Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast

“It is a raccoon city that exists in the city of Toronto.” Raccoons cracking raccoon-proof compost bins, coyotes finding refuge in city neighbourhoods, and giant Pacific octopuses making homes in discarded refrigerators. These are just a few examples of wildlife adapting to urban life in extraordinary ways, while challenging our ideas about where nature belongs. On this episode of Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast, host David McGuffin welcomes epidemiologist and bestselling author Dr. Dan

“Emerging out of this darkness suddenly was the bow of Quest.” — John Geiger Nearly 400 metres beneath the Labrador Sea, John Geiger watched Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last ship emerge from the darkness. Two years after leading the expedition that discovered Quest, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society CEO returned aboard the research submersible Alvin to see the wreck with his own eyes. In this episode of Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast, Geiger joins host David McGuffin to discuss that

“We knew we had something that was ours and unique and different, and we figured we better shout it out loud.” - Alan Doyle For Alan Doyle, travelling the world has only strengthened the pull of home. Along the way, he takes us back to his childhood in Petty Harbour, where music filled the family home, cutting cod tongues earned him spending money, and singing Anne Murray songs bought him a later bedtime. Doyle reflects on Great Big Sea’s beginnings in the shadow of the cod moratorium, the ba

“I knew about bears in this abstract theoretical way, but I didn’t really know what it meant to live closely with them.” What happens when a mother black bear refuses to leave the hillside beneath your fire tower? For bestselling author Trina Moyles, the answer became the heart of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. While working at a fire tower in northern Alberta, Moyles found herself living in a black bear corridor, where a resident mother and her cubs returned to the nearby sl

“One of the main reasons we travel is to be different, hopefully better, versions of ourselves.” For Eric Weiner, travel has always been a way to pursue the big questions: What makes us happy, creative, wise, and fully alive? He has spent much of his career exploring the intersection of place and big ideas. A former NPR foreign correspondent, he reported from more than 30 countries before turning his attention to philosophical travel: journeys in search of happiness, faith, creativity, wisdom

“To be in a relationship with a place is a very complex and beautiful dynamic.” Bestselling author, explorer and master storyteller James Raffan returns to Explore to discuss his new book, Echo Maker: Craig Macdonald and the Lives That Produced One of Canada’s Most Significant Historical Maps. The book tells the remarkable story of Craig Macdonald, a quiet and determined ethno-geographer who spent decades travelling through the Temagami region of northern Ontario and learning from Teme-Augama