Bob Morrison is welcomed back to discuss the second half of the series on Water in Southern Alberta. The series began with discussions on irrigation history, resource extraction impacts, and water management, featuring experts like Professor Shannon Stunden Bower, David Mayhood, and Dr. Trisha Stadnik. This episode features Dr. Brad Stelfox, a scientist and thought leader, who groundbreaking work has influenced land management across Alberta and beyond, ensuring a balance between development and ecological integrity. Brad was also a guest on The Gravity Well podcast, Season 2, Episode 2 where we discussed The Harms of Coal Mining in Southern, Alberta.
Brad highlights the challenges of linking social, economic, and environmental models, emphasizing the need to understand trade-offs and prioritize sustainable land use. He discussed the degradation of natural capital in Alberta, particularly in the eastern lowlands and the foothills, due to excessive land use and the failure to account for environmental liabilities. The conversation also touched on the importance of the Eastern Slopes for water quality and quantity, advocating for careful land use management to preserve these critical areas.
The podcast concluded with a call for a shift in economic models to prioritize natural capital to ensure a sustainable future for Alberta’s landscapes.
Re-Introductions to Dr. Brad Stelfox and the Water in Southern Alberta Podcast
Jenny (00:00:05):
Welcome to the Gravity Well Podcast with me, Jenny Ami. I host the gravity well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty seven and Metis districts five and six. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples are created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature, and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide the Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of the gravity well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The Gravity Well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see and hear, remember to like and subscribe.
Good morning folks. I am very pleased to be welcoming back Bob Morrison to the studio. Bob has been working hard over the last few months to generate the second half of our series water in Southern Alberta. Much gratitude to you, Bob. Without you, this second half would not be happening. First of all, thank you for that.
Bob:
You’re welcome.
Jenny:
Yeah, I’m just going to quickly, we’ll run through where we’re at. We started this series in May of this year. We started with Professor Shannon Stunden Bower and special areas expert Jordan Christiansen. They discussed the history of irrigation with us. Then we discussed the impacts of resource extraction on water with limnologist, David Mayhood, Dr. Younes Alila, who’s a forestry expert and engineer and environmental law expert, expert Dave Unger. We learned about the Water Act and the water licence transfer system from Professor Arlene Kwasniak, a law professor, and Davin McIntosh, who’s a water transfer expert. We discussed the water cycle and modelling with Dr. Trisha Stadnik of the University of Calgary. We engaged with Watershed and Lake Stewardship current and former leaders, Mike Murray, Susan Ellis and Tim Romanow. We listened to Dryland, Irrigated, and Ranch land farmers, Dwight Popowich, Julian Vandenberg, and John Smith about the changes they’re seeing on the farming landscape.
And then finally, I was joined by Markham Hislop to have a conversation with Derek Connick about the impacts of climate change or water on insurance. We have come a long way, and now we’re in the second half where we’re helping to help unwind all of what we learned and take it forward. I’m very pleased to, and I recommend you please have a look at those seven episodes as we dive into these next ones. Now I’m pleased to invite to the stage Dr. Brad Stelfox, who I’ll lead with. Brad has for more than 35 years, Brad has been a driving force in reshaping how Albertans and the world understand cumulative effects of land use. A scientist, educator, and thought leader, Dr. Stelfox, has dedicated his career to helping policy makers, industry leaders, and communities make informed decisions about environmental sustainability. His groundbreaking work has influenced land management across Alberta and beyond ensuring a balance between development and ecological integrity. Brad was also a guest on The Gravity Well podcast for episode two this year where we discussed the harms of coal mining in Southern Alberta. Welcome back, Brad.
Brad:
Thank you very much, and thanks for the invitation. Good to talk to both of you, Bob and Jenny.
Jenny:
Great, it’s greatly appreciated, Brad, your episode has been very popular. People really resonated with the thought about being somebody who’s been working in water and land use for decades and suffering the consequences of the average person not paying attention to these vital things that we do. Thank you very much. I’m really pleased to hear more from you today. And with that, I’m going to let Bob lead us off with some questions for you. Thank you.
Bob:
Great. Thanks, Jenny. No, we were hoping to hear from Brad first in terms of his experiences.
Jenny:
Oh, yeah, go ahead. Bob would like you to lead us off with some of your experiences, please.
Brad:
Okay. Well, I’m Albertan, born in Edmonton, but grew up west of Edmonton on a small ranch northwest of Stony Plain. Yeah, my university background is primarily as a zoologist at U of A. And I had an opportunity after my undergrad to go to East Africa and look at land use, particularly livestock and wildlife in Kenya where I lived for several years, and also set up a university campus and taught there and then came back to Canada and where my wife and I raised a family, had an opportunity to go down to Jackson Hole and work at the Teton Science School in Grand Teton National Park, looking at environmental relationships dynamics, primarily environmental education where I taught from basically six year old’s to 96 year old’s. That was thoroughly enjoyable. We moved back to Canada and that’s where I started working with the provincial government for a few years, heading up the Wildlife Ecology Program, then what was called the Alberta Environmental Centre, and then branched out on my own, starting to build some of the early cumulative effects models which tried to look at how a collection of overlapping land uses were reshaping the landscape of Alberta and other provinces.
