It’s November and the days are short, so it’s still dark when Billie Lyons leaves her apartment in Rocky Mountain House at 7 a.m. This is her first winter living here and she’s a little worried because the cold creeps into her bones and settles there, making it tough to think about anything other than getting warm. Meteorologists are predicting the coldest winter in a generation, but so far, so good: November or not, the first snow is melting into puffs of white on the gravel and grass, and when the sky lightens it will be deep autumnal blue – the same colour as Lyons’ eyes when they’re enlivened.

Much of the 20-kilometre drive to work takes Lyons through Crimson Lake Provincial Park. The landscape is all foothills and aspens, soft and serene, one of the truly good things about living here. There’s never  I  much traffic so it’s easy to sink into the wilderness and forget about civilization. But when her grey sedan crests a gentle hill, that illusion is dispersed – down below are the blazing flare stack and pistachio-green vinyl sided buildings of Petro-Canada’s Ferrier gas plant. Lyons pulls into the parking lot and reverses into a parking space. All the vehicles, the majority of which are trucks, face out. This is a back-in facility, a safety precaution in the event of an evacuation.

After she enters the main building, Lyons walks past the office, calling out “morning” to the admin staff, and grabs a coffee from the break room down one of the narrow hallways decorated with safety messages from head office. (If she ever forgets what causes accidents, these posters remind her that haste, frustration, fatigue and apathy are the culprits.) Lyons heads down another narrow hallway and passes through the control room, where a bank of computers, monitoring every pulse of the plant’s operations and equipment 24/7, display numbers and intricate graphs in primary colours. Now she’s back outside, walking to the shop. 

The shop has the same queer pistachio vinyl siding as the rest of the plant, and though it was built in the 1960s, it has a temporary attitude, like it’s saying, “Don’t spend too much money on me – I’m not going to be here for long,” It’s a big barn of a building, with a large open space and concrete floors, and like all buildings on site, it’s very neat: everything is tidily in its place. Three tiny rooms – two offices and a neglected bathroom – flank the workshop. In one of the offices, crammed amidst workstations equipped with computers and a touch of personal space, sits Lyons’ desk.

She may have a desk and that desk may be in an office, but Lyons is not a bookkeeper or a clerk. In fact, when I come to visit her, the 24-year-old doesn’t spend any time in the office other than to grab her purse at lunch. And she doesn’t wear pantyhose or polyester suiting or make-up. No, she wears a pair of fire-retardant coveralls over her jeans and layered tees; a bandana covers her strawberry-blond hair to prevent it from getting tangled in her hard hat. Billie is a millwright apprentice, and on her feet she wears a pair of men’s steel-toed boots. “I bought a women’s style once,” she says with a grin. “They were exactly the same as the ones I’m wearing now, except they wore out in a month.”

Funny thing about steel-toed boots. I went to Wal-Mart to purchase the pair I needed in order to visit the Ferrier plant. (Petro-Canada is very safety conscious – one of the many things that impresses Lyons about the company.) I wandered past the men’s footwear first (I was lost) and noticed that an entire wall was dedicated to work boots, with plenty of steel-toed options. But as I trawled the many women’s aisles, overwhelmed by the selection, I couldn’t find a single pair of women’s steel-toed boots. Luckily, considering Lyons’ story, I settled for the smallest men’s size available.

This absence of women’s steel-toed boots seems strange, bordering on ridiculous. Not because women should take to the streets to demand equal opportunity shoe-shopping, but ridiculous because, in the 21st century, neither women’s nor unisex steel-toed boots are available at a shopper’s mecca like Wal-Mart.

Think, for a moment, about those Second World War images of Rosie the Riveter, the woman dressed in coveralls flexing her bicep underneath the slogan “We Can Do It.” OK, she was American, but she was equally a symbol for Canadian women who filled the empty factories when 60,000 men enlisted. Given incentives such as free nurseries and income-tax concessions, more than a million women were working by the war’s end, many on traditionally male turf such as manufacturing and the trades. More than 260,000 women produced war goods, and women accounted for 30% of all labourers in the aircraft industry. Women can do it, so history has proved. But after the war, Ottawa stopped all incentives, effectively pushing women out of male-dominated industries.

Now we’re in the midst of another nationwide labour shortage, one brought on by economic growth and, some might say, poor governmental planning. And nowhere is this shortage more acute than in Alberta, where the provincial government predicts the situation will only get worse. By 2015, it forecasts a human-capital deficit of 86,000 people, with the trades falling 12,000 workers short.

Considering this prediction and coupling it with the potential economic opportunities afforded workers in the trades, you would expect women to be tying on their steel-toed boots in record numbers. And they are: more women are donning hard hats than ever before.

This looks like it could be bible camp. Young people, mostly in their late teens, are making the cheerful, tinkling sounds of breakfast. Even the groggy kids are smiling, talking about the hows and whys of their grogginess.

