Season 1, Episode 22: When We Have No Water
with J. Bruce Smedley
Featuring Bruce Smedley, a chemical engineer with extensive experience in industry, government, and banking, this discussion highlights the urgent need for an integrated water resource preservation and restoration agency that is independent, apolitical, interdisciplinary, intercultural, and autonomous. This agency would be responsible for comprehensive data collection, scenario modeling, and real-time communication to address water shortages, climate change impacts, and resource conflicts. The conversation emphasizes the importance of accountability, public awareness, and sustainable practices, urging a shift from traditional infrastructure solutions to innovative, ecosystem-based approaches. The episode calls for immediate action and collaboration among government, industry, and communities to ensure long-term water security and environmental sustainability.
Alex:
Welcome to The Gravity Well, where you break down heavy ideas in the small buckets you can handle. Your mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas, through conversation and process. Together, you and your community will face your dilemmas and make the world a better place for everyone.
Jenny:
In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I am a settler on stolen Blackfoot Treaty 7 Territory and Métis Districts 5 and 6 lands. I take reconciling action by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life or community. A healthy living-relationship with each other and the earth is our guide.
I’m thrilled to have Bruce Smedley here again. Bruce is with us today to talk about a letter that he wrote to the government calling for an organized, independent, apolitical, interdisciplinary, intercultural, autonomous group of people to help us do some future casting with respect to water.
We’re going to get into what has happened in terms of the government’s effort in water and then we’re going to talk about some recommendations that Bruce made, Bruce, myself and others made, and we’ll talk about what the Auditor General has and the School of Public Policy has said about [the government’s actions]. That’s what we’re hoping to cover today.
To give you a little bit of background on Bruce, and we’re not going to spend too much time in here, Bruce has a master’s and bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He studied in both British Columbia and Alberta. He has 50 years of industry, government and bank experience, which is a trifecta, in both the public and private sectors.
I am grateful to know Bruce through the 4C group, our Concerned Calgarians on Climate Change group, that meets Tuesday mornings to basically help support each other in our learning and our attempt to build solidarity in these really important issues. This is a call for an Integrated Water Resource Preservation Restoration Agency. I’m really grateful to you for doing that, Bruce, and thank you for your time tonight. Is there anything in your introduction that you’d like to add on or some other background that you’d like us to know about you before we roll?
Bruce: No, I think that covers it off. I would just add that as a chemical engineer, water and carbon are probably the two items that come up most in all of my work. And it doesn’t matter which industry you’re actually working in, it’s either one or the other that’s so…
Jenny: To me, they’re one and the same. They can’t be separated, right?
Bruce: Yeah, and everything humans do essentially involves water in one respect or another and the requirement for water or the use of water in the process.
Jenny: I bet.
Bruce:
My background has been various industry processes around the world and commenting on the relationship between the process that’s being proposed or built or running and how that relates to the community, the culture and the environment that it’s actually placed in. So I see my role as always been the integration of the industry within the society or the culture. And then in the context of doing that on every continent over the last 50 years, it’s given me quite a background in how these processes might unfold and what they might ultimately achieve.
Jenny: Absolutely.
Alex: Have you found that based on your field experience throughout that time, you discovered that the only way to actually get these issues somewhat resolved is to remain apolitical and just focus on the tasks at hand?
Bruce: Yeah, I tend to be apolitical. Politics is a bureaucracy that is different in every culture and every set of circumstances. So I mean, in all the cultures I’ve been in, in China or Indonesia or Thailand or North America for that matter, even in various provinces in Canada, the politics pretty much I can leave out of the process other than to include it as a constraint to getting things done. So I have to try to understand it so that I can understand how things can be moved ahead and or modified or fixed or whatever.
Jenny:
Yes. My experience with you, Bruce, is that you’re very thorough, focused on data and information from real people and who are impacted. All those great questions that come with thoughtful decision making. I’m just so pleased to have you here to talk about this big issue.
Outlining Alberta’s Water Crisis and Government Inaction
Jenny: Let’s back up a little bit. Let’s talk about what’s going on in Alberta. We have a drought that started several years ago. We are, you know, in this in the fall last year, we really saw water levels drop to a scary level. There were four communities in southern Alberta that didn’t have access to water. They had to have their water truck to them. And we have a, you know, a government that looked at this issue and decided to do some modeling mostly focused in southern Alberta where there was a crisis of water in southern Alberta.
The [Alberta] Auditor General (OAG) did an analysis of the work that the province has done. The OAG highlights the shortcomings [of the province’s work]:
They’re not modeling the whole province.
There are no conservation objectives in most of the basins. No expectation of actually trying to conserve water, no mandate from each of the municipalities, nothing to that effect. They don’t know even if the existing water conservations are objectives are working. So the ones that they do have, they’re not sure if they’re actually helping us conserve water.
