Season 1, Episode 27: What are the Water Alternatives?

with Kevin Van Tighem and Lorne Fitch

In this episode, Alex and I delve into critical environmental issues, focusing on the conservation and restoration of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. Guests Kevin Van Tighem, Lorne Fitch, and Colin Smith, discuss the urgent need to address cumulative impacts on the environment, particularly water security and biodiversity. They emphasize the importance of collective responsibility, local community involvement, and informed land use decisions. The conversation highlights successful grassroots mobilization against coal mining and advocates for large-scale restoration projects. The podcast underscores the interconnectedness of land and water management and calls for a shift in cultural and political perspectives to prioritize ecological health and sustainability.

Welcome and Introductions to Kevin and Lorne

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast. Here we break down heavy ideas into small buckets that you can handle. Our mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas and conversations and process. And together you, we and our communities will face your dilemmas and make our world a better place for all beings.

Jenny:

In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on stolen Blackfoot Treaty Seven and Metis Districts Five and Six Territories. I take Reconciliaction by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life, or community. A healthy living relationship with the earth and each other is our guide.

Thank you for being here, Kevin and Lorne, and Colin again, I’m excited to speak with you three. Lorne and Kevin are two conservationists and writers now, biologists and ecologists by background and have worked, they’ve said together for nearly 40 years trying to help make sure that Alberta is moving in the right direction in terms of restoring our environment and looking after the ecology. And Colin, this is his third time on the show for us (episodes 4 and 11). Colin, myself, and Alex have been working together to try and bring community together and understanding of where we need to go.

A lot of what we’re doing, of course, is following what you’re doing, Kevin and Lorne. Thank you very much for all the work you’ve been doing and we are trying to honour [your work] and make sure that as we go, that people understand that. I’m going to tee off the conversation with a first question. I want to start with purging, if you will. Let’s talk about what we are doing wrong in the province. If we can just go around, Kevin, I’ll let you start. Please, if you can just help us understand some of the things that we’re seeing that’s going wrong in terms of cumulative impacts on our environment. Thank you.

What is Going Wrong in Alberta with Respect to Cumulative Impacts?

Kevin:

I think the biggest thing, the overarching thing is it’s really past time that we stop thinking we can do whatever we want without consequences. There’s a bit of a libertarian colour to the Province of Alberta where people just want to be left alone to do what they want. We don’t want to regulate industry too much. We don’t want ourselves regulated too much. We all want to do what we want, but it’s a finite province. It’s a shrinking world, it’s a changing world, and we’re already seeing the stresses all around us. I think that would be the big overarching thing I would say is that we’ve got to stop living as if there’s no consequences to doing whatever we want. We need to start really taking, I think, at a more micro scale, since my primary focus for the last few years has been on water security.

I would say we really have to take a look at the Eastern Slopes and recognized that they were originally intended recognized from a policy point of view as our water resources, the place that generates our water. And we are doing a lot of things out there that are actually compromising their ability to deliver us water. We’re getting bigger floods more frequently. We’re getting very low warm river flows in the summer. The overall flow water production in the South Saskatchewan River Basin has dropped by at least 12% since they started monitoring it. That’s the natural water flows when you’re seeing that sort of thing going on in the province that uses this much water. We have two thirds of Canada’s irrigated agriculture here, just as one example. It’s a recipe for disaster. And it’s an example again of what I’m saying, of we’re living as if there’s no consequences and there are consequences. They’re on us now and they’re going to be even greater if we don’t turn the ship around and start managing water security for the future.

Jenny:

Yeah. Thank you. That was great. I’m going to let everybody go around first before I comment. Go ahead, Lorne. You’re next please.

Lorne:

I think we have to start with the notion, maybe the prevailing opinion, at least in a lot of circles, that especially the Eastern Slopes is an unexploited frontier of endless possibilities. If you’re listening to this and you’re still skeptical of where unrestrained development leads us to cumulative effects and crossing ecological thresholds, I would suggest try this simple at-home experiment, invite more and more people to live in your house until the refrigerator’s empty the toilet’s, plugged the air wreaks of sweat and old socks, and then add a kid with a drum set to the mix. And then ask yourself, was there a line beyond which this just wasn’t a good living arrangement? And this is what cumulative effects assessments do for us. And there are at the current time, 20 associated cumulative effects assessments and similar studies that have been done up and down the Eastern Slopes.

And every one of them, every one of those cumulative effects assessments, including the ones done by the government of Alberta, indicate that maintaining the status quo in land use, which is really about increasing our land use footprint, leads to or has exceeded the thresholds for ecological integrity and resilience. The problem with the status quo is the quo has long passed its status, we’ve got to stop ignoring the evidence and use that evidence in terms of the next steps to help us understand where we need to go, particularly with the Eastern Slopes, and as Kevin said, the primary importance of Eastern Slopes to Albertans, and a reminder to us that we’re a headwaters province and that we’re also responsible for two other provinces downstream from us.

Jenny:

Agreed. Sorry, Lorne, can you touch a little bit on irrigation just in the context of what we shouldn’t be doing potentially?

Lorne:

Sure. Well, again, Kevin has helped us understand that we live in a world of declining water supply, and yet the irrigation sector, you would think based on their aspirations for more and more irrigated acres that we live in primarily a wet landscape. We don’t live in a semi landscape, and it’s getting more arid progressively as climate change impacts us. And the madness of expanding irrigation agriculture with more and more reservoirs, more and more onstream dams just strikes me that this is a zero sum game. That we cannot do this and expect that we’ll have living rivers as a consequence, as an example. And the other one is that we can’t out engineer climate change. We can’t run ahead of it. And building more reservoirs and dams, it’s a prevailing engineering motive that doesn’t recognize that there are ecological constraints. Thank you.