In a room beside the dining area, the sun shines through a stained glass Jesus and someone plays a piano in the way people at parties absentmindedly strum guitars – half to stumble on a potential hook, half to get attention. The event, what with all the bright religious paraphernalia on the walls, sounds like a hymn written by Rufus Wainwright. Maybe. Only this isn’t Bible Camp. It’s Gay Camp. At least, that’s what one of the founders calls it.

Photograph by Curtis Comeau

Kristopher Wells stands in the middle of the morning hubbub. Breakfast is over for the most part, and the campers are starting to look busy, entering the lobby, exiting, returning, grouping up. Wells talks to the campers who come up to him, like the big, copper-haired kid in a neon blue Obama shirt. But mostly, Wells, who is well built, head shaved, and wears the eternally unfashionable uniform of a camp counselor – khaki shorts, socks rising out of outdoorsy shoes – is playing host to a group of media. He selects a few articulate, camera-friendly kids to tell their stories to a local news reporter. After he ushers the interviewer and interviewee outside to talk in the morning sun and then sits off to the side watching the younger generation spread the good news of Camp Fyrefly. He looks proud. This, just as much as what will go on at the camp itself, is what the camp is about.

Wells started Camp Fyrefly as a place for Canada’s “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, questioning, and allied youth,” (or LGBTTQ&A) in 2004. That broad definition is how Fyrefly is described on the website, and it’s a big tent. (The “y” in Fyrefly is not a typo – it stands for youth.) Embedded in that misspelled jumble is the goal to foster leadership in teens. The camp doesn’t exactly have sessions on how to give, say, Obama-style, hope-infused speeches or to create the next generation of LGBT CEOs; the leadership training is more internalized. Which makes sense, considering that a lot of the problems LGBT youth face are internalized, too.

Before he started Camp Fyrefly, Wells was a teacher in St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton. After a student from the school killed himself, Wells felt responsible. “That was a significant turning point in my own life,” he says. “We had never been able to talk about our identities in the school environment. I saw how the school dealt with it, with complete denial and silence, and decided that I couldn’t be in that kind of environment as a gay teacher who had to be closeted to work.”

He left teaching and joined a youth group called Youth Understanding Youth, which became Camp Fyrefly. Now Wells runs workshops in four provinces and has worked with more than 150 teens (the average age of attendees is 18, who can attend for a subsidized cost of $25). This is possible because the camp is more about community than bricks and mortar. It can go anywhere, even to this church in St. Albert.

As kids mill around, the local media are talking with one such kid who just ran for city council in Surrey, B.C. He is confident and eloquent, a born leader. “Our unofficial motto is ‘take what you need and give to others,’” Wells explains. “Someone has created the opportunity for you to be here, and it is investing in you as a leader. How are you going to repay that investment? We let the young people define the kind of leadership role they are going to take, and recognize for many of them, they need to spend the time being leaders to themselves first.”

After the campers have their time on camera, Wells is up. He speaks effortlessly and manages to make his sound bite material sound sincere. He’s like the cool teacher who had that remarkable, yet elusive ability to connect with students. Watching him, you can see just where the campers who had their moment on camera might be in a few years. U

We take a cable car to the top of a mountain adjacent to the famous Matterhorn. It’s still ski season, and everyone (except us) is decked out in fashionable ski attire. It’s an older crowd, their skin leathery and monied.

The most sublime aspect of this mountainous terrain, I realize as we coast upward, is the light. The hue and intensity is fluid, constantly shifting as the sun ducks in and out of the peaks. The 19th-century Italian painter Giovanni Segantini once said that people of the mountains see the sun rise and set as a golden fireball, full of life and energy, while flatlanders know only a tired and drunk sun.

Finally, we reach the peak: 12,763 feet. A sign informs us that thus “Europe’s highest mountaintop accessible by cable car.” The qualification somehow deflates our senses of adventure. It’s snowing lightly. There’s a wooden crucifix, which strikes me as odd in such a secular country. Underneath are three words: “Be more human.”

A sense of calm sneaks up on me, a feeling so unusual that, at first, I am startled by it. I don’t recognize it. But there’s no denying its presence. I am at peace.

The naturalist E.O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I’m experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Wilson argued that our connection to nature is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. That connection isn’t always positive. Take snakes, for instance. The chances of encountering a snake, let alone dying from a snakebite, are extraordinarily remote. Yet modern humans continue to fear snakes even more, studies have found, than car accidents or homicide or any of the dozens of other more plausible ways we might meet our demise. The fear of snakes resides deep in our primitive brain. The fear of the Long Island Expressway, while not insignificant, was added much more recently.

Conversely, the biophilia hypothesis, as Wilson calls it, also explains why we find natural settings so peaceful. It’s in our genes. That’s why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined.  U

From The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Reprinted with permission from Hachette Book Group, USA.

6:59 a.m. I should get out of bed.

7:00 a.m. I should be dressed in my department-approved, ankle-length pants, long-sleeved, button-up shirt, sensible earrings and makeup, flat shoes and boring hair.

