Singer near some aohtoksooki, or common yarrow.

Singer and his dog Zorro beside raised beds where he is growing native plants to preserve seeds and eventually fight back leafy spurge.

Ninaika’ksimii, or Louisiana sagewort, grows in Singer’s yard.

Leafy spurge, an invasive plant, grows in the prairie that Singer is working to restore.

Singer shows a goldenrod plant on the Kainai Blood Tribe reserve. Goldenrod is a native plant, but its Blackfoot name has been lost to colonization.

Api’soomaahka, or William Singer, is converting his cultivated land back to native grasslands. His father began growing crops on their land when Singer was a child. Cultivation introduced non-native species such as Kentucky Bluegrass, brome grasses and invasive spurge, which harm native medicine plants such as sage and sweetgrass. Singer watched these traditional plants disappear. Twelve years ago he began to restore the land to its former state, a project now called Naapi’s Garden. He uses controlled burns, goats and hand weeding to remove the yellow-flowered spurge, but its roots can extend nine metres deep. To protect traditional native plants, Singer grows sage, sweetgrass, mint and turnips in raised garden beds, collecting their seeds and reintroducing them to the land.

Photography by Amber Bracken

With information originally published in The Narwhal, July 31, 2020.

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Kevin Van Tighem says YES

Alberta-born author, naturalist and former Banff National Park superintendent (2008–2011)

Over four million people visited Banff National Park in 2023. Some got lost or hurt and had to be rescued. Others fed bears and had to get straightened out. All flushed toilets, drove on roads and parked in parking lots. Campgrounds had to be maintained. Signs, picnic tables and boardwalks had to be repaired. The list goes on. It’s costly.

A lot of Canadians, however, didn’t visit Banff or any other national park—either because they couldn’t afford to or weren’t interested. It’s not clear why their tax dollars should finance holidays enjoyed by others.

Should the occupants of all those vehicles streaming into the park each day pay their own way Of course they should; they get to enjoy a costly privilege that others don’t. But the core costs associated with national parks should be funded through the public treasury. That’s not a contradiction, because it’s not the same thing.

National parks are institutions that represent the part of our Canadian identity defined by our nature and our history. Parks ensure we’ll always be able to know ourselves, because we’ll always be able to find ourselves. That mandate is a benefit to all—visitors or not—and a legacy to future generations. Like our national archives, military, treaty obligations and other institutions, it makes sense to fund our parks with tax revenues.

And, in fact, every Canadian should be welcome to visit and be inspired by their national parks without paying a fee. The parks are ours, by virtue of citizenship. But here’s the problem: when we choose to visit by means of a vehicle, that creates costs unrelated to protecting heritage—and compromises that very mandate. Without cars, we wouldn’t need to replace wildlife habitat with kilometres of paved highway lined with noxious weeds. Without cars there wouldn’t be bear jams and traffic gridlock. Snowplowing, parking lots, fencing, roadkill—all are in service of vehicles and those of us who insist on using them.

When I was responsible for Banff National Park I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that well more than 75 per cent of the park’s budget went to providing for the use of—or mitigating the impacts of—vehicles. Recently congestion has brought parts of that park to a virtual standstill. An added irony: the exhaust gases spewing from those engines contribute to a climate disaster that makes park protection increasingly hopeless as glaciers melt, fires burn and wildlife comes under growing stress. In Banff’s case the problem is compounded by a species of mandate creep that has turned a protected heritage place—dedicated only to future generations of Canadians—into an international tourism resort. More vehicles.

So here’s my idea: the basic costs of protecting parks—our national birthright—should be fully funded by tax revenues. Canadians arriving on their own two feet should get in for free. But anyone who comes by vehicle should pay a substantial fee that accounts for the full cost of that privilege. No free rides.

Ian Urquhart says no

U of A professor emeritus and former editor of the AWA’s Wild Lands Advocate

Free admission to Canada’s national parks was a gift Ottawa gave Canadians in 2017 for this country’s 150th birthday. It was a good idea then; it’s a good idea now.

Entrance fees are a revenue source for Parks Canada, albeit a small one. In 2022/23 the agency spent $1.28-billion; entrance fees paid for $91.5-million, or 7 per cent, of those expenses. Why get rid of these fees I recently posed this question to Catherine McKenna, the federal minister who delivered free admission to national parks in 2017. Today she strongly believes parks should be free “because we need people to understand the value of nature,” and that spending time in the outdoors may be the best way to do that. She suggested free admission helps parks promote many values, including health, equality, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and Indigenous partnerships. I agree, and I’ll just address two of them.

Research into the nature–human relationship clearly shows the health benefits of spending time in nature. Greenspace exposure reduces high blood pressure, high HDL cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality. Nature delivers similar mental health benefits. Connectedness with nature reduces stress while increasing happiness and cognitive abilities.

The research demonstrates parks are essential health care institutions. Dr. Melissa Lem agrees. She’s the director of PaRx, Canada’s prescription for nature program. Parks Canada has partnered with Lem’s program to enable registered health professionals to prescribe an annual park pass to patients. Alberta doctors who register with PaRx can prescribe this access to Alberta’s outstanding national parks. Calgary physician Andrea Hull regards PaRx as “an exciting way to showcase the health benefits of time in nature.”

Inequality is another important foundation for opposing entrance fees. User fees discourage people with lower incomes from participating in outdoor activities. Personally, $22 for a day pass to Banff isn’t going to stop me from visiting, but I’m lucky. The cost of a family day pass or annual pass ($151.25) puts time in national parks beyond many people’s reach.

I couldn’t support abolishing entrance fees if I thought it would mean damage to the parks. Maintaining and restoring ecological integrity is the first priority of managing the national parks. But the experience of 2017, when entry was free, allays my concerns. Parks Canada used other measures, such as buses and area closures, to manage the increase in visitors.

Banff National Park’s assessment of the 2017 season argued that McKenna’s decision was ultimately justified. Free passes “allowed more Canadians… to connect with these wonderful places that are actually their places.” The feared additional damage to nature from more visitors didn’t arise.

As minister of environment and climate change, McKenna favoured this tagline for our parks: “Discover. Connect. Protect.” Today let’s adopt it and add the word “Free.”

kevin van tighem responds to ian urquhart

Ian Urquhart argues that national parks should be free to Canadians because of parks’ health benefits. It’s hard to disagree with that view, but to an unfortunate degree it’s an idealistic one that doesn’t reflect the actual park experience for many visitors. It’s hard to see how sitting in a traffic jam on Banff Avenue or jostling with the crowds that throng the Lake Louise shoreline is good for health. If anything, the tension experienced by visitors during crowded times—which, increasingly, is most of the time—frays tempers and exacerbates the social stresses those visitors went to their parks to escape. That’s not healthy.

Minister McKenna’s 2017 decision to provide free access to Canada’s national parks was not the painless success that Urquhart suggests. Yes, in many less visited parks and historic sites, Canadians did connect to their heritage. But Alberta’s already crowded mountain parks saw worse traffic, bigger crowds and the diversion of budgets from priorities such as trail maintenance and wildlife management to crowd-control.  When a national park visit becomes an exercise in navigating traffic cones, being directed into emergency parking lots by safety-vest-clad employees, crowding onto buses and waiting endlessly, something has gone wrong. It certainly wasn’t good healthy fun for anyone, including those harried park employees.

Yes, Parks Canada scrambled to mitigate the challenge by setting up public transportation. But those buses, signs and flag-people came at a cost. Nothing is free, after all. Somebody has to pay. In 2017 it was Canadian taxpayers who picked up the tab. I’m not sure how this was fair to the large percentage of those taxpayers who chose not to visit a park that year—partly because of the well-publicized crowding issues.

Nothing guarantees a right to private vehicle use in the parks. Kilometres of pavement compromise nature.

Social equity challenges don’t just involve the cost of getting into a park. People who can’t afford a park pass generally live far from national parks. The economic challenges involved in enjoying those parks include the cost of transportation to get there, finding accommodation and paying inflated prices for meals and other amenities in parks that have been taken captive, to a considerable degree, by a tourism industry that targets well-off motorized travellers. Low-income Canadians unquestionably deserve the opportunity to experience their national parks, but the cost of admission is often the least of the barriers they face.

For all those quibbles, I generally agree with Urquhart. National parks are meant to benefit every Canadian; every Canadian should be able to enjoy them for free. But the traditional emphasis on private motor vehicles can make parks less than enjoyable.

Public transportation is one way to democratize access to the national parks. For that truly to work, it has to include not just internal options such as Banff’s Roam bus service but also services to help Canadians get to their parks from the cities and towns where most of us live. That’s a costly proposition, given that the country’s infrastructure is built around the private vehicle. It was no accident, after all, when Greyhound folded. Cars rule.

But the value of good, affordable public transportation to and in our national parks would go beyond social equity; it’s a critical part of any meaningful response to the climate crisis—a crisis that threatens both human health and the natural environment.

So how could we pay for it Collect high fees from those who insist on driving their vehicles to the parks. Progressive economic policy requires that those who demand special benefits that work against the public good should pay dearly for their privilege.

Nothing in the Canada National Parks Act guarantees a right to private vehicle use in the parks. As Urquhart points out, parks’ first priority is the protection of ecological integrity, something inevitably compromised by the kilometres of pavement covering what was once wildlife habitat; the hundreds of birds, mammals, amphibians and insects killed each year by vehicles; and the climate chaos engulfing us because of all the CO₂ those cars release.

National parks are dedicated to future generations of Canadians as places that provide for the benefit, education and enjoyment of people. Private vehicles aren’t required for that; just the opposite. Nature is off-pavement.

Anybody who doubts the need to challenge conventional car-centred logic in the management of national parks should take a trip to Banff on any summer weekend. Yes, national parks should be free to all Canadians. But not to our cars. If we charged private vehicle users the full cost of their privilege, we’d start generating the kind of revenues needed to fund public transportation for all. We might also restore the peaceful enjoyment of nature—the kind of real national park experience that is rapidly becoming roadkill.

ian urquhart responds to kevin van tighem

Kevin Van Tighem believes that anyone using a private vehicle to visit national parks should pay a “substantial fee.” Why Because such visitors compromise Parks Canada’s heritage protection mandate. He uses Banff National Park to make the point that vehicle congestion can produce gridlock. Banff again is used to argue that managing private vehicles costs a lot of money. Such costs are compounded, in the case of Banff, by the park’s alleged transformation from “a protected heritage place” into “an international tourism resort.”

Much of his argument is Banff-based. Banff is unique, and we should be wary of generalizing from what we think is best for Banff to all national parks. That said, I believe his prescription is wrong even for Banff.

Before I critique the former superintendent’s position, readers should know he misrepresents Banff’s history. Tourism, not heritage protection, motivated the establishment of Canada’s first national park. Sir John A. Macdonald concluded Banff could be “a great place of resort” that would attract people from across North America and Europe. Banff was created to be an international tourist destination. Decades later, parks commissioner J.B. Harkin wanted the parks to serve all Canadians. Ironically—given this dialogue—he saw roads and the automobile as the way to do that. Promoting tourism is a constant, not a novelty, in Banff National Park’s history.

We agree, however, that tension between human desires and heritage protection is another constant in the history of our mountain parks. Today’s volume of vehicle traffic to Banff attests to this.

But all visitors, including those in cars, are more than simply threats to heritage protection. They are potential allies to promote that mandate. Their support for parks is an important political resource in the annual competition for Canada’s tax dollars. Building public support for Parks Canada is especially important now. The agency benefited from the 2021 federal budget’s $2.3-billion investment in nature conservation. But the funding was temporary. It will dry up in 2026–2027, and with it will go an important chunk of the agency’s budget.

All visitors are potential allies to promote heritage protection. Support is more likely when entry is free.

Parks Canada needs our support to try to secure dollars to invest in its core mandate. Support is more likely when nearly all visitors say they would recommend their experience to others. In 2022–2023, 95 per cent of visitors to Canada’s national parks surveyed said this. A new, substantially increased entrance fee, a form of double taxation, might damage or kill that support.

A substantially higher fee would also make access even more challenging for lower-income Canadians. Today, as a century ago, the car offers the most practical and affordable means of travelling to Alberta’s national parks. The least expensive round-trip bus option for a family of four going to Banff from Calgary is just under $95, or $117 with a day pass. If the same family’s SUV uses 8 litres per 100 km, the fuel cost will be less than $35.

A bus trip to Jasper is a non-starter for a family of four living in Edmonton. The only commercial bus service to Jasper would cost them $344.44—one way. And if you live elsewhere in Alberta… An automobile is your only practical means for visiting.

The report of the expert advisory panel on moving people sustainably in the Banff Bow Valley (2022) saw pricing as one of its eight key strategies. But the panellists wrote that if a pricing strategy didn’t consider income it could “create equity issues and discourage lower-income persons from experiencing the  park.” Van Tighem’s position sounds like it would do exactly that.

Do vehicles produce gridlock in parts of Banff National Park Absolutely. But the panel suggested that serious transportation issues arose only “in a relatively small portion of the park. [Some] 97 per cent of the park is declared wilderness, where development is prohibited.” When gridlock occurs, it likely arises in the town of Banff, Lake Louise or Lake Minnewanka.

I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon in July while looking at the Town of Banff’s traffic cams on my computer. The cameras show considerable traffic entering, leaving and driving around town. But while I’d be annoyed by this traffic if I lived in Banff, I can’t conclude the cars I’m watching constitute gridlock or pose a serious threat to heritage protection.

Without tourists, especially Canadian ones, the future of our national parks would be dim. Canadians’ support is vital to the heritage protection mandate that Van Tighem and I both value. Slapping a substantial fee on visitors who drive threatens that support. Instead of higher fees, Parks Canada should do what it does already for youth, members of the armed forces/veterans, and new Canadians—offer free entry. And let’s all join the fight for additional tax dollars.