There’s a lack of a robust process to monitor the water pressure, to assess risk and decide when water conservation objectives are needed. So we’re not even looking at when we should trigger these things.
There has there’s an ineffective process to approach licenses and monitoring compliance. So essentially saying there’s a really poor compliance enforcement.
And we have an example from that from one of our guests, Dixon Hammond, back in episode eight, he was telling us that an inspector came to look for his creek and they came back and said, “it’s dry due to climate change.” But it turned out that they didn’t even know where the creek was. He said, you missed it. It’s actually five miles up. And so their report was wrong and they didn’t want to change it. You know, so these are, these are some of the real life issues that we’re seeing on the ground with this.
Some of the recommendations [the OAG] had was to:
Establish a process to identify when to develop and assess and update water conservation objectives. So I like that. I would add that there’s still no mention of restoration. You know, we still are in a deficit, right.
Improve licensing and compliance monitoring process. So to actually know where water is and where it’s going and who’s using it for what. And then the last suggestion they had was to publicly report relevant and reliable information on managing surface water. So that’s one of the big gaps in this that I know from being on the watershed stewardship council coordinating meeting or council, excuse me, is that the, there is no surface water analysis happening. The only analysis is happening in creeks and rivers and streams. So it’s not a full scope and those are where the changes are going to happen most.
Bruce: Yeah.
Jenny: Do you want to add to that, Bruce? Is there more?
Bruce:
My letter addresses the big picture in a sense, going up to 10,000 feet and having a look at what’s going on. And I think what I’m seeing here is that there’s no one looking at the river basin in its entirety and no one’s really looking at the future prospects for the river’s ability to actually supply water in the future.
We’re entering a crisis here in the sense that we’re trying to allocate water along the river system, but we don’t even know we’re going to have the water there to be able to allocate it. And this comes about primarily because of the circumstances we’re in. In this century, in terms of climate change and unpredictable weather patterns. We’re getting too much moisture because of the heat, we’re getting dry spells, we get droughts, we don’t know where they’re going to be in the province or to what extent. And we’re getting an increased rate at which the glaciers are melting.
We have to factor in the fact that we’re not going to have later spring water in the system at all. And then we talk about making changes to the river system and whether we’re going to build dams or not dams or whether we’re going to reallocate the water around different ownerships and that. And, you know, none of that seems to be coordinated with what we should be expecting in the future. So that’s the kind of perspective I’d like to see.
You were mentioning the OAG coming back and talking about the data availability. When I looked at some of these issues in, for instance, mining in the eastern United States. The problem was that [many] samples were taken in the wrong places or just weren’t taken from places that were indicative of the actual pollution that was happening or the actual water flows or anything else. All of that science needs to be sort of working together.
Jenny:
Yes, and being looked to and integrated. So we’re meeting regularly with communities affected by gravel, which is in one of your statements here. You talk about gravel, sand and gravel extraction need to be considered, as well. But in that group, we have people that have wells that are dry and the recommendation from the province is to truck it in. The [Alberta Health Services] AHS says that’s not a long-term solution to water management because, of course, that trucked water is coming from another place.
What you’re saying, Bruce, and I completely agree is we’re not asking if are we going to have less of in the future? Right now we’re looking at this is what we have and this is the allocation. That’s not enough. We need to be looking at this is what we have. This is what is potentially going to stop coming. Like you said, when the glaciers go, if we’re not reversing this bus, then we’re going to have less inflow into the system. And the bigger thing, which we haven’t talked on, touched on is we’re just, our border doesn’t stop this water.
You know, we are at the heart of this issue. We’re the taps for, you know, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and down to the Mississippi. So what we, what decisions we make are going to impact these areas hugely, as well. Anyway, I’ll stop there. Do you agree or anything [more] around that?
Bruce:
I pretty much agree with what you’re saying entirely. I may have framed it a little bit different in the sense of this relationship between what we can, what we can estimate is going to happen and what I call a new perspective on the water issue in the sense of being able to appreciate how quickly it’s going to change on us in the next few years, whether or not we want to sustain our reliability of water.
Right now it should be sort of 98% guaranteed that we’re going to get water for the kind of applications we want to use it for. And then the administration and bureaucracy that’s going behind the background and sort of making sure that we have that reliability in the long term, that I’m very, very concerned about that not being in place.
Jenny:
Yes, agreed that we need a structure in place that’s very open to the public looking and measuring forward so that people can understand the implications of the decisions we’re making today. Right. It’s just, it’s not even a part of the equation right now. The models that they are using, and I know this from being at the Red Deer River Watershed Council meeting, assume water in equals water out. They’re assuming that there isn’t evapotranspiration from the heat loss.
There’s big gaps, not enough eyes on this, not enough dispersed effort. So we can start getting into that. But before we do, I can touch a little bit on the School of Public Policy.