7:09 a.m. Roger, my cat, is pacing. He’s hungry. My other cat, Chester, bounces over my head to the floor.

7:18 a.m. I stir. My back is sore, my legs are stiff. There is a wheel-shaped bruise on my thigh.

7:27 a.m. I should be on the train.

7:29 a.m. The bags under my eyes are suspiciously dark. I ponder what management will think.

7:34 a.m. I check the mirror. Ponytails, capri pants, dangly earrings and a short-sleeved button-up shirt are sufficiently rebellious. My tattoos peek out from under my sleeves.

7:47 a.m. Cats fed, coffee in hand and iPod loud, I board the LRT. I will be 14 minutes late for work. Tiger Army’s psychobilly charges me to the Health Sciences station.

8:14 a.m. The office is quiet. The other members of my clinical research team are not here. Yawning, I slouch in my ergonomically correct chair, enter my password and open Outlook. Appointments, consultations and meetings fill my day.

8:22 a.m. I open my Hotmail account. Five messages from my roller derby team. “Thanks for the practice – I hurt.” I decide which team I prefer. My stomach leaps.

I ENTERED THE FULL-TIME workforce two years ago. I am forced. Forced to be productive when biological cycles say I should be sleeping. Forced to fill out forms and obtain approval before I can go to the dentist. Forced to remain at my desk until 4:15 p.m. despite finishing my work at 10:30 a.m.

Shaking the crumbs out of my keyboard, I squint at the screen. It’s covered in a thin film of black dust. Perhaps this is the culprit for my third debilitating migraine in as many months. Perhaps it is the fluorescent lights buzzing above my head. I’ve put in a work order to remove some of the bulbs, but the maintenance department says I’m not allowed.

“Why do I need permission?” I ask.

That’s the Policy. They need things to be fair. They need to know where I am. They need to answer to Others above Them. Who are these People? I sigh in defeat and change my screensaver.

That afternoon I meet with Denise (not her real name), a teenager in the midst of a weight management program. She has lively green eyes and satin red hair and is laughing gregariously. We sit side-by-side, brainstorming ideas about how to curb her emotional eating. Her body mass index, a ratio of height to weight used to define obesity, is 32. Anything above 25 means you’re overweight. She worries about boys. Her parents are getting divorced and sometimes she’s so depressed she stays in bed all day crying.

“Buy the groceries yourself if your dad won’t buy fruit,” I say to her. “You’ve got a car. You can take care of yourself.”

She hits me on the shoulder. “You’re kidding!” she squawks, incredulous.

In a rare moment I cherish as a counsellor, I look her straight in the eyes, poised to say something that may permanently alter her perspective. “It’s your choice what you put in your mouth and what you do with your body. You will never change until you accept that you are in charge of your life.”

She pauses, her comedic composure altered. “But I don’t want to,” she mumbles to her thumbs on her lap.

“Then you won’t, Denise.”

I wanted so badly to see her reach the tipping point, when you make a change and never go back. I knew personally how powerful that change could be. I saw so much of my teenaged self in her. I had done it, why couldn’t she? That’s why I became a counsellor – I thought I could pull change out of people. But my perspective was slowly changing.

I’d been playing roller derby for six months by then. In the beginning, when I was still shaky on my skates, it was a diversion, a type of aggressive workout I hadn’t experienced in 15 years of running and elite cycling. But the more I played, the more I wanted to shape how the league was organized. It felt like running a business, which illuminated the frustration I was feeling at work.

Denise lost nearly 20 pounds over six months. And she taught me that despite the similarities between the two of us, we’re all on our own path.

Three years ago, I got a call from a theatre friend who scouts for a local talent agency about a television commercial being shot in Calgary that required a man to play guitar and sing. I auditioned for the McCain’s International Series Thin Crust Texas Barbecue Chicken Pizza ad, waiting in a holding pen with the majority of the city’s roots-rock singer/songwriters. Most of us were wearing country suits and western hats. The commercial’s story arc was brilliant: a young cowboy rises spontaneously from a long table of pizza-eating family and friends and woos a pretty cowgirl at the head of the table by singing “Yellow Rose of Texas.”

I hammed it up when it was my turn, getting down on my knees as though I were pleading. I played the song faster and more energetically than the original and was called back to audition again for the commercial’s director, an L.A. industry type with blonde, shoulder-length hair and a tangible air of self-assurance. (I overheard people say that he’d just come from working on a movie with one of the lesser Baldwin brothers.) “You really want this, hey?” he asked after I laid the cheese on thick, which made me feel both encouraged and ashamed. My third audition was in front of the McCain Foods board, who had flown in from Halifax to make the final decision. They seemed pleased, but it was lunch hour and most were tucking into sandwiches. (The catering got better at each subsequent audition.)