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Over the past five years Dr. Tyler May has noticed what he calls a “sizeable uptick” in sightings and interactions with grizzly bears in the area surrounding Manning, a town on Highway 35 next to the Notikewin River, approximately 600 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. May, born and raised in Manning, grew up on a small grain farm. His grandfather was a hunting outfitter and ran a trapline in the Chinchaga, an expanse of boreal forest directly west of Manning. After graduating from medical school in Dublin, Ireland, May moved back to the north in 2013 to work as a physician at the Manning Community Health Centre. Today, with his family, he manages a grain and cattle operation, raising 250 head on pastures adjacent to the boreal forest. “We’re seeing more signs of grizzly activity closer to where we live,” May says, citing regular sightings of tracks along the creek that runs through their cattle lease, bears caught on his neighbour’s trail cameras and a grizzly preying on a neighbour’s horse.

Most concerning to May, however, is an increase in livestock loss and injury from what he believes could be grizzly bear predation. He acknowledges it’s difficult to say for sure, when you’re running a remote operation. “Even if they’re on a kill, did they kill it or did it die naturally I haven’t seen a grizzly actually kill anything.” But this year he’s seen three injured cows with open wounds, which leads May to believe they’re being chased by something.

A moratorium on hunting has resulted in grizzly bear populations stabilizing

May admits his perspective is purely anecdotal. A population estimate conducted for grizzlies in the Chinchaga area in 2021 identified only 16 individual bears and estimated a density of 0.7 grizzlies per 1,000 km, which is the thinnest grizzly density in Alberta’s bear management zones. But May isn’t alone in his concerns. He and his neighbours aren’t inherently fearful of bears, he says, but rather of what he calls the “punitive nature” of Alberta’s laws: namely, that it’s been illegal to shoot or hunt a grizzly bear in Alberta since 2006. That’s what leads to the “shoot, shovel, shut up” mentality, he says, or the illegal killing, or poaching, that continues to be one of the leading causes of grizzly bear mortality in Alberta. “The sort of vigilante stuff, where people are taking measures into their own hands.”

In August 2024 May received an email from AlbertaRELM, the province’s regulatory body for hunting and fishing licensing, inviting eligible Albertans—licensed hunters—to become potential “wildlife management responders” to track and euthanize “problem” grizzly bears. “Just about everybody who hunts up here applied,” says May, of the local response to Alberta’s new grizzly management policy. “I don’t think grizzly bears have a lot of friends up here. They have a role to play [in the ecosystem], but people don’t want them in their yards—and for good reasons.”

 

Grizzly bears evoke polarizing emotions in Alberta. While some people perceive them as a symbol of an intact wilderness, an iconic species to be conserved, others view them as a “pest” or a “problem” to be removed. Research at the University of Alberta shows that Albertans, regardless of their stance on grizzly bear conservation, agree on the importance of “improving policy processes and decision-making” to build trust between different interest groups. In doing so, the province is more likely to achieve positive “outcomes for human–bear coexistence.” But the Alberta government has a track record of impeding constructive dialogue when it comes to grizzly bears, says human–bear conflict researcher Douglas Clark, particularly in the context of government “decision-making processes that leave everyone unsatisfied and angry at one another.”

In 2002, when the local grizzly population was about 1,000 mature adults, the province’s Endangered Species Subcommittee recommended that grizzly bears be listed as “threatened.” The Alberta government declined, though they did assemble a team of grizzly bear specialists to put together a Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan for seven different bear management areas (BMAs) across Alberta, with the goal of reducing human-caused bear mortality and human–grizzly bear conflict through mitigating food attractants, securing habitat and educating the public through a BearSmart program. The draft recovery plan was submitted in 2005—when the grizzly bear population had fallen to 700 adults—but the grizzly bear hunt remained open. Then, in a move widely covered in the media, the province’s leading grizzly bear biologist, Gordon Stenhouse, was reassigned from his position after speaking publicly about the plan’s failure to address the impact of the grizzly bear hunt. A few months later the grizzly bear hunt was suspended. It would take eight years after the initial recommendation for the Alberta government to finally list grizzlies as a threatened species under Alberta’s Wildlife Act in 2010.

A young grizzly foraging next to railway infrastructure near Grande Cache. Since the Alberta government banned the hunting of grizzlies in 2006, the population has stabilized, and even increased in some areas, though the bears are still considered threatened in the province.

Nearly two decades of a moratorium on hunting, coupled with conservation efforts, has resulted in grizzly populations stabilizing in some BMAs and increasing in others. In BMA4, which covers the Rockies and the eastern slopes from the Trans-Canada Highway to Rocky Mountain House, for instance, the number of grizzlies nearly doubled (to an estimated 88 bears). The latest population census, in 2021, estimated the grizzly population in Alberta to be between 856 and 973 bears—an increase, but not enough to be delisted as a threatened species.

Still, in recent years, hunting and outfitting associations have been lobbying the Alberta government to reinstate a limited season on hunting grizzly bears. “We should target problem bears first,” wrote author and hunter T.J. Schwanky in an op-ed published in Outdoor Canada in August 2021. “This could easily be done if landowners and Fish and Wildlife officials work together to give licence holders access to the bears.”

Nearly three years later, on June 17, 2024, Alberta’s minister of forestry and parks, Todd Loewen, quietly amended the Wildlife Act to authorize “hunting a grizzly bear” if the bear “is involved in a human–bear conflict situation,” or “is in an area of concern.” On July 9 the ministry issued a press release announcing a new grizzly bear management strategy involving “a new network of wildlife management responders to help stop dangerous and deadly grizzly bear attacks on people and livestock.”

According to the amended regulation, when a “problem” grizzly is reported, and a wildlife officer deems the new “grizzly bear management” strategy to be appropriate, a licensed hunter will be chosen from a list to kill the bear—so long as they can be “onsite within 24 hours.” By September 24, about 7,000 licensed hunters had applied for a slot. From that list, 30 hunters have been shortlisted, with 10 each in the north, central and south regions of the province. Hunters will be able to keep all parts of the bear except the gallbladder (which is highly coveted in Asia for its medicinal properties and illegal to export from Alberta).

Loewen told media that on average roughly 20 problem grizzlies are killed due to “negative human interactions” each year in Alberta, and that up to 15 could be killed annually under the new policy. But those numbers aren’t backed up by provincial statistics, which show that from 2013 to 2022 some 23 grizzlies were killed in self-defence and another 57 for agency removal—eight a year on average, significantly fewer than Loewen’s claim.

Critics argue the new strategy undermines efforts over the past two decades to mitigate and prevent negative interactions between people and grizzlies. Former fish and wildlife officers are calling it irresponsible, if not dangerous, to transfer the onus of managing human–wildlife conflict onto the public. Some conservationists argue the new plan is simply a backdoor way to reopen the grizzly bear hunt in Alberta, prompting the question: is the new strategy really about problem bears, or is it indicative of a political agenda?

 

After Loewen’s announcement, I talked to a current provincial employee formerly involved in grizzly bear recovery. They asked to remain anonymous but indicated that “government biologists” were not consulted by the minister or had any prior knowledge of the new program before it was announced by the government on July 9, 2024.

I requested an interview with Paul Frame, an Alberta carnivore biologist, or any other biologist working for the government, but was denied. Instead, I was referred to the minister.

In an interview, minister Loewen, a former hunting outfitter, was adamant that the new program isn’t a grizzly bear hunt, and that wildlife responders will be told exactly where and when to “try to take out one of these problem bears.” He says the new program was based on concerned feedback from rural Albertans about the safety of residents and livestock.

“There’s a lot of people living in an urban environment that just can’t relate to that,” says Loewen. “But if we have somebody that’s committing crimes in the city, well, we try to catch that person, we don’t just write it off. I think in both urban and rural [contexts], public safety is important, and people have the right to feel safe in their own homes, yards and neighbourhoods.”

Loewen told me that the new program offers Albertans the opportunity to manage problem grizzly bears while freeing up time for overburdened wildlife officers.

But many critics, including Lorne Fitch, a retired provincial biologist and conservationist, are calling the minister’s bluff, arguing that this new approach flies in the face of grizzly bear science and is nothing more than “political meddling.” Fitch says the new program exploits the rhetoric that “grizzly bears are everywhere” and plays on the fear of being attacked, even though the annual number of grizzly bear attacks on humans hasn’t increased.

“This is not something that came from biologists,” says Fitch. “It likely came directly from the minister, without any discussion.”

Prior to the minister’s amendment to the Wildlife Act, Fitch heard from colleagues in the ranching community in southern Alberta that Loewen’s press secretary had sent an email soliciting ranchers for complaints about grizzly bears. “Instead of having an open, transparent public meeting or forum in which there’s the opportunity for people to advance their concerns, you end up with a really slanted view of whether or not there’s a problem big enough to warrant this sort of a response,” Fitch says. “In other words, they were trying to pre-stage the answer—which was a bear hunt.”

A photo of hunters and black bears they’ve just killed, posted on the website of Red Willow Outfitters–founded by Todd Loewen and now run by his family. The company offers black bear hunts starting at $5,250. Loewen is Alberta’s Minister of Forestry and Parks.

 

Political meddling or not, there’s no question that grizzly bears and humans do occasionally come into conflict. But when does a grizzly become a “problem,” and are there other ways to deal with the issue besides killing the bear?

Over the past 30 years, biologist Jay Honeyman dedicated his career to mitigating negative encounters between humans and grizzly bears in Western Canada. In 2012 he started working with the government of Alberta as a large-carnivore biologist in the southern part of the province, specializing in reducing human–grizzly conflict. In 2022 Honeyman retired and his position hasn’t yet been filled. He agrees that the number of grizzlies in southern Alberta is on the rise: they’re moving eastward into more-developed areas. But hands down, says Honeyman, the number one cause of conflict with problem grizzlies is food-related. “Mitigation is about securing or removing the food that’s bringing the bear in, and then the bear moves on—you don’t have a problem anymore,” Honeyman says.

Throughout his career, he consulted with landowners and community groups to find ways to reduce interactions between grizzlies and humans, such as installing electric fences around beehives and livestock, erecting bear-proof garbage bins and granaries, or passing bylaws that prohibit bird feeders and require fruit to be harvested. The results These measures were often cheaper and more effective than sending out teams of wildlife specialists to euthanize a bear.

“It was very rare to revisit a place once these proactive measures were in place,” says Honeyman. “There are always going to be problems—weak bears, sick bears, injured bears, bears that just don’t get it—and they’ll have to be dealt with… but we can definitely reduce the amount of conflict that we’re having.”

While Honeyman cautions against calling the new wildlife program a “hunt”—and he doesn’t think it poses a risk to the overall grizzly bear population in Alberta—he does say it’s taking the province back into “reactive management” of dealing with problem bears: trap, move, euthanize. Only “now the public can help kill the bear as well,” he says.

Honeyman and other critics worry that randomly selecting an eligible hunter to track and euthanize a problem grizzly bear could have major public safety implications.

“Hunting a grizzly is not like hunting anything else,” says Alex Frank, who worked as a provincial conservation officer in northwestern Alberta from 1974 to 2009. He and his colleagues received years of tactical training to safely respond to scenarios involving problem or conflict grizzly and black bears, which could be unpredictable and dangerous. “Especially if you’re hunting an angry bear, they don’t just pop out at 300 yards so you can shoot it,” says Frank. “You’re not using a scope. Sometimes it’s close range—load and shoot.”

Far more dangerous, says Frank, is if hunters wound a conflict bear. “I wouldn’t want to be the CO (conservation officer) having to sit there and sweat about a hunter running around out there with a rogue bear,” says Frank. “I wouldn’t want them near it.”

Then there’s the issue of shooting the right grizzly bear, says Frank. It may not be so simple for a lay hunter to determine whether or not they’re targeting the bear responsible for conflict. “What happens when the hunter shoots the wrong bear, or just shoots the first grizzly he comes across—or even a black bear What about if they accidentally shoot a sow with cubs How does that work?”

“If you’re hunting an angry bear, they don’t pop out at 300 yards. It can be close range–load and shoot.”

Minister Loewen, however, told me that “hunters are already screened in Alberta in order to get a hunting licence,” referring to basic requirements that they pass a hunters education course and obtain a wildlife identification card. Loewen said citizen wildlife responders will only be called upon when that’s deemed safe by wildlife enforcement officers. He points to the case of the recent grizzly attack on an elk hunter in the Madden area on September 1, 2024. The grizzly was the same one that had caused the death of David Lertzman in 2021. “The bear had adolescent young with it, so it was determined that Fish and Wildlife officers would deal with this one directly themselves,” says Loewen.

Critics argue that the incident was an outlier. It’s incredibly rare for officers to be dispatched to kill free-roaming bears, says Honeyman. Today, more often than not, problem bears are captured in a culvert trap, tranquilized and, once sedated, pulled out of the trap and euthanized. It’s the safest and most humane way to dispatch a problem bear, he says.

As for the government’s new wildlife responder program?

“I don’t even see a scenario where it would be applicable in a safe and efficient manner.”

Honeyman believes the real issue is that the government has failed to implement priorities laid out in the grizzly bear recovery plan, which aims to reduce human–grizzly bear conflict, including hiring conflict specialists in the seven bear management areas and increasing funding for landowners to install electric fences and bear-proof garbage bins and granaries.

While Loewen cites the funding of prevention work, including with the Waterton Biosphere Reserve’s carnivores and communities program, these activities are unique to southern Alberta, says Honeyman. “None of these resources are present in the rest of the province, contrary to what the recovery plan says should be occurring,” he says.

Up in Manning, May told me he wasn’t aware of any programs that supported farmers or ranchers in northern Alberta with measures such as electric fences or bear-proof grain bins—and that’s because those don’t exist there. In the absence of mitigation efforts, May believes reopening the grizzly bear hunt is the best course of action. For now, he says, the wildlife responder program is a step in the right direction. “If I had to speculate, the ministry is doing what it can, hopefully without provoking the ire of people who are against this, while still trying to responsibly manage grizzly bears.”

Securing or removing food that’s bringing a grizzly in is cheaper—and safer— than killing the bear.

Hunting bears, says Andrea Morehouse, an independent scientist who’s been studying human–bear conflict in rural Alberta since 2011, is not an effective tool to reduce such conflicts. A recent study in Ontario, for instance, showed the number of negative interactions between humans and black bears failed to decrease after a spring hunt was introduced in addition to the fall hunt. While Morehouse agrees there are situations where lethal control is necessary, she says Alberta’s new wildlife responder program fails to address the root cause of human–bear conflict.