Kevin:

I got to say something about that last point too. The irony of this is we’re hearing the Alberta government wants to build a new reservoir on the Red Deer River because of drought. Well, in 1989, I believe they finished building a dam on the Old Man river because of drought. And for the last year and a half, for most of the last year and a half, it’s that empty dams don’t cure a drought, you got to have water. And the water doesn’t come from the dam, it comes from the headwaters.

Lorne:

Yeah. As someone who, as my wife says, is a bit anal about gasoline and our capacity to drive distances, doesn’t matter how big your gas tank is, if there’s nothing to put into it.

Jenny:

Yeah, that’s a great analogy. Okay, Colin, how about you? Can you add into this, please?

Colin:

Yeah, I just want to say thanks for having me. And to your question, what do we need to stop doing? I think there’s lots of examples, just a wee baby, when that, just before that dam was built on the Old Man, my parents and friends and family were there, and I was just a wee young one when Ian Tyson played that the protest concert down there. I agree with a lot of what’s been said, but yeah, just thinking about it on a landscape and watershed from south to north, thinking that, yeah, what do we need to stop doing? We need to stop potentially entertaining future coal mining in the Eastern Slopes, thinking about the Crowsnest and the Grassy Mountain debacle, I guess you could call it. Hoping that that does not proceed, as one of the things we need to stop doing.

And then going a bit further north in the Livingston and upper headwaters, the Old Man, I think we are potentially excessively clear cutting that area. I’ve studied the Google satellite time lapse of the amount of clear cutting that’s been happening in the headwaters of the Old Man there. And just on a visual layman’s perspective, it seems very excessive and talking about not enough water entering the Old Man dam, I think that cumulative impact of that one’s particular land use should be looked at. But that forest management area stretches all the way from the Crowsnest all the way to the headwaters, the red deer. And I think there’s some changes in forestry policy that should be looked at and implemented as soon as possible in that area. And then another thing I’ll mention going north is the Kananskis area. Lots of clear cut south of there, and then maybe under management of our forest in our protected areas where there is a buildup of fuel stocks and a suppression of fire over the past a hundred years.

And those forests may be need some more specific management to reduce the forest fire risk in those protected areas of Kananskis and Banff. And then today I was just out in the McLean Creek area and the impacts of off highway vehicles are very clear out in that area. And that is ironically one of the areas that you don’t have to pay for a Kananskis conservation pass where if you want to go hiking in Kananskis, you have to pay $90. And I’ve recently where this summer was in Canas, and many of those areas in the upper headwaters are beautiful and thriving ecosystems in many ways full of abundance of wild flowers and butterflies and insects and grizzly bears. But yeah, other places in the similar area, but that have more cumulative impacts that biodiversity is clearly not thriving as much as it is in the protected areas.

Colin:

So yeah, off highway vehicle use I think needs to be, I dunno, I think a lot of users are respectful, but the landscape is managed to the lowest common denominator. Maybe implementing the conservation past in all areas of can ASCUS or where there’s off highway vehicle use to provide more funding to repair those areas. I don’t know, those are just a few ideas. I guess the one other I’ll mention, or maybe two more just of connecting with the community lately, Three Sisters Mountain Village, expanding Canmore’s footprint into a wildlife corridor based on a 1992 approval is outrageous. That’s one of the last key wildlife corridors between Banff and Kananskis. And there’s lots of data to show that. That’s another thing we could stop doing is expanding into our natural remaining intact or semi intact ecosystems. And then gravel mining is another one. I know Jenny, you and Alex are both working on that, but the impacts of an expansion of gravel mining in the big hill springs and sundry areas is having poised to have detrimental impacts on groundwater and very unique natural water features on our landscapes. That’s the highlights of my experiences.

Jenny:

The lowlights. Yeah. Thank you very much. That was great. Alex, why don’t you reflect back some of the things you heard and offer anything you’d like to please.

Alex:

Sure. There are a couple of good ones, Kevin just mentioning. Stop thinking that there aren’t any consequences, right? It’s the general law of thermodynamics, like any action is going to have an equal or opposite reaction. Sometimes the intended actions that we had in the past, though maybe good intentions were there at the time, they produced unnatural results within the environment at the same time. And now that we’ve gained more knowledge, it might be interesting to see how we can revise some of those initiatives. And a good example of the, “We all think we can do what” was in Calgary with the latest water shortage from the main feeder line rupture. I have been focusing on the main feeder line since last October because it’s talk about putting your eggs in one basket. We only have one feeder line that supplies 60% of the city’s water supply, and it was installed in 1979.

It was not maintained for 49 years, even though the budget was allocated for general maintenance, they just seemed to take the money and it wasn’t done. That was a little bit frustrating. But at the same time, when Kevin was speaking of volumetrics and metrics of scale and things like that, just simply getting a million people to skip one flush a day, save 8 million litres of water. Now there’s not just skipping a flush, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” once a day is not a labour intensive decision to make, right? But if more people make these simple decisions on a metric of scale, then big differences can be made in terms of the overall consumption levels. It can reduce the strain on our systems. Also, I think in terms of land preservation and preventing these mining operations, be it gravel, be it coal, be it oil and gas or general expansion of communities or what have you, we should also have an equal or greater focus on habitat preservation and restoration to ensure that some of the most unique and vital habitats are maintained and preserved. Colin you were touching on the Canmore expansion.