Alex:
I think you guys both touched on something profoundly important in the sense that one of the things that I’ve noticed that bureaucracy consistently does. It stifles proactive measures specifically with regards to proactive infrastructure modification in order to not only maintain surface water preservation, but also groundwater reclamation. If we reduce the water table levels to the point where the ground can no longer absorb the surface water, we end up being in real trouble. And it can kind of exacerbate these droughts.
In terms of regenerative farming or field practices, I think that plays an important role in maintaining the water table so that the reserves can be maintained. I think there’s actually a lot of job opportunities in those types of projects and they’re not actually even that high tech. You know, you can plant wetlands, you can dig crescent moons and plant seeds, you can do all sorts of things that are actually low tech, labor intensive, but low tech. And they could help contribute to maintaining that water table.
I think based on what I’ve read on your research and your experience so far, based on the research that Jenny’s been doing, her activism, I think these need to be multipronged approaches and I think we need to galvanize multiple different departments, not only governments, but NGOs and private sector investors to sort of exercise the fundamental understanding that the reality of providing water for millions of people is of the utmost priority. And if we’re lackadaisical about it and we kick the can down the road, we may run out and people can only survive for three days without water. That’s just biology. I think we should actually be a lot more proactive about trying to get to the bottom of this before it’s too late. Proactive rather than reactive. That’s my contribution.
Water is More Valuable than Gold
Bruce:
Well, I’ve been looking at some of the articles coming out of Germany and South Africa, and they’re talking about water being more valuable than gold. I think we need to take that kind of approach to it. The other thing is that what you’re saying there, Alex, I’m not sure that there’s planning for how we develop this province related at all to the water availability. For instance, the City of Calgary wants to grow and yet we’re not even convinced that this is where the City of Calgary should be. You know, we maybe should be growing in Canmore, not in downtown on the Bow River here, because we just don’t know what the long-term availability of water is going to be here.
For instance, we’re approving a lot of developments up towards Banff and Canmore. Whether those developments should go ahead on the basis of the water that will never get to Saskatchewan, I don’t really know. We have to answer these kinds of questions. That was the other aspect of what I was looking for from this province with some indication that they’re doing modelling, river basin modeling, which is all of the relationship between the rainfall that comes, whether the aquifers are being filled up and whether or not the usage is meeting the supply and all of those aspects. Plus the social aspects of irrigation water for fields versus urban water uses versus recreational water uses. We don’t even factor in the ducks or the birds, or the fish for that matter.
I’m concerned that we’re not putting this science together at the level that we need to be able to appreciate what’s happening to our own environment. I have to support the fact that there’s a lot of very competent people in Alberta that can look at this issue. I think they need some direction and financing from the provincial government to pull this together. I don’t like it split into all these river basins and everybody doing their own thing. And there’s no comprehensive planning going on in the province as near as I can see. I’d like to see it be an agency with some accountability. Not just agreement amongst friends or different groups along the river basin here, committees. We need somebody that is going to be accountable to what’s said and done and we don’t have that right now.
Jenny:
Yeah, this is a really important point. I attend these watershed council meetings and they are allowed to advise, but they are not able to say no. For example, I’ll be specific. The Bow River dam, this proposed alternate dam or to expand the ghost dam. Number one, we don’t even know if we need that expansion. We did expansion work downtown Calgary to mitigate for this. Like you said, Bruce, we don’t even know if we’re going to have water in Calgary, let alone do we need [a dam]? And they are not investing in the natural capital in our Eastern Slopes. Starting to restore the Eastern slopes, meaning getting coal mining sites, roads, oil and gas sites out of the way and restoring that forest could have a much greater stability in terms of our water, as Alex brought forward, storage capacity for decades rather than building another [dam]. None of the watershed council members would recommend a dam to mitigate flood or drought. Infrastructure is not a solution that any scientist would propose. And yet it’s the only lens that we’re looking at things in instead of backing up and doing this properly.
The only other thing I wanted to add before we get into your letter is Alex helped me think of this is you were talking about where are we testing versus are we testing in the right places? It came into my view from one of these watershed council meetings: if we’re not testing wells, then our likelihood of seeing contamination goes way down. Contamination generally is heavy; you’ll see it in wells. You’re not going to necessarily see it on the surface. We’re doing a lot of the sample testing in rivers. I’m not suggesting that is an important work. It absolutely is. But we need to marry that with the well information. And these landowners are seeing both contamination and dry wells. We need that to be in my view to be sampled everywhere. Anyone who has one that would be great if they were taking regular samples.
What Is Missing from the Water Strategy
Jenny:
The one statement I captured from the School of Public Policy summary is that they want to superimpose climate change in this modeling and they want to have regular and robust analysis that’s open to the public. Was there anything from them specifically that you wanted to highlight?
Bruce:
Accountability is one thing that we are lacking. Who is going to take on this accountability? Who’s going to be the agency responsible? I mean, you know, this is what they’re finding in South Africa, that everybody’s doing a great job, but nobody’s accountable. And so [change is] not happening. There isn’t the money to fix what needs to be fixed when it needs to be fixed because nobody’s there to make those decisions and being accountable for them.
Jenny: Yeah.
Bruce: There’s lots of sort of little bits and pieces here everywhere. The urgency of this problem doesn’t seem to be stated anywhere in any of these government reviews. How quickly the weather is changing and how extreme it’s changing on both ends. And if you just want to look at the weather patterns in the United States this summer. They’ve got nothing but floods and tornadoes and hurricanes. The financial damage associated with that is massive compared to being ready for it or aware of it or anything.
And then and then we don’t have a contingency plan. Look at the city of Calgary. We’ve got this question of a pipe failing and half the city doesn’t get water. Why is it not designed into the process in the first, you know, there is redundancy there.
Jenny: Right.
Alex:
I may have an answer for that. The pipe was designed and installed 49 years ago. Anyone who made the promise that it was a hundred year pipe is dead. There’s no accountability when it fails. These are the kind of built in redundancies, the can kicking that we tend to see a lot of. I’m younger than you, but I’ve seen enough of this, enough of these built in redundancies to know that by the time something fails, like no one who is directly responsible for it is going to be held accountable. And it just keeps going that way.
Bruce:
The City of Atlanta, Georgia, I think they have the same pipe and they just took it all out and put new stuff in. There is a history of that pipe that’s that’s out there. Somebody’s watching for it.
Jenny:
Well, and this is just it. We saw a failure in the Milk River on the border there. Same timing. It’s systemic, right? This is likely pipe that’s all across [North America]. We know that the city said 50 percent of the pipe is of this age and in good condition. Well, if that was in good condition, what does that say about the rest of the pipe? There are many issues, as my husband says, as an emergency responder, “it’s not one thing that causes a crisis. It’s many things all at once.”
You’re right. We have compounding issues. We talk a lot, in 4C, how we’re developing oil and gas, which uses water. We’re using we’re developing new new communities rather than building within the city, which uses more water. We’re doing more gravel in more sensitive areas, which uses more water. We’re moving in the wrong direction. We’re using more water in in knowing that we have a shortage that’s coming at us in the future.
Bruce:
Yeah, that’s that’s really what my letter is about to the government is that issue of what I what I would have been suggesting is is in the last 20 years, we were starting to get the mathematics of complex systems and modeling and our ability to actually address a lot of those interrelated factors and get some models built. There’s also been a lot of work done throughout the world. I know MIT and places like that, even the University of Saskatchewan. They’ve come up with some great models on sort of some of these river basins. And those things need to be checked against the reality of what’s really there. The reality in the sense that if you clear cut a certain area, that area isn’t as the model might predict. It’s got to be in real-time here. Then you you work on complex models that match and mirror the circumstances you’re seeing in the field. And then you throw in variables and do a risk analysis on the variables to see where the whole system can fail or not meet the recovery or the supply demand scenario or whatever.
That takes an institution that should be funded and it should probably be associated with one of the universities in the province or something like that, where there’s some serious people can come and work at this issue. And that’s really what my what this agency that I’m proposing should be doing, which I’m asking the government to consider is to look at the science and the advances we’ve made in complex theory and AI and the rest of it and, you know, use it to our advantage, embracing it. This mathematics was just a Nobel Peace Prize in science, in 2021 or 22. It’s that new that we and it’s it’s well founded and it’s showing up all over the place now.
Alex:
If we look at Calgary and urban sprawl, for instance, we have 5000 kilometers of pipe just within the 780 square kilometers of Calgary sprawl that we have to maintain. That’s a lot of infrastructure maintenance, right? So the scale, like when we start looking at metrics of scale and how the water is delivered or not, that it can help to put things into perspective. I think in some cases, at least based on my analysis, a lot of people have difficulty understanding the metrics of scale when it comes to that. So I try and come up with a metaphor. I think of the human body and a circulatory system.
The main feeder line is your abdominal aorta. It’s about as thick as your thumb. But it delivers the blood to the femoral arteries, all your major arteries. And then from those arteries goes to capillaries. And the capillaries are like the tap in your house. And the capillaries make up the most of that circulatory system. But there’s a blockage within any of the chain, like the main feeder line.
As a first responder, it would be considered a triple alarm, an abdominal aorta aneurysm. It’s extreme. In terms of maintaining the flow of that venal system, right, it’s really important to recognize that any obstructions within how that system operates can create major, major, major complications.
We need to consider which basins are going to be able to be reinforced and hold more water. And then what type of landscaping can be done or wetland projects can be performed so that we can maintain a healthy water table. And as Jenny was saying, remove coal mining operations away from basins, away from groundwater wells, away from these other projects, energy projects that are going on. And then coupled with that, using the agency that you’re proposing, to sample all these different locations honestly and apolitically. We got to ask who’s sponsoring the sampling right now and why is it biased?
Bruce:
I’m proposing an agency like this as a way to address this issue of the cost effectiveness of having some planning here. We need to be able to decide going forward what we’re going to actually invest our dollars in. We often know whether it’s time to take certain things that have been done in the past and take them out of service as much as maintain them. I mean, we can advance different, but unless we have some basis on which we can make those decisions, we’re just putting together a lot of pieces and your circulatory system is going to fall apart or fail or we may have to amputate Lethbridge and Canmore or something.
Jenny:
The National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, they hosted a discussion a couple months ago talking about deciding whether or not you stand up a community again after a weather event, an extreme weather event. We need to be asking these questions. You’re absolutely right, Bruce. You and I have talked about this in our 4C meeting, we tell AI these are the variables we need to know locally and this is what we’re looking for going forward. If we did that in each area, then we would have an amazing way to see the changes because we’d be measuring the same things in the same way across, let’s start with Alberta, but then of course across Canada and across the bioregion, right? Not stopping at the borders.
Bruce:
Right. But we need that complex system model before we can ask the AI to find the answer. You know what I mean?
Jenny: Right.
Bruce:
We need to kind of put the data set together in such a way that we can answer the questions we’re going to have to answer going forward.
Jenny:
For sure. And this is where I get excited as somebody who loves multivariable analysis. The key is we need to find out all of those variables and feed the machine the wise stuff. So let’s get into your letter.
Breakdown of the Proposed Water Modelling Agency
Jenny:
I’m just going to tee up because it made me, it was reminiscent of the conversation I had with Alex at the doors, which was we’re in the Apollo 11 moment. I used to say we were in the Apollo 13 moment and Alex corrected me. What you’re saying, Bruce, is we need that reverse analysis happening right now. We need to look at when this happens, what are we going to do? When that happens, what are we going to do? If these things happen in combination, what are we going to do?
That’s what I understand you’re trying to build with this agency. And I want to reiterate with accountability, we need to understand who is responsible in all of this. And it’s got to be stakeholders first and foremost in my view. Let’s talk about the pieces, you have terms of reference. Can you talk a little bit about your terms of reference?
Bruce:
What we’ve been talking here is coherent social planning and interdisciplinary approach to this. Because water is involved in everything we do in society, we have to get the industry [on board]. We have to get the amount of water oil companies use, the water that goes on the fields, the fish, everything that tested. It’s got to be that kind of comprehensive analysis, if you will.
We want to look at this whole issue of how the weather is changing and how violently those changes could be and how erratic those changes could be. I mean, we’re getting rainfall, but if we don’t get the rainfall in the same month that historically we’ve had, we’re starting to affect the whole biosystem. I see in the southern United States, they’re getting mangrove trees moving up the shoreline and moving north because the climate has changed so much. You’re going to see all of these kinds of things that you haven’t even really anticipated right now. That’s that aspect of it.
The scope of work is the intake, withdrawal, and loss of every drop of water. And that water scenario goes from our expectation that we’re going to get rainfall on the mountains, on the Eastern Slopes, that we will be able to store some of it in the snowfields up there for part of the year, that the ice fields are disappearing and they won’t be there in the long term. Plus evaporation that’s coming off the forests. By the time we actually get water in the river, we get about 25 percent of what actually falls as moisture. We can see a lot of clouds go by, but we don’t tend to get a lot of moisture in the river system that we can actually functionally utilize and redirect and do what we need to. There’s a lot of water out there that we’ve got to get much better at preserving and controlling.
Jenny:
And one of the mechanisms I think of in this, Bruce, and it’s hand in hand with the work that Colin and Alex has been involved in as well, is this idea of using the land use agreements, the cumulative impact land use agreements. Those talk about all of the industries, all of the players in the area, all of the stakeholders and including the wildlife. They include Species at Risk and include all of those natural capital pieces. I think that’s a good way to focus the work. And, I totally agree that all of the businesses need to be involved activities. And to Alex’s point, we don’t even really have a plan for local food systems yet. So we need to have a future forward plan with this water that’s different as well. Our use needs to change.
Bruce:
That’s another characteristic here is data collection and information, you know, consistent with the scope of the modeling requirements. I mean, we’ve got to find the data. Scenario modeling and analysis, and that goes towards extreme weather, financial and institutional risks. Government and public response, input, real time communications about whether we can do this or can’t do that. And then questions asked of the model relative to, you know, our sustaining food or health, whether the quality of the water is going to be, whether it’s safe to be and how we deal with the water from a recreational point of view and all the rest, the ecosystem aspects of it and long term sustainability.
And then agency accountability and communications with the public and public awareness. It might our ability to sort of phone up someone and say, look, the dam’s being breached. Can you come and deal with it? And then finally, I really talk about an appreciation of the urgency and finally government and industry funding of this particular scenario and putting this whole agency together. So that’s what’s in my letter.
Complex Decision Making
Jenny:
It’s great, Bruce, it covers so much. And when you talk about the forecast modeling, to me, this is a big switch. We’re no longer in a place where we can rely on what , we now need to be focused on this future casting rather than forecasting what we think we have. It’s a behavioral switch to acquire.
Alex and I took this complex decision making course in order to have this conversation like the host of these conversations. So can you speak a little bit about the work itself? I’ve taken three complex decision making courses now. To me, it isn’t necessarily complicated for people to to take on. Like I just want to make sure that we’re not people thinking that’s for somebody else. That’s for somebody who’s like, you know, a Ph.D. and this and that. This is really just thinking about problems differently. Correct?
Bruce:
Yeah, it’s like it’s like all things that you want to characterize. It comes down to the fact that if there’s these this ability to understand what the situation that you’re in and you have the opportunity to use something like complex modeling, there’s four or five different kinds of approaches to complex modeling. And and you know, you find the one that’s suitable for this particular type of application. You put together the data set that you can you could find. You you make assumptions about the other data sets. You do an analysis of how how how substantial or how credible your model actually is with the information that you have. And then you fill in the gaps to make your model more robust. It’s just a process, it’s purely an academic process. You have you have the people in Alberta that can take that kind of task on and deal with it. You have to focus them in a place to make make that institution exist.
This is this agency, fund it and fund it for 20 years, not fund it on the next political cycle. You have to fund it so that it’s credible and it’s accountable.
Jenny:
Yeah. I mentioned the Save the Slopes campaign and and Alex and I we talked about last week on the show, we have Andy Kubrin helping us now and you met him this week, too, Bruce. One of the aspects that we went through this exercise exactly like you’re talking about this future casting approach, what are we trying to do? And we landed on one of these specific gravel communities. Let’s take municipal district and get them standing up this information as much as they can, standing up what they want to see as much as they can. I’m thinking of to your point, yes, this needs to be funded. At some point, we’re going to need to have actual figures and regular monitoring, which is going to require that.
But I think it comes from a well coordinated ask from the from the residents, from the stakeholders, from the people all impacted by this with some of those questions asked and answered already. For example, we don’t want gravel here. We want wetlands, like Alex said. And for that to be enough of a voice from the community that it can’t be ignored. I think that that’s where I’m my head’s at. Let’s talk about your response.
The Response from the Province
Jenny: You did receive a response from the province. Can you speak a little bit about what you got back from the province?
Bruce:
Yes. The letter is that I got back is really a letter from the minister saying that it’s all under control and we have these various aspects in place that should account for your concerns. It doesn’t for me, it doesn’t answer my question at all. It doesn’t respond to yes, we can do this or you know, we can’t. It just it’s more a kind of a feel good letter. It’s a political letter. It’s not a response to to an ask, if you will, or or the credibility of the problem or even suggesting that they understand the urgency of what I’m suggesting is happening here. Time, degree, aspects of the problem we’re facing, it’s not being managed. It’s not, I have no assurance that anything’s changing at all.
Alex:
Have you found that recent years, there’s more filibustering when you write a very specific letter that addresses specific points and then you end up just kind of getting a gas light or a filibuster and like a foreign response, where it’s just kind of like it’s almost like a pre-press response letter where they say, oh, yeah, we’ve got everything under control. Or you know, we’ve taken your concerns under advisement and blah.
Bruce:
Yeah, that’s very common. It doesn’t matter which which culture I’d ever worked in or which government agency anywhere around the world. The first response is always, well, don’t worry, I’ve got it all under control. That’s that’s just fundamental politics, really, or bureaucracy, if you will. For me, my success doesn’t come from them ever doing what I ask. It comes from opening up the conversation so people get involved and then they can kind of drive the problem forward, if you will. I’m trying to say there’s a bigger world out there than what we’re kind of looking at. I’m never sure how it’s ever going to end up.
I’ll give you an example. I wrote an environmental assessment for a coal mine in Thailand and I heard about it eight years later when I happened to be down there again talking to a professor at the university there. And he said, “your [environmental impact assessment] EIA was the only one that told us what what we should be looking for in the future. We made it mandatory and all the other EIAs we ever did after that. But I never knew about that for eight years. It was just fortunate that it ended up being that way, that I had another chance to go back and see what had actually happened. So I’m not optimistic.
I did a big study for the oil and gas industry in Mexico on climate change and I didn’t get any response back from them, but the government turned around and sold the properties to the private sector so that they had to deal with the problem. I suspect my letter was sort of help them make that decision about moving the responsibility maybe to someone else who could actually deal with it. You never know how it’s going to turn out but you know, unless you go forth and sort of propose that these things need to be done and get the conversation going, which is really what I’m trying to do here.
Jenny:
I just want to be clear. This is another example where we’re not getting leadership from our government to understand that this is urgent. It is severe, and it requires a lot of people to be working on it in a very transparent way. People listening to understand that we are we’re shaping this. It’s up to us. And that’s why Bruce is here. Thank you so much, Bruce, for for taking the time to do this. I do want to talk a little bit about accountability. If you if you can expand on that a bit, Bruce, I can tell you some things like like I was saying stakeholders first. When I’m saying stakeholders, I mean landowners. I mean Indigenous communities and Indigenous lands. I tried to actually get Keepers, but they’re on one of their conferences right now, Keepers of the Water to talk with us today, because they’ve put out a letter requesting that indigenous participation be primary and equal with the government’s actions.
I think that is a wildly helpful first start to get us in a place where we have that piece of accountability, especially when we have sort of two eyes across the table. Also the KEPA, Kainai Ecosystem Restoration Association, they’re looking to do a water treaty. Have all members of society understand that water is something we have to stand up for and be be active about. Can you talk a little bit more about accountability? Anything that you see in there?
Bruce:
There’s several aspects of that. When we had the big flood here in 2013, I think it was, you know, there was a lot of damage done to the downtown city of Calgary, but the actual damage that was done downstream that scenario. Even just the kinds of response that during a flood or something like that, those kinds of things have to account for everybody in society, not just not just those that can can deal with it politically.
I think it’s another group in society or social context that we need to put into these kind of modeling scenarios. I don’t think anybody has a right more than anyone, because we’re all human and we all need water. I think we’re 80 percent water as it is or something like that, it’s not like there’s any uniqueness to being a different kind of animal. We all need to be equitably treated across the board in terms of of what should be done.
When you start talking about agriculture versus urban, you know, we waste a lot of water. And I think it’s it’s going back and looking at that problem and saying, why are we why are we trucking in vegetables from South America? You know, when we could be growing them right here on top of buildings and distributing them within a five block area, they even they even lower the ceiling down at night so that they don’t have to keep moisture in the whole building at night. You know, there’s all kinds of scenarios that happen here. I mean, Calgary would be perfect for that.
Alex:
The Dutch actually have been practicing vertical gardening for over a decade. And a lot of that decade, they become one of the second largest producers of vegetables. And if we want to reduce our carbon footprint, there’s no reason why we should be burning twenty thousand liters of diesel to ship strawberries from Mexico when we can grow them in places like Redcliff just outside of Medicine Hat. That’s one of the largest greenhouse operations in North America. And it’s all locally produced. It’s organic. They can control the light. It’s aeroponics. It minimizes the water usage and it’s just better food. No need for pesticides. And so there’s no reason, tech wise, why we can’t use some of these empty skyscrapers to implement the same technology. It’s a huge cost savings if we were to just maybe convince enough people, plant that seed, convince enough people that it was a good idea. You know, I’ve been fighting for that.
Bruce:
That’s why I want to get into this complex modeling, though. These these small items that you think are sort of not really relevant are very relevant to a complex model. You can change the whole model by basis of one factor that looks rather small. And it’s because everything’s interrelated. Whatever you do here affects what happens there. And we have to understand that.
We have to understand how how those things evolve.
The other thing is that there’s no going back. Once we start changing something, we’ve changed the whole script and you can’t go back to recreate that normality you thought you had. We have to be careful going forward. We can’t just build a dam here, there and everywhere because it happens to be within our budget. We have to build a dam where, you know, we know it’s not going to affect all of these other scenarios, recreation or too much evaporation or whatever. There are a lot of things that we should be doing to make sure that we don’t have a hot island in in the city so that we have to air condition everything. There’s there’s just so much that’s interrelated. But the fact we can’t ever go back, I think people have to understand they there’s no turning back. We have to plan where we’re going more.
Key Takeaways
Jenny:
That’s an excellent point, Bruce, because we we I think we do keep looking back. This is the solution we did last time, we’re going to keep doing that same solution. We have to stop convincing ourselves that something that failed in the past is something we should invest in in the future.
I see we’re close to the hour. And I would love to do a few takeaways, if we can just do a round of takeaways. I just want to touch on the letter again. Bruce is calling for an integrated water resource preservation and restoration agency. We want it to be independent, apolitical, interdisciplinary, intercultural, autonomous and has the authority to use and demand and forecast data for the public in that there’s specific terms of reference, which means that it’s open to many people. It addresses resource conflicts, external disruptions, climate change, all the big ticket items that we need to have put into this model. The scope of work includes all water in all levels and everything at scale.
To Alex’s point, we need to make sure that people everybody has the same measuring system scale in mind, adequate data collection and information. Making sure it’s public and that it’s happening widespread and where it needs to be happening. Scenario modeling. This is the what happens if and what are we going to do when that happens scenarios and analysis of that? What did we miss?
Like you said just now, Bruce, if we change this one thing, holy smokes, that changes everything.
Those low hanging fruit things, like Alex just said, instead of shipping strawberries from Mexico, this is something that’s not complicated. That’s just all I’ve been doing my best to support farmers markets, support local, buy local as much as possible. This is something we can do right now that will have a massive impact on the way our food is is shipped and stored and used and all those wonderful things. Government and public response. We want to make sure that there’s that partnership expectation, that it’s real time and communicated when it needs to be your example of if there’s a clear cut happening or better question, how can a clearcut be justified if we’re looking to water shortages and the impacts that clearcuts cause knowing that it impacts both flooding and drought? We can’t be doing it in the face of this information, right? We talked about accountability lots and then communication we’ve talked about. And finally, that it is funded.
We need to make sure that there’s money. I heard Mayor Gondek say this once, “What isn’t funded isn’t happening.” We have to make sure that there is we have a line of sight to funding. And like Alex said, there’s lots of great work in this restoration and regenerative farming work that’s local and will make us feel good. As long as we can keep showing that we see this future and that it’s we’re committed to it as a as a as a community, we can start getting some likes to Bruce’s vision.
Bruce:
The only other thing I’d like to add is again, going back to this perspective idea that we have to look at this from the ecosystem point of view, from what what is needed downstream, upstream of humans. We can keep focusing on us wanting more agriculture or wanting to pump more oil or whatever, but those things have to be in the context of the ecosystem we live in. We we get long, hot days here and the sun isn’t going to move off the horizon too far. I think I think we have to look at how we coexist with the environment we’re actually in. And we’re not doing that at all right now.
Jenny: No, we’re putting ourselves above 100 percent.
Bruce: We need to make sure that we yes, the we that we speak of needs to include all the fish, all the birds, all the leaves, all everything.
Jenny: Yeah, definitely need to be less human centric.
Alex: Yeah, I agree with everything that you guys just said. And I think what you were just touching on there, Bruce, in terms of understanding our latitude and longitude, our elevation, the historic environmental influences that are specific to each topographical region is crucial in terms of going forward with any sort of plan and then understanding, you know, the basic laws of thermodynamics, you know, which is every action has an equal or opposite reaction. If we choose to terraform or build a dam or alter the flora system, it’s going to have its own environmental impacts on not only flora and fauna and also the jet stream.
When it comes to micro scale, macro scale alterations to the natural world, those risks and repercussions need to be weighed out in terms of developing a long term plan that is proactive and sustainable. That’s where we need all hands on deck and experts from as many fields as possible to come together and coalesce and sort of almost t funnel the metadata down to something that might actually work based on common agreements where we could have as little negative environmental impact as predictably possible, though it’s never going to be an exact science, there’s always going to be an effect. We can just hope that the effect will be more positive than negative. And I think that’s, politics aside, that’s as a people, that’s kind of where we really need to just plant that seed, plant those ideas into people’s heads, right? Because you can kill the guy, but you can’t kill the idea, you know. If we can inspire people to think creatively and outside of the box and come together, whatever their educational background or what have you, or skill level, then maybe over the long term or at least in the next generation, we can have an inspirational impact that could secure the following generations.
At the same time, I think as we were all saying, the time to act is now. But we do need to set those politics aside and just start providing information, sharing information with each other. Maybe there’s a possibility we can start getting some of those things done and getting some funding.
Bruce: Try to understand the world we live in, eh?
Alex: Just kind of be spatially aware, self-aware, aware of your impact on your environment. And if we can do that successfully, then it’s like even the example of the pipe burst, like 1.4 million people were actually responsible water stewards. So if you can just provide enough information for people to exercise their choices, they can make better choices, you know. So that was proof in the pudding that if it’s done the right way, then people can exercise their own individual responsibilities and do the right thing.
Bruce: And water is worth more than gold.
Alex: 100%. Yeah. You can’t drink oil.
Jenny:
Yes, that’s absolutely right. There was an article on the head of the BOE a few months ago that said, follow the water. To me, that was the signal right there, that that is more important than anything else.
Bruce: Absolutely.
Jenny: Thank you so much. Anything you want to close on, Bruce, before we wrap today? I think that we could definitely revisit this later in the year if it seems appropriate with you. Because we’re going to do in the next round, not this round, but the next round, we’re going to talk about zero alternatives. So what can we stop doing? And I think there is a lot of untapped potential in those conversations. And I think you might have some really interesting ideas for us in that. So think about that. Thank you so much for your time. Anything else I do not want to cut you off?
Bruce: No.
Alex:
Have a good evening.
Jenny: Thank you. You guys too.