What’s imperative, says Morehouse, is that scientists and communities come together to identify local concerns and brainstorm long-term solutions for human–grizzly bear coexistence. “The tools already exist,” she says. “This is where government could put some funding to try and work on these issues.”

In rural Alberta, dead livestock, also called deadstock, is a major attractant for large carnivores such as grizzlies, and can increase the likelihood of human–bear conflict. Morehouse points to a study in southern Alberta that showed the efficacy of community programs that help farmers install bear-resistant deadstock bins and reimburse costs associated with deadstock removal.

But these necessary conversations between biologists and rural communities just aren’t happening in Alberta right now, say critics, including Fitch. He points to the silent “gag order” that’s preventing biologists from giving public presentations or speaking with hunting or angling groups in rural communities, and this is creating divisions. “Because of this political tension to control the narrative, there’s very little opportunity for biologists to go out into the communities and have conversations with people,” says Fitch. “And what it’s doing is creating suspicions about biologists.”

The provincial employee I spoke with agreed, calling it a “low point” in the Alberta government’s history of wildlife and ecosystem management. “This isn’t about grizzly bears,” they said of the new wildlife responder program that targets so-called problem bears; it’s about party politics. “This is an example of the government trying to mobilize their political base.”

Trina Moyles is the author of Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (2022).

Photography by Darrel Comeau
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Read more from the archive “The Mystery of Ursus arctos” July/August 2017.

Update from CBC  “Grizzly killed through Alberta’s new hunting program” Oct 27, 2025.

Update from CBC  “All Options On the Table” Nov 3, 2025.

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Of course, there are other, more banal reasons why such a patch of untouched forest would be anomalous in a city like Calgary: development and sprawl—phenomena far more of this place than those towering trees. As early as 1982, only a decade after the trail was first built, a Calgary Herald journalist remarked that she “half expected the trail to be gone and suburbia moved in.” Historically, Calgary’s untouched areas rarely remain untouched for long.

The Douglas Fir Trail owes its unlikely existence, and half-century longevity, to members of the nearby communities who have, time and again, rallied to its cause.

The trail winds up and down and across a steep escarpment that has never been entirely stable. City of Calgary officials noticed slope failures as far back as 1920, and such fragility requires occasional attention. In 1992 the City shut down the trail for renovations. Municipal officials partnered with the Edworthy Park Heritage Society, who in turn activated a crew of about 20 volunteers to spend sunny weekends helping out with the rehabilitation. In addition to repairing and rebuilding trail infrastructure such as bridges and railings, five different greenhouses took on the task of raising wildflower seedlings and native grasses to revegetate bare patches of the trail. Dogwood and fireweed. Wild roses and bergamot. Gooseberries and snowberries. Twenty-six varieties in all, each with a genetic link to the hillside’s ecosystem.

By the time the trail reopened in 1994, volunteers from the society, local Scout troops and other community organizations had contributed over 1,000 hours of labour to the revitalization project. The workers built seven new bridges, spread eight truckloads of sand, gravel and clay by hand over the pathways, and planted 5,000 wildflowers.

Mike Bracko started running the Douglas Fir Trail not long after the reopening. He and his dogs have been regulars ever since. Bracko lives a four-minute walk from the trailhead, in the community of Wildwood. For 30 years he’s run the route nearly every day in the spring and summer, and at least twice a week during the winter. In 2016, on one of his autumn runs, Bracko found the trail blocked by metal fences hung with orange signs warning that the trail had been closed, again, “due to flood-related damage and stability concerns.”

Bracko promptly started a Facebook page called Save Douglas Fir Trail to draw attention to the closure. Repair work started on the trail the following summer, and Bracko used his Facebook page to rally volunteers to help in the effort just as the Edworthy Park Heritage Society had done in the early 1990s. Again community members assisted city workers in building new bridges, rope railings and stairs. The trail reopened in November 2017.

Those renovations, though, weren’t built to last. According to Amir Wazir, a geotechnical engineer with the City of Calgary, the structures installed in 2017 were designed in consultation with the Calgary Mountain Bike Alliance rather than with municipal engineers. “The trail wasn’t built according to city standards,” Wazir said, and had a design life of only two to five years. Sure enough, by 2023 city officials noticed enough degradation and erosion to close a long portion in the middle of the trail where, according to their press release, “the boardwalk, railing and steps have failed, and where the terrain has been deemed hazardous for public use.”

The city also announced an erosion and drainage study on the central slope. Wazir believes the city will complete the slope analysis by the end of 2024, at which time they’ll decide what to do next. In the meantime, the fences and warning signs went up on either end of the closed portion to keep users off the trail.

The trail owes its unlikely existence to community members who have, time and again, rallied to its cause.

Bracko fears that if the city’s analysis concludes the ridge is shifting, the whole trail may be permanently shut down. “Decommissioned,” Bracko said. “That’s a word I heard a lot back in 2017.” And just like in 2017, Bracko is calling on community members to step up and advocate for their beloved trail.

Elise Burgert, a former ranger at BC’s Golden Ears Provincial Park, will be one of them. Burgert moved from Vancouver to the Calgary community of Montgomery in the summer of 2023. “The trail is probably the most beautiful thing about the community and one of the reasons why I moved here,” Burgert said. She crosses the Bow River at Edworthy Park several times a week to walk her dog along the Douglas Fir Trail. “He’s a very adventurous dog,” she said.

Burgert rejects the city’s claim that the trail is too dangerous. “That’s not really a thing,” she said. “It’s just that they didn’t put in the effort of maintaining it. You can build a trail anywhere you want.” Burgert’s experience building and maintaining trails has taught her that such closures are too often permanent. She’s seen the same sort of thing happen in and around Vancouver. “Once you lose them, they’re gone forever,” she said. “It’s really easy to take away natural spaces, and really hard to [get] them back.”

After seeing the trail closure, Burgert reached out to Save Douglas Fir Trail on Facebook and offered to contribute to whatever community efforts were being planned. “Hopefully in the springtime there’s some [way] for people to get involved and help. That’s what I want to do. Just chip in and spend a day or two if possible with other people in the community and fix it.” Burgert believes the city could simply dig some culverts to help with drainage and build a bridge across the wash with two trees. In fact, Burgert figures she could do it herself with a chainsaw and some tools. She’s done it before. “When it comes to building trails, you just have to work with what you have,” Burgert said.

“I don’t think it’s equivalent to the moon landing to build a bridge there,” Burgert said. “The city just needs to want to.” If the city decides to close the trail instead of repairing and maintaining it, she’s confident the community would rally to maintain the trail themselves. This, she said, happens all the time where she’s from; BC employs a “more laissez-faire attitude” to trail maintenance. Instead of fencing off and closing down a trail, the government simply declares a trail unofficial. “You use it at your own risk,” Burgert said. “And if you want to get a group together to fix it, the government might support you. Otherwise they just stop putting the trails on official maps.”

Both Burgert and Bracko believe people will continue to use the trail whether it’s officially off-limits or not. “I’m not promoting civil disobedience,” Bracko said. “But I literally don’t know how they can close a trail.” He recalls when a part of the escarpment slid down during the flood of 2013. “It was actually pretty amazing what happened,” he said. “So many people use the trail that eventually everybody, including myself, made a trail through the tangle of trees.” And when the city closed the trail in 2016, people just removed the fences. “So it’s almost like no matter what h

appens—if it’s an act of God or if it’s the city—we’re still going to find a way to use the trail.”

Both Burgert and Bracko believe people will continue to use the trail whether it’s off-limits or not.

Still, if the city decommissions the Douglas Fir Trail and stops maintaining the stairs, railings and boardwalks, it could become inaccessible to all but the most adventurous users. This would be unfortunate. Many Calgarians use the trail nearly every day, especially in the spring and summer. “That’s their daily walk,” Bracko said. For locals intimidated by “actual wilderness,” the trail provides an opportunity to commune with nature a short walk from their own front doors. It offers social time, too. Women’s walking groups frequent the trail, and Bracko has seen three generations of families walking together during the summer months. “They hike as a family,” Bracko said. “It’s just the best thing.”

For Burgert, losing the trail would mean losing the wide view of her own neighbourhood of Montgomery, her new home, from the lookout on the other side of the Bow. “Every time I go up there I feel really magical,” she said. “I cross the river and hike up. I get a progressively nicer view of Montgomery.” She’ll especially miss its proximity. “Without the trail, I guess I’ll have to drive every time I want to go somewhere to get away from things,” she said. “Which is a completely different experience.”

Wazir, however, feels confident that the trail will eventually be returned to users. But he stresses it needs to be rehabilitated properly. If the analysis shows the slope isn’t safe, “then we’re going to make it safe,” Wazir said. “And then we’ll rebuild the trail according to the standards the city follows, and that will be for a much longer term than five years.”

This prediction could relieve the trail’s defenders, whether they are long-time trail runners like Bracko or newcomers like Burgert. “There is so much peace having something like that so close to home,” Burgert said.

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers.

Guillaume Nolet is a photographer who documents society culture and rural life. 

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The enclosure exemplifies the zoo’s new approach to polar bears. Interim chief operating officer Jamie Dorgan in July 2023 said that in the past the Calgary Zoo wasn’t “so concerned with animal well-being,” and was “more worried about showing animals to people. Now for us it’s critical, if we’re showing those animals to people, that [the bears] have got everything they need and they’re able to be well-adjusted.” The enclosure aspires to that promise. As part of a larger sampling of Wild Canada habitats, the bears have more than two acres to roam. They have grassy meadows interspersed with trees, rock outcrops, pools of various depths and a wading stream. Hilly topography gives them long views of their surroundings.

Most notably, this “refuge” will keep only naturally orphaned bears. The zoo hopes that by protecting them, they will educate the public while helping save an iconic species threatened by rapid climate change.

But the bears will also draw crowds and business. The Alberta government in 2021 provided $15.5-million for the new “Wild Canada” complex in the expectation that it will raise the zoo’s annual revenues by $13.4-million and increase its annual contribution to the local economy by more than $140-million. Then-Minister of Culture Leela Sharon Aheer said “revitalizing the Canadian Wilds habitat is an important investment that will continue to elevate the zoo as a world-renowned conservation facility.” Those hopes have already been borne out with the zoo’s record-breaking attendance in 2023, when Wild Canada’s opening, and undoubtedly the polar bears themselves, helped draw 1.54 million visitors.

The Calgary Zoo has had polar bears since 1938. Only in the 2000s were bears absent. In their long history in the prairie city, polar bears have lived in very different circumstances. There really isn’t anything new, however, in the zoo’s claims to be meeting the animals’ needs and ensuring their well-being. In the past, zoo officials, zoo experts and Calgary’s media have all reassured visitors that Calgary’s polar bears were happy. And zoo visitors themselves have wanted to believe it too. Perhaps more importantly, each generation of zoo authorities has been confident that the enclosures they built for polar bears were more humane than previous ones.

C. 1918 Banff Zoo

Not many visitors went to a zoo in the 20th century to taunt or torment animals as they commonly did in earlier times. Anti-cruelty movements in the 19th century confirmed that animals, like humans, suffer pain and emotional distress. Later in the century, experimental animal psychology began revealing high degrees of animal intelligence. Early 20th century bestselling storytellers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G.D. Roberts and Jack London anthropomorphized animals, attributing to them human-like thinking and feelings. The convergence of animal humanitarianism, psychological studies and popular stories prompted zoo visitors to look differently at captive animals. They wanted to gain insight into the animals’ thinking and emotional state by interpreting their behaviours, and sought reassurance from zoo authorities that the animals weren’t suffering.

Few animals can appear as intelligent, curious, complex in behaviour and happy in captivity as polar bears. William T. Hornaday in the 1920s, drawing from his experience at the New York Zoological Park—one of the largest zoos in the world—said bears were the most popular of zoo animals, after chimpanzees and apes, because of their facial expressions, vocalizations and complex body comportments. Highly intelligent, a bear would constantly change its repertoire of behaviours. Given the opportunity, it interacted with visitors, often to solicit food treats. A bear also ingeniously exploited its enclosures and manipulated novel objects introduced to them. It typically, ceaselessly, sought a means of escape. Famously, Barbara and Sam, two polar bears at the London Zoo, did exactly that in the early 20th century.

Each generation is confident their enclosures are more humane than previous ones.

Calgarians gained first-hand experience with polar bears early in the city’s history. They saw them in 1910 when the German showman Herr Albers showcased his six trained polar bears at the Victoria Park Grandstand. The crowds loved it when Albers had a large water basin rolled onto the stage and prompted the bears, one after another, to jump in to cool off.

But it was at the zoo in Banff that city folk really got to know polar bears. Canada’s Parks Department traded some mountain goats to the London Zoo to bring two bears to Banff in 1914. From the start, Banff visitors wanted to see these bears, clearly out of place, happy in their new mountain home. When one of them was holed up in his “capacious” den, a reporter stated that “at first sight [he] would appear a most forlorn creature, facing the north, with his head wagging from side to side…. But wait awhile and see him dive into the swimming pool, turning somersaults and playing with an old whiskey keg, and then decide whether after all captivity to him is so irksome.”

When the Banff bears died, after the First World War, they were replaced by cubs, one from the western Arctic, not living long, and another in 1922 from Chestermere Inlet on Hudson Bay. Calgarians got to know the latter, Buddy. Buddy grew up at the zoo learning clownish behaviours conditioned by visitors tossing him peanuts and other treats. Buddy’s complex behaviours generally reassured visitors that he was happy. Young Buddy likely played to experience happiness. But at other times his hyperactivity surely owed to his auditory and visual overstimulation, as well as the anxiety he experienced with throngs of visitors pressed nearby. With keen olfactory senses, Buddy could likely smell each visitor around his enclosure—their perfume, body odours, even the scent of hotdogs on their breath. Since many visitors tossed him treats, Buddy behaved to please people, yet was perpetually uncertain about inconsistent rewards. That most of his behaviours were interpreted as expressing happiness is hardly surprising. Animal humanities scholar Erica Fudge believes that humans want to see captive animals as happy because that makes us happy too.