And that of course, led to some opportunities with my colleagues who really helped build some wonderful software to look at these relationships in countries like United States and Australia, parts of Europe, southeast Asia. That’s kept me busy over most of my career. Bob is looking at the interface between humans and their landscapes primarily through all the land uses that makes humans human, I guess.
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’ll just offer that I saw you speak in Bragg Creek where you were showing just that how you would put road use and agriculture use and oil and gas and et cetera, et cetera, into these models to help us see how they add together and how they can cause what I would call deconstructive interference on the landscape.
Brad:
Right? Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it. Yeah, there’s a lot going on and Albert’s a very busy place
Jenny:
For sure. Okay, go for it, Bob.
What are the gaps between different types of models generated?
Bob (00:07:24):
Okay, well let’s start off with modelling because you’ve done quite extensive mound of that. And there are economic models, there are water management models out there, there’s some, I gather environmental models in terms of what’s the impact of one thing or the other. We’re not doing well in some cases on political models in terms of how decisions should be made. Where are the gaps in terms of making all those models work together that you see?
Brad:
That’s a good question. I mean, I just say there’s just so many models out there and I think we as society, struggle with scale and how we relate these models together. There’s thousands of models that just deal with how water moves for the landscape or how wildlife walk through habitat or how people select the homes they live in or how our climate may change, whether it’s the next forecast or the next 12 hours or two weeks or next 18 decades. There’s an abundance of models out there. I think one of the historical problems that we as modellers have had is in linking effectively social, economic and environmental models together. And our particular focus with the work that I’ve done and with the colleagues that I’ve worked with is trying to help people understand at a strategic scale that humans and their land uses all create benefits. They create social benefits. It could be, okay if we have a commercial logging operation area, what does this mean to royalties and rents in that area that might help fund all sorts of infrastructure that’s critical to the community or just build a community of people that are making adequate money so that they can live together and have community. Those are examples very roughly of social benefits. Other people for any given area want to know how land uses create economic benefits. Again, the jobs, the royalties, the rents, how does this contribute to GDP?
And those things are critically important. And I think most probably of listeners have heard of tryout approaches that are trying to help people understand the social, the economic and environmental effects. What we’ve tried to do is a good strategic job of quantifying social dynamics, economic dynamics, but mainly try to focus on how do land uses affect natural capital or environmental variables. The landscape habitat, carbon in the soil, the wildlife themselves or populations, biodiversity water, both quality and quantity, and help people understand that all land uses, I guess without exception, create benefits, social and economic benefits. I don’t know of any exception to that. They also create liabilities. Where we think a lot of historic models may be struggle a little bit is that they don’t do a good job of highlighting the trade-offs, the liabilities. My personal belief is too many models that are used by industry and government are looking for win-win win scenarios.
We’re going to have all the force we sector logging and energy and mining and agriculture, whether it be livestock or crops and recreation settlements. And if we’re wise about it, we are not going to compromise water quality or water quantity or biodiversity or carbon. And I don’t know of any examples on earth historically where that’s the case. It’s all about trade offs and many governments, and I think the current administration in Alberta is basically spun a narrative that smart people with smart models can figure out how we can have it all and we can’t. Our modelling approach has been to help people understand that there are trade-offs and that Alberta or any other jurisdiction needs to figure out what their priorities are and to make hard decisions about where are we going to get our jobs from, where are we going to produce our food?
Where are we going to get our wood fiber from? How important is water? And if so, where are we going to get it from? Same with biodiversity. And instead what I’m seeing is a hyper exponential growth in almost all land uses and a narrative message from much of industry and certainly government that if we’re just careful about this, we can do it all and have it all, or in fact, we can’t. Any objective examination of the quality and quantity of water in Alberta today compared to when this place became a province in 1905 or biodiversity or soil carbon shows an absolutely profound loss of natural capital. Clearly we traded off a lot, and I think the rate at which we’re trading off what remains, what little remains is alarmingly fast. Yeah, just a few thoughts on modelling. Anyway, well
Jenny:
Now…
Bob:
Go ahead, Jenny.
Jenny:
Oh, I was just going to reflect back a little bit of what I heard. From what I’m seeing, and you and I have talked about, I’m a liability expert as well, and the first rule I’ve learned is we don’t talk about liability as much as possible. This is part of the problem is we’re not accounting for those genuine risks to a continued freshwater source if we continue to take more than the system can allow. That’s what I think you’re describing. Is that correct, Brad, that we are taking more from the system in Alberta that will allow for the water and biodiversity to recover? Is that a good summary?
Brad:
Yeah, land use, I have no problem with logging and mining and oil and gas and people and residential patterns and recreation. As long as we have people we’re going to have land use. The problem is the number of people that we have has grown quickly and the average significantly normal human, they’re per capita resource use. Just looking at the three of us compared to our parents or our grandparents or our great grandparents, the water, the carbon, the land, the electricity, our footprint is large compared to previous generations. The basic equation is number of people times per capita resource equals true effects. And as Jenny indicated clearly is with so much of the historical work we have, I think intentionally externalized natural capital, there is this trade off and we do not factor it in. And if we’re going to have people, we’re going to have land use, we will be using carbon, we will be using water where there will be losses of biodiversity, and those systems can support a certain amount, we could call out the interest, but we’re not taking water away at any sort of natural interest rate.