I wasn’t informed I had the part until getting a call at 8 p.m. Go to the Currie Barracks parking lot at 3 a.m., I was told. The barbecue in the commercial was supposed to be taking place at sunset, but for our purposes sunrise could masquerade as sunset, giving us two chances to film the spot in one day.

The amount of equipment and size of the crew on location was ridiculous for a one-minute ad, I thought, knowing how excited my filmmaker friends would be to have such resources for one day. We filmed the courtship scenes dozens of times, from all angles, but I wasn’t allowed to eat the pizza because it had red pepper on it which could get caught in my teeth. All the other actors and extras were told to take bites out of their slices during each take, to chew and nod like they were enjoying it. Pizza with a barbecue sauce base doesn’t taste right at 6 a.m. – one of the girls had to purge behind the barn. The pizzas were replaced when the cheese hardened and started to sweat, usually every other take. Two women doctored the frozen pies by adding freshly cooked green and red pepper and pieces of white chicken breast. One of the ladies at the table said she was so sick of the song, she wanted to smash my guitar, like in that Juicy Fruit commercial.

At 3:30 p.m., the director was calling for the last shot, and by 3:45 p.m. the skies unleashed one hell of a wind and rain storm. As the crew scrambled to cover their gear, I had to go into a barn with the sound guy to record the song another dozen times. Most of the actors had done a number of commercials before and said this was an unusually smooth shoot. “You’re a principal,” I was told over and over. “You’ll get a whack of cash for this.” I shook off the hat head and waited for the royalty cheques to roll in.

A couple of months later, when the commercial first aired, my e-mail inbox was full of “Is that you?” notes.

Corb Lund saw the commercial and he told a mutual friend of ours, “I would never do that.” And of course he shouldn’t. Corb is a cowboy. A real cowboy might seriously damage his stature as a country music artist were he seen dressed up as a Hollywood cowboy, hawking pizza. I, on the other hand, do not play country music and am not a cowboy, therefore my career as a singer/songwriter and my stint as the Pizza Cowboy do not conflict. Very often.

At one of my shows not long after the spot started airing, a nearly hysterical woman and her sister approached me. They had seen the commercial and discovered my true identity. They asked me to please, please, please play “Yellow Rose of Texas.” They were disappointed it wasn’t on any of my CDs. They were at a Kris Demeanor show, but all they wanted was the Pizza Cowboy.

Downtown Freiburg is an accurate approximation of the mental image conjured up by the term “Europe” in your average North American’s imagination: an Altstadt of narrow, cobblestone streets and half-timbered houses encircled by medieval stone gates, footbridges lined with flower boxes over babbling brooks, bakeries and cafés with little circular tables out front lining compact squares.

The traditional highlight of a tour of Freiburg is the Münster, the city’s towering Gothic cathedral, an imposing edifice of spike-crowned buttresses and leering gargoyles in red-brown sandstone that looms over a broad square in the centre of the Altstadt. Completed in 1513 after three centuries of construction, its 381-foot spire testifying to God’s glory and the engineering genius of medieval Europe, the Münster is the quintessence of the high art and refined culture of its time. But I didn’t come all the way to southwestern Germany by intercontinental jumbo jet and superfast train to gawk at another old church.

Instead, I caught the No. 3 tram down on Kaiserstrasse, passing smooth and electric-quiet through the 13th-century gate to a southern suburb called Vauban. Here I found a new landmark, a temple for the worship of both ancient sunlight and hypermodern science: Heliotrop. A house, actually, but some other kind of house entirely: three storeys high and tubular in shape, a sleek glass drum perched upon a stout pole, wrapped in translucent pipe and crowned by a bank of reflective panels. Heliotrop looks like the misplaced centrepiece of a “Homes of the Future” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair or a stage set for a live-action version of The Jetsons. The house was completed in 1994 after much less than 300 years’ work by a visionary architect named Rolf Disch, as a place for his family to live and as living proof of his big idea, which he calls das Plusenergiehaus. Which idea, if you can’t parse the Deutsch, is this: the plus-energy house, the house as power plant. Heliotrop then: the first home in Germany – maybe the first anywhere – that produces more energy than it uses.

The name, from the Greek, means “tracking the sun” – heliotropes are plants whose flowers turn toward the sun’s rays. And that, for starters, is what the house does: it spins on its stilt-like perch so that its triple-glazed, light-welcoming glass front can face the warming sun in winter and its sun-blocking, heavily insulated rear can repel it in summer. When supplemental heating is required, a geothermal heat exchanger makes use of the warm ground below, and hot water heating comes from the translucent solar thermal vacuum tubing that snakes around the building (which doubles as balcony rail). The antenna-like protrusion on the home’s roof is a bank of photovoltaic (PV) panels, which convert light from the sun into electricity; these panels rotate independently to maximize their solar exposure, thereby generating something like five to six times this 2,000-square-foot, intensely naturally lit home’s electricity demand. Beyond this, there’s a rainwater catchment system for the washing of dishes and clothes, on-site composting and chemical-free sewage treatment. Greenhouse gas emissions are essentially nil.