As years went by, Buddy slowed down. He exhibited behaviours typical of polar bears aging in captivity. The utter monotony of the enclosures drives them to repetitively pace, chew the bars, or swim back and forth in their pools. Bears are most susceptible to boredom, defined by Dutch captive-bear expert G.M. van Keulen-Kromhout as a “disharmony between the natural, internal experience of time and the objective period of time” passed in an enclosure. A bored bear invariably exhibits one or two forms of “neurotic tics.” In 1930 a reporter wrote that Buddy “keeps walking back and forth from the stone house to the iron bars of his cage. The manner in which he swings his hind legs and turns up his flat, hairy paws reminds one of a comedy in the movies.” However comical it all seemed, Buddy still stopped to “entertain his admirers” and beg treats by “sitting on his haunches in front of the bars.”

Calgarians should have questioned why their zoo suddenly deemed the old cages inhumane.

In 1938, shortly after the park closed its zoo, the 16-year-old Buddy was moved to Calgary. By this point, Banff park planners felt that public sentiment was changing, at least among visitors to a “wilderness” park. Visitors wanted to drive slowly in cars to see animals in nature. They didn’t want to see “the confinement of animals in small spaces,” as Banff’s own town advisory council concluded. But the Parks Department had found it nearly impossible to find a zoo to take Buddy. Few could afford to accommodate the 1,000-pound animal. Buddy’s diet was enormous. And he needed a pool. Calgary’s Zoological Society, however, rushed to add a polar bear to its collection. The cage in Banff was disassembled and rebuilt in Calgary. A pool was hastily constructed. Calgary’s Arctic Oil Company paid for Buddy’s feeding in his new “palace.”

In Calgary, Buddy initially remained listless and morose in his cage. The Herald reported that the “glum” bear stayed in his den, much to the disappointment of visitors, but reassured readers that the animal at least rallied at feeding time. When Buddy glimpsed zookeeper Tom Baines coming with a bucket of fish, “he almost tore the cage down to get to them.” Even animal cruelty advocates found evidence that Buddy was happy. “Aunt Marian,” writing a weekly newspaper column for the city’s Junior Humane Society, asked her young readers: “Have you wondered, as I often have, why the polar bear swings his head from side to side as he walks?” She explained she’d learned from authorities that the bear’s behaviour derived “from training his eyes to look for fish in the icy waters of his native land.”

Other zoo officials reassured Calgarians that their captive polar bear was content, even in a cramped, barred cement enclosure and enduring Calgary’s hot summer temperatures. The Herald reported that in Oakland, the Animal Shelter League had raised concerns about Wrangel, a listless and apparently unhappy polar bear at the zoo in 1930. The zoo appointed five veterinarians to look him over; they checked his blood pressure, took his temperature, listened to his lungs. These experts concluded that Wrangel was “not sick or mistreated, but treated too well.” Discovering the bear suffering from eczema, they simply removed all meat from his diet. More reassuring were London Zoo authorities, who, in Calgary’s wire service news reports, stated, “Polar bears in captivity enjoy the heat of summer almost more than the other animals.” The Colorado Springs zoo director similarly claimed “the polar bear does not like cold weather. The warmer it is, the better the polar bear likes it if they have plenty of water.”

In 1949 the Calgary Zoo expanded its enclosure, as the one built in 1938 now seemed too small. With support from a local bridge-building firm, the zoo constructed a 40×40-foot barred cage (basically double the minimum regulated size of a two-car garage in Calgary now). The bear moving into it had a “palatial cage and swimming pool all of his own,” and the Herald reported him “happily splashing in his new pool.”

in 1938 when the Calgary Zoo acquired its first polar bear–16 year-old, 1000 pound Buddy–from the Banff Zoo, visitors consistently found evidence to reassure themselves that the cramped cage humanely imprisoned this animal.

But how were the bears faring, really? Buddy lived only a year in Calgary before dying of pneumonia. Sonya, his intended mate from the Chicago Zoo, lived less than a year, after she “simply lolled about, listless and panting” in the bear cage. After her death, another bear arrived as a cub: Carmichael. Though female, Carmichael was named after radio comedian Jack Benny’s fictional pet polar bear. Carmichael died in Calgary after seven years from a lung infection. Within a year she was replaced by a male, Carmichael II, a cub that lived until the 1970s (so long that one Calgarian remembered him pacing constantly to the point that “he wore grooves back and forth and at the turning points” of his cage). Carmichael II survived other bears introduced to his cage, including Mary Livingston, a cub that lived only three years.

If current measures had been used at the time to rate the Calgary Zoo’s care for polar bears, it would have failed on most counts. The animals were beset with stereotypies (repetitive behaviours), they only inconsistently reproduced, many deteriorated in physical condition, and they often didn’t exhibit “ecologically valid behaviour” (i.e., they didn’t act like polar bears naturally do). Zoo authorities, Calgary media and the public itself, however, interpreted these bears’ physical condition and behaviours positively. Even into adulthood, Carmichael II was deemed the “Calgary Zoo’s polar bear clown.” He was apparently happy to share space with Mary when she, at four months old, was introduced to his cramped space. When photographed splashing around a hole in their frozen pool in December 1958, the Herald saw “Icy Fun for Polar Bears” at the zoo.

Similarly reassuring the public, the zoo published visitor guides showing an early photo of Carmichael II, still a cub, standing on his hind legs “in a playful mood.” Years later, another photo showed the adult bear standing up to receive food at the end of a long pole over his cage bars. The cutline still read that he was “in a playful mood.” One guide stated that polar bears “are more easily acclimatized to our varying seasons than are the tropical animals,” while “they thrive in Calgary’s moderate climate.”

The Calgary Zoo has always counted on the support of local newspapers to promote visits, most of the coverage confirming the happiness of its polar bears. The Herald ran a photo of an apparently smiling Carmichael II in July 1956, describing him as a “hot weather animal.” When the bear apparently didn’t enjoy the warm April of 1970, he still found “consolation in the still chilly concrete floor and iron bars of his cage.” Numerous newspaper photos show the bear chewing his bars. One that ran in the Herald in February 1951 shows Carmichael II gnawing on his bars, apparently saying, “Ah-h-h-h … six weeks more,” in respect to Groundhog Day. Another shows Carmichael in 1963 doing the same thing: “Zookeepers say polar bears, who are as tough as nails in their native environment, like to keep their teeth in condition by chewing on hard objects.” When another bar-chewing bear was photographed in 1965, the Herald mused whether the animal was “trying to gnaw his way out, or he has a toothache…. Or perhaps he just likes the taste of iron bars?”

Almost any evidence was used to show the bears enjoying their cramped cage or their monotonous diet. Carmichael II was pictured enjoying his “turkey dinner” at Christmas 1963 when a zookeeper was feeding him a handful of “juicy pieces of meat.” Candy, another bear, splashing water from her pool toward a photographer in 1968, seemed to say, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” Yet another bear was later photographed “shooting the curl” as the zoo’s resident “surfing polar bear.” The bear “hangs ten on the biggest wave he can muster up within the confines of his pool,” a newspaper said. During a heat wave in 1971, another photographed bear gripped the bars of his enclosure while floating in his pool, his enclosure deemed Calgary’s “Polar Bear Hilton.” In June 1972 a photo of two bears wrestling each other in their pool said it all: “Play-Time,” the cutline read. “Though they’re far south of their arctic home, these inmates of the Calgary Zoo seem to be enjoying life in the city’s warmer climate.”

1971 The Calgary Zoo during a heat wave in July.

Zoos changed course in the 1970s, aiming to offer animals habitat instead of cages. The enclosures now offered more space for animals and naturalistic features. In the blueprint planning, these spaces met the needs of visitors as much as animals. Their layouts obscured fencing by hiding it in shrubs and behind screens of trees; visitors on winding paths could pass these enclosures and feel as though they were among the animals rather than separated from them by bars.

But Calgarians really should have questioned just why the Calgary Zoo in the 1970s suddenly deemed the old and “unsightly” bear cages to be inhumane and was now raising money to build new ones. To help pay for a new polar bear enclosure, the zoo launched its “ban the bars” campaign in 1972 to “remove the last vestiges of a now-frowned-upon part of its history.” A news photo shows the zoo’s director using a welding torch to cut the bars of the old polar bear cage.

Many Calgarians will remember the “polar bear complex” that opened in 1973. Calgary would now serve as a refuge for a species threatened in the destructive circumpolar bear pelt and trophy hunt. Offering more space, the enclosure would also accommodate more bears—its aim being to make Calgary’s collection one of the largest in North America. The enclosure offered unprecedented ways for visitors to view the animals through windows, overhead galleries, even from underneath the bears’ pool. The windows allowed visitors to stand “nose-to-nose” with the bears—an experience touted as “the first of its kind in the world.” With their new “room with a view,” animals inside would “live a bit of the ‘good life’ in more spacious surroundings without bars,” as the Herald reported. Especially when bears were underwater, visitors would get “a clear view of their submarine tricks as they plunge from dry dens and exercise areas above.” All this would be “heartening… to zoogoers used to seeing the same animals do little but pace back and forth out of sheer boredom in small, square iron cages.”

Visitors were indeed enthralled. “Those bars and cramped quarters were, I thought, degrading,” a Calgarian wrote to the Herald, “but with that beautifully designed complex completed, the animals can enjoy more natural and spacious living. Hurray for the people of Calgary.”

But visitors had to stretch their imaginations to see the bears happy in the enclosure, really a big bowl of cement with all its surfaces painted to simulate Arctic ice. A Herald editor said that one bear, likely bored and lying prostrate across a cement barrier—the enclosure was all cement—was having a “poolside snooze.” Here was “one Calgarian [that] didn’t have to go to Hawaii to lie outside by the pool.” Another bear was later photographed “at play” in the basin pool, affirming that “Some folks travel as far as Hawaii or Florida for a wintertime dip. But this polar bear gets his kicks from an icy frolic in his pool at the Calgary Zoo. Retrieving his [toy] hoop from the brink is not only fun—it also gives him his exercise and
daily bath!”

Despite their larger space, the increased number of bears created overcrowding, and the bears acted aggressively. Initially there were Candy and her female offspring, Snowball, and a bear arriving from Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo in 1971 named (again) “Carmichael.” Soon joining the three bears were two recently acquired from Hudson Bay’s Southampton Island, Sue and Ralph. Two orphaned bears from Cape Dorset then followed. In 1974, in front of horrified children, Carmichael drowned one of the newcomers, Ri, in a shallow pool.  The scene was forgotten a little later when a Herald photo showed two of the bears at their pool, “A refreshing dip on a hot day is always one of the great sensual delights for man and beast,” read the caption, but a swim was “double the pleasure” in the polar bear complex, since one of the bears was “licking away at traces of dinner left on his paw. Zoo officials say the bears find their meals finger-licking good.”

But all fun was gone only a year later when, at two years of age, Ralph killed Sue by tearing out her throat. As a dominant male in the enclosure, Ralph became so aggressive towards the females that he was kept separate from them most of the time. In 1979 the zoo had a dentist grind down Ralph’s canine teeth, to give the females a better chance when he attacked them and to teach him “not to be a bully.”

In the long term, the polar bear complex’s “expert” design dearly cost the bears’ psychological well-being. Stereotypic pacing became the norm. The worst affected was Snowball, who repetitively paced or swam in the pool 60 per cent of her waking hours. Snowball made international headlines when the Calgary Zoo tried putting her on Prozac before her death in 1997. The zoo’s last bear, Misty, aged 24, died in 1999.

1973 Calgary’s Polar Bear Complex when it was opened.

Given its poor planning, and apart from a couple of loaned cubs in 2005, the Calgary Zoo’s polar bear complex remained empty throughout that decade. The zoo announced in 2005 a new enclosure in the works, “something new and modern that is going to position the organization to go into the next millennium with a huge added attraction to the city.” As part of its “Arctic Shores” section (to also include beluga whales), and to provide a refuge for polar bears in the context of climate change, the new enclosure promised a large and deep aquatic “facility” in which bears could catch live fish. Projected to be 10 times the size of the polar bear complex, this enclosure would offer an ice cave, refrigerated rocks for the bears to walk on, and a hill high enough that they could see Memorial Drive. A bridge would allow visitors above to watch the bears below.

But many Calgarians remembered the polar bear complex. Zoowatch, doing an independent survey in 2006, found that 71 per cent of Calgarians thought the best way to learn about polar bears was in the wild, and 58 per cent didn’t want to see them return to the city. The zoo dismissed the survey as biased, but lawn signs popped up across Calgary protesting polar bears coming to the zoo’s Arctic Shores. Petitions reached City Hall. A Zoowatch-funded billboard on Memorial Drive decried the zoo’s plan to have polar bears and belugas swimming in the city. By 2013, citing rising costs, the zoo shelved immediate plans for the reintroduction, but promised the bears’ return in its “Twenty-Year Planning.”

Today the Calgary Zoo is reassuring Calgarians that its new polar bear enclosure is planned carefully around current animal science. The problem, however, is that bear science only partially translates into “zoo biology,” the latter factoring in human and non-human animals and their interactions, balancing the necessary modifications of artificial environments to please visitors and animals alike. Fundamentally, enclosure design cannot anticipate an animal’s psychology, since an animal’s mental worldview and emotions can never be known conclusively. More to the point, can humans even relate to an animal’s emotions, whatever they are Does a bear feel happiness like humans do?

There was little foresight in 1938 when the zoo acquired its first polar bear. The zoo and its visitors consistently found evidence to reassure themselves that the cramped cage, expanded in 1949, humanely imprisoned these animals. In 1973 the zoo unveiled the polar bear complex as an effective alternative. The complex still casts a dark shadow on the history of polar bears in Calgary. The 2004 design, never realized, offered a refuge space that other experts promised would keep bears and their human visitors happy. (What bear wouldn’t feel content looking at traffic jams on Memorial Drive?) Whatever passions, hubris, civic pride and science have gone into hosting polar bears in this prairie city—and whatever the best of intentions of the zoo and its visitors—polar bears still find themselves in a foreign habitat and alienated from their own natural history.

Ultimately the Calgary Zoo is accountable for the health, both physical and mental, of these Arctic creatures. Beyond what they now learn from zoo authorities about the welfare of these animals, Calgarians, as zoo visitors, should be as circumspect about their own perceptions of the bears in their newer, larger, “world class” enclosure.

