This episode about the future, is the last of the 2025 mini-series on Water in Southern Alberta. It features experts J. Bruce Smedley, a 50-year engineer, and Kennedy Halverson, a conservation expert with the Alberta Wilderness Association. We discuss topics such as irrigation, resource extraction, and water security. The conversation highlights the over-allocation of water resources, the need for comprehensive water management, and the importance of biodiversity conservation. The podcast advocates for a dedicated water preservation agency to address these challenges and emphasizes the role of public pressure in driving much-needed change. A wonderful conversation!
Introduction of Kennedy Halvorson and a Re-Introduction of J. Bruce Smedley
Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast with me Jenny Yeremiy. I host The Gravity Well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 and Metis districts 5 and 6. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples were created to honour the laws of the land maintained balance with nature and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide the Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of The Gravity Well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The Gravity Well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see in here, remember to like and subscribe.
Good afternoon, Bob. Thank you so much for being here again with me. How are you doing today?
Bob:
I’m doing okay. Fine, have a cold.
Jenny:
Try to get around that. Yeah. Thank you so much, Bob. So good afternoon everyone. I’m rejoined here with Bob for what is potentially our last water in Southern Alberta podcast, potentially of the well likely of the year, and potentially there may be more in the new year. Let’s see. We’re hoping to potentially have a conversation with Bob Sanford, but we’re going to bring in some of his thoughts into this conversation from Cop 30. Stay tuned for any of those details. This is episode 12 in this mini series. On this episode is on the future of water in Southern Alberta. We’ll be chatting with Bruce Smedley, who participated last year in episodes 18 and 22, and Bob and I are thrilled to welcome Kennedy Halverson of the Alberta Wilderness Association as well. We’ll get to them in a moment. So reminding folks, we have covered irrigation, resource extraction, the Water Act and licence transfer system, water modelling watershed and lake stewardship, dry land irrigated and ranch farming insurance. And then after a summer break, we returned to meet with Dr. Brad Sta Fox to learn about land use limits. Dr. David Sauchyn on climate change, Dr. David Swan and Jason Unger on water security, and Dr. Judy Stewart and Cheryl Bradley about Aquatic and health. Sorry, aquatic and riparian health. It’s been quite a learning experience. I’m so appreciative of you, Bob, for your leadership through this. This wouldn’t have been possible without you, and I’m super grateful for all the work you’ve done and for everyone that you have brought forward. And for all I’ve learned, this has just been remarkable.
Bob:
Well, back at you, Jenny, for all your organizational skills. Speak to this is totally disorganized on most days.
Jenny:
Yes, you’re very humble. You have done so much work in this and you have kept us all on track to do this. So like I said, this has been an incredible experience and I’m just so grateful for it. Okay, so let’s welcome first Bruce Smedley back to the studio. Thank you so much, Bruce for being here again with us.
J. Bruce:
Well welcome to be here. I do appreciate it and I appreciate the work you’ve done so far in the podcast to date and I urge people to watch them. There’s a lot of information there.
Jenny:
Thank you, Bruce. Bruce has a master’s in, excuse me, and bachelor’s in chemical engineering. He studied in both British Columbia and Alberta. He has over 50 years of industry, government and global bank experience, which is a trifecta. It’s quite incredible in both the public and private sectors. Bob and I know Bruce from the four C group, so that’s our Calgary Citizens on Climate Change Group. We meet Thursday mornings to help each other learn and attempt different strategies to help inform people about these critically important issues and how to move ideas forward together. He also last year during episode 22, which I do encourage you to watch as well in the context of this work, he brought forward the idea of an integrated water resource preservation and restoration agency. So I’m sure we’ll discuss that. Welcome back, Bruce. Thank you for being here. Okay, so Kennedy, thank you so much, Kennedy for joining us.
Kennedy Halverson is currently with the Alberta Wilderness Association. She has a BSc in chemistry. She did a stint of honeybee research that convinced her to be that work at climate controlled laboratory bench. It led her to work with the climate controlled laboratory bench. Fast forward through a graduate degree in environmental studies focused on native plants and pollinator conservation. Kennedy has worked in research and projects on food policy for Canada, finding flowers at York University. Before joining the Alberta Wilderness Association, she helped develop a bumblebee pathogen sampling protocol for environment and climate change. Canada, it’s just wonderful to have you here, Kennedy. I was saying before we went live that I get the opportunity to see you in such a different space. You spoke so well at the coal hearings in Southern Alberta and you’ve just been such a big voice for conservation in the province. So it’s just such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you.
Kennedy:
Thanks for having me. Yeah, no, hearing the cast of people who’ve been on the episodes preceding me, they’re all people I really look up to in this field, it feels a little big shoes to fill to be here to talk. I don’t know if I’ll say anything new that they haven’t already set, but we’ll see.
Jenny:
Funny enough, you came up actually several times, Kennedy, with your expertise, so I appreciate your humility, but you are very, very on equal footing in this conversation, so thank you. Why, before we dive in, we forgot to mention, I would love to just hear a little bit about how you came into this work. So Kennedy, it sounds like you started having interest in bees and that’s what led you into the work that you do now. Is that right?
Kennedy:
Yeah, yeah. I definitely started at a biochemistry bench and realised I did not want to stay in a lab my whole life working on proteins. I needed to work on something a little bit bigger and then I was with honeybees and salmon and then I got an interest in our native species and that led me into conservation. And I wasn’t able to do a master’s in biology because the prof that I wanted to work with, she didn’t have any spaces left for that. But she said take a master’s of environmental studies. And I said, sure, I’ll do that. I’ll do it on native plants and pollinators. And it ended up being a really happy accident because I think it gave me the opportunity to work in a lot of different disciplines that now inform my conservation work today. And water is one of those things that pops up everywhere. So when I was working in food policy, water is a really important input to agriculture. It’s an important for health anyways. It pops up everywhere. I just keep finding it. And then when I joined a WA as a conservation specialist, I was given the waterfowl to work on and have been immersed in water policy ever since.
Jenny:
Fantastic. Same for you, Bruce. What brought you into this climate work? Initially I
J. Bruce:
Fishing. I do a lot of fishing around the province and I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time. I’ve fallen out of a canoe several times and thought that I should maybe go to a row boat and float down the Bow river south of Calgary. And I just have a great appreciation for a lot of the water systems. I used to ski on the glaciers, so I’ve watched their progress over the years. I have that history from a technical point of view. I started out in wastewater treatment systems for meat packing plants, actually in British Columbia. I worked on that for a while. I worked on the pulp and paper industry. I worked in the cattle industry. I worked on a lot of oil and gas projects over the years. And at some point in my life I got asked to go to Thailand and give a talk. And since then I’ve travelled the world on behalf of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to look specifically at the interface between people and the projects that they were funding and the consequences on the community and on the culture and that as they relate to these projects. So I’ve had a lot of interesting projects to look at in and in a lot of industries as well.
Jenny:
Yeah, you bring such a broad perspective to this dialogue, Bruce. I’m much appreciated. Okay, Bob, I will let you lead off the questions, please. Thank you.
What is working in water management, use, and protection?
Bob (00:09:45):
Okay. I’ll start with a pretty basic question. In terms of the future, what are the strengths and weaknesses in our system of managing water, using water, protecting water here in southern Alberta? Just basically what are the good things that we’ve got that we want to make sure we strengthen, at least keep? And what are those things that we really want to improve upon? I’ll start with you, Kennedy.
Kennedy:
Yeah. I think some of the things that are strong with how we manage water right now is we do have some good legislation in place that if it was implemented fully, I think we could have really good water protection in the province. So things like the Alberta Land Stewardship Act is a really interesting act in that it enables us to essentially plan out on a regional scale how we’ll have industries work and what areas we’d like to protect, things we’d like to prioritise in the region. And I think if it was implemented fully and maybe through a more environmental lens, we could have really strong environmental policy that does protect our watersheds. But I think maybe a reoccurring theme, and what you’ve probably come up on in your other conversations is that a lot of the legislation we have meant to protect our watersheds and protect the ecosystem services they provide is not necessarily being implemented fully or there’s a lot of loopholes or ways around protecting water.
Bob:
It’s very important to have some sort of regulatory system that actually provides that umbrella to work under. Is that what you’re saying?
Kennedy:
Yeah, absolutely. I also would say too, in addition to having a good regulatory system, we want to have the data available to make those informed decisions. So recently the Alberta government has been doing pretty extensive engagement on water availability in the province where they were asking folks how we can make more water available. And while that’s on its own, maybe a little bit of a, maybe not a correct, like we’re not going to make more water available, there is a closed amount of water in the system. It did show a lot of people’s opinions on waters and how we should manage it in the province. I recently submitted a foip request to get the feedback from that engagement because the government hasn’t yet released it publicly. And one of the things they noted, the environment and protected areas staff in their summaries within that foip request was that there’s a recognised need for stronger water use reporting and measuring in the province, but that’s not happening right now. Right now they have, it’s something like less than 10% of water users actually report their water use. When that’s the dataset you start with, it makes it really difficult to make informed water management decisions because we just don’t have the necessary data. So not only do you need a good regulatory system in place to ensure it, you need to have the information so we can make those informed decisions and we’re not just, we’re flying blind there.
Bob:
Yes. That’s one of the things that we noted when we looked at the licences that are out there, particularly older licences, licences don’t have that kind of reporting and measuring. And even the ones that do, it’s not even on a daily basis. It can be monthly, maybe even yearly. Bruce, in terms of the system we’ve got out there for managing water, using it, protecting it, where do you see the strengths and weaknesses?
J. Bruce:
Well, I think the strengths are in the people that are involved looking at the podcasts and the people involved in the papers. I read even the history of where we at. We’ve certainly put a lot of energy into water management in the province. We have one of the most, I would say, managed rivers anywhere in the world really in terms of the power dams and the rest of it. I think that’s certainly a strength. The problems I find is we don’t have the time and we don’t comprehend the situation we’re actually in. And we’re trading our demand for really our supply model. We should be looking at the river from the point of view of how much water is actually there that we can actually utilize over a very long time. And yet we manage it from the point of view of the water we want rather than the water we have. In a long-term sense, I’d like to see a much stronger organizational process that’s current and responsive in a very short time. And I equate that to things like how quickly our weather’s changing and how far out we are from the norms in terms of the possibilities of what the weather might be in the future, and we don’t have a system for alerting us to those kinds of effects.
Bob:
Yes. Go ahead, Jenny.
Jenny:
Oh, thanks. I just wanted to add, yeah, I love, thank you for bringing in the land stewardship laws right away, Kennedy. Yes. To me, it’s such a well constructed story and it includes all the components, it has all the stakeholders mentioned in it, but it’s not being applied and it’s not being looked at from the lens of an environmental integrity standpoint and being upheld to those standards. It’s just a concept and it keeps getting, I hear things like, oh, it’s too complicated. Well, we don’t really have much choice to not be looking at the complicated nature of the landscape and addressing it. Thank you, Bruce, for bringing in the fact that it’s the strength of the people. We have to look to the people who know this information, who are willing to actually get into these challenging conversations because quite frankly, that’s what it’s going to require.
The Pitfalls of Water Allocation
(00:16:22):
And to understand that management is not going to be a real solution and that we have to look at the problem from an actual ecosystem stability standpoint rather than a what can it deliver for us standpoint. Thank you guys for those wonderful introductions. If we can talk a little bit about, I think, Bob, this is where you wanted to go next, and you can stop me if I’m wrong, but to talk about allocation, can we get a little bit into how are we doing this wrong? A little bit about the allocation process and what are the pitfalls that we’re creating with it? Kennedy, can I start with you again?
Kennedy:
Yeah, yeah. I guess the situation in southern Alberta was recognized as really as 2007 that we had essentially over allocated our rivers, which means we’ve licensed out more volume than they can withstand. The whole basin was closed to any future water licences. The only way you can get water now in the basin is if you get a water licence transfer. The issue is that we don’t have anything in the water act to essentially restore balance and return flows to our rivers in a meaningful way. Oftentimes you’ll hear, especially from industry that, well, we’ve over allocated the basin, but we don’t necessarily use all of our allocation every year. But the allocations have been set based on the average natural flow of our rivers. That’s the flow we expect to come through our rivers every year, but that’s not necessarily the flow we get every year.
We’ll often get years much higher, years much lower. You can imagine if you’ve already over allocated a basin, it’s a year of low flows, industry’s going to use the regular amount they use, you suddenly get circumstances where you’re using 50% of the river flow for industry. And we know from really good research that you need to have a certain amount of flow in your rivers at all times to maintain their function and their structure, which is called the instream flow needs. When you have those years of really heavy use, which are often years of drought conditions of dry conditions, we can have times where we don’t have enough water in the rivers to meet the instream flow needs, which is something that threatens their long-term health and security. If we’re planning long-term in the future, we need to figure out a way to rewrite our rivers so that their needs are constantly being met and then we can balance use after that, which is, it’s like a wicked problem, I think is what, there’s a term called a wicked problem where it’s such an insurmountable problem that people don’t even want to begin dealing with it, but by not dealing with it, we’re making it worse essentially.
Yeah. I’ll stop there.
Jenny:
Yeah. I was listening to a podcast from the Climate Town podcast series from last year talking about water, and they were talking specifically about FITFIR and explaining how the water licence transfer process encourages full use because if you don’t use it, you lose it. To your point about exasperating a problem, we are not only discouraging overuse, we’re actually encouraging it in the face of limitations as we learned from Dr. Sauchyn. I’m sorry, Bob, you were going to add something there. Go ahead.
A Comprehension Problem
Bob (00:20:13):
Well, Kennedy, you hit on something that Stelfox said when we talked to him that when people are confronted with these unpalatable choices, they tend to ignore them. Let me start with Bruce on this question then. Is the problem really a technical, an engineering a biological problem, or is it really a political problem? Is that where things start to fall apart?
J. Bruce:
I think it’s a comprehension problem. I think that we’re focusing so much on our own needs that we’re not really focusing on the needs of the river. I would start there, then I would look at this whole issue of how do you manage this system given that we have to be able to predict what the weather’s going to do and the variation that we might get in a different year and have some kinds of indicators of whether we’re going to have enough water or not have enough water. And then the allocation applies after that. We’re putting the cart before the horse here in terms of allocating. Rather than having fixed allocations, we might even have consideration for not so much irrigation for instance, or we may actually want to change the crops we’re growing and the extent of which we’re actually growing crops. I think we have to look at a much more comprehensive idea of what’s really happening here.
Bob:
Kennedy, what are your thoughts on that?
Kennedy:
Yeah, I agree with Bruce on that. If you think about this area, it’s an area that has these really rich soils because they had thousands of years of native grass growth that enriched the soils. These soils look and appear as if they would be good to grow crops, but the limiting factor has always been precipitation, it’s always been water, irrigation was the solution to that. But we’re now using this massive input of water every year to sustain crops in this region. Even doing so, we’re growing crops that are water heavy, they consume a lot of water. We’re not growing drought tolerant crops. We’re growing things like sugar beets that we’re forcing crops to grow where they wouldn’t naturally grow at the expense of our rivers. Lots of the argument will be that irrigated agriculture is this massive part of our agricultural industry, but really only 5% or a little bit more than 5% of all agricultural land is irrigated, and yet they have 44% of the water licences in Alberta.
This is the last time I looked at the math, it was in 2022, 1 fifth of the water we used in Alberta went to 5% of these irrigated lands. And they don’t necessarily, the majority of our agricultural industry comes from, or the economy comes from our dry land crops. We’re just removing so much water onto these irrigated acres to grow food that we don’t even necessarily eat. And I guess it begs the question is, is where we’re irrigating now appropriate knowing we’re heading into this future where water scarcity and water security are going to become much more common. I think we do have to start managing our water like it is this commonly held public good, but it is really difficult in the current system we have, because right now water is primarily held by people, a small minority of licences that have held that water for a really long time. Trying to figure out how we move forward is, yeah, it’s very difficult.
Jenny:
And just to add that the geography of it is bizarre too, that the most senior licence holders are downstream of most of Alberta too. It’s just such a wild thing to think about in terms of that allocation. Sorry, Bob, go ahead. Lead into your next…
Water Over-Allocation
Bob (00:24:52):
Well, I was going to get back to this allocation, the over allocation problem back in the 1990s, the provincial government basically said, we’ve got to deal with it somehow. And they basically put a cap on irrigation acres in southern Alberta. They changed their mind in the early two thousands with the new water management plan that’s out there, and they basically put a cap on everybody as Kennedy mentioned by saying that you now can’t get any new licences, you have to rely on the transfer system. Those are similar approaches. They’re obviously trying to put some sort of a limit, but they are very different in terms of who gets affected because with the first approach, the irrigation industry would certainly be limited unless they could come up with more efficient use of water.
On the second approach, everybody gets affected, but the irrigation industry, particularly because they hold senior licences, get an advantage because now they can transfer water that maybe they weren’t using or they no longer need because of efficiencies. Which of those two approaches do you think is better? Because they are very different in terms of the impact on people. Certainly municipalities now are paying a lot of money, although we don’t know how much because it’s all confidential to get water from whoever has it available. Bruce, which of those approaches do you think is better? Or do you think there’s a third approach that might work better than either one of ‘em?
J. Bruce:
I don’t like either one. I think that they point to resource conflict. For me, it means that eventually we’re going to reach a point where we have to decide whether we want agriculture or cities and we should have an allocation process that’s maybe much more, if you will, weather centered and cost effective for where we live and how we want to live. Otherwise, we are going to end up with Phoenix, for instance. They’ve allowed housing to get out of control down there, and they’re debating whether they’re going to bypass the city entirely with water because they just haven’t got any more for the growth that they’ve allowed to have happen and Calgary’s facing the same entity. I also think that we don’t do urban planning at all in the context of the water. We have availability or the kind of weather we actually have here. I mean, when you get four insurance companies leaving the province, they’ve obviously indicating that there’s something wrong with their mismanagement of our insurance industry relative to what we’re building and the weather we’re getting. Those issues are the kinds of things I look into.
Jenny:
Yeah, I was really interested by Judy Stewart’s comments last week about how the municipalities have, they should have the authority to be making water decisions, and yet every level of government has the ability to overwrite the municipal decision making process. So yes, therefore it’s not happening for that reason. It’s just being avoided altogether. Really good point. Sorry, go ahead, Bob.
Bob:
Yeah, I’ll put it to Kennedy. Bruce doesn’t like either of those solutions. What are your views?
Kennedy:
I think they were not so much solutions as they were knee jerk reactions to a really bad situation where it was like, we have to stop something and this is how we do it. And I think what at least the 2006 or oh seven decision shows is recognizing that there are ecological constraints that we all live in. There’s only so much water in this river. There’s only so much water that can be taken out of this river for use. I think that maybe something better would be looking at how we can all work with the environment instead of against it to ensure that the water that is here and moves and flows in a way that is more conducive to our lives. One of those things, like Bruce has mentioned, we’re going to have changing weather patterns increasingly in the future.
In southern Alberta, one of the things we expect is we expect when the snow is going to melt, we expect when we’re going to get our highest flows in that June time, we’ll have our lowest flows in the summer. And that’s how water is currently managed all throughout the year. Those are the predicted time periods that we base our agriculture on. Knowing in the future that we are now going to be seeing a lot less snow falling and more of our water is going to be coming as precipitation throughout the year, we know that our snow is going to start melting earlier, we’re going to have higher peak flows earlier. Those are all things that we need to be planning for. But they also, those climate predictions show a really worrisome case for things like our agricultural industry.
It means that the water that they usually hope and expect for in June and July is going to be coming closer earlier June, earlier in May, and they’re not going to have it in those mid-summer months where it’s really hot and their crops need it the most. We need to be thinking about how can we store and slow water on the landscape that doesn’t, what’s the word, intensify the climate system even worse, which means not using these conventional sort of human infrastructure grey approaches, but using our natural ecosystem approaches. I think a solution to me would be investing in our ecosystems. We invest in infrastructure like dams and reservoirs, moving that money and looking towards our headwaters and how do we make our headwater forests more resilient? How do we retain wetlands on the landscape? How do we increase complexity to the streams and tributaries that feed our rivers? How do we restore beavers to the landscape? All these things are things that could be done very simply that would help also fulfil our commitments to supporting biodiversity while also making us a more water secure region.
Biodiversity and Water Supply Losses
Jenny (00:31:57):
That’s wonderful. Kennedy. I think if we can lead in then to some of the ways that we could do that biodiversity, it’s just so as Bruce was saying, this is such a complex problem, when we talk about water, it also brings in the thought of biodiversity loss. Those two things go hand in hand. If lost water, if we’ve lost ecological or habitat, let’s say we’ve lost biodiversity, we’ve lost water. These are all the ways that you’re saying that we should reverse the bus and start investing in those things. Can you speak a little bit about the loss of biodiversity? Can you help people understand, I mean, I could use an example of the cold lake sub-regional planning I was involved in, and I know that we were 96% disturbed and needed to move back to, I can’t remember what the percent was we were looking for, but if you can just speak to some of those kind of the logic behind the land stewardship laws and how that is meant to move us back from that footprint. Thank you.
Kennedy:
Yeah. Yeah. I think when we think about biodiversity loss, you could think about it sort of both spatially and temporally. Spatially it’s important to have intact ecosystems and big areas of them, but it’s also important to have connected ecosystems. One of the things, a really great data source I always go to is the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute. They have really great layered data that you could visualize on a map that shows all of Alberta. I think right now it’s something like 30% of, I think Alberta is human footprint is impacted by human footprint, and that is largely concentrated in southern Alberta where agriculture and cropland dominates. But while I guess only 30% is human footprint, you can see on the map visually that human footprint extends to every point in the province, which means that we are fragmenting habitat.
That’s one of the ways we’ve lost biodiversity. And then on a timescale, you can also look to species and species populations. Some of the species we have that we think of as bio indicators, these are species that are really intimately tied to the ecosystem that they’re in, and their health reflects the health of an ecosystem we’re seeing declines in their populations. Bruce mentioned earlier that fishing was where he got his start in water, and I don’t remember these times, but maybe he can recall a time the bull trout in Alberta is Alberta’s trout, and it used to be one of the most populous fish species in our river systems. And now the bull trout is a threatened species. It’s increasingly on a decline, and one of its major threats is the fragmentation of its habitat, which means its streams and rivers are getting chopped off, and then it’s also the degradation of its habitat.
Our land use is too close to the streams it uses, and its habitat quality is decreasing in such a way that it can no longer thrive. When we look to this increasing habitat loss and fragmentation and the species decline, we know that we’ve lost biodiversity in these ways and it has really real implications. I think a lot of people will think, well, what does it matter if we lose one fish species? Well, the bull trout is one fish species, but it’s emblematic of a whole ecosystem. And if its health is declining, if it’s health in our headwater streams and in our southern tributaries, if it’s not there, it indicates that our southern tributaries are suffering. It shows that we really need to do something to repair it because inevitably as ecosystems work, it’ll cascade up that food chain and we’re there at the end. Right. Investing in species health is investing in our health.
Jenny:
Wonderful. Bruce, did you want to add to that?
J. Bruce:
Yeah, I think Yellowstone is probably a good example of that. They brought back, I think it is the wolf, to bring the whole habitat of Yellowstone back to its former self, and I think it shows that every species has its value in maybe having ended up in this part of the world after centuries of working with other animals and you end up with this kind of habitat. And I think that’s what we have to get back to. We have to get back to appreciating all of those various otherwise insignificant aspects of even just losing one bull trout. I mean, it’s important to keep those habitats as sound as we can. I think the other concept I like to look at is that we are not separate from the water. We are in fact water.
I weigh about 150 pounds and a hundred pounds of me is water. You’re almost 60% water as an individual. You’re not much different than a trout, really a different outlook on the outside, I guess. But for me, we have to appreciate this in a much more cohabitation kind of way with what is our ecosystem and what we have to do to preserve it. And it’s the little things that add up to the big things like too many roads, no planning for drainage and putting houses in the wrong place. There’s all kinds of issues that we could address to deal with that balance, if you will, or that cohabitation of this particular part of the world.
Jenny:
Wonderful. Bob, did you want to lead into the next?
Is reversing biodiversity loss possible?
Bob (00:38:12):
Yeah, Bruce, you mentioned the wolves in Yellowstone, and they’re basically the keystone species there, particularly in terms of managing, naturally managing wildlife. We’ve become in a sense, the keystone species in terms of managing things here in the Southern Alberta because it is such a managed system. Our governments and land managers actually capable of changing their behaviour to reverse the loss of biodiversity. And if so, how will that happen? Let me throw that out to Kennedy first.
Kennedy:
I think if it happens, it will only happen if it’s forced. Right now, I don’t see any amount of data or information speaking to our current government to change how things are done, and I think that it will take a lot of public pressure or a massive natural disaster event to really get people to commit to action. I think we can look to something like the floods in Calgary in 2013. That is something that really changed how people thought about water and plan for water. And I think, or even I guess, yeah, the wildfires in Jasper as well, when we see how quickly the systems we built up can be taken over by these natural events that have been made more severe because of climate change, I think it really shows that while we believe we’re managing the land, at the end of the day, nature bats last, which is something Lorne Fitch loves to say. I think things like that are what really forced change, unfortunately.
But it’s one of those things that we just don’t have another choice moving forward. We have to be building cities that are resilient to climate change because unfortunately, we have not taken action fast enough to stop climate change. In the context of water, that means making cities that are not these concrete jungles that do not allow water to actually infiltrate into the ground. It means not draining our wetlands endlessly and keeping them as these natural reservoirs on the landscape that do filter and store and slow flows. There are many things we could do, and we’re choosing not to do them because they do not pay us back immediately. But I think, yeah, something needs to happen to reframe our mind and recognize that we’re investing for our own futures. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe Bruce will have another answer.
Bob:
Well, I think before Bruce jumps in, Brad Stelfox mentioned the same kind of thing when we asked him a similar question, and it was basically, he used an example in India, I think it was, where basically a crisis happened in terms of their managing the land. They became much better than that. We had a crisis here with the flood, the big flood in Calgary and the one that came a couple years before that. Bruce, are we really faced with a situation from your understanding of human behaviour? Are we really faced with a situation where you have to have a crisis first before people will actually make significant change?
J. Bruce:
It would appear that’s the case. I don’t think it necessarily has to be the case. I don’t see anything happening in this province from a political point of view that suggests that we’re on track to have much of a future. I get a sense that we can do and manage and plan our futures much better. There’s certain areas of the world where it’s been very successful to do that. There’s a little island off the coast of southern Japan that had been there for thousands of years, and they have a maintained population and survive very well. It can certainly be done. I just think we have to find what our real objectives are, whether we want the capitalism, the way in which we apply it or whether we want to have a future for our children, it becomes a kind of a social culture, cultural entity rather than a political entity.
Bob:
Well, in a way, the people in the future, in terms of our support or benefit to them, it’s how much they’re in debt to us for what we did now, I don’t think it came out quite the way it was supposed to, but the crises are there in terms of global warming, in terms of our own use of water and land. We’re going to expect to see more frequent, more severe droughts, floods, and weather events. I think you both Bruce and Kennedy, you both have identified the kinds of things that we already have that can help us deal with those kinds of things. But can we actually move beyond that? And I know that Bob Sanford said, and I’ll just get the proper quote here so I don’t misquote him here if I can get my computer to move. He said that in terms of climate vulnerability and water security, Alberta is essentially ungoverned and therefore totally unprepared. Do you sense that, and if so, what can be done to improve the governance with all these wonderful people? We have all these wonderful laws, we have all these wonderful systems we have. Do you agree with him? And if you do agree with him, how can we make the political model, I guess, work better? Bruce, I’ll start with you.
J. Bruce:
Yeah, we can do it better. I get to see it feeling that we’re chasing resource extraction in this province, whether it’s coal, oil or anything like that for a short term economic gain and to maybe satisfy investors somewhere else in the world. But we’re not really looking at again, what this province is capable of sustaining the fact that we can be continuing to produce hydrocarbons at the rate at which we’re doing and in the way in which we’re doing it and not appreciate what we’re going to be left with. I mean, at one time I worked on the tar sands, on the reclamation part of the tar sands, and nobody was interested in actually following through with any of that. The government wasn’t interested. The Energy Resources Conservation Board wasn’t interested, the investors weren’t interested, the oil companies weren’t interested. We end up with probably the largest black spot on the globe in Northern Alberta. I mean, you can see it from space. The only other place I’ve seen it is actually in Indonesia. There’s a tailings coming from the gold mining there. It’s about the same as what’s happening in Alberta. I think that we either have to do it in a different way or we have to follow through on our commitments to actually appreciate the environment while we’re doing it.
Bob:
Okay. Kennedy, are we essentially ungoverned from a climate and a water security point of view?
Kennedy:
Yeah, it’s tough right now. I think I’ve seen a lot of, really a lot of our water legislation worsen at least, especially in the last year, which makes it seem, which will govern it worse. And then the reports we get coming out from people like the auditor general that says Alberta has little knowledge of how much water it uses, if it’s meeting its conservation objectives, those things all suggest that we are ungoverned. And I think that’s, that’s the same for climate. This is not a province that prioritizes addressing the climate crisis, unfortunately. But what I think is a good thing is that there’s a lot of people who are not the government who do know these things and are working very hard to try to address these things. We have had and have some very brilliant scientists that work here. We have water leaders like David Schindler who has passed, but people like that, we have people from I guess Saskatchewan that help a lot like John Pomeroy.
We have leaders here who are internationally recognized for their knowledge on water and watersheds and water systems. And then behind that, we have many different groups like the people we see here today and many different associations who are concerned about water. I think that the people power and the knowledge that we have outside of that are things that give me hope that we can change how we manage water in the province. But I do think it starts with really increasing maybe just general public knowledge of the situation we live in and we live, especially in southern Alberta, we’re in a dry arid landscape. We need to act like we are in a dry arid landscape. Even at the municipal level, places like Okotoks that recognize and have always planned for having limited water supplies, I think that’s something we need to see on a widespread scale for municipalities in southern Alberta. Yeah, maybe the change starts at a grassroots level.
Key Takeaways
Jenny (00:49:13):
Wonderful. Yeah, I think this is a great time to shift into some of the takeaway ideas that we each have. I’m going to offer some things that I do really appreciate. First of all, Bruce, and I’ll tip it to you next, the thought about having an actual entity that is dedicated to water preservation and restoration. To me, we talk a lot about management. We’ve heard the word management throughout this conversation, but we don’t have a specific group of people that are dedicated to that. Aside from what you described, Kennedy, these individuals and organizations that are working to help inform the public and essentially get that tipping point of people who are asking for this to be a priority by this government. Because fundamentally that’s what’s needed is we need the public to acknowledge that this is happening. Bruce spoke, or sorry, Bob mentioned the example that Brad Stel Fox used.
It was not only, so it was a place in India that they had had shortages and they had gone in and drilled water wells and they had created irrigation and they had done all sorts of things and then it all collapsed. Like he said, it was down to rubble. That’s how bad it was that they were actually trying to regain soil in the area. That’s how bad it was. I don’t want us to go there. None of us want us to go there. This is a battle, quite frankly, of the people to establish what is actually needed. And I’m going to say something that I heard a toxicologist, Mandy Olsgard, say to a public audience in Nanton, which was, this is not going to happen unless we make it happen. This isn’t a priority. We’ve heard it through from Bob, we’ve heard it from Kennedy, I’ve seen it.
We’ve all seen it in terms of what’s happening with the water decision making in this process. It’s getting more lenient rather than more conservationist, and it will break. There is no question I’ve heard from specialists like Dr. Cathy Ryan at the U of C say, they are not clear on when the water table might break, meaning we could prevent trees from being able to catch root, and that means you would lose that soil like what just happened in India. These are real situations that we are facing if we don’t turn the ship around. I will tip it to you first. Bruce, can you expand on what that looks like for you? That group, for example, if we were to establish it, what does it look like? And Kennedy, you can think about how you might add to it too. You go ahead, Bruce.
J. Bruce:
Yeah, a couple of aspects to it. I’m talking about an institution that is separate from government in the sense that it is fully funded by government for some significant period of time, but it isn’t up to the government to decide what the future is. It’s time that all of these specialists get together and work on this problem and make recommendations to the government that we expect the government to actually fulfil. And I think it’s, it’s not the politics so much as it’s the understanding that this is a very complex system and we have to trade things for other things, and we have to balance our investments or our funding, our dollars. We have to make things practical, inexpensive, and function well. And the only way I can see you do that is to bring the various parties together in one place where they can work on these problems and come up with a specific answer that maybe then take to the government to actually make it happen. I’m quite concerned that the government is not telling us things that we should be knowing right now rather than telling us what they want us to hear. I think this province is in a different state than we are all imagining that it is right now.
Jenny:
Agreed. And you help me remember, I wanted to expand a little bit on what this action looks like. Kennedy, you mentioned we’re irrigating in a landscape which we know can’t tolerate that long-term. Therefore we need to be thinking about drought tolerant crops. We need to be thinking about water preservation and restoration rather than conservation in terms of those water management systems. And then also local food systems. If we were to reduce our expectation of growing on the landscape, in some cases we have the capacity to have greenhouses in Calgary, especially with the amount of natural gas we have. There’s a massive opportunity there to couple those things and provide some, alleviate the landscape, if you will, while we recover that landscape. And again, this isn’t coming from a place of wanting to take away from those who are managing the landscape. This is trying to help them prevent them from witnessing and suffering that collapse. Let’s be real. We’ve talked about it a couple of times in this conversation that there are farmers who are committing suicide because they are experiencing such severe changes on the landscape that they don’t know how to handle it, and this is therefore a way to provide them support. Sorry, I went off there, but I wanted to get that in the conversation. Go ahead, Kennedy. Please offer your thoughts in this space.
Kennedy:
Yeah, I guess maybe just even speaking to that a little bit, I think the recognition is, and I think farmers would know this firsthand, especially in the area that it is requiring more and more inputs to grow crops. And this ask for them to continually grow more and more is not possible. You hit your limits eventually. We can’t keep putting fertilizer and pesticides and water, and there’s only so much where you plateau, and it is not necessarily sustainable if this is what is required to grow crops in these regions. It’s not sustainable. I think, I don’t even know how you begin to do this, but you need to somehow figure out what is a just transition for these people as a way to recognize that there’s some areas in the province where we’ve decided to grow agriculture, where agriculture is not an appropriate land use because it requires such intensive inputs and the loss is so heavy in drought years. And how can you essentially help those people either continue their livelihood until they’re done and then you transition that land out of use for agriculture, return it to native grassland, which is something that would be a climate solution. Native grassland is drought resilient. It helps store water on the landscape as well.
And then also it would return licensed water back to the rivers. I think a lot of the climate conversations is just figuring out what does that just transition look like for people who work? Things that just are not sustainable anymore in the reality we live in. And I don’t know, I think it just has to start. It has with some sort of legislation and political will and public power, but I don’t obviously have the solution for that. But I do really love the idea of a dedicated water preservation group or a climate core people that would go around the province and find areas that are biodiversity hotspots are ecosystem services like priorities for conservation. In Alberta, that would be places like our remaining native grasslands, our remaining wetland complexes, the Rockies and Foothills, which are our water towers. Focusing those areas for conservation would help us in a lot of ways. But yeah, I think it’s tough to say how that gets done with so many competing interests and without the political will there.
Jenny:
Yeah, I love the thought of looking, I think of it as like the 80-20 rule. If we just focus our efforts on the most bang for our buck, that’s where we can really see the change and then people will get behind this concept more broadly. I love that idea, Kennedy. Bob, did you want to make sure that we covered off all the questions that you had in mind or any comments that you wanted?
Bob:
We’ve covered the questions I wanted to ask. And Jenny, that was a great question at the end here because it’s touched on several of the things we’ve already talked about on the other podcasts, including what is the role of these watershed planning and advisory councils? Because Bruce’s agency that’s funded by the government, but independent looks a little bit like them. The WPACs don’t have all the regulatory responsibility that they should have. In fact, they have none. And in terms of the just transition Canada, you’ve hit upon the issue of do you move the water to the people or do you move the people to the water? And maybe there is a more significant cap that you have to put on Southern Alberta that encourages, as you said, Kennedy, with a just transition to locate where the water is, rather than try to make more out of the little bit of water that we have. Very interesting question at the end, Jenny, very good responses from you, Kennedy and Bruce. I’m very appreciative of all of you in terms of joining this podcast, joining this series, and helping us figure out what the future of water management might look like. Thank you.
Jenny:
Yeah, anything that we missed, please Bruce, if you have any final thoughts, I’d love to hear them from both of you as well. Please go
J. Bruce:
Ahead. Yeah. Part of this agency I’m talking about is to hold people accountable and to know who’s collecting the information and why we’re not getting the results we’re supposed to be getting. If we distribute the responsibility, then we end up with not understanding what’s happening and why it’s happening and why we’re not meeting our future water needs.
Jenny:
Yes, I think like you’re saying, you can’t solve a problem. You’re not including in your logic. I think to back up the bus and make sure we have a tendency of, like you said, Bruce, especially right now with this government to hide things or not leave the outliers out of the discussion. And rather, we need to have all of those outliers in the discussion.
That we can make sure that we’re incorporating all of those issues at once. And when I think we’ll realize, I think of Bruce was saying, or Bob was just saying, these watershed councils, they’re already in place. They’re already on the watershed. If we can just empower ourselves to support them in a meaningful way, I think there’s a big opportunity there for us to make use of a system that’s already in place. Kennedy, did you have any, oh, go ahead, Bruce. Was there any
J. Bruce:
We need to do it in a timely manner too.
Jenny:
Yeah. Thank you. Kennedy, any final word before we wrap?
Kennedy:
No, I think that covered everything. Yeah, that I have to say today. I think a lot of good questions and discussion.
Jenny:
Yeah, Kennedy, you brought it. I have to say that was phenomenal. Thank you guys so much. And this is also from my friend, my client, who would like to say thank you folks as well for a brilliant chat. He’s not wrong. Okay. Thank you. This has been incredible, Bob. Again, I’m so appreciative of us having done this, and I am excited to see what comes next. We will take action with this. Thank you very much for your time, everybody. And remember, please to like and subscribe to the gravity wall. Sorry, Kennedy, that’s not cool. Get the word can get out about this and that we can get enough public pressure to make sure that this stuff gets done. Okay. Have a great rest of your day, everyone. Take care for now.
J. Bruce:
Thank you both.