I think that’s a huge deal because now that they’re expanding in Canmore, they’ve allowed for 27 bear tags because the natural habitat at these grizzlies and black bears are being encroached upon by the expansion of Canmore. And as a result, [our government is culling them] because ultimately human beings, the amount of interactions that they’re going to have with these bears are going to increase over those expanded areas. Experts disagree with this effort. Colin, I also really appreciated what you’re speaking about with regards to ethical forest maintenance in the northern sector. I think Jasper is a good example this year of where there were adequate warnings of pine beetle issues and mass amounts of fuel and thatch. And it wasn’t a matter of if it was a matter of when, and everyone was a little too slow to react in terms of that. I would love to see more ethical forest management within our protected areas.

But I would also as a whole to see a little bit more attention being focused on not just the protected areas, but areas in general as a whole so that people can see that, find the common ground, that common agreeable no matter what their walk of life or their position and their political view. It’s like we all enjoy a healthy environment. We all enjoy clean drinking water, and if we can just agree upon those things, that’s the fundamental. I think that would put us in a really good direction. The Eastern Slopes, I haven’t spent enough time down there. I do plan on doing that. I was at McLean Creek this summer briefly. The ATV use in that region has put a scar on the landscape. And I think if people aren’t going to pay a park fee or something to help contribute to the overall maintenance of these areas, I don’t think maybe the use and abuse of recreational vehicles should be permitted.

There should be some safeguards put in so that either people are going to be held accountable or they’re going to contribute to the overall budget to help maintain and preserve those habitats. That’s about it for me. I’m still focusing on Big Hill Creek Provincial Park, and working with Andy and Jenny on that to try and put together a proposal that maybe we can present to the districts out there and see if they may have an interest in having our help, or at least educating us on what the challenges are that they face with regards to their interface with the industry as a whole. Thanks, that’s all for me for now.

Jenny:

Thank you, Alex. Yeah, I think we’ll get into those ideas when we get into question three here. Yeah, one thing when you talk about scale, it’s really interesting. I was doing the math while you were talking there. One flush is 8 million liters? We are currently if we want to talk about scale, putting 550 million liters a day into oil sands tailings ponds. Talking about scale, that’s something to think about right there. When I think about the things that we could stop doing, I’d expand it from coal mining and say that all fossil fuel development should cease today. We can ride down our reserves for the next 25 years. And to me, the reason why I say that is because carbon capture and storage is not a real solution. It’s a partial solution, even if it were something that was beneficial and it is required to justify any new emissions and for that matter, any more footprint on the landscape.

As Kevin and Lorne and everybody were saying here from my learning in the industry, cumulative impacts exactly what Kevin was describing, or Lorne, I can’t remember, which we are overshot in our landscape and we need to remove our footprint. I’ll give you an example. When I talk about what we should be doing instead, one of the things that was put forward in 2022 under the UCP, the previous UCP government was sites on timelines. Two sub-regions have oil and gas sites on timelines for the next 20 years. 80% of them are supposed to be coming off the landscape as one of those ways that we can reduce our footprint. I look at when I working with Colin, I have this visual that we have. You guys are working on one-half of the globe if you will. the outcomes.

What do we want the landscape to look like? And I’m looking at the other half of the globe, which is how do we stop harming the landscape and how do we heal the landscape? From my point of view in terms of mapping contamination. I look at the oil and gas industry as a group of people that could be, instead of mapping a reservoir, I’m mapping contamination. Instead of looking at production reserves, I’m looking at sustaining reserves. To me, it’s just shifting everybody away. Instead of drilling wells, I’m abandoning wells. Everybody’s just, their focus gets switched on to restoration. And we have the workforce in place to help us get started from that point of view, from the industry point of view. But I will say, and then I’ll pass it on to you guys that my experience is that the outcome, the industry, the regulations, when you talk about a lack of regulations, one of the things that irks me is that the regulations are that the land should be restored in the way that it’s being used today rather than the way it once was or the way it should be in the future.

One of my ideas around this is that perhaps the industry should just do the closure work, like the abandonment and the decommissioning and the equipment removal and removing any emissions and things like that. And then experts should be potentially taking over that work from a different perspective and with the community’s input in terms of what that landscape should look like. Anyway, those are just some of the thoughts I have from my perspective, from somebody that came from industry as to what we should be doing instead. I agree with, I’ll say the other comment around protecting the headwaters. One of the things that was overwhelming for me in the industry was, “Where do we start?” There’s so much damage in this province, 500,000 holes in the ground, so many issues. And one of the things I learned from the two of you is the Eastern Slopes.

To me it’s about if we have a boat taking on water, we first want to plug that boat. That is, if we focus on the Eastern Slopes, we can stop the problem by, it’s a very localized area, but has such a significant impact that I think that’s huge. And then the other area that I think is obviously, maybe not obviously, but to me it is the oil sands to start restoring that 1.7 [trillion] liters of wastewater that’s sitting in 17 different tailing ponds. That’s my point of view as to things that we should be doing instead. I’m going to pass it around again. Maybe we’ll go in the, well the same order. Kevin, why don’t you go next, please?

Kevin:

And the question is what we should be doing?

What Should We Be Doing About Water Security In Alberta?

Jenny:

Yeah, sorry. Thank you. What we should be doing instead? You talked about the things that we’re doing wrong. We aired our grievances, and now it’s somewhat of what are the ways that we can start moving forward and what should people understand in terms of what the province should be doing. We talked about reversing cumulative impacts, for example. Anyway, I’ll stop there.

Kevin:

Well, there’s an awful lot of subjects that are on the table. I tend to think that we need to think in terms of individual responsibility. That’s where we get to the toilet flushes, I guess, and collective responsibility. And that’s where we get to policy approaches. I tend to lean towards the idea of working together to get better policy outcomes. I’d say that if there’s something that we could do more of, it’s something that we’ve already done that was quite inspiring to me. And that was when the Jason Kennedy government decided to open up the Eastern Slopes to coal mining to get rid of the coal development policy that had kept most of those Eastern Slopes out of bounds for, well, it was over 30 years when that happened. I said earlier that we think we can just keep on doing what we’ve always done without consequences.