George Colpitts is an environmental historian at the University of Calgary interested in human encounters with the wild world.

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Their production potentials were equally impressive. Saddlebrook’s approximately 185,000 solar panels would generate 81 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough power for 20,000 homes. Foothills’s capacity was to be 150 MW.

But their differences were more striking. Saddlebrook was intended for a brownfield, land that has already tasted industrial activity of one form or another. For decades the land immediately east of Highway 2A between High River and Aldersyde has been zoned for industry. Cargill has been processing meat in this corridor since 1989. Its vast slaughterhouse and associated infrastructure sits only 2.5 km south of the middle of the TC Energy project.

The most noteworthy previous tenant at the Saddlebrook site was magnesium processor MagCan. This much-ballyhooed economic diversification venture is infamous for having sucked more than $100-million from Alberta citizens, then shutting its doors in 1991 little more than a year after opening. Today only bad memories and MagCan’s massive red brick building remain. In the Saddlebrook proposal, this edifice looms over hundreds of perfectly aligned rows of solar panels, many literally a stone’s throw from Highway 2A.

Foothills, on the other hand, coveted farmland. Since the provincial government doesn’t allow utility-scale renewables on public land, developers seek private land, often farms or ranches, for their projects. Elemental Energy proposed to lease some of Foothills County’s best land for growing spring grain.

That food-producing promise was largely hidden during my mid-spring 2023 drive to the Foothills site, less than 10 minutes east of High River. I saw no indication that several thousand migrating snow geese annually feed on waste grain in these fields.

The snow geese migration signals another key difference between Foothills and Saddlebrook—the former’s proximity to Frank Lake. A 3,100-acre low-lying wetland, Frank Lake is also an Important Bird Area (IBA), an international designation for significant bird and biodiversity habitat. The IBA regards the lake as “the most important wetland in southwestern Alberta for breeding water birds.”

These differences between the projects guaranteed that Foothills would be controversial. Saddlebrook, on the other hand, wasn’t. The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC), the independent quasi-judicial agency responsible for evaluating power projects, approved Saddlebrook. It rejected the Foothills application in its entirety.

In August 2023 the province slapped a seven-month moratorium on all renewable power approvals. Premier Danielle Smith suggested the AUC wasn’t adequately addressing social, economic or environmental concerns in determining whether projects are in the public interest. But to disprove this you’d need only compare the Saddlebrook and Foothills applications. The approval of the one and rejection of the other shows how ham-handed the moratorium is, threatening billions of dollars in investment. In fact, as proven by the AUC this year, Alberta can green its grid while respecting other land uses and values.

One was intended for land that’s already tasted industrial activity; the other, for farmland.

Fossil fuels still provide most of Alberta’s electricity. But this truth hides dizzying change. In the blink of an eye, coal’s decades-long dominance in this province vanished. In 2014, 55 per cent of Alberta’s electricity came from coal. By 2022 this had collapsed to 17 per cent. By the end of this year, likely no electricity in Alberta will come from coal. Natural gas now wears coal’s crown, supplying 64 per cent of electricity to Alberta’s grid in 2022.

But the real revolution is the rapid rise of renewables. The Alberta Electricity System Operator (AESO), the non-profit manager of the province’s electricity market, reports that renewable generation is growing “by leaps and bounds.” Thirteen new utility-scale wind facilities came online over the course of 2021 and 2022, as did 25 new utility-scale solar projects. This boom will soon see wind and solar delivering 30 per cent of Alberta’s electricity supply. Rystad Energy predicts we will overtake Ontario as Canada’s largest producer of utility-scale wind and solar power by 2025.

Policy and economics join Alberta’s bounty of wind and sunshine in explaining these shifts. On the policy front, Rachel Notley’s Climate Leadership Plan (2015) signed the death sentence for coal-fired electricity. It committed to phase out all coal-fired generation by 2030 and to increase the amount of electricity supplied by renewables to 30 per cent. Coal’s phase-out will happen seven years ahead of that schedule.

But technological change is probably more important to understanding the swiftness of the (now paused) renewables boom. The falling cost of solar and wind generation has been eye-popping. In April 2023 the price tag for an unsubsidized utility-scale solar facility was 83 per cent lower than in 2009.

This combination catapulted renewables investments to record levels. Recent changes in the mix of major power project investments are remarkable. Natural gas dominated Alberta’s investment ledger in 2016: $4.9-billion in natural-gas-fired electricity projects were on the books in April 2016, nearly four times the total investment in wind. At the time, the Brooks solar project, with an estimated price tag of $30-million, was the only utility-scale solar venture proposed.

The picture couldn’t be more different today. The investment balance has shifted strongly in favour of renewables. When the UCP government announced its renewables approvals moratorium in August, the Alberta Major Projects website reported that $11.5-billion in investment was being considered for solar and wind. Utility-scale solar had accounted for next to nothing in major project investments in 2016; in July 2023 it led the investment intentions pack at $8.2-billion. At that time the AESO predicted solar’s importance would continue to grow.

Humanity has forever converted landscapes to satisfy our ambitions, with Alberta renewables just one more chapter in that history. Utility-scale renewables compete for a place on the land with other human priorities, such as agriculture, oil and gas production, urban development and natural areas.

Southern Alberta, the preferred terrain for most of our province’s solar and wind projects, is already a very busy landscape. All the aforementioned uses plus more figure in 2014’s South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, ostensibly a land-use management blueprint for the region.

Land conversion is a downside of the renewables boom. The first generation of Alberta solar panels and wind turbines often were erected on lands previously set aside for agriculture. Native grasslands are Canada’s most threatened ecosystem. The Nature Conservancy of Canada estimates that since 1867 the prairie provinces have lost 75–90 per cent of their native grasslands. In southern Alberta, those grasslands, already sacrificed for cities, farms, ranches and oil and gas wells, have a fragile hold on the landscape. Only 1.3 per cent of the province’s grasslands are legally protected in a way that satisfies the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s protected area definition. This dramatic shrinkage and these weak laws are why most Alberta species at risk are from grasslands. Utility-scale renewables threaten their further decline.

Between provincehood in 1905 and the Second World War, grasslands were converted to farming and ranching. Some of this land was later used for petroleum exploitation and urban expansion. Albertans became concerned about the loss of farm and ranch lands, so the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan was designed to “(m)aintain an agricultural land base by reducing the fragmentation and conversion.” In addition to threatening native grasslands, utility-scale renewables threaten farming and ranching livelihoods.

We can green our electricity grid while respecting agriculture and wildlife habitat.

The AUC decides the fate of utility-scale electricity projects. Its decisions can’t be overturned by the provincial cabinet; they can only be brought before the Alberta Court of Appeal on questions of jurisdiction or law. The commissioners who make the call on proposals such as Saddlebrook and Foothills are provincial government appointees. Most are lawyers, with engineers a close second, and most have joined the AUC since 2020.

The AUC has considerable discretion to decide the extent of public involvement in its proceedings. Generally, participants must show that a project “may directly and adversely affect” them. The law must recognize whatever right they assert. The AUC can allow still more Albertans to participate if they might contribute “relevant information.”

Taken together, the AUC decisions in the Saddlebrook and Foothills cases are promising. They tell us that a robust renewables future in Alberta doesn’t have to come at the expense of wildlife or agriculture. Saddlebrook’s approval was arguably an ideal utility-scale project, increasing renewable electricity supply without converting land otherwise useful for farming or wildlife habitat.

The MD of Foothills’s development plan forcefully commits to protecting farm and ranch lands. The Saddlebrook project respected that priority; the MD didn’t need to defend its farming and ranching heritage before the AUC. Heather Hemingway, the MD’s director of planning, considered Saddlebrook a good use of lands already zoned for industrial purposes.

Saddlebrook’s brownfield location also reduced its threat to wildlife. The government’s Wildlife Directive for Alberta Solar Energy Projects identifies site selection as “the first and most critical factor” in preventing harm to wildlife habitat. Saddlebrook wasn’t risk-free from this perspective, but wildlife managers concluded Saddlebrook presented few issues.

The project was a “win–win,” promising green electricity at a minimal cost. It met the AUC’s public interest test and was approved on December 17, 2021.

Elemental Energy’s Foothills project, however, was a very different story, and faced opposition on agricultural and environmental grounds. The MD, as a landowner in the project’s immediate vicinity, obtained standing to participate in the hearing. Hemingway told the AUC the MD couldn’t support Foothills, as the project failed the responsible-development test by proposing “to take high quality farmland out of production when there are other locations available on marginal land and outside of the area.”

But ultimately it was the potential environmental and wildlife harms of Foothills, not its appetite for farm and ranch lands, that sank the project. These revolved around Frank Lake.

For someone who spent much of his youth on Kootenay Lake in southeastern BC, I found Frank Lake’s environmental significance well hidden at first glance. Approaching the lake on Highway 23 just after dawn, it struck me as most prairie lakes do—small, shallow, unremarkable. But I stopped at the lake’s edge and was treated to the birdsong signalling its importance. American coots grunt and croak while cruising through reeds and grasses near the shoreline; courting northern shovellers bob their heads up and down; common terns hover in the air above the shallows before diving to chase a meal. But the American white pelicans, avian versions of Hercules air transports, were the most impressive that morning. They flew effortlessly, silently, just above the water before gliding to land amidst dozens of their kin.

Of the 256 bird species that frequent Frank Lake, 60 are at risk. Greg Wagner, the lake’s volunteer IBA caretaker, was a vital participant in the Elemental project’s hearing. The AUC described him as “a credible, helpful witness” who provided “material and relevant information” derived from decades of professional and volunteer experience.

The “lake effect” hypothesis made the Frank Lake site controversial. The phrase theorizes that, to certain birds, solar panel arrays resemble waterbodies; they become life-threatening attractants, especially to waterfowl. Birds will collide with the panels. If they aren’t killed outright, their injuries make them easier prey. This effect can be especially threatening to water-obligate species—species that can’t take off from land. Grebes, cormorants, coots and loons are among the water-obligates frequenting Frank Lake.

The AUC commissioners didn’t hear definitive answers about whether the Foothills project would lure many waterfowl to injury or death. Foothills’s consultant, referring to data from Alberta and the US, concluded “there are no data to better suggest that the [project] represents high risk to water-obligate birds than to suggest it does not represent high risk.”

Wagner agreed: no data definitively proved the project would threaten birds. But he wasn’t sanguine about this. He told the commission he viewed uncertainty, and the absence of mortality data from a comparable case to Frank Lake, as reasons to exercise caution. He reiterated Alberta Environment and Parks’s own conclusion that the project posed a high risk to birds. He cited the Canadian Wildlife Service’s conclusion that the location was too risky. Consequently, Wagner said, it would be poor land-use planning to allow Foothills to be built so close to an important conservation site.

Elemental Energy argued it had followed to the letter the legal standards. One of these is that a “solar energy project must not occur within 1,000 m of a named lake…” The Foothills proposal followed this standard… with six metres to spare. The southwest corner of its array would sit 1,006 m from Frank Lake.

The province’s wildlife directive also lists best management practices (BMPs) that “may assist” with site selection. These “are provided for information and consideration in the planning of solar energy projects to support better conservation and protection of wildlife and wildlife habitat.” But they’re not mandatory. Only one BMP pertains to site selection: “(T)he solar energy project should not occur within 1,000 m of a wetland-based Important Bird Area…”

Elemental Energy ignored this recommendation. Roughly 50 per cent of the Foothills site was within the IBA, and only 20 per cent was beyond the BMP’s 1 km buffer. The buffer error apparently was due to an environmental consultant’s having conflated this Frank Lake with another Frank Lake in northern Alberta.

The Commission wasn’t satisfied that Foothills, with 80 per cent of its project lying within the BMP’s 1 km setback from the IBA boundary, could justify ignoring the recommended buffer. This failure, together with Frank Lake’s significance to birds, concerns about the lake-effect hypothesis, and other direct and indirect negative impacts in the vicinity of Frank Lake, was enough to doom the project.

The Commission rejected Foothills. The project posed “an unacceptably high risk to the environment and is not in the public interest.” The AUC found the environmental risks so compelling, in fact, that it based its decision only on these grounds.

An orphan well site in southern Alberta that’s now a “brightfield,” with solar panels.

This decision is striking. The AUC has never before rejected a utility-scale solar project. Its 2022 Brooks Solar Farm decision reduced that project’s footprint but nonetheless approved the rest of the proposal. The array had initially been partially sited on native grasslands, and the AUC concluded this posed an unacceptable risk to grasslands-reliant species. The approved project excludes those lands.

In the face of uncertainty about the lake effect, the Commission effectively invoked the precautionary principle, a favourite of conservationists. The principle shifts the burden of proof from project opponents to proponents. The latter must demonstrate that their actions will not create unacceptable harm. The potential risks to birds compelled the Commission to reject Foothills. Caution won the day.

Taken together, the Saddlebrook and Foothills decisions point to how Alberta can increase clean electricity generation without compromising other values. They model an approach to renewables where “win–win” outcomes are more likely. They suggest that Alberta’s approval process isn’t flawed, and that a moratorium on renewables isn’t needed.

These decisions should push our government to insist that solar installations be built on brownfields. Saddlebrook shows that placing utility-scale solar on such sites significantly reduces potential harm to agriculture or the environment. Foothills suggests that environmental values should figure importantly in AUC decision-making.

Small solar arrays can accelerate oil and gas reclamation and reduce costs by over 50 per cent.

Putting solar installations on brownfields converts them to “brightfields,” a label the Bill Clinton presidency attached to a 1999 climate change initiative. That government called for repurposing old industrial sites and locating solar arrays there, thus converting them to sources of pollution-free electricity. Today, US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act appears to be accelerating such conversions.

This is the path Alberta should follow once the misguided moratorium is lifted—especially given the alarming growth of oil and gas liabilities and brownfields in the province. In March 2023 the Auditor General reported that we now have more than 100,000 inactive oil or gas wells, more than twice as many as in 2004. The Alberta Energy Regulator estimates the closure liability of these wells—the cost to clean up and restore the land to its original condition—at $30-billion.