We are profoundly cutting into the capital. We’re literally choosing what this province has been around 120 years. I guess this year we have a profound loss in the capital of biodiversity. I think many Albertans would be amazed to know that pre-European times, if you just looked at mammals, they probably native mammals. That would be all mammals except for humans or pets and livestock that yeah, they’d probably, yeah, we’re not doing as well as we were say three, 400 years ago because three or 400 years ago, they were like 99.2% of all biomass or numbers. In Alberta, there were people, first nations and they had dogs.
Most people would say, yeah, we’re down, but we’re not down to 90% of, or 80 or 70 or 60 or 50 or 40 or 30 or 20. And a lot of people in Alberta would say, if you’ve got friends in Argentina or Germany, come over to Alberta. It’s this beautiful natural place. And maybe biodiversity or wildlife would be part of the attraction to bring them over. But we’re not down. It’s not like we have 90% of what we had and we’re not down at 30%. We’re not down at 20% of, we’re not even down at 10% today we’re maybe 4% of what we had pre-European. And the severely normal Albertan doesn’t get it. Part of it is shifting baselines because this stuff, we’ve been losing it at maybe one and a half percent per annum. Very few people effectively see these one and a half percent changes per annum.
And of course we have some biodiversity, maybe white-tailed deer or coyotes that are doing really well. But on mass, we just wiped out our native biodiversity and replaced it with humans and livestock and pets, and we’ve largely lost our natural capital and water, both quality and quantity. I mean, the water we have today is just unbelievably different. Qualitatively, many parents that want to throw their kids into creeks today, they get quite sick, especially in the southern half of the province and most of our creeks and the prairies, they’re just gone. I mean, they’ve been ploughed over and put into canals for irrigation. This goes back to what Jenny said is all land uses require the use of natural capital. We externalize it. We don’t factor it into long-term equations because for the most part, Albertans and their governments are, they’re me here now type of people. I’m an Albertan and most of my friends are Albertans. I love Albertans. But our actions tell us that we’re not really concerned about our kids or our grandkids. We’re concerned about ourselves, and we’re not concerned about regional landscapes, we’re concerned about where we live, and it’s a me here now type of mentality, which is fundamentally externalized natural capital. We have grown economically, unbelievably, we have very affluent people, but in a province that has been mined of most of its natural capital and all evidence is that we’re going to accelerate that rate.
Where are we in the most trouble with respect to land use?
Bob (00:18:34):
Well, most of us see natural capital and biodiversity and all those things. When we go to a park, we go out to the mountains, we go out to Banff, we go to our local park and walk around and say, oh, isn’t this wonderful? Where are in the southern part of the province? Where are we most in trouble? If you compare, say the mountains to the foothills, to the parkland areas we have to the prairies, where are we having the greatest problems from what you can see?
Brad:
Well, that’s a good question. I would suggest, I would think about it in terms of, let’s say if you’ve got a bank account full of natural capital, whether it be water quality or water quantity or biodiversity or soil carbon. In southern Alberta, there is a very noticeable gradient from west high elevation to east low elevation hard. I guess the good news is we’re not losing a lot in the eastern lowland parts because it’s already empty. There’s nothing to lose. Okay? If you have a bank account, you got a hundred pennies in it, and two weeks ago you ain’t gotten any more money in that bank account. I don’t think you’re worried about losing anything because nothing to lose. The biodiversity of the water quality, the water quantity in the lower eastern portions of Alberta is gone. I’m not too worried about losing a lot there.
The only way we could move is to talk about how we could reclaim it, and then people will point to an individual species of a bird or a mammal or reptile that’s doing reasonably well. And yeah, that’s true. But if you look across the board, the full communities, whether it be insects or birds, mammals, amphibians in these landscapes that have been heavily transformed by agriculture, water quality, water quantity, and biodiversity is basically gone. The ones that are at greatest risk right now, I would argue are the foothills and the mountains where we seem to have this attitude that we want to love them to death, we want to recreate in them. We’ve got this human population that’s growing at 2% and quite affluent, and they want to recreate in motorized and non-motorized ways. We have a protected areas network still quite small in many ways, larger than other people’s landscapes and others going from Waterton, Kananaskis, Banff, and Jasper, there’s places to go.
Those places are full of land use, but they’re primarily recreational. Although there’s a lot of residential too. If you think of places like Banff, Kananaskis has got a lot of residential. We have a bow wave of rural, residential and acreage owners like what I used to do or I used to live. These landscapes in many ways are critical. It comes back to us soon. One of the key topics of this interview, which is water. I dunno, what I think this province gets must be seven, 800 billion cubic meters of water fall on it every year, and about three quarters of that evaporates. It’s not available for land use, it’s back in the atmosphere. And we probably have 130 to 150 billion cubic meters that will flow in streams and rivers or slowly in our aquifers, and then we use some of that. But that water, which in all lands require water, we have a part of Alberta in the southwest part where it’s high in elevation and it’s colder, and a good chunk of that precipitation falls in the form of snow and it accumulates through these winter months.
It gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then in the spring it warms up and we have this fertile discharge of water, and that is critical to our fish, our wildlife, and also our land use. And southern Alberta, we’ve got logging and we’ve got agriculture, both crops and livestock and mining and oil and gas and transportation and residential. We’ve got it all and they all need water. And those east slopes are absolutely critical. And it seems like somehow Albertans have forgot their original conversation with the federal government when those resources transferred to us as a province, which everyone back then knew in the absence of all the amazing science we have today from the Pomeroy’s and Sauchyn’s and others of just how important these slopes are to water. Yeah, they’re there. It’s an important land use, just let ‘em be, let them do their dynamics, let them accumulate that water, leave the organics in the soil so that some of that water can be absorbed and replenish aquifers and allow them to deliver profound quantities of high quality water for downstream land uses. And now we are incrementally eroding that with every time we put more acreages or more roads or more people hiking that pee and poop in that landscape and more cattle.