And the assumption I had was that there’s no point in fighting it. It’s just Alberta doing what Alberta does. We’re going to do more damage to another piece of the landscape and leave a little bit more of our soul behind. This is the way it is, but that’s not what happened. People looked at it from various points of view. Ranchers looked at it in terms of water security. Some of the First Nations communities looked at it from a cultural values point of view. Hunters and fishermen looked at it and said, “What? That’s my hunting fishing place.” A bunch of people from a bunch of different perspectives looked at that landscape and said, this is just one bridge too far. And they mobilized, but they mobilized together. They came together. We had conservatives working with NDP, working with liberals, working with greenies, working with non-voters.

Kevin:

We had Indigenous people sitting around having barbecues with ranchers who were at the same time talking to environmentalists from the city of Calgary. I sat at that barbecue and looked at people, and thought, you guys have never talked to each other before. You’ve only talked about each other. And here you are. We came together around a piece of this landscape that we value and care for, and we fought for its future. Well, that’s a people becoming the best of what they can be. That’s Albertans no longer just calling ourselves Albertans but being Albertans. I think if there’s one thing that we need to do, we need to take responsibility collectively to know our neighbours and to work with them to give us a better future, whether it be water security, whether it be restoring endangered species, whether it be cleaning up some of the messes that we left behind us in our rush to prosperity, but we can do it if we work together and if we actually value our future and value the place we live in, we’ve tasted it was inspiring as heck. I think we need to do a lot more of that.

Jenny:

Love it. Thank you, Lorne.

Lorne:

We have to acknowledge particularly the Eastern Slopes is a busy place and the expectations that we have for it have already exceeded the ability of the landscape to absorb all those schemes and dreams. And we really need to think collectively, as Kevin says about what’s the tomorrow of the Eastern Slopes? And to get to that point, we need land use plans and planning that are a combination of courageous and don’t simply entrench the status quo. Again, the quo has lost its status. These land use plans need to incorporate cumulative effects, assessments and ecological thresholds. We’ve got a clear message. And that message resonates in government, in industry, and in the public on where the lines in the sand are and where they’ve been exceeded. And those land use plans really require us to provide a cogent statement about what the Eastern Slopes does for us.

And that doesn’t include just two by fours beef and motorized recreation. There needs to be an articulation of the values and the virtues of water space and biodiversity and how in many cases, those Trump economic aspirations. And that would give us a framework that defines what we want the Eastern Slopes to be, not modelled after today, but something into the future. And if we don’t pursue that, we’ll end up with an Eastern Slopes. That’s one continuous tree farm or coal mines or muddy OHV trails. And what’s really a recognition has to be that we have treated the Eastern Slopes like a warehouse to be ransacked instead of a place of investment. And Jenny, you’ve talked about a lot of the investments that would be necessary, but because we’ve allowed the creation of all these environmental liabilities, they bite us badly and they will bite us even worse in the future. Kevin talked about the specter of flood and drought if we don’t start to deal with the hydrologic response of some of our land use footprints. We’ve created a land use footprint that contributes to flooding and drought and the loss of ecological indicators like native trout. And unfortunately because we don’t often recognize these things, we also have created a phenomena of shifting benchmarks where many think that nothing has changed. We’ve got to invest in things that aren’t necessarily the things of the past, but the things of the future.

Jenny:

Agreed. A term that comes to mind while you’re speaking is natural capital. That is not a part of the equation on anything we’re doing. And I think that is a big piece that we can benefit from understanding the value of nature in place. I heard recently, and pass this on to you after Colin, that insurance companies are now looking at the risk of developing something versus keeping the nature. I think there are some tipping points coming from various aspects. As you said, Kevin, we have an opportunity to come together from many different angles looking at this. And I think some of those aspects are going to help us make decisions that are thoughtful and future thinking, as you said. Anyway, I’ll stop for now. Go ahead, Colin.

Lorne:

Jenny, can I add one more thing, please. This is on the heels of Colin just coming back from a willow planting experience, which I fully endorse. These are the small scale restoration projects that hopefully we can expand. But what we have to get right is the scale of how we fix things because we can’t afford to continue with postage stamp reclamation projects. This has to happen at an appropriate ecological scale. And I would characterize this, and again, I don’t take away from the sweat equity that Colin and others have put into stream bank restoration, but every little bit doesn’t count unless you do every little bit.

Jenny:

That’s right. Thank you. I have more to say on that, but thank you so much for bringing that into this. Go ahead, Colin.

Colin:

Lorne, I fully agree with that. We’re just putting band-aids on gaping wounds. A forester that I follow, Herb Hammond out of BC UBC Forestry says that every clear cut is a restoration project, and that’s getting to the scale of these things, but I think the scale is the entire Eastern Slopes. I keep coming back to, actually Kevin’s book. Heart Waters is one of those books that just really stuck with me. And in there, there’s a chapter that mentions the Eastern Slopes Conservation Board. I might be getting the full name wrong, but essentially a federal provincial partnership that recognized the importance of the Eastern Slopes, but also I think it led to opening up the Eastern Slopes with logging roads and Highway 40 and all those things. Getting back to it, I love both of you both touched on some great things, but about “What do we want the Eastern Slopes to be?”