Keith Hirsche, founder and president of RenuWell Energy Solutions, wants to tackle this blight by converting abandoned oil and gas properties to brightfields. In the MD of Taber, RenuWell spearheaded a pilot project on two Orphan Well Association sites, called Barnwell and Fincastle. The MD plus a handful of governmental, corporate and educational actors support the project. The province’s Municipal Climate Change Action Centre and the Irrigation Canal Power Co-op invested $2.3-million and $1.5-million, respectively, in the project. The Power Co-op owns both small solar projects and uses the electricity generated to offset power used for irrigation.

A few minutes southwest of the town of Taber, the Barnwell site sits in the middle of fields branded with the telltale circular patterns of centre-pivot irrigation. Just north of it a canal cuts through the land, supplying Chin Lakes water to the pivots. During my informal tour of the Barnwell site in June, I heard that, since coming online at the end of March 2023, Barnwell has exceeded both its power and its revenue-generation predictions. Unlike some oil and gas companies that have reneged on their legal duty to pay taxes to MDs and make lease payments to landholders, the Barnwell project is no deadbeat. And its panels aren’t going to negatively affect the adjoining potato field that my boots sank uncomfortably deep into.

I asked Keith Hirsche about RenuWell’s claims that these brownfield-to-brightfield conversions would accelerate oil and gas reclamation and reduce costs by more than 50 per cent. He said the cost savings are related to the transfer of access roads, power lines and the vegetation restoration responsibilities from the oil and gas company to the solar operator. Removing roads and restoring vegetation are the most costly and time-consuming steps in the reclamation process.

This pilot project offers a small, sweet taste of what’s possible. If only half of the 3,000 inactive wells in the MD of Taber were converted to brightfields, 465 MW of electricity could be generated. This is how much power the Travers solar project, Alberta’s largest installation, produces. But Travers took 3,330 acres of farmland out of production; brownfield conversions wouldn’t remove one acre.

A variety of measures could put Alberta firmly on the brownfield conversions path. Our government should create a version of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “RE-Powering Mapper.” This interactive online tool provides data for over 190,000 brownfield and related sites in that country. The US National Renewable Energy Lab has developed criteria for this tool to identify sites with renewable project potential. The EPA is working with the Lab to produce feasibility studies of where brownfields could profitably be converted to brightfields.

Tax and regulatory changes would help too. Alberta could follow the example of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and offer tax credits for renewable electricity projects on brownfields. Regulatory change could treat smaller-scale brownfield conversion projects (generating less than 5 MW) like large-scale micro-generation (between 150 kW and 5 MW). This would relieve proponents from paying interconnection and meter infrastructure costs and make investing more attractive.

The Saddlebrook and Foothills projects provide a clear lesson: brownfield conversions allow us to generate more renewable electricity while avoiding much of the controversy and harms that come from the conventional project-siting path. If Alberta’s UCP government and rural municipalities are genuinely concerned about losing valuable farmland to renewables, this is the path forward.

Ian Urquhart is a professor emeritus of political science at University of Alberta and former editor of Wild Lands Advocate.

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Not that it helped. Grasshoppers have bedevilled human plans and their crops ever since. The biggest outbreak of desert locusts in seven decades is attacking eastern Africa even now. An estimate in 2020 reckoned that, every day, a single swarm in Kenya of 200 billion insects was eating as much as the human population of Germany. Food across the region has become precarious for millions of people. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calls the current surge “a scourge of biblical proportions” and has launched a locust hub webpage to track swarms by satellite.

In the past several years, South America has been hit too, its first locust plague in six decades. And in North America grasshopper outbreaks have struck the three prairie provinces, parts of British Columbia and the US west in recent years. While these haven’t caused as much loss as the African outbreak, the eruptions carry reminders of the panic of the Dirty Thirties, when pitiless swarms of grasshoppers in the prairies ate not just the remnants of wizened crops but also clothes off farmers’ limbs.

And things are poised to get worse. Droughts and heatwaves, fuelled by climate change, are on the rise. These ramp up the ability of some grasshoppers to produce eggs. Warmer temperatures also push the insects’ metabolisms higher, meaning they need to consume even more food than normal.

But while the crop-gobbling has an ancient hold on the human imagination, it’s only one part of the complicated grasshopper story. Canada has more than 100 species of grasshoppers, and only a few of them are capable of episodically ripping through a quarter-section. As unlikely as it may seem, many other types are instead critical to preserving the highly endangered grasslands ecosystem. Grasshoppers, for example, are an essential food for wild birds. Some, such as the Turnbull’s grasshopper, which gorges on Russian thistle, eat only weeds.

“If you were able to easily see the flow of energy through a grassland,” says John Acorn, an entomologist and lecturer at the University of Alberta, “you would see it flowing through the very abundant grasshoppers—flowing from the sun to the plants, through the grasshoppers and into the birds and other insects.”

And alongside other threatened insects, including such pollinators as bees and butterflies, some of those ecologically indispensable grasshoppers seem to be in freefall. Climate disruption, habitat loss and dramatic shifts in bird populations are all in play.

“Some very weird things are happening, and some are good but some potentially are very bad,” says University of Lethbridge entomologist Dan Johnson, who is funded through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership and is one of the world’s foremost experts on grasshoppers. Some species, for example, are expanding their range. And in Alberta’s north, for some species the typical five-year pattern of growth followed by decline is now squished into two years. Reasons unknown.

While there are no comprehensive studies that show exactly how insect populations on the prairies are changing, the red flags are disquieting. Johnson has been monitoring grasshoppers for many years at the Alberta Conservation Association’s Silver Sage Project south of Manyberries, for example, and has tracked a grim decline among some of its 40 species of grasshoppers. Many types of mountain grasshoppers are becoming sparser, and so is a non-pest group called band-winged grasshoppers, a favourite repast of birds.

Ironically, Johnson says, pest-control measures that decades ago killed off many types of grasshoppers are now used far more parsimoniously. One would expect that trend to lead to increases in the populations of non-pest grasshoppers. But it’s not happening, for reasons he continues to examine. “If the only thing that was hurting grasshoppers was us spraying, then right now they’d be back in record numbers and everything would be cooking out there in the ecosystem,” Johnson says.

While we don’t know exactly how grasshoppers are faring, the fate of the grassland songbirds that rely on the insects for food is better known. The 2022 State of the World’s Birds report, published by BirdLife International last September, tracked a 42 per cent drop in grassland birds in North America from 1968 to 2018. In sheer numbers, that’s roughly 700 million fewer birds in just 50 years.

The disappearance in Alberta has been stark. In the 1990s Johnson would routinely spot vast numbers of a dozen species of birds as he conducted insect surveys. “Now, you go to the same sites, and it’s just like the dead zone,” he says. “So, where are they?” But the disappearance of birds—like the let-up in chemical spraying—hasn’t helped grasshoppers either.

All of this matters, Johnson says, because counterintuitive as it may seem, as goes the grasshopper, so goes the prairie. One study, for example, shows that grasshoppers make up more than 85 per cent of the diet of nestling chestnut-collared longspurs. Another found that for sharp-tailed grouse, a key indicator of the health of the prairies, grasshoppers are a diet staple. Endangered burrowing owls rely on grasshoppers, and so do prairie owls of all sorts. Grasshoppers “hold up the food web,” Johnson says. “Without them, massive loss would happen.”

Psoloessa delicatula, Brown-spotted range grasshoppers, overwinter in soil and grass as miniature hoppers, emerging in early spring just in time for baby birds to feast on them.

Grasshoppers are marvels of evolution. Every continent except Antarctica has them, and each one features the good-hopper/bad-hopper morality play. The 600 or so species that inhabit North America likely evolved in Mexico or in the mountains of Nevada and Arizona during the last Ice Age. Then, propelled by powerful back legs and leathery forewings, they walked, jumped and flew northward as ice sheets retreated.

They’ve developed a suite of quirky survival skills, Johnson says. Most of them lay eggs an inch or so under the ground toward the end of the summer, producing a single new generation a year. The embryo grows inside the egg for a while and then puts the brakes on, going into hibernation during the coldest parts of winter. They survive because they’ve mastered the trick of making what amounts to antifreeze in their blood. Once the weather warms up, the embryo finishes growing and pops out of the egg.
But others take a different tack. Some, like the brown-spotted and velvet-striped grasshoppers, hatch before the cold weather and spend the winter in bits of soil and grass as miniature hoppers, emerging in early spring, just in time for baby birds to feast on them.

“And even after being aware of this for decades, I have absolutely no idea why they’re not dead,” Johnson says. “I mean, I can see living a day or two at minus 10, with the wicked cold and wind and drying conditions. But all winter It’s like a miracle.”

These different life cycles have evolved so that if one species of grasshopper gets into trouble, another can take its place in the food chain. This diversity is evolution’s prime mechanism for building resilience, rather than stability, in an ecosystem. But the reasons why one population thrives while another fades away remain mysterious.

“I go out every weekend in the summer and just make sure I’m familiar with what’s happening with all the species,” Johnson says. “Which ones are up this year, which ones are out, which ones are late, which ones just completely disappear. And even after 30 years of chasing them around and trying to keep tabs on them, I don’t know why.”

For millennia, the triggers for grasshopper swarms were equally opaque. But ever since humans began farming, we’ve been all too aware of the havoc the swarms could bring. Tales of locusts infuse ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew, Roman and Greek texts. “Due to the extent of their devastation and the spectacular nature of their migratory swarms, locusts have left an indelible mark since ancient times in the minds, beliefs, literature and arts of many cultures all over the world,” write locust specialists Michel Lecoq and Arianne Cease in February 2022 in the journal Agronomy. Both the Bible and the Qur’an cite locusts as one of the ancient plagues of Egypt, a divine retribution for sin. China alone has been recording locust outbreaks for 3,000 years, logging more than 800 separate events. In North America, six voracious swarms of the notorious and now extinct Rocky Mountain grasshopper, each lasting at least two years, struck the Great Plains between 1818 and 1875 alone, shaping tales of the settlers forevermore.

More recently, the X-Men comic book franchise introduced the villain The Locust. This evildoer creates a swarm of giant locusts with an ionizing “magno-ray” to devour crops. “Feed well, my pretties,” he coos. “Feed well! Now only I, your leader, am present to hear your song of mounting menace! But soon the world shall know the meaning of that sound… and live in terror of it!”

Some farmers have told me, ‘Wow. Now I get it. We should conserve some grasshoppers and just not bother spraying.

But magno-rays aside, where does a swarm come from In 1921 the Russian entomologist Boris Petrovitch Uvarov finally decoded the mystery. It turns out that about 25 of the planet’s 6,700 grasshopper species can alter themselves from benign, shy insects into the terrifying swarms of locusts that devastate crops—but only under pressure from very dense grasshopper populations. The drier and more abandoned an area, the better for incubating swarmers.

These hoppers change colour, size, shape and even brain size, essentially shapeshifting into eating machines. The process is called gregarization, meaning that they transform into what’s known as their “gregarious” phase, the opposite of their “solitarious” phase, and then band together into dense, marauding mobs of insects.
The behaviour of some species can shift within mere hours. They move fast, too: hordes can migrate hundreds of kilometres in one night, eating everything they come across. That includes the leaves off trees and handles off shovels.

On the grasslands, the attacks have spawned generations of ingenious eradication campaigns, including bounty systems, grasshopper “armies,” burning, beating, drowning, plowing eggs into the soil, crushing them with horse-drawn “hopperdozers,” dynamite, flamethrowers and poisons of all kinds. A popular formulation in the 1930s was sawdust, bran and arsenic.

Today, chemical insecticides are still the go-to to control pest grasshoppers. But these poisons are shorter-lasting now, far more targeted and more regulated, to prevent persistent damage to the landscape.

As well, in an attempt to prevent outbreaks, nations now monitor desertified areas to find out whether they’re becoming cradles for locusts. Some countries have established early-warning systems that trigger immediate insecticide programs. Arizona State University has set up the Global Locust Initiative to make sure knowledge about outbreaks remains accessible across the world. That’s especially important now, because climate disruption is likely to reverse any recent progress in controlling outbreaks, making the events more frequent, more severe and more apt to strike in new locations, according to the Agronomy article.

Alberta maintains a pest-grasshopper population map and forecast, plus a late-August count of adult grasshoppers capable of laying eggs, conducted by agricultural fieldmen—professionals with applied agricultural or environmental science backgrounds. The Bruner’s spur-throat grasshopper, for example, could be shaping up to be a problem this summer in the Peace River region, and crop-pest grasshoppers have been on the rise in the warm, dry south and eastern borders over the past two years, carrying risks of an outbreak.

A mountain bluebird bringing food to its babies. One study shows that grasshoppers make up more than 85 per cent of the diet of nestling chestnut-collared longspurs.

Modern safeguards aside, the old evil-grasshopper battle stories remain tenacious. And, in Alberta at least, they’re taking hold once more. Despite many types of grasshopper appearing to be in decline, hotter weather is encouraging still other local species to multiply.

“I would say that in the last six months, more than at any time in 10 years, the news services and the people I bump into, they’re all just grasshopper, grasshopper, grasshopper,” Johnson says. “It’s back on their radar, and it wasn’t for a long time.”

It’s his cue to remind people that a grasshopper is not necessarily a blight. It could even be a blessing. To that end, he’s put together illustrated guides explaining the differences between good and bad.

Johnson’s basic message If the grasshopper sings, or if it flies before June, or if it has brightly coloured or black hind wings that you can see as it flies, it’s not a crop-eater—meaning farmers shouldn’t spray.

Pest species, on the other hand, hatch in late May and early June. They are brown or black and always have little wing buds rather than large wings that fold back. One of the big hungry ones with a fondness for grasses, cereals, pulses, canola and safflower is the two-striped grasshopper, with its characteristic twin lines of spots running along the back.
Johnson also posts grasshopper ID photos prolifically on social media. “I throw them on to try to get people that follow me interested,” he says. “And some farmers have said, ‘Wow. Now I get it. You know, this is really interesting. We should conserve some and just not bother spraying.’ It’s much better than it used to be.”