Heliotrop’s price tag was one and a half million euros, with some of that coming from the Baden-Württemberg state government. Disch has built two others in Switzerland as “demonstration buildings” (neither of which is lived in) since he finished his own. Which is kind of incidental, because he has already refined his concept for the mass market on a site just up the street, as a sort of gateway to Vauban – quite possibly the first great model suburb of the Anthropocene Era. (Anthropos, from the Greek, means “human”; this term was coined in 2000 to descibe an age whose defining features – namely our climate, atmosphere and ecology – are manmade.)

Sustainable Vauban was born of a transformation nearly as quick as the fall of the Iron Curtain that set the stage for it. Until 1991, Vauban was a French military barracks, a legacy of the Second World War turned Cold War relic. After the French went home, it passed briefly through the German government’s hands to the city of Freiburg, which in 1993 began the launch of an ambitious redevelopment plan for the old barracks blocks. The core of this new neighbourhood is found at the wide, plaza-like intersection where the southbound No. 3 tram makes a hard right off Merzhauser Strasse into the reclaimed military lands, and it’s at this corner where you’ll find Rolf Disch’s more recent designs: Sonnenschiff (sun ship) and Solarsiedlung (solar settlement).

Sonnenschiff is a five-storey, block-long complex lining Merzhauser, tight to the wide sidewalk and tiled in smooth slate grey, its upper-floor windows bracketed by little flashes of pastel cladding like exuberant shutters. As of the overcast spring day in 2006 when I first laid eyes on it, Sonnenschiff’s ground floor was occupied by an organic grocer and a pharmacy, with the far southern bank of storefront windows covered over by a billboard-like display reading ZUKUNFT – “The Future” – in bright red lettering on a white background, like it was the gateway to a new world. Sonnenschiff’s second and third floors are given over to office space, and at the very top, perched on the main building at intervals, are nine two-storey luxury condos. And atop these lies Disch’s signature crown: roofs paved entirely in PV tile. Sonnenschiff is a bit of a laggard by Disch’s astronomically high standards – it produces only about 55% of its energy requirements – but then its main purpose was to bring mixed-use life to the street and provide a visual and aural buffer between the busy boulevard and the cozy car-free neighbourhood tucked behind it.

That neighbourhood is Solarsiedlung: 59 townhouses tightly packed in five neat rows out back of the Sonnenschiff. Each unit is decked out in bright siding – red then yellow, aqua green then vivid primary blue – and each has its own balcony and small patio and wee patch of garden. More importantly, each is hyper-insulated and triple-glazed-windowed and topped in a sloping south-facing bank of solar panels, so that each is, like Disch’s own green home, a net energy producer. Simple and utilitarian. Plusenergiehaus-ing for the masses.

“Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here!” _Bob Dylan, rock icon, SUV pitchman

Everyone seems concerned about global warming and other environmental issues (toxic pollution, species extinction, Paris Hilton) these days. It’s like “the environment” is something that humankind has just discovered, like when Neil Armstrong discovered the moon back in the 1960s, or thereabouts, or when Columbus discovered America in 1819. Yeah, it seems that everyone is thinking for the first time about the consequences of their actions. Like what happens, for instance, when you decide to recycle your parking tickets, instead of throwing them in the garbage like you’re supposed to. I don’t often think about the consequences of my actions – just ask my mother – but then again, maybe that’s why I am, once again, recently divorced, owe $3,000 in unpaid parking tickets, and in jail. Talk about efficiency: I’m saving money on my grocery bills and heating bills. Say, I should be eligible for some kind of energy-saver rebate – or an educational grant like the one Don Cherry gets.

A lot of so-called environmental thinking has to do with the future: worries about the safety of the world’s beer supply, will there be enough for the party, etc. For a guy like me, a member of what kids call the “old school,” or what my former teachers refer to as the “not enough” school, it’s not easy thinking, let alone about the future. And that’s why I like living in Alberta. Here the future is something that won’t happen until later. And because it’s later, we don’t worry about it now. For us, planning ahead means burying the guns in the backyard. The neighbour’s backyard.

But you gotta have a plan of some sort – like “invade Iran” – and you gotta do your bit for the environment. And that’s why here at Mulder Industries (a division of Don’t Call Me, Call My Lawyer Inc.) we are implementing major changes in a grandstanding attempt to go green. They say a great deal of carbon is released into the atmosphere by people who drive their cars to work. Which is why I’ve stopped working. Although, since I never really started working, it’s proving to be quite a challenge. But conducting my mixed business out of my home (some real estate speculating, some stock market speculating, but mostly just speculating), or more specifically, doing business out of my bathtub, has been quite rewarding. Especially since I started cutting down on my water consumption, using beer in the tub and brushing my teeth with orange juice. I’m as drunk as when I failed my driver’s test, but certainly getting my Vitamin C.