And that sounds very dreamy, and I think that’s a good way to frame it. But what do we also, we need the Eastern Slopes to be our water source. If we don’t recognize them for what they are, we are not going to be resilient in the face of the immense climate changes that are already underway. And those water towers of Southern Alberta have priceless ecological service value, but also value to the mental health and the connection to nature that most Albertans really value. Yeah, I agree with much of what’s been said. Looking at the Eastern Slopes or the South Saskatchewan River basin as a bioregion and looking at it as not just piecemeal here and there, it’s how do we look at this as an interconnected landscape that’s important to wildlife and water production? That seems like a kind of too economic of a term.

The Y2Y: Yellowstone to Yukon vision of we need interconnected natural corridors for wildlife, but also for just nature to flourish. I think more specific things that come to mind of what we should do instead is we should, like it’s been mentioned, we should be investing in restoration and regeneration of the scarves on the landscape. Following the landscape, again, instead of further mining Grassy Mountain, we should have a restoration project there for doing the best we can to fix the scars from the coal mining that’s happened there in the past. I think youth have a large youth and the community, the local community members in each watershed have an important role to play. Comes to mind is the Green New Deal of the 1930s of the economic benefit of employing people in landscape based projects that was maybe more big infrastructure and things like that.

But there’s jobs and important meaningful work that can be done in the Eastern Slopes on a restoration type basis and removing roads, restoring beavers. I’m trying to remember the five Rs from the Dried Up documentary and some of Kevin’s other presentations. But there’s a lot of work to be done there. I know many people my age and younger that go to university or go to school with the intention of wanting to do good in the world and get environmental degrees only to be working for industry to further development rather than repair the landscape. And I know that’s the work that I want to do, and I know many people that are called to it, but we need to create systems of scale to invest in the ecological integrity of the Eastern Slopes and the entire South Saskatchewan Regional Basin. Our headwaters are important for water and biodiversity, but also the entire grasslands of Southern Alberta are heavily commercially farmed and there’s growing that conventional farming is definitely harming the landscape in our downstream waterways and regenerative agricultural practices are becoming more mainstream, and there’s a lot of work to be done in that space.

I always come back to the question of how do we pay for it? Or there’s a trade off here, and somebody mentioned the messes left behind by our rushed prosperity. Yeah, I think we need to value how good we still have it. There’s many other places in the world that are more degraded and farther along in their downward spiral than we are. We still have a lot of intact and potential to keep the web of life held together. We just need a shift in our priorities from endless growth and more money, more jobs to what does a regenerative economy look like? How do we trade our values for wealth? That’s financial versus wealth, that is the beauty of the natural world and all of the abundance it provides. I think there’s a growing shift towards that, but the juggernaut of modernity still grinds on, but we would get some wake up calls. Mother nature, if you don’t let her in the front door, she’ll come in the back door with a pitchfork.

Jenny:

Yeah, I mean people in Florida are experiencing that today. I think. Go ahead, Alex, can you offer some of your thoughts, please?

Alex:

Sure. There’s a lot to cover, I’ll try and keep it relatively short and sweet. I do think there’s a lack of initiative in terms of the interface between let’s say the powers that be industry and the people, the general population. I hear a lot of politicians stand at the podium, talk about unemployment rates and say, oh, they’re down to 6.9% last year. They were at 8%. We’re making headway, dah, dah. A lot of these solutions like habitat restoration require boots on the ground. We can get a fancy degree and be as intellectual as we want to be about it, but eventually we need shovels in the ground. And I’m trying to figure out a way to propose to some of these industries and governments how important it is not only to restore the habitat, but I’m trying to find a way to make it appealing to them that they can see it as not only profitable but beneficial for their public image in creating jobs and doing the right thing long term.

That’s what I’m trying to convince these people how to do because there’s a lot of money in cleanup, there’s a lot of jobs in cleanup. There’s 8 billion hands pairs of hands that are looking for work, that are looking for meaning, that are looking for purpose on earth. And if we stop, as Lorne was saying, just running straight towards the status quo when it’s long since lost its status with a focus on sustainability and sustainability means to me just like sustain it where it is. Well, it’s not good enough as far as I’m concerned, that we can do better than that. Making a quick buck is easy. Just destroy something and pillage it.

It’s easy to destroy things. It’s very difficult to create something. When we go into these environments, I think it’s crucial to just connect with it at a root level, no devices, no nothing, and see what it’s speaking to you. And I’ve noticed in our youth these days, they don’t really have any source of inspiration. They don’t feel as though their life has any direction because they’ve been told that the world’s going to end in 10 years and there’s nothing they can do about it. Why would they do anything? It’s already gone. There’s nothing to look forward to. To inspire our youth a little bit more and say, Hey, there is still something, there’s still time and we need you to get on board and help us. I think that’s from everything that you guys have been saying, which is a lot to digest.

And I’m furiously taking notes, I’ll have to mull it over tonight and I’ll have some brilliant thoughts that I wish I had contributed to this conversation tomorrow. But yeah, I think inspiration is the name of the game, breathing it all in, inspiring others to do the same, not barking orders at them or anything. And motivating our politicians and our leaders and our corporate hegemons that it’s more profitable to do the right thing long-term than it is to just decimate something for a quick buck. War is 8% of the global carbon footprint. We could knock 8% of that carbon footprint right off the planet if we stop these wars for profit.

As far as insurance companies go, Jenny, I saw something on CTV National just last week. Insurance companies have been spending $2 billion a year on what they call atmospheric chemical injection, where they’re spraying the upper atmosphere was silver iodide so that we don’t get hailstorms because it costs ’em $2 billion a year in damage. They’d rather spend $2 billion every couple of years spraying the skies with silver iodide. But that stuff comes down in the rain. If you take samples, you can find it in the soil, you can find it on every leaf, every plant we’re breathing it in. These are seriously dangerous chemicals that they’re spraying in the other upper atmosphere just because they don’t want to lose money, and that has an impact on the environment.

Jenny:

It’s this idea that we can control nature rather than working with nature and trying to help nature come back. Thank you for bringing that into the view. I think that’s really important. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off for you.

Alex:

No, it’s okay. I’m wrapping up anyways, but there’s great ways to restore the groundwater by just gathering people together and start creating natural wetlands again, like some of the work that Colin’s doing with plant transfer, indigenous plant transfer and things like that. Those are all really good things. When water’s moving and it goes through marshland, all the phosphates and sulphates naturally get filtered out. The things from fertilizer naturally get filtered out. But when we build a dam like in Lake Winnipeg for instance, and that water gets still and stagnant, those phosphates produce algae, and then you get blooms and it turns into blue-green algae, which produces micro cysteines and it can poison the liver and it kills the fish. They take out all the marshland, they put farmland in there, and then they start throwing phosphates and sulphates into the water constantly, and they don’t allow it to move naturally, and it doesn’t get naturally filtered out anymore. Also, they can produce electricity. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. They just require the most sweat, and that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

What Can We Do Together to Make This Work Happen?

Jenny:

Thank you, Alex. Okay, let’s go into, and this can be our last round, go into what can we do together to make this work happen? I’m going to frame for you my view on this and then you guys can go around. Again, if we go back to the notion of cumulative impacts and the bioregion notion. To me, what Colin and I are focused on is trying to help empower locals in those regions. First of all, get people to understand that decisions do need to be made locally by the people that live there with the right intention, as you’re saying, Lorne, in terms of having this understanding that we have to take responsibility and put nature first. The other piece I think Colin brought into the conversation that I think is really important is local food systems. I think that’s part of the conversation that needs to be had in terms of what does local regional services look like in the future.

The other piece that I think is an opportunity I’m going to put out there is the province does have a nomination process for sites to be put on timelines. I think there is an opportunity for certain regions to get organized. The ones that are of high priority, let’s remind people that is the Eastern Slopes. I think that is a focus that Colin and I are looking at is trying to help people understand what sites would we want out of the way. I’m meaning local in the community hall. What is the landscape that we want to preserve and what is the landscape that we want to return back to its normal state and start proposing these things back to the province from a local standpoint. Of course, I mean including experts in this so that locals understand, but I do think that that to me is the opportunity I see in terms of regardless of the government that’s in place, to have local people start speaking up for what they want.

Colin touched on the fact that we’ve had conversations with gravel communities, people offsetting gravel mines that are seeing 10 meter drops in their wells. Some wells have gone dry, some wells are contaminated with frack water. These are real big issues that need to be addressed, and they’re seen on a local scale, but they’re going to have big implications downstream if they aren’t addressed. I think our thoughts are trying to help empower those communities to help having the difficult conversations with their neighbours and with their representatives to try and make sure that we start making decisions on the landscape. Those are my thoughts in terms of coming together. I think it’s really what you said, Kevin, is so true. This is stuff that impacts all of us. This is nonpartisan and it’s bigger than Alberta. Like you said. We are the headwaters for not just, I always like to say not just Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but even down to the Mississippi. This is a really big portion of North America’s water that we’re responsible for. And I think if we frame the work that we’re doing in terms of water going forward, I think that’ll help us understand from a local standpoint and from a scalable standpoint where we should focus, why we’re focusing, where we’re focusing, and all the great other rest of the Six Ws. I’m going to stop there, Kevin, was that question clear enough? The question just to remind you again, is how can we work together to make this change happen?

Kevin:

I’m going to give you a macro answer and a micro answer. I think one’s going to be up in the clouds and one’s going to be down on the ground up in the clouds. I think we have to take responsibility for and take control of the conversations around these issues and not be led into the wrong direction. And I go back to a point that Colin made about the Jasper wildfires. I was very uncomfortable with the way in which Colin framed that it was not a problem with forest management in Jasper National Park. Jasper National Park spent 30 years reducing fuel around that town, and it wasn’t a problem of mountain pine beetles. The forestry industry loves us to freak out of our mountain pine beetles because it allows ’em to throw away the rule books such as they are and log even harder. Mountain pine beetle spread is a product of climate change.

As our winters get milder and our summers get drier and the trees get more stressed, mountain pine beetles will do well. Is the mountain pine beetle the problem or is the change in climate the problem? And the firestorm that hit Jasper with 150 kilometer winds and a hundred meter tall flames was unstoppable and unnatural because again, that was driven by climate change. But if you allow people to say that the forest were mismanaged, that leads to proposals to get in there with valour, bunchers and clear cut, big fire guards put cows in there to graze ’em down.

It enables vested interest interests that are vested in the status quo, which as Lorne says, that quo should have no longer have any status with us to double down on the harm. We need to control the conversations. We can’t be led by vested interests in the commercial exploitation of our living environment to conclusions that they want us to make. But on the other hand, it’s hard to do that if you can’t define the problem adequately. We also need to work collectively. We need to bring experienced biologists like Lorne and hydrologists like John Palmeroy, people like that into contact with the rest of us so that we can have informed conversations about the things that matter to us, not the things that matter to those whose interests are averse to ours. That’s my macro answer. I think my micro answer, something that we can and should be doing, let’s find one sub drainage in the Eastern Slopes.

Dutch Creek, maybe on the Old Man Headwaters or Sylvester Creek or McLean Creek, and the Elbow River Headwaters, Rocky Creek and the Clearwater Headwaters find one drainage and say, “We are going to restore this to its finest condition.” “It’s going to have the optimal condition for water generation. It’s going to have quality wildlife habitat, it’s going to have restored populations of native trout. It’s going to have all of the things that we want our Eastern Slopes to look like in the future.” Let’s take one of those [watersheds] and get the forest companies and the off roaders and the hunters and the fishermen and the cows and fish people, all the groups to come together and say, we’re going to set aside our separate ambitions. We’re going to talk about how we can make this the best place possible. Collectively recognising that the best place possible has to be one that contributes to water security, biodiversity, landscape health, those sorts of things. Let’s just try it and get it right once it’ll create some of those jobs that Colin and Alex talked about, because there’s a lot of work to be done. It’s a mess out there. You can’t fix a century’s worth of mistakes in a week without a lot of hands, but let’s try it out. Let’s actually start building for the future rather than ignoring the future and living for the present.

Jenny:

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Kevin. Go ahead, Lorne.

Lorne:

Yeah, I’d like to echo what Kevin has just said. I think we faced some Herculean tasks and a lot of hand wringing. We faced some false starts and some wrong directions and a whole suite of denial and starting small on something and the scale is appropriate. As Kevin has talked about picking one watershed to work on. It is the place to show what’s in the realm of the possible if you start, but I want to just change tracks for a minute because we can talk about on the ground stuff, we can talk about the planning and so forth. We need to create the understanding and the political will and the incentives to do this. And that has to start at the micro and macro scales. And I think just as an example, one of the things that we might be able to do, we can do today is fill out the recent Alberta Government survey on their Nature Strategy.

Now, I’m generally skeptical of government surveys even this one, but I think it’s a step in the right direction that collectively all Albertans can make their voices known and start on a direction that gives us the opportunity to start on one of these watershed projects that gives us the understanding of how we can work a realization that it isn’t rocket science, that it’s picking a place using the expertise that’s currently available. It’s not that we lack expertise, it’s not that we lack knowledge. It’s not that we lack understanding. We lack the motivation to use all those tools to get on with it. And maybe filling out the government’s somewhat slanted nature strategy might be a way to get Albertans to think about what’s in the realm of the possible for not only the Eastern Slopes but the rest of Alberta.

Jenny:

Awesome. Yeah, I put the link in the live chat here for anybody paying attention. Colin, and I can make sure we push that out to some of our network as well. Go ahead, Colin.

Colin:

Yeah, I agree with most of the comments made. I don’t have much hope in this current government, but I also don’t want to discourage people from sharing their voice through whatever means possible. But yeah, these online surveys and Alberta Nature strategy I feel are going to be taken and spun in a way that allows the status quo to continue. Through Land Lovers Network and the work that we’re all me and Jenny and Alex are doing along with others is what I’m calling Bioregional organizing. And I guess this is a growing movement across the earth, the planetary movement, focusing on the unique place that we all find ourselves in and the unique challenges. It’s essentially a networking. There’s so much good work and expertise already out there and going on as I experienced today with our on the ground work with cows and fish and trout unlimited and watershed groups.

And Alex, to your comment about youth, there was an 11-year-old young man with us today who is full of inspiration and full of energy and no despair and just excitement for keeping nature or protecting nature. Yeah, I think the inspiration is key. But back to bioregional organizing. I love the suggestion of picking one creek or one area and doing the best we could, best we can, but I would encourage us to think a little bigger and do that in each major South Saskatchewan Head River. It doesn’t have to be the specific river, but what we’re trying to organize is the community leaders and the work that’s already going on in each watershed from the Waterton to the Crowsnest, the Old Man, Highwood, Sheep, Elbow, Bow, Ghost, Red Deer. Each one of those areas likely has a priority watershed that is either the last refuge for cutthroat trout or a priority.

And there’s already groups working specifically in those local contexts that have the local knowledge and the local expertise and the local relationships to do that work. And they are trying their best. And we’re just trying to knit that together on a South Saskatchewan Basin, bio-regional scale. The land use planning is key and the government, it’s also the 10 year review of the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan this year. And just like the nature survey, I feel like it’s an opportunity for the government to allow industry to have a voice, but not necessarily the local community and the local stewards of the land. Another thing we’re hoping to do over the next six months is continue to engage the local leaders in each watershed and the community to have a grassroots, Kevin said, take control of the conversation from a community and the land-based level of how we can steward this land and not just exploit it and extract it and turn it into dollars.

This is our public land and it should be stewarded by the public and the government in a way that serves the public. And I think, yeah, this Bioregional perspective is trying to knit the community together in a way that feels like we have a collective voice for the local issues in our unique watersheds, but also on a bioregional scale and trust that the bioregions next to us, be it the North Saskatchewan River or the Mississippi or on the west side of the Continental Divide, they’re also working on these same macro challenges, but in their own local context. I think it all comes down to inspiration and realization that we all have an important connection to the services that nature provides, and we can’t eat or drink money. This is the work that we are setting out to do and we’re trying to inspire and empower people to come along with us.

Jenny:

Awesome. Thank you. Alex, do you have anything to add there please?

Alex:

I think I’ll echo pretty much everything that everyone said. I think as far as the governments go, politics typically follows culture. The more we contribute to shifting our cultural view on why it’s important to maintain our environment than and maintain all of these different environments, it’s like the finger bones connected to the hand bones, connected to the wrist bone, connected to the elbow, connected to all the live long day. It’s all interconnected, right? It’s a venous and capillary system of water that leads back to the oceans and recirculates. But I also really appreciate that “Just focus on one area, one task” and provide proof of concept in that people can see the results and they can go, that does work. Maybe we should expand it. That’s going to be the real test, that’s going to be the real source of inspiration so that more people are going to get on board with it and see it as a good idea.

I would love to be able to just write enough letters to enough politicians, get other people to do the same thing, because they count one letter as a thousand votes, they get enough of it, they’re going to have to make a decision. And if they’re worried about the economy and they’re always telling us the economy is going crap, we got to do this, we got to do this. It’s like if you employ a whole bunch of people to restore and preserve land, there’s your economic fix. They’re earning a living, they’re doing the right thing, they’re spending the money, they’re paying down their debts, they’re paying their bills. It is a more winnable, long-term solution to employ people to preserve and restore the environment than it is just to pillage for a quick profit. It would be nice if I could translate it in a way and help other people to translate it in such a way that we could convince the powers that be that this is the right choice to make and the right thing to do, and nobody has to suffer dire consequences as a result.

Colin, next time you’re going out, maybe just shoot me an email and I’ll see if I can jump in and go see some of what you’re doing directly and in person. And it might be fun to take some pictures and put together something or some video and put something together for the website and maybe help promote your cause. And both Kevin and Lorne, as well, if you could provide where people can find you, if you have any social media or anything like that, we’d be happy to include that in the edited video We can help spread your word, too. Titles of books or current works or anything. As always a help also. And it was a privilege to speak with you all. I’ll just finish at that. Thank you very much.

Jenny:

Yeah, thank you. I’ll let you two have the final word. Kevin and Lorne, if you guys could please mention your books. I know Lorne, yours is out, and I have the title of that one. Travels Up the Creek, A Biologist Search for a Paddle. And I know Kevin, if you can remind me, yours is too, please. It’s coming out right away. Oh, sweet. He’s got your books right there. Awesome. Okay. But I just want to say thank you both very much. We really appreciate speaking with you. Obviously we will see you at several things that we’re working on in collaboration. The one thing I will add before I let you guys say the final word, any last comments that you have is I, I’m on the watershed council coordinating committee, as well. And we were just last week talking about storyboarding and actually start looking at outcomes to quantify these landscape efforts and start showing the scale like you’re saying, and help people understand one small Willow Creek is what in the grand scheme of things and how do we help start helping people see the value of putting this stuff back on the landscape.

I’m going to stop there and let you guys offer some final words. Thank you, Kevin. First, please.

Giveaways from Kevin and Lorne

Kevin:

It’s awfully hard to do a summary comment after such a wide ranging conversation in many different perspectives and priorities brought to the camera here. My priority, my focus. We live in a difficult world. We live in difficult times. It’s hard to sustain one’s energy when dealing with so much nostalgia and all of the big thorny problems that we see in front of us right now. And my solution, my personal solution that just took shape over a number of years was just not to try and solve it. Not to try and fix everything, find one area of focus and focus on that. And for me, it’s being headwaters restoration. We have huge issues in this province with the loss of prairie habitats. We have issues up in the Oil Sands area. We have riparian challenges where a lot of our riparian areas are in trouble. We have all sorts of issues in our urban areas.

I could burn myself out, throwing bloody myself against countless walls. I chose to focus on the headwaters. And if there’s one insight I came away with, through certainly Lorne’s wise mentoring and through of course the studies I took with John Pomeroy and working on these books and things like that is that every single land use decision that we make is a water management decision. And yet we always, when talk about water management, we talk about rivers, canals, dams, reservoirs, we talk about the water when it’s already reached, that it’s reached the place of consequences. The solutions all lie upstream from that in the land. And yet because we separate land management from water management, we make a whole bunch of really goofy land management decisions that we pay for with water management consequences. And they lead us to bad water management decisions like building dams on the Red Deer River and expanding irrigation in an arid problems during an era of climate change. We’ve got to get out of this bunkered thinking where we separate things out and think that somehow they exist in isolation from one another. Every land use decision is a water management decision. We all make land use decisions. We have to take responsibility for making the right ones for a change. That’s my final word, I guess.

Jenny:

Thank you. Kevin, can you remind us your new book that’s coming out?

Kevin:

Oh, well, I’ve got a few titles out there. I think the one that’s most relevant to this conversation is called Heart Waters and its subtitle, Sources of the Bow River, because it really goes into this, into these questions in a deeper way. It was really intended to try and drive some of these conversations in a different direction. And then the one that’s coming out this fall is an updated version of My Wild Roses or Worth It book, which is the one that Colin so kindly is waving in front of the camera. Thanks, Colin. It’ll be coming up with a new, fairly long introduction because a few things changed since I wrote it. Some things needed to be added. I’ll leave it to that. People can read it.

Jenny:

Okay. Go ahead, Lorne, please.

Lorne:

Well, thanks Jenny and Alex for a platform to talk about these things. These are not easy subjects. They’re not easy to convince people who may be in recession or denial over the cumulative effects that we’ve created. But I think one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that land held in common gives all of us Albertans something to collectively fight for. And as Kevin about how the coal debate came together from all sectors, all portions, all corners of Alberta, there’s strength and conviction in the crowd over and above individual political and corporate desires. I think we always have to keep that in mind, that we’re not necessarily alone, that there is some collective will out there that challenges harnessing it. And I think the other thing is that the Eastern Slopes in particular are a gift to us from previous generations that creates an ongoing sense of responsibility and a relationship.

And there’s only one way that we can thank those prescient individuals with the foresight for this gift of the Eastern Slopes is let’s not squander it, which is unfortunately what we are tending to do. Let’s engage in a bunch of stewardship actions that show those earlier people that led us to this, that we actually deserve the gift that they gave us. And lastly, I don’t know about you, but for me, the Eastern Slopes are part of my DNA and I think that we should treat them like they are a vital part of us, which they are.

Jenny:

Agreed. I think there’s something inherent that we know this, like you said, how quickly we all mobilized when this threat came about to us. I think we know that how important these slopes are to not only Alberta but North America. Thank you very much you guys. I really appreciate this. I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to chat again. Thank you so much. Have a great evening and weekend.