As for Acorn, he marvels at how grasshoppers manage to continue to play a key role in the grasslands ecosystem. They sing the soundtrack of the prairies, he says. What you hear on a warm summer evening in Alberta is mainly stridulating grasshoppers, rubbing a small, roughened surface on their hind legs against the front wings. Some make soft, lisping sounds in the grasses, while still others emit sharp calls across the wind, nestled up at the side of warm cliffs.

To him, it’s a lesson in being humble. In honouring the unexpected. And in being careful how we treat this tremendously complex world we find ourselves inhabiting.

Alanna Mitchell is a journalist, author and playwright fascinated by how science, art and society intersect.

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It’s a large, popular lake about 65 km west of Edmonton. At the northeast corner is Moonlight Bay, a body of water as lovely as its name, with a big sandy public beach at a provincial park and many lakefront property owners.

Wabamun” means “mirror” in nêhiya-wêwin (Cree), and the situation here is a kind of mirror for Alberta.

Wabamun has long attracted praise. Early settlers called it “White Whale Lake” because of its huge and abundant whitefish. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway Company laid out the Village of Wabamun, intended as a lakeside summer resort beside Moonlight Bay, and tourists flocked from Edmonton. “Wabamun,” wrote the Edmonton Bulletin in July 1914, “[has] the largest fleet of motorboats and launches of any lake in the province.” Commercial fishing boomed, peaking in 1956 with over a million pounds of whitefish hauled from the lake. That same year, right next to the village, the Wabamun power plant began producing electricity. When the fishery declined quickly in the late ’50s, sprawling coal mines and adjacent TransAlta coal-fired power plants to the north and south of the lake offered new jobs. Tourism continued. Cottagers built around the lake. A sport fishery thrived. Zon loved to restore old cars and built a big garage on his property. He could swim from shore. “I spent all my free time there,” he says.

In 1982 the lake water was near historically high levels. A heavy snowpack melted the following spring. One morning in May 1983 Zon noticed “a sloughy smell, like you usually only smell in the fall” when water levels drop and near-shore water plants decay. “I walked over to the weir,” he says, “and I saw a trench dug [through the weir] and it was draining. I said ‘Hell, that’s no good.’ So, I phoned the department of environment and expected them to say, ‘Thank you very much, sir; we’ll look after it.’ And here I am now, 40 years later.”

Zon and his son Dwayne met me at the weir in August 2021. He’s an older man now, thin and slightly stooped, but he walks with pace from our vehicles down a dip in the dirt road to the weir, a thick bundle of papers in his hand.

The old steel weir at Wabamun Lake was destroyed by unknown persons in the early 1980s. The Alberta government built a replacement weir—the road—at a lower level. Photo by Tadzio Richards.

Alberta lakes are in trouble. Starving fish. Shrinking water levels. Blue-green algae. Many of the 600+ lakes in the province face these and other issues: invasive species, pollutants, cumulative impacts from development and, as scientists David Schindler and Bill Donahue wrote in a peer-reviewed paper in 2006, “the impending water crisis” on the prairies due to climate change.

For those who live by, visit, use and play on Alberta lakes, the problem is what to do about the issues. The water is owned by the Crown, but lakes are subject to a range of jurisdictional oversight, from the federal government (fisheries, navigation etc.) to the province (shorelines, lakebeds) to municipalities that give local development permits. Historically, in response to problems in lakes, Albertans either advocate to solve a single issue that affects them personally or, as has happened now and again, they try and collaborate to find solutions that will benefit the health of the whole lake and all lake users. Neither approach can fully deal with the challenges.

For starters, it can be hard in this province to even agree on the problem that needs fixing.

Wabamun Lake is a good example. Moonlight Bay has weeds. That’s what lakefront property owners call the aquatic plants that grow in abundance in the shallow water. Paddling here you can see these plants underwater, so thick and high in places that the vegetation clings to the blade of a kayak paddle dipped just beneath the surface.

Are the aquatic plants a problem It depends on who you ask. Wabamun Lake is 19 km long—83 km², among Alberta’s largest lakes—and has many users: the hamlet of Wabamun (formerly a village), the summer village of Seba Beach, tourists, property owners, fishermen, the Paul First Nation on the east side of the lake, a railway line on the north shore and the Sundance power plant on the south side. Not everyone cares about the plants in the water. But some people do, and among them is Nick Zon.

The “weeds” are lowering property values, says Zon. Artificially low water levels in the lake are causing excessive weed growth, he claims, arguing that this problem would be solved if the government would “raise the weir.”

The weir has been an issue for nearly a century. The lake has only one natural drainage point, Wabamun Creek, a small creek on the Paul First Nation reserve, just south of Moonlight Bay. Over the years, the creek has often been dammed by beavers, which jams up the drainage point. Back in 1912, unknown people—likely farmers trying to expand cropland—dug a trench, a new outlet from the lake to drain into the creek to lower the water level. Some lakefront property owners didn’t want that, and in 1927 they built a weir at an agreed upon height to block the trench. In 1946 the province legally committed to maintain the weir.

“People think if that weir were lower the water level would go down,” says Don Meredith, a biologist and until recently the communications lead for the Wabamun Watershed Management Council. When he and his family came to the area, “and issues started coming up about the lake,” he says, “I’d go to meetings at Wabamun village, back in the ’70s and ’80s. Lake level was always one [of the issues]; it was either too high or too low. I remember with the weir early on somebody actually went and blasted the thing down. I would ask, ‘Does anybody know who did this?’ and people would say, ‘Yeah, some do, but nobody’s talking.’ ” That was in spring 1983, when unknown people destroyed the weir at night. The province built a replacement weir. But Zon and other property owners asserted that the new weir was built too low.

“I know what Wabamun used to be and what, with a little government help, it could be again.” Don Meredith

At the same time, Meredith and others tried to resolve multiple issues at the lake. Spurred by a 2004 government-commissioned report on Wabamun Lake by Schindler, a University of Alberta limnologist, their strategy coalesced around the idea that problems are best addressed by approaching lake management with a public interest mindset, as opposed to focusing only on individual concerns. Environmental issues have rarely been dealt with that way historically in Alberta. For instance, in 1985 a regional planning commission released a comprehensive management plan for Wabamun. It was “sent to all levels of government around the lake,” wrote Meredith in an article on his blog, “and it was dutifully filed and forgotten about. Why Because of the age-old problem in this province where no one department or indeed government is responsible for lake management. The result is, on any particular lake issue, the buck is passed from one jurisdiction to another and nothing significant gets done.”

“Wabamun” means “mirror” in nêhiyawêwin (Cree), and the situation at the lake is a kind of mirror for Alberta. The lake has had booms—a commercial fishery, a long era of coal power—and now it faces decline. What is done now, at the community level and in government, could determine if that decline will continue or whether another way is possible.

Health advisory in 2021 at Wabamun Lake for blue-green algae, which can produce toxins causing rashes and sickness. Photo by Tadzio Richards.

By August 2021 the old weir is a rusting steel sheet with lake water flowing around it. The new weir is the road, which is paved with cement across the bottom of the dip, blocking the outlet. Lake water laps at the cement. It’s been a record-setting hot summer and water levels are low. If the water were higher it would flow over the cement weir into the creek, which meanders close to the lake at this spot, a low, marshy bit of ground allocated to the reserve. The new weir is visibly lower than the top of the old one that was destroyed. Zon has a blueprint of the old weir in his bundle of papers and pulls it out, struggling to hold it still as the documents flap in the wind.

Zon’s papers tell a saga. Moonlight Bay is the shallowest part of the lake, and Zon and other cottagers there wanted the weir rebuilt. It became an obsession. He organized petitions, met with government officials, researched old reports and contracts related to the weir and filed FOIP requests that revealed internal government memos related to the issue. He kept all the files.

In 1988 he and his fellow advocates met with the environment minister, Ken Kowalski. The minister agreed to fix the situation, but instead of rebuilding the old weir, the government issued itself a permit to store gravel in a waterway and built a roadway across the trench next to the old weir. This caused a new kerfuffle (the road was higher than the weir) and so the government knocked the road down to where it is now: 724.55 m above sea level, an elevation measured by a surveying company and approved by the government.

This approval is the crux of Zon’s issue. He thinks the new weir was put in 18 inches too low. Usher, the company that did the surveying, admitted in a 1988 letter to Alberta Environment that they “cannot confirm or dispute the accuracy” of the work without cross-referencing it with “benchmark” measurements made by the railway company earlier in the century. But this wasn’t done. Zon got a meeting with Premier Ralph Klein and showed him the Usher letter, urging more survey work be done at the weir. Klein’s office sent Zon a letter saying, “Everything is fine at Wabamun.” The local MLA gave the same response. As did Environment Canada, whose representative told Zon, “Nothing you’re going to show me is going to change anything.”

But Zon persisted. Through the 1990s the lake levels remained low. Aquatic plant growth increased. In 1997 Zon and other cottagers appealed to the Environmental Appeal Board about TransAlta’s Wabamun power plant, alleging that warm “cooling water” discharged from the plant into the lake was causing weed growth and weak ice in the winter. The board agreed and recommended mitigating measures, such as increased weed cutting and putting up warning signs around the lake about the ice. Zon also had documents showing the power plant was built using the old CNR benchmarks and he alleged that TransAlta built the Wabamun plant 18 inches too low relative to average lake levels—which, as he speculated in his notes, would mean that if water levels were unusually high, as in the early 1980s, the company’s options would be to “raise the plant or lower the lake.” The Board did not comment.

In 2006 Zon applied to the Court of Queen’s Bench to certify a class action suit seeking $25-million in damages against TransAlta for harming the lake and an order “requiring Alberta to raise the lake level by ‘fixing’ ” the weir. Acknowledging Zon as “a committed advocate,” the judge cited Schindler’s 2004 report to the Alberta government on Wabamun Lake, which noted that complaints about fluctuating lake levels date back to the early 20th century, with low levels leaving some “high-and-dry” and high levels leaving others flooded. “Mr. Zon appreciates the likelihood of flooding if he and the other plaintiffs prevail,” wrote Madam Justice Topolniski in dismissing the application. “[Other] class members living on a ‘flood plain’ might well view his attitude towards them as the antithesis of a fair and objective representative plaintiff…. This action… is unsuitable for class certification.”

Zon was devastated. “The merits of the case weren’t even discussed in court,” he says.

I ask if I could take a photo of him by the weir. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t take photos of me,” he says. “I’ve had a rough go. They didn’t take the suit kindly, me poking around and asking questions, finding this and that.”

“Who’s ‘they?’”

“I’m hoping they’re retired,” he says. He stares at the old weir, steel jutting from water, a channel carved in the bank. “Just ask yourself: Who is big enough to do this?”

He hands over a stack of papers—old reports, notes chronicling his efforts over decades, his summation of events: “Management of the lake has been delegated to an act of vandalism and an admitted error in survey.”

The Wabamun Lake watershed—the lake and land that drains into it—covers 259 km² near Edmonton. Map courtesy of Wabamun Watershed Management Council.

Driving around Wabamun Lake reveals a landscape both in transition and at risk of stagnation. The power plant closed in 2010 and was imploded in 2011, a blow to employment in the Village of Wabamun, where the adjacent plant and coal mine are now fields of grass and gravel behind chain link fencing. In 2021 the village became a hamlet, joining Parkland County. Tourists still flock to the beach and boat dock in summer, but the big municipal government building in the middle of the former village sits mostly empty. From nearly any point around the lake the smokestacks of the remaining power plant—Sundance, which transitioned from coal to natural gas in 2021—are visible on the south shore, though public access to the lakefront is limited by private property, a fact communicated in road signs. No Trespassing. No Parking. No Access to the Lake. Once on the water a speckle of boats sail, jet, motor and drift with fishermen casting lines. From 2008 to 2021 it was catch-and-release fishing only here—no eating—after a train derailed in 2005 and spilled nearly 800,000 litres of oil into the lake. Anglers are now allowed to keep a few whitefish, walleye and burbot. No signs of the spill remain visible from a kayak, though greenish algae scums the surface in places, a result of naturally high phosphorus levels mixed with development runoff into the water.

“The number of lakes that are suffering is a key to understanding the whole lake system.” Ray Makowecki 

Lake health decline is not unique to Wabamun. Fisheries biologist Ray Makowecki, formerly with Alberta Fish and Wildlife, says the end of what could be called the “golden era” in Alberta lakes was “roughly the mid ’80s, say, 1985.” Before that, lakes in the province were “pretty healthy [for] water quality and fish habitat and fisheries,” he says, in a phone interview. After that, “we saw decline,” he says. “One of the more dramatic changes was the drought [in the mid ’80s and again in the early 2000s]. We lost about 35 lakes in northeast and central Alberta—they no longer supported fish, simply because of declining water levels.”

Among lakes similar in size to Wabamun, Muriel Lake, near Bonnyville, saw dramatic water level declines and lost all its pike, perch, whitefish and walleye sport fish. Pigeon Lake, 108 km southwest of Edmonton, also saw water level declines, along with outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae. “Increased development, land use changes and increasing populations” were all factors, says Makowecki. While some lakes are “coming back” in terms of fish numbers, he says, “the number of lakes that are suffering, or have suffered in the past, is a key factor in understanding the whole lake system” across the province.

Consistent with this big-picture view, declining sport fish populations and other issues at Wabamun were obvious by the end of the 1990s. The Alberta government contracted David Schindler—Alberta’s most prominent environmental scientist—to chair a committee of experts to review previous studies and make recommendations to guide future management of the lake. Along with better monitoring of water quality and an end to “overfishing,” Schindler’s 2004 report recommended “that a permanent citizen panel, whose objective it is to protect the health of Wabamun Lake… be established and maintained. This panel must have members who are selected by, and representative of, the community of Wabamun Lake users.” 

“There is no coherent provincial monitoring program for lakes in Alberta.” Bill Donahue

Bill Donahue, a member of Schindler’s expert committee, says they recommended the citizen panel because of “a lack of transparency, accountability and public responsibility when it comes to Alberta Environment and their decision making.” The recommendation, he says, “was in the wake of hearings out at Wabamun for the expansion of coal power plants.” Donahue had presented evidence at those hearings that “showed significant, clear and huge increases in all of the pollution associated with coal mining in terms of metals, organic contaminants, chemicals, starting pretty much exactly when coal mining and coal burning started in the Wabamun area.” Consultants hired by industry, however, claimed the opposite, presenting data that Donahue said was “literally laughable.” Instead of submitting their data for peer review, he says, “they wanted me to engage in a public tour where we would go and give our competing presentations. I said, ‘Why would I do that You’re wrong. I’m not going to debate you if you don’t even know enough to know you’re wrong,’” he says. “Alberta was pretty complicit in that. Deceptive public communications by both industry and government were why one of our recommendations was for a citizen panel—to provide transparency” at a ministry that “should be responsible for the sustainable management of the environment in a dispassionate and unbiased way.”