There are a lot of initiatives out there with a green focus. You’ve got your green mutual funds, green energy, even green accounting. I’ve been doing my own form of green accounting for years, smudging dirt on the accounts payable. Even if you don’t go to an office, though, you can always run for office: the Green Party is always looking for new members. That said, the only green party I like is hosted by a guy I know who just got back from Nelson, B.C. Besides, politics isn’t for me. As my financial advisor Bob Dylan said recently, “I don’t expect politicians to solve anybody’s problems…. We’ve got to take the world by the horns and solve our own problems. The world owes us nothing.” (Speaking of which, I don’t intend to pay his bills, either.)

But it’s not enough to make green sacrifices on your own. You have to get other people thinking environmentally, too. And you have to give them incentives to do so. A couple of years ago in Alberta, when the price of natural gas went through the roof after deregulation, Premier Klein passed around cheques so people could still afford to leave their windows open in the winter. He also drunkenly threw money, some of which might have been green, at homeless people, telling them to get jobs. And that’s precisely the kind of thinking we need. Like any investment, if you put something in, you gotta get something out. Because the promise of a clean planet for your children, and fish not contaminated with mercury, isn’t enough. In Alberta, we care about the environment. We care so much, in fact, that we’re digging a hole in the earth’s surface big enough to be seen from space so a few people can get rich enough to buy pristine properties in B.C.

But with all this talk about the environment, I gotta ask: What has the environment done for me recently? Sure we get oxygen for free, without a bill or monthly payments (other than the ones I send my tenants), and clean water is better for showers than beer, but when I really think about it, when was the last time the environment sent me a birthday card, or recharged my iPod? I may not pay my taxes, but I’m sure someone out there does, and whoever that is, I hope they’re busy lobbying the government, or whoever it is that runs the Weather Network, to turn up the heat. I mean, I’m freezing in here. U

In the decade that I worked at a commercial greenhouse, I advanced through the ranks at a respectable pace. After a few summers of selling potted plants, I moved to supervising sales. Two years later I began growing plants. By the next season I was overseeing that. It was good work, full of sunshine, exercise and, of course, fresh flowers. At least this is how I remember it on summer days when a deadline has me shackled to my desk. But that’s the trouble with nostalgia: it tends to leave out stuff that’s best not forgotten. So ponder what coulda-been at your peril.

I pondered anyway. A year after quitting, I returned to Hole’s Greenhouses in St. Albert for a long overdue performance evaluation from my old bosses, personnel manager Dave Grice and co-owner Jim Hole, the son of Alberta’s late lieutenant-governor, Lois Hole. Sure, I’d left to write, but I’d also concluded that the higher rungs of the company’s org-chart were too crowded for one more hourly wage earner hoping for the stability of a salary. Not so, it turned out. But, as my ex-bosses explained a little too enthusiastically, I wasn’t on the fast-track to agri-biz stardom, anyway. “You had your comfort zone,” said Hole, “and you didn’t want to step outside of that.”

Hole and Grice agreed that I worked smart and hard and got along with co-workers – stuff that would really only impress my mom and dad. (Or Hole’s mom, who acknowledged my efforts over the years with a couple of her famous hugs.) “You had to be a top-notch grower,” said Grice, “and you were definitely on your way to being that.” That is, I got the job done, but I never relieved my managers of the thing they tend to dislike most: managing.

Workers striving for upper management must act like they’re running a business within a business, said Hole. Cut costs, reduce inefficiencies, boost sales, improve product, repair equipment, upgrade your training – basically, take ownership of problems – and you’re on your way towards a potentially more engaging, and more lucrative, job. “A lot of times,” Hole went on, “you create a position. The very act of stepping up and asking for it would give us a clear idea of your abilities. Frankly, it would blow us away if anyone would do that. We’d be shocked! Stunned!” Maybe just showing initiative would have done it, but doing it right, he pointedly added, “takes some thought, some really deep thought.”

Let this be a lesson, then: if you’ve struck a comfortable balance between smarts and ambition, getting the occasional promotion can be a simple matter of keeping down the weeds in your project portfolio so the boss tip-toes through nothing but tulips. But if you want a quicker ascent, a rosy performance record won’t cut it. You need a strategy.

Every aspect of your character, your actions and your appearance counts – use them to your advantage or change them. And keep in mind that, if the plum job you’re eyeing doesn’t seem likely to free up, you can always try to pitch a position of your own. But before taking on any of this, understand that career advancement starts with good old-fashioned, troublesome soul-searching.

Know thyself and you’ll know not only what you actually want to be, you’ll also recognize the time, energy, cash and, yes, deep thought necessary to get there.

As a professor of applied psychology in the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Education, Bryan Hiebert works mostly at studying work. He’s also president of the Canadian Career Development Foundation and an editor of the Journal of Career Development. All erudition aside, careers are practical matters, and Hiebert likes to treat them that way, without the padding of academia. “Few people set up their lives to be slobs, right?” he says. “But sometimes it happens because they don’t have a vision of the person they want to become.