But in architectural sense, we have all of this logging that is profoundly changing the hydrology of that area and its infiltration rates. We’re just treating these slopes as some sort of bank account we want to draw down in one generation, and we are drawing it down, it is being destroyed at a stunning rate at the same time, probably no more than maybe one point a half percent per year. Then if you’ve got a hundred pennies in your bank account and someone takes out one point a half, next year you’ve got 98.5, the average severely normal, Albertan doesn’t detect that, and on it goes, but over a few generations it’s all gone. And we’re mining it down so quickly right now, in my view anyway.
How can ranching be viable in a water limited Southern Alberta?
Bob:
And I know in terms of ranching, and you came from a ranch originally, that there are many ranchers who would say, yeah, we agree, but tell us what to do and make sure that we can still survive as ranchers. How do you somehow accomplish that with a land use that’s already established? How do you make sure that those folks can still be viable unless you’re going to kick them off the land and still be able to protect the environment in the way that they would like to protect it?
Brad:
Well, I think first you admit if you believe in an empirical world in science, that it’s not protected now. It’s not a matter of we need to protect it for something that’s coming. We’re already dealing with something that is being profoundly transformed. Your questions still bang on Bob. I think you need to recognize that that landscape can receive some land use. The first thing is, what should the east slopes before? I mean, maybe their destiny is we just log the heck out of them because we as Albertans can just accept completely damaged water quality. Okay, that’s a decision I guess, in a society if they want to make that decision. And others would say, well, no, it’s priority land use as oil and gas or cattle or recreation or coal. But right now the answer is we think it can sustain all of it and it can’t.
A blunt conversation like the Alberta Land Stewardship Act was designed to do, which is recognizing that we need landscape legislation that says you can’t do everything everywhere all the time, the time. You need to figure out what the priorities of the landscapes are. And of course, in the East slopes, and even Elsa said, that’s a great example, it’s for watershed protection. And then you could ask the question of what land uses can occur. If you did that, then I think the answer would be what land uses could be compatible with water quality and water quantity because there’s no part of Alberta that gives us more water quality and quantity than southwest Alberta. And then you could look at cattle and crops and logging and mining and rural residential in that context. If we’re losing it already, I think the first thing we need to do is stand back and say, we’re already in trouble. We have to start looking at reclaiming these landscapes, and we have to instead of growing, because all these land uses are growing, like logging is a land use that even though I think it’s over allocated, it’s growing. We’re finding ways…
Jenny:
At an accelerated, right? It’s accelerated growth, not just growing. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Keep going.
Brad:
It is, yeah. And we already have a bow wave of rural residents that are living up and down the east slopes, and that’s growing. And we have an oil and gas sector, and many people would like to see it grow. Coal mining would be an example. We could conceivably mine commercially valuable deposits of coal right up the east slopes. That’s an area that has been seriously entertained. As everyone in Alberta knows, in recreation, we could say, well, we need another 15 or 20 Canmore that be wonderful, and we could increase the number of livestock on it. If it were me, I would say what land uses would be compatible with water quality and quantity? Then those are different things. Some land uses agriculture is massive on the water use side. And I would say I’m quite impressed by many, not all, but many of the local ranchers who do a pretty good job of putting cattle on these foothill landscapes and keeping ‘em out of streams and keeping their densities low.
And they’re there and encouraging native grasses and the soil dynamics that let water infiltrate, but not all of ‘em. Many do. But those cattle, like the others in Alberta, I think we’ve got about four or 5 million head of cattle. They all go to feedlot systems. And those feedlots need, well, every cow needs to eat two and a half percent of its body weight per day. And they’re not getting that from feeding on any field. They’re in feedlots. They get that from literally tens of millions of hectares of cropland that are grown, much of it even on the irrigation side, which needs water. I’m a pretty big advocate of sustainable cattle ranching. I’m not a big advocate of feedlot systems, but our livestock system in Alberta is, I’d say entirely based on feedlots, at least in terms of number of animals that are processed well over 98% and tremendous water.
We have the cattle ranchers going, we need feedlots, we need good quality water, let’s not damage it upstream. I get that. But they’re by far the biggest users. And then of course, irrigated crops for humans too. That’s a lot of humans. I would be looking at what land uses can exist and more importantly, how to conduct them. And I think quickly you’d start looking at logging and forestry and say, well, first of all, I think we’d back up the eastern slopes in their forest. These are disturbance ecosystems. There’s nothing wrong with disturbance. Ever since glacial ice sheets retreated, what, 14,000 years ago, these systems have been kicked in the midsection regularly by fire, by insects, by floods, by droughts. There’s nothing wrong with disturbances, and we still have them. And because of climate change, we’re actually radically changing the intensity and the frequency of natural disturbances.
It’s now an anthropogenic system. That’s a problem in and of itself. But in addition to that, we have all these land uses, which are disturbances. The disturbances are additive. It’s not like we’ve removed natural disturbances and just put human made ones on. We are logging at a very high intensity. We need roads to get up there. It’s causing immense amount of sediment, which is going into our streams. Bigger streams, bigger streams, yet rivers and downstream, we are removing so much carbon, the amount of carbon that’s being able to decompose and maintain organics and soils is going down. We’re doing a poor job of holding and absorbing and replenishing that water into aquifers. Logging, there’s just too much of it. And we’re not conducting best management practices, even though the fourth sector and the government would say we are, I think there’s often a fairly good agreement as to what best management practices should be in terms of, for example, how many residual green trees should be left in cut blocks, how big cut blocks should be?
What is the rotation age? How far back from large creeks and rivers should we go before we log anything? Our practices in reality are different than the best management practices on paper. And then best management practices, I would say are essentially useless if industry doesn’t actually implement them. And if there isn’t an enforcement to monitor, then you don’t have a good system. We have a lot of logging, but when I look at it, it is not configured in a way that fundamentally respects the value of water. And I mean just the number of roads, the number of crossings, the number of hung culverts, the amount of sediment getting into it, the shift in reduction in our age class structure, and the changes in biodiversity. That’s just be an example of one land use that could be conducted in slopes, but I would say at far lower rates and with fundamentally different practices.
And the same with mining if you want mining, but why would you put mines at the headwaters, these water towers that everyone realizes nothing’s more important than water. Why would we want any land you said is going to interfere with the quality of water in these headwaters? And why would we let off highway vehicles up there? Why would we allow in municipal lands, acreage owners to build right on parent habitat? First of all, it’s a liability for them and floods. And secondly, those landscapes are critical to flood dynamics, and they need to be allowed to do their own thing. What I would suggest, Bob, is a bottom up by a physical strategy that recognizes these ecological processes and say, okay, how much disturbance can they take? What land uses could we fit in? And how much of them, and in the east slopes, I just can’t imagine where we’d be more careful with those discussions than there I would think.
Bob:
Well, wasn’t that the purpose of the Eastern Slopes policy back in the 1970s?
Brad:
Yeah,
What is the land’s carrying capacity and in what direction do we need to go?
Bob (00:34:33):
Okay, what’s our carrying capacity and where should things go?
Brad:
There were a bunch of thought leaders. I called ‘em the Lorne Fitch’s and Cheryl Bradley’s of the world who back then, of course, those two were part of those conversations and people could very clearly see the degradation in natural capital. It was occurring on e slopes. There was some very progressive encouraging discussion about the role of e slopes and that what we could do or couldn’t do. But at the same time, Alberta is a, for the most part, pretty right-leaning, economic driven. This is a province where we need to see our economy grow rapidly. Land uses need to expand so we can attract risk capital and we can get high profit margins. And I mean, just look at the land uses we have today in Alberta, whether it be forestry, energy, agriculture, transportation, residential recreation, or I don’t know, whatever.
Today they’re all, if you read their business plans of either industry or government, they’re all unacceptable today to their own sectors and why they’re all unacceptably too small. They all have to grow, and they’ve all experienced exponential growth, but they’re unacceptable. You look at their five or 10 or 20 year pounds, they all, no one says, we’re going to hold our own. We’re all going to grow. It was against that backdrop that those early discussions on the East Slope said, okay, we just can’t allow that to happen. But we’ve had a series of governments that said, we’re smarter than the rest of humans on earth. We can make it all. We can have our cake and eat it too. We can have win-win, win win, win win scenarios. Just because we’re so smart, we can put another 300,000 residential homes and right here habitat, and as long as we do it well, there won’t be a problem.
We can put another 15 coal mines into the headwaters of the East slope. And as long as they all adopt best managed practice, there’s no problem. We can put more cattle, we can mine these landscapes for gravel. We can have rural residential urban sprawl. It’s just, nothing’s going to be adversely affected because we’re just so damn smart. And the evidence suggests that there’s no truth to that at all. But it’s a great mantra, civilian norm, Albertan goes, yeah, that’s what being an Albertan is. We’re just smarter than everyone. And how else could I buy my fourth pickup unless this whole system continues to grow. The whole system is based on this insufferable, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow and solve at the expense of natural capital. If we can do that elsewhere, we can certainly do it for the East Slopes sickness.
Land Stewardship Laws (aka the Laws of Nature)
Jenny (00:37:26):
I’m wondering, Brad, if you can unpack a little bit, you touched on something that is obviously very close to my heart, which is the land use management programs. I would describe that work. I had a view of it when I was in the industry and we were looking at, I’ll say, I’ll be specific. We were looking at caribou habitats and we were looking at restoring those habitats by 2060. And part of the issue with those conversations I saw is that it’s very, what does that mean for humans? We hear this concept of species at risk, and I understand it to be that’s an indication of ecological health. And if those species are intact, then your ecological system is intact. That’s a very, I would say for the average Albertan, that’s not really something that is resonates with them. I’m going to share a short story. I was at the water and land conference for the Athabasca Fort Chippewan First Nation in September, and they were talking about indigenous land rights, like access to traditional ways of living. But the challenge I see when you talk about biodiversity losses, we’ve also had indigenous community losses as well. I look at, and I’m curious how you would describe this, Brad, because I look at all of us living in a basin should really think about having those traditional land access to those traditional land rights. Meaning if we don’t have caribou, then there isn’t a sustainable land, or sorry, a sustainable food system, let’s say, in our watershed.
And I would say the same thing for trout species. That’s another example of species at risk where, that to me is the purpose of those. And I think that’s often lost on people that when we talk about species at risk, we’re ultimately talking about the human species being at risk. And you already talked about how we are overstretched right now. We’re not in a position where we have this option to say, well, let’s just keep going. We are keeping going, but it’s going to lead to catastrophe, meaning we will have a breakdown in our water system. I’m thinking of, I’ll be specific around Lethbridge, we just heard Chris Spearman explain that we’ve got piped water a hundred meters around Lethbridge, the same thing in Edmonton since the spill that was experienced in Wabamun Lake and Two Hills all the way out to those areas.
That’s 150 kilometer radius around Edmonton that is sustained by Edmonton’s water system. These are the ways that we have taken more from the bank account than we can sustain, which will lead to catastrophe ultimately if we do not make restoration the center of our economy. Is that a fair summary of what you’re arguing? We need to look at these land uses and say, which are the things that need to cease and which are the things that we can sustain in a way that will serve us both locally? And I don’t even know if globally will be an option if we do let it break. I don’t know if you can sort of clarify what I said here in terms of how do we help people understand what it means to be restoring and what that looks like in terms of those difficult conversations.
Brad:
The Alberta Land Stewardship Act, and I can’t even remember when it came out, I want to say 15, 20 years ago, it seems like yesterday it was on the bus piece of legislation that was supposed to ride over top of all other types of legislation and crystallize precipitate the conversation, Jenny, you just talked about. And it started it. But I think once, and I saw a fair bit of appetite for it at the community level or for the severely normal Albertan. But I think once industry and government understood that that conversation would lead to, Hey, we have to stop growing the total amount of water. We take out the total number of cubic meters of wood. We harvest the total amount of cubic meters of natural gas or conventional or shale gas or whatever that we extract that there needs to be a limit maybe on our livestock population.
People started, some people said, well, you know what, this could mean that we need a limit on number of people. And everyone got, oh my God, who said that? It became a very awkward conversation and the initial efforts within the land use framework to do this work well and show the trade-offs were just politically, they’re just non palatable. And I also saw, and unfortunately I think I detected that people could have that conversation theoretically, but in their own watershed, and of course it’s another person, people Albertan say, when I’m in the watershed, there’s never been an Albertan’s ever got out of the watershed. We’re always in the watershed, should remind ourselves. But anyway, when you start talking about people’s individual watersheds, it could be the upper bow or it could be Red Deer or Athabasca, that there needs to be trade-offs in terms of growth opportunities, in terms of the primary resource sectors.
People became very quiet and would ask, well, what does this mean to the funds coming into my municipality or my job, or maybe even the performance of their investments in the stock market? It just reminded me in a very sobering way that this is a fundamentally difficult, maybe impossible conversation for humans. Only a very small fraction of them seem to be able to be willing to actually change their behaviour today to not only stop the growth of these land uses, but as Jenny was saying, how do we put money and effort and time into reclaiming them so that we might have streams in the future, which are the ones that our grandparents talked about putting their kids in or drinking water that is not treated chemically or physically or being able to see the suite of wildlife.
I’ll just say we’ve lost 96% of our native wildlife, native mammals and birds are very similar insects. We really don’t know. We’re sitting at with a grade of F minus right now. Maybe we want to reclaim it back to a C. Well, that would take tens of billions of dollars. And most people, they might think it’s a good idea in theory, but the effort and the money, they’re going, no, my primary concerns are the flame’s going to win tonight, and what kind of pizza am I going to order? More important things like that. People struggle with this conversation, immense that
How do we address the most damaged lands?
Bob (00:44:54):
Well, you’ve hit upon two things there that are very much interconnected. First of all, can people actually manage their land the way they probably should, at least in terms of their own self-interest and also in terms of the overall societal good? And the whole question of in floodplain management, they talk about a strategic retreat from floodplains that is, we’re already developed these floodplains. How do we somehow get the worst potential damaged areas out in terms of the land use? And I know that after the Calgary flood, the provincial government actually did go in and buy out some of the most threatened properties just so that we could at least reduce some of the impact. And you’ve hit upon this whole question of how do you get people to understand that and then be able to willingly talk about those non palatable at this point?
Brad:
Yeah.
Bob:
Well, that is what, are you enough of a sociologist as opposed to a zoologist to be able to answer that question?
Brad:
Well, I was one of those guys that had my house severely damaged by that flood living in Sunnyside in Calgary at the time. Isn’t it interesting, and I’ve heard estimates that that was the single most expensive catastrophe in the history of Alberta in terms of the total cost. Some people said it was 4 billion, I think it was 9 billion. Anyway, it was a major one, just inconvenienced a lot of people and destroyed a lot of floodplain infrastructure. And yeah, there’s some of it, maybe 2% that’s been removed since then. But isn’t it interesting after that event, I would bet anyone that for every house or piece of infrastructure that’s been removed from floodplains, and we’re not talking about Alberta, but just southern Alberta, I would say it’s a 10 to one ratio. We’re building 10 for every one we’ve reclaimed. That event has had no effect.
All you have to do is hop in a car and start driving up and down not only the main stem rivers, but the smaller trips on the elbow and Bragg Creek and Sheep Creek, and just look at all the new driveways and new well pads or cut block access roads that are going up and down riparian. I have seen no evidence of a reduction in the amount of infrastructure in the province of Alberta going into floodplains despite this teeny meanie, teeny little 8 billion flood that happened in Calgary once upon a time. Now that was, I’m trying to use hyperbole here, hopefully effectively, but that was an event some people should have heard about or experienced. Maybe they saw it in the news, but it was just way too small an event to get anyone interested in doing anything than try to mitigate it by saying the solution isn’t getting out of the floodplain. The solution is paying TransAlta to manage water volume so that they don’t release water or to build a big or dam face on the Glenmore or to have off river storage like SR one outside of Bragg Creek. The answer is to tame mother nature not to get our infrastructure out of the flood plane.
What will collapse look like?
Jenny (00:48:42):
Right? We’re still solving the infrastructure or over land use problem with more land use solutions.
One of the questions I have then, because like you said, we’re refusing to have this conversation, let’s put it that way. We’ve decided that we’re going to keep burning the flame at both ends and keep going with this. From your experience, from your knowledge, Brad, where do you think the areas will show up first? I’ll be specific. I look at any natural gas, oil sands, coal mining, gravel mine sites and know that they are at the worst quality for the highest damage to the ecology going forward. The cost to extract them is getting so expensive for the reward that it is just not valuable, add that the rest of the world is now rapidly moving into renewables, that demand is also falling as well. To me, those are some of the ways that I think that this conversation will be forced upon Albertans. Let’s say from your understanding of, as you were talking about from example feedlots, is that a place where you anticipate will be where we will see a breakdown? Can you say from, you talked about scale from a scale perspective, can you highlight the areas where you think Alberta might feel the pinch and be forced to move in a more restorative manner, if you will?
Brad:
I remain stunned that Albertans don’t respond to the signals they see, and we can pick on any land use, but Jenny, you just talked about feedlots. Let’s look at those. And it goes up and down year to year, decade to decade. But often we have around 4 million ahead of cattle, and we generally have, we’ve recently grown into Ford of approaching 5 million head of humans in this province too. But they outweigh us, I think probably six to one, and all our cattle with very rare exception go through feedlots. And on the provincial herd, about 25, 20 5%, about one out of every four cows or beef. Are you going to go into a feedlot in any given year? Okay, we’re processing one and a half million head per year in feedlots. That’s more cattle biomass than we have the whole weight of all humans in this province.
And those animals need good water. The ranching community and rightfully so, says, I’m really concerned about what’s going on upstream. It might be like, I don’t want coal mining happening because of selenium, and those are very legitimate concerns. But if anyone wants to just go out and look at the quality of water coming into feedlots and the quality of water leaving feedlots, you’d be stunned. It’s already, we’ve lost it. And that is especially in feedlot alley. And of course we’ve literally got tens of thousands of lots in Alberta, depending on their scale. Of course, we’ve got the big ones that can hold 20, 30,000 animals, but we’ve got so many smaller ones too. But the water quality that exits to the east moving downstream out of feedlots is just, in my view, horrible. And the watershed report cards tell us that, but they \say, you know what?
It’s holding its own or it hasn’t deteriorated. But I mean, if you’ve got a D minus, there’s not much lower. You can go in a report card, right? And the severely normal Albertan just accepts that. If I was from Saskatchewan, I might wonder why the water is not very good, and they should, and I think they do. But we already have this massive degradation of water quality, whether it be sediment or organics or pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, growth hormones. The whole cornucopia is there. Myself, I’d go, I’m pro livestock, I think we should have a livestock sector. I think we should have a lot of ranch gate or farm gate sale of cattle. I think we should significantly reduce the population. I don’t think it’s Alberta’s job to feed every human, but when you talk to the Alberta Cattle Commissions or Alberta beef producers are going to go, yeah, there’s 9 billion people on earth and the population’s growing.
We have a responsibility. And you walk out of that door and you go into the next door and there’s all the oil and gas people and say, well, they’ve got 8 billion people and we’re cooking nine and their per capita demand for hydrocarbons growing. We have a responsibility, an ethical, maybe even a religious responsibility to energize these people. And the same with coal, and the same with everything. And there’s 9 billion people, and I represent the tourism boards. I want them all visiting the headwaters of the bow every day because my goodness, our province is beautiful. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’d become wealthy, and of course it would be no adverse effect. And it goes on and on and on. The problem isn’t the land uses per se, it’s just the intensity and the amount and the province of Alberta hasn’t changed by a square centimeter in area. It’s the same province it was in 1905, but the land use has gone up by multiple orders of magnitude. It goes back that base equation, total number of people times per capita resource use. Whether it be water or distance travelled or carbon or food or oil and gas, it’s just we’re using, whether looking at Bob or Jenny or Brad, if we were average Albertans, we’re using probably seven or eight times as much resource per capita as our grandparents.
And the province hasn’t changed at all in size. Oh.
Bob:
Brad,
Brad:
I couldn’t hear you, Josh.
Bob:
Brad, in terms of the extensive experience you’ve had, where have you seen successes and in terms of people being willing to first of all talk about these non palatable and be able to actually do something about it?
Brad:
Well, I don’t think I have a very encouraging response to that important question where in my own experience where I’ve seen communities with tremendous commitment actually doing something would probably be the ole region of India, where I worked for a bit in an area that allowed all their land uses to grow, and particularly fueled by more water because they over the previous decades had discovered the ability to drill their aquifers. It was an area that was basically low intensity agriculture, sustainable been going on for probably thousands of years. And then foreign aid from Canada and Europe and the United States came in and said, you know what? If you guys could just start using borehole, you’d be much better off. Tens of thousands of bore holes go in, food production goes up, population explodes. Yeah, family size goes down, but youth survivorship explodes up. Populations are growing now at four and 5%.
Aquifers get drained, crops fail, people starve, but you can’t, when you’re starving, you’ll eat whatever’s around. They ate everything they could. Vegetation was gone, no vegetation. The soils got eroded and it went back to rock. And then it was in the aftermath of that, and others were invited into Look at that. And I saw people committed to doing something, and I thought, wow, I couldn’t imagine a more blunt signal. Basically everyone that anyone knew was dead, and my goodness, these people were committed. Now at this point, they’re dealing with rock. They wanted rock to turn into soil, and they wanted soil to turn into vegetation, and they thought vegetation could be eaten by humans, and then they are working. They have people out on the ground working with particles of soil just to try and move this particle here so that maybe a water droplet might stay there for six seconds, not two. I saw immense commitment. Now, I don’t think there’s any hyperbole in that narrative, but the point I’m trying to make is I’m stunned at how bad shit has to be before anyone seems to go beyond rhetoric and want to do something about it. But those people were actually serious.
Jenny:
Right. It’s fascinating. Like you said, how low do we have to go before we finally change? And yeah, it seems like we aren’t there yet, at least in Southern Alberta. We’re still going to play this game. But I do think that those pressures are coming, Brad, I don’t know how they’re accumulating, if you will. It is different pressures from different areas that will potentially lead to one of these catastrophes. Like you said, when we had our conversation about water transfers with Davin Macintosh, the one example he used where the fit for allocation system broke was in a feedlot. That was the precise example he used that there was not enough water to provide for them who were lower licence or lower ranking in the fit for model, and therefore the ranchers had to make those trade-offs to make sure that those feedlots were able to sustain themselves. I definitely think those types of situations are the things that we should be looking for as those big signals that something is needed rapidly. If you were
Brad:
Those scenarios, Jenny, I’d be curious how well are those scenarios embracing the full suite of what if scenarios on climate change and looking at the probability of intensity and duration of droughts? Because the ones that I’ve looked at are looking at some variances, but not the kind of variances that I think are reasonable relative to the work of Bill Donahue and David Schindler and Dave Shan. Tell us about the magnitude and intensity of droughts that we’re likely to experience. We’ve been unbelievably secure in our water for many decades, and that’s in a non climate change scenario. We have every good reason to expect that we’re going to be dealing with a whole lot less water in the future just because of natural dynamics. It should reappear plus all the climate change scenarios, and we’re building a demand complex in Southern Alberta that is highly unlikely to be met by the future water availability we’re going to encounter, I think.
Jenny:
Right.
Bob:
Go ahead.
Jenny:
I was just going to… Go ahead, Bob.
Bob:
We’ll be talking to Dave Sauchyn in a future podcast. Good. I think it’s next week, or maybe it’s this week. I don’t remember
Key Takeaways
Jenny (01:01:03):
Any closing comments that you wanted to offer, Bob, and then maybe a last question for Brad before we set him free. Thank you so much for joining us. Go ahead, Bob.
Brad:
Your welcome, thanks for the questions.
Bob:
Thank you, Brad. It’s been very, very informative. Very great discussion. Do you have any hope that we can get around this problem where we need to maybe even get into Degrowth rather than growth exponentially?
Brad:
I think I’d answer this question differently today than maybe 10 years, but I think unless Albertans and more broadly Canadians want to have a heart to heart about not only the benefits but the liabilities of growth economies, I don’t know how we rationalize the fact that economies need to grow and deal with environmental issues. I think we have to rethink our economic models if we want to see a pragmatically helpful discussion on how to manage natural capital because a continuous growth economy, I don’t see examples where it’s effectively internalizing natural capital, maybe in words, but not in practice,
Jenny:
Right? Yeah, I mean, we decided that growth and that the oil standard was our economic backbone, and we can decide that water is, and that could be our focus. It’s certainly something that I think we need to come to grips with as a country, and specifically as you said, as Albertans in Southern Alberta, we have to cherish those eastern slopes and start fighting for their restoration. To me, that is the 80 20 rule. If we can get after that and make sure that we are preserving that sacred area, then we have a hope of restoring the rest of it too. Is that true?
Brad:
I wouldn’t disagree. I think that would be a good per step, and I don’t think that’s it’s anti economy. It’s just like let’s define an economic model that actually makes sense and perhaps does a good job of allowing our great, great grandchildren to have a healthy lifestyle in a landscape that has some reasonable natural capital. Because right now, the prospects I think are indeed poor.
Jenny:
Yeah. Well, I am committed to making sure people understand this and moving us forward. Thank you so much for joining us today, Bob. Thank you, Bob. Sorry, Brad. Thank you, Bob, for getting this going for us. I’m really pleased to be back in conversations around water and I look forward to hearing the rest of them. Just lastly, please remember to and subscribe to The Gravity Well, make sure that these important conversations do have a broader reach for the precious time that Brad offered us today. Thank you so much, Brad, and have a good rest of your day everyone.
Brad:
You guys too. And thank you so much. Take care. Thanks.