Formed in 2006, and initially under the auspices of Alberta Environment, which provided funding and a secretary, the Wabamun Watershed Management Council included representatives from local communities, provincial and federal governments (though Environment Canada only attended one meeting) and environmental and recreation groups. “We spent the first couple of years just learning about lake biology,” says Don Meredith, a member of the panel from the beginning. “We wanted to write a plan, but we never got on to it,” he says, because the provincial government “didn’t know what this is—coming up with a watershed management plan. That was new ground. As a result, we had a lot of turnover of [volunteer, non-remunerated] council members; people got tired and said ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ leading to nothing. But some of us stuck around. And we finally got things moving. But it took a long, long time.”

And frustration. As Meredith wrote in a 2014 article on his blog, at one early meeting, “after I had repeated what a fisheries biologist had previously told the council about pike needing aquatic vegetation in which to spawn and how cottage development had destroyed much of that habitat,” another council member replied, “Well, the fish are going to have to get out of the way. I will not have weeds growing in front of my house!”

“The point I was trying to make at that early meeting,” wrote Meredith, “was that the lake’s fish populations were indeed the ‘canaries in the coal mine.’ If the fish were not thriving, it might indicate the lake’s health was in some kind of trouble, regardless of whether you had vegetation growing in the water in front of your cottage or not. And if the lake’s health was in trouble, then many of the reasons why people come to the lake were threatened.”

With the health of the lake “slowly deteriorating,” says Meredith, the now independent council (Alberta Environment withdrew funding in 2010) identified key threats to the lake such as blue-green algae and cumulative impacts from development and climate change. The weir was not among them. “The lake level of Wabamun is largely governed by the amount of snowfall over the winter and rain events or dry spells during spring and summer,” reads the council’s website. “Evaporation… is the chief cause of water loss,” and the effect of Wabamun Creek (and the weir) on the lake is “like a straw draining a swimming pool.”

“People think we should be able to control the water level a lot easier,” says Meredith, talking about the “straw” wording. “It’s been quite the issue. We were trying to tamp it down.”

In 2020 the council, now mostly composed of lakefront property owners, organized a “steering committee” representing local municipalities, the province, TransAlta and others to come together—“it was like herding cats,” says Meredith—to review, agree on and release the Wabamun Lake Watershed Management Plan, essentially a non-binding plan for action. 

“Every day, provincial, municipal and Indigenous governments, industry, private landowners, and others in the Wabamun Lake watershed make land use and other decisions that can affect lake health,” reads the plan. “While many of these decisions are well intentioned, it is difficult to see the ‘big picture’ and [to see] if individual actions by different jurisdictions are complementary to lake and watershed well-being. A watershed management plan is meant to provide this landscape-level view … [and to help] coordinate who is doing what, in order to ensure activities are integrated and that they lead to a collective shared goal or outcome.”

Guided by a shared vision of the lake watershed—“a healthy ecosystem with a robust economy and a thriving community”—the plan recommends using the precautionary principle for all lake management decisions. It also details priority areas for action such as more water-quality monitoring, shoreline restoration, and better alignment of policies and plans between different levels of government. “Where possible,” said the steering committee, these actions should be done through “existing budgets” and “existing stewardship initiatives.”

Quoted in Alberta Outdoorsmen magazine, conservationist Lorne Fitch praised the council for “the herculean task of preparing a watershed management plan.” But he cautioned that community-led landscape-level planning has historically been hampered by the provincial government offering “empowered” citizens “little in the way of resources [and] little or no technical assistance.”

Meredith, quoted in the same article, agreed. “I hang in there because I know what the lake used to be and believe that with a little government help it could be again.”

Across the lake from the Sundance power plant, a train derailment spilled oil into Wabamun Lake in 2005. Photo by Tadzio Richards.

Waiting for government help could be in vain, says Bill Donahue. He has a Ph.D. in aquatic science and a law degree, both from the University of Alberta. In 2015 he was appointed vice-president and chief monitoring officer at the independent Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA). That agency had been created in 2014, after a research team led by Schindler found that oil sands pollution wasn’t being detected by Alberta’s environment ministry, a finding that sparked international outrage, embarrassing the government into creating the independent body. When the NDP government folded AEMERA back into government, Donahue stayed on as executive director of science in the new Environmental Monitoring and Science Division (EMSD). The entire project was hampered by a lack of funding, he says, citing “dishonesty, incompetence and intentional deception” at the highest management levels of the ministry as reasons why he resigned in 2019, not long before the UCP dissolved the EMSD as an entity in the department.

“There is no coherent provincial monitoring program for lakes in Alberta,” Donahue says. As a result, “in many cases you’ve got community groups or cottage associations trying to do their own community-based monitoring in the absence of any leadership and resources from the province. So, you’ve got fractured and disjunct decision-making based on fractured or absent information about lakes—their status, what’s going on, there’s no real understanding of what specifically is affecting any individual lake.”

The NDP government made a mistake when it brought AEMERA back into government, he says. “AEMERA was created [to do environmental monitoring] in a way that was transparent and scientifically defensible and not driven entirely by a need to defend fill-in-the-blank industries’ priorities, whether its oilsands or coal mining or power plants or oil and gas,” he says. “That’s similar to the reasons why we recommended that public panel [at Wabamun Lake], which was that the department had shown itself to be either unwilling or unable to properly deliver scientific environmental monitoring and assessment.

“Ideally that should be done by government,” Donahue says. “That is the role of government. A ministry of environment is responsible for managing the environment. And I would say arguably responsible for doing that in a way that respects the public will and protects the public interest. But Alberta Environment is not capable of doing it.”

Tadzio Richards is associate editor of Alberta Views.

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The post After the Golden Era appeared first on Alberta Views.

Published in Eye on Alberta, Alberta Views, June 2022.

The ranch has fallen on hard times. The once prosperous land is dry and food scarce for the ranch’s animals. Hungry and crestfallen, the animals grumble. Only the eldest among them can remember such difficult times.

Joshua, a power-crazy magpie, squawks aggressively to all that would listen, declaring that the ranch is a victim of “outside forces,” blaming the eastern beavers who manage the waterways and promising that he alone can bring back prosperity. The ranch’s many herd animals—cows, horses, sheep and goats—are convinced by the magpie and angered by stories of unfair beavers and conspiring forces. They elect Joshua to lead the ranch, ousting Hannah, the diminutive but kind and wise swift fox.

Out on the prairie a locomotive rumbles along, carrying Banff-bound tourists. Its iron wheels strike a stone, sending a single spark into the tinder-dry grass. A prairie fire grows rapidly and threatens the ranch, where industrious burrowing animals and wise owls scramble to shore up the fire defences.

“Please stay in your corrals. We’re all in this together,” hoots Cheryl, the pint-sized barn owl charged with organizing the fire brigades. Meanwhile the gophers, squirrels, chipmunks, mice and badgers desperately dig trenches to protect the Ranch and its inhabitants—courageously placing themselves in harm’s way.

“Your hooves will spread the fire and more animals will get burned or hurt by the smoke,” hoot the other owls, carefully studying the fire.

“We won’t mooooove. You are heroes,” the cows low thankfully.

The burrowing animals and owls eventually control the fire, examining it closely to learn much about its dangers, how it spreads and how to best protect the ranch.

“Fire is not a threat. We must be free!” Joshua caws disapprovingly. “The owls want to keep us locked up. We are self-reliant, personally responsible animals.”

Behind Joshua, a group of castrated bulls band together with a pack of yappy dogs. “The fire isn’t dangerous. We don’t believe it burns, and we have our own fire protections and treatments.” They bark and bellow, rolling in fresh cow patties.

Restless, the herd animals return to the dry fields. But the grassfire smolders on and the stamping hooves cause the grassfire to erupt again—leading to the deaths of many animals, especially the elders who cannot quickly flee.

The burrowing animals, badgers and owls again work furiously to fight the fire, treat the injured and protect the ranch. Again, the fire abates, but before it is out Joshua disparages the owls’ advice—and again the fire erupts.

As summer approaches, the danger subsides after the third grassfire. Joshua, eager to please the bulls and dogs, declares a premature victory. “Animals of the ranch, the fire is over!” he caws. “Now we can enjoy our traditional Summer Ranch Festival! This summer will be the best ever!”

The herd animals, tired of the fire’s impact and anxious for merriment, cheer loudly.

The gophers notice the prairie smoldering and winds rising. They squeak their warnings to the animals and beg the barn owl Cheryl to convince Joshua of the danger. Unfortunately, scared of the dogs, Cheryl says little.

Intent on celebrating, Joshua, the steers and the dogs protest loudly against the burrowing animals. “You know nothing and only want to stop us from enjoying the summer we deserve. Our festival will entice the rain clouds and bring back prosperity!”

The owls and burrowing animals, exhausted from fighting the fires and saddened by the destruction and deaths, anxiously warn Joshua—but to no avail.

The prairie’s fourth fire explodes, and this time destroys entire swaths of the ranch—corrals, winter shelters, barns, hay, grains and gardens. Overwhelmed, the exhausted burrowing animals send out distress signals that are thankfully answered by a platoon of eastern beavers—but it’s not enough.

The ranch burns on and the spring-born calves, foals, kids and lambs begin to fall injured. All looks bleak on the ranch as many more animals die in the fire and others suffer permanent lung damage from inhaling the thick smoke, made toxic from the prairie’s poisonous over-fertilization.

Eventually, seeing smoke on the horizon and hearing the animals’ distress, a bison herd escape their nearby pen where they’ve been relegated despite living longest on the prairie. The bison help the exhausted burrowing animals and owls dig the required trenches and stamp out the fire—saving the ranch.

Realizing the many lives lost and destruction around them, the animals angrily turn on Joshua and his followers.

The magpie protests, “I’m sorry, I’m not sorry. It’s not my fault! I was following Cheryl’s advice. She’s the fire expert. We didn’t need help, especially not from beavers—they hate us.”

Annoyed by Joshua’s incessant squawking and lack of remorse, a bison elder charges at the petulant magpie and his followers, who together run away, still bellowing and barking about cow patties and beaver conspiracies.

“What now?” squeak the mice, licking their burnt paws with singed whiskers and blackened faces.

The wisest bison elder scans over the remaining animals and speaks solemnly. “The fire was Mother Earth’s way to remind you about your ranch’s lack of balance and the danger of over-extracting this land. We cannot live apart from nature nor divided between animals.”

Leaderless, the animals ask Hannah the swift fox to lead them again.

“What are we going to do?” meow some kittens, poking their heads from behind a scorched haybale.

“We will bury and remember our dead,” says Hannah, softly. “We will thank the brave animals who sacrificed for all the others—then we rebuild.”

“Woof!” barks the largest dog. “The fire wasn’t so bad. Let’s just go back to how things were.”

Protest and bickering flare among the animals, venting their sadness and frustration caused by the collective losses.

“I know we just want to forget and move on,” says Hannah. “But we can’t. The fires may return, and many would have died and much lost for nothing if we don’t learn and change.”

Dr. Fabreau is a general internist at the Peter Lougheed Centre, director, Refugee Health YYC Research Program, O’Brien Institute for Public Health, and an assistant professor at the University of Calgary.

The post The Cautionary Tale of the Grassfire and the Prairie Ranch appeared first on Alberta Views.

I just got back from one of the best summers of my life, working in the Alberta Climate Conservation Corps, so I’m writing to thank you for what you did, way back in the early 2020s, to make this possible. I remember you telling me about the mood of despair back then. It’s hard to imagine that now. Our end-of-season party was full of hope and joy. And it’s all thanks to you.

I thought you might like the following extract from an essay I did for school last year. It describes the gift your generation gave mine:

By 2022, things looked grim. Alberta’s oil-dependent economy was on life-support as carbon fuels fell out of favour. A pandemic, lasting several years, had also undermined the economy and deepened divisions in society. Recurring news about extreme weather events driven by climate change were even more demoralizing.

But something remarkable began to happen. Having lost patience with an out of touch government, a grassroots movement coalesced around the need finally to confront the province’s environmental problems head on. The movement united Indigenous communities, rural communities and urbanites in common cause: a future worth wanting. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a government decision to open up the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mining, just as a growing drought was beginning to threaten the province’s economy by reducing water supplies that originate in those same Eastern Slopes.

Frustrated opposition to such bone-headedness led, in 2023, to the election of a whole new government with a strong mandate for positive change. Responding to the public mood, that government banned new coal mines and finally started to address the widespread and unnecessary damage that other industries and human activities had been causing.

They started by reforming forestry. New rules required companies to protect forest soils by operating only when the ground was frozen, and to selectively remove no more than 60 per cent of the trees in a given stand so as to retain a living canopy. Clear-cutting was banned. Monitoring already shows that the modified forests trap more winter snow and the protected snowpacks are improving groundwater recharge.

Students worked together every summer in the woods repairing damage. They revegetated sites and fixed eroded stream banks.

Older logging areas still needed restoration, though, because ill-advised earlier forest policies had put wood supply ahead of water security. The Eastern Slopes were also riddled with roads and old oil and gas infrastructure, all contributing to rapid water runoff and erosion. So the government created an Alberta Climate Conservation Corps. It employed post-secondary students every summer to work in the woods repairing that damage. Year after year, young Albertans worked together to revegetate sites, repair eroding stream banks and even transplant dam-building beavers back into headwater valleys.

For repairs needing heavy equipment, the government contracted companies that had previously worked mostly in the oil patch. That not only protected jobs but changed their focus from land exploitation to land restoration.

All this work, of course, required money. The government instituted a logical solution: a climate conservation surcharge added to everyone’s water bill. It only increased residential water bills by a dollar a month, