip an updated environmental impact assessment (the original was conducted 32 years ago, long before the current iteration of the proposal). Heuer says the valley and the proposal have changed significantly over those decades.

It is just one of the foundations Heuer has laid for those he will leave behind. He says he has struggled throughout his life to pass tasks on to others, but he’s learning to let that go and make peace with the fact he won’t know how things end.

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We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3,600 and a Web Browser.

At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers operating through representatives with generic names like “Jenny” will air-ship fentanyl ingredients, also known as precursors, door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough of these chemicals to make 3 million pills. This stellar investigation reveals how drug traffickers are skillfully eluding government efforts to halt the deadly trade fueling the fentanyl crisis, now the top killer of Americans aged 18 to 45:

Reuters couldn’t determine whether any of the Chinese suppliers were the actual manufacturers of the chemicals received or simply middlemen. Nor could the news organization determine where the operations were located. Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.

The address listed in a government database for a precursor seller known as Hubei Amarvel Biotech, for example, led to a Wuhan office tower. A visit to the listed room number showed another company occupying that space, while the building’s management told Reuters that the chemical supplier had never rented space there.

Amarvel is the operation that sales agent Jenny worked for. It is one of three Chinese suppliers that sold Reuters precursors after having been indicted last year by U.S. federal prosecutors. The Justice Department accused Amarvel of exporting “vast quantities” of chemicals used to make fentanyl and similar drugs. Two Amarvel suspects—Wang Qingzhou and Chen Yiyi—are in jail awaiting trial in New York. They have pleaded not guilty. A third, unidentified suspect remains at large.

Wang’s attorney, Leonardo Aldridge, and Chen’s attorney, Marlon Kirton, declined to comment.

A Mexico-based Reuters reporter initially contacted Amarvel via Telegram in July 2023 to inquire about fentanyl precursors, a few weeks after the grand jury indictment was unsealed in New York. Sales agent Jenny denounced U.S. drug policy and the case against the company.

“What we sell is completely legal in China, but the United States always uses this matter to criticize us, and they even pose as buyers to get our information and slander our country,” Jenny wrote in Spanish. “I hate all Americans, they use it (fentanyl) themselves and blame us.”

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Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps

Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying on the hand-drawn maps of locals and strangers to find his way. The result is a lovely essay accompanied by Buckland’s own photographs on serendipity, unexpectedness, living in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes.

This teaches me something unexpected about maps. I was asking people how to get somewhere. But more often than not, what they illustrate were the things to which they pay attention. For these farmers, what is important is the number of doors on the cowshed and the limits to the valley they call home.

Later that day in a cafe in Château d’Oex, I talk to Charlotte, the retired schoolteacher sitting next to me. She orders ice cream for lunch. “I have watched my weight for 60 years and now I don’t care anymore,” she says.

Her map includes the number of meters I’ll need to climb and descend to reach the next valley. She remembers them exactly because she once ran over these passes.

Our attention is a gift. Reading maps is an act of empathy. They tell us as much about the person who made them as they do about the world.

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It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil

“The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country,” writes Jonathan Blake at the outset of this fascinating piece about Los Angeles’ still-active oil industry. Many have seen the wells near Baldwin Hills—it’s tough to miss them when driving down La Cienega—but fewer are aware of how drilling fields persist a century after the original oil boom, particularly in urban residential settings.

A synagogue with the facade of a theater, a school with the facade of a Brooklyn house, an oil drilling operation with the facade of a synagogue: uncanny architecture that gives no hint of the buildings’ actual uses. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that there is active oil drilling just 125 feet from people’s homes, according to the environmental justice group STAND-L.A., a distance that seemed generous to me when I visited recently. Apartments abut the alleyway behind the tower. Some residents have windows that look onto its ivy-covered walls. Without leaving their homes, neighbors could easily read the number for the emergency hotline on the sign by the door to report a leak. 

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The War Over Safe Drug Supply in Vancouver

At one time, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver had a drug overdose rate of 25 times the national average due to the unpredictable composition of street drugs sometimes laced with lethal amounts of fentanyl and carfentanil. Activists Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicums believe that harm reduction via safe supply is the only way to save lives. So, the pair founded the Drug User Liberation Front. At first, they bought cocaine and opium on the dark web with their own money and gave the drugs away for free. Later, they started a group called the compassion club geared toward safe access to drugs.

This is how the compassion club worked: first, Nyx and Kalicum converted crowdfunded Canadian dollars to Bitcoin, then traded that for Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency. They used private browsers to access the dark web and, for extra security, operated on private servers, which encrypted their IP addresses. To find online drug vendors, they searched discussion boards where people posted tests of substances they received. Careful to avoid international shipments, they only bought from Canadian vendors with good reviews. After selecting one, they’d order a small amount to confirm its purity. If a sample wasn’t received—or if they got a bad product—they could get a refund. Communication was limited to ordering and address details; the goods were delivered by Canada Post.

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My Mother, the Gambler

From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart.

At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.

There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.

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Fear as a Game

From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.

I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.

Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.

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