“Probably outside a person’s choice of mate,” he adds, “career-related decisions are the second most important ones a person will make in their lifetime.” Anyone taking such choices lightly has ultimately “left their life satisfaction up to chance.”

Or, much worse, up to an employer.

I was attacked in February 2006. Some drugs went missing. I didn’t take them but they blamed me anyway. Someone was hired to come to my place with a baseball bat. I knew the guy. He hit me across the back, my legs, my head. I went to the hospital that night. I thought I was bleeding internally but I wasn’t. The doctors gave me Percocet. Basically they gave me the same thing I was addicted to. It was perfect. I lied to the doctor. I said I slipped and fell off a ladder at work.

I was born in Saskatoon, spent my summers at the lake and had an excellent childhood. As I got a little bit older, I started wrestling. I was Saskatchewan provincial champion, Saskatchewan Winter Games champion and placed fourth at the nationals, all in 1994. If I would have placed one higher at the nationals, I would’ve had a chance to go to the Olympics.

My grandfather on my mom’s side went to the Olympics twice, in 1948 and 1952, for speed skating. My grandfather on my dad’s side was drafted by the Detroit Red Wings in the late 1940s. Two of my cousins have been to the Olympics. My mom was Canadian women’s speed skating champion. There’s a lot of drive in my family and I guess that always weighed on my shoulders. I wanted to be the best. I took too much responsibility at too young an age.

I started framing in Saskatoon when I was 15. One of my dad’s friends was a homebuilder. He was a well-rounded carpenter so I learned the cabinet trade, doors, windows and framing. I wanted to be certified so I started my apprenticeship under a journeyman carpenter. I was smoking pot and drinking on a regular basis at that time. It was more or less from peer pressure. It wasn’t something I was particularly interested in but everyone seemed to be doing it.

Eventually I got a job at a construction company in Saskatoon that was looking for a truck driver. I said to myself, “I’m going to start out as a truck driver with the goal in mind to be a carpenter.” Within two months, I was working with the tools on the job. At 20, 21 years old, I was a foreman and worked my way up to a fourth-year apprentice carpenter. I was the youngest foreman the company ever had. At any given time, there could have been four or five people plus sub-trades under me on job sites. That was a lot of responsibility.

But I loved being on site with my tool belt on. And I was good at it. I knew what was behind the wall before I opened it up. I knew how it all fit together, from the foundation to the shingles. Out there on the spring and summer mornings, right through to fall and winter, just loving it – the smell of the spruce or whatever material you’re working with, it’s an addiction in itself. You become very attached to it. That smell reminds you of where you belong.

I was 22 when I started my own business, Burgess Construction. I was pretty much a one-man team. I’d do decks, flooring, finishing work, framing jobs, full commercial renovations. That’s when I started using more cocaine. It started with a couple of pills of ecstasy.

One of my friends brought ecstasy around and I ended up trying it and enjoying it. It’s easier to express yourself when you’re on it. It’s easier to get into the party. Cocaine was just the next step. After you do it, it opens up channels to the people around you. I ended up doing it again and again. It’s a big stress reliever. All your major concerns in life get thrown to the ground and you’re loving everything around you.

Within two months of starting my business, I moved to Calgary. I had some friends out there who were involved in finishing work and installing new kitchens. My parents had moved to the Okanagan Valley earlier that year to set up for their retirement, so I decided to make a move of my own. It was very overwhelming when I first got to Alberta. I was out of my environment. I had no connections. I started installing new kitchens for some pretty big developers. It went fairly well. We did good work. Then the cocaine really started to come on.

I wasn’t doing it too much in Saskatoon, maybe two or three days a week. I got to Calgary and some of my friends there were using too – all tradesmen, every one of them. It was a regular thing. You’d go out for a couple of drinks on a Monday or a Tuesday night and it was there. People didn’t really hide it. In a fast-paced environment where the city is really booming like that, a lot of people are making a lot of money real fast. They’re moving from other places and there’s that pressure from being in a new environment. Work-related stress will throw you off. People try to get rid of that somehow and one way is by self-medicating. Cocaine is the ultimate self-medication. It was for me, anyway.

About a year after being in Calgary, I decided to move out to the Okanagan. I did very well for the first month. I built kitchens for a big shop out of Penticton. My first job was a $25,000 custom built-in kitchen that went amazing. My life was back on track. Then I slipped. I went back to Calgary in 2004.

Little opportunities would come along. I had a chance to work in the Saddledome doing some fine-finishing on a custom box there. We redid one of the booths in all-maple wainscoting. That was one of the times I was sober. Man, that job went well. When I wasn’t high, my work was beautiful. I knew I had everything it took to be number one in any field I chose but I had this constant grip around the back of my neck that I couldn’t shake.

I loved the tools. I loved the people in the trades, such good people, such humble people. Most of the people I met weren’t from Calgary. They were from  little prairie towns. When you get to know these people, you feel at home with them. It was very comforting.

In Calgary, waking up in the morning on days when I didn’t use the night before, being out in the hustle and bustle of the city and the cars going by and the beautiful city – the vibrant, new, growing city – where there’s lots of money and lots of opportunity: I felt propelled to do something big, something amazing. But I couldn’t control my hands anymore. I couldn’t control my legs, my mind. I’d wake up every morning saying, “I’m not using today.” By six o’clock that night, I was feeling better and on my way to see my drug dealer.

In Grade 8, I joined an extracurricular social studies club called Project Business, designed to help young people learn about supply and demand economics. I signed up because Krista Copper was in it. She had brown feathered hair, eyes like a stunned deer, and wore a corduroy jacket buttoned right up to her chin, which gave her a look of impenetrability that I found alluring. We were to make peanut brittle and sell it at lunch hour, calculating the cost of the peanuts, sugar, molasses and labour time, and fixing a price that would recoup our costs or, even better, make a profit.

The club was divided into three competing groups. I made sure I was in Krista’s, and she set the strategy. The key, she said, was the quality of our peanut brittle. Her mom’s was awesome, so she’d get her mom to make it. We would charge the same price as everyone else, but ours would be better, so we’d sell more. Ours was indeed better, and we did sell more. We made more money, but we used twice as many peanuts, which were the most expensive ingredient. Our expenses were nearly double those of the other groups, and we made less money than everybody else. Krista was demoted from club president to treasurer and I joined flag football.

From a slave to ulterior motives to a career in the performing arts, I’ve spent the past 10 years cobbling together a viable existence by writing, performing and recording original music as Kris Demeanor, often with my Crack Band. Sure, under the auspices of making a respectable living, I have made halfhearted stabs at biology, architecture, horticulture, English literature, but none stirred in me a sustainable passion. Many people love music, and love to play it, but playing professionally requires a type of enthusiasm akin to mild but unrelenting panic. I liken it to navigating through the maze of mirrors at the Stampede as a child. It was confusing, frustrating, and everywhere was me. I would bash into the glass and cry, but suppress my sobs and get it together so dad wouldn’t have to rescue me. I’d go in again the next year.

Life as a touring musician is one of thrilling variety and profound uncertainty. I have been involved in theatre, film, public education, television and spoken word, putting as many fingers into as many pies as I can without feeling like a cheap huckster. Most artists, in their early years, and often throughout their careers, need “real” jobs to supplement their grand ideas. By real, I mean any job with a defined payment structure, with shifts of a set time frame. When the Crack Band and I play to drunken snowboarders at the Rose and Crown in Banff for $300 and nobody listens until an insufferably insistent guy crashes the stage and plays “American Pie” to grateful screams, we call it a paid rehearsal, a punch-the-clock gig. Sometimes, a great gig pays good money; it doesn’t feel like a real job when you’re backstage at a folk festival chatting with Bruce Cockburn in the port-a-let lineup.

Usually, though, it’s difficult to quantify where art meets making a living, or what is a satisfying experience as opposed to a perversely interesting one. Creating quality art sucks time and energy, and it takes years for the monetary payoff to come close to equaling the time and personal resources spent realizing the vision. An artist’s ongoing internal debate bats around many questions: How much do I need in order to live comfortably? Will CD sales and live shows pay the bills? Should I focus on publishing and write a cookie-cutter country hit? Learn a bunch of Neil Diamond songs and do corporate parties? If I do these things, am I still an artist? Who cares? Where is the romance in being an artist of unwavering integrity when Alberta Health sends the collection agency after you? Do I party because I’m a musician or did I become a musician because I like to party?

Most musicians I know are in a perpetual state of unease, continually revisiting these questions and revising our answers, knowing that we’ll be asked, at family parties, by old friends at bars, and by other artists, “So, can you survive doing just music?” We all want to look at them squarely and say, “Yes, that is all I do. I live humbly by some standards, but I stand before you, clearly surviving.”

Many artists have colourful “real job” histories, though not because they have a lot of interests. They love their art, and secondary loves such as cooking and bird watching don’t make any money. An artist’s catalogue of real jobs is unique because they take whatever outside work they can, only when they absolutely have to or when it’s convenient, jobs with flexible schedules, jobs devoid of deep responsibility.

By global standards, of course, we enjoy lives of ridiculous comfort and wealth (understanding this helps us through the droughts).

And, like every successful business, we’re helped by the supportive “teams” we’ve compiled: encouraging parents and spouses, understanding bandmates, the odd fan-turned-patron, a friend with some industry clout, the Canada Council. Still, it’s a tenuous existence, because not only are we trying to create decent art, we are also trying to invent our own job niches. The dangerous thing about saying goodbye to real jobs is that the more time passes without one, the more impossible it is to imagine ever getting one again. But then, the most dangerous animals are the hungriest.

Let me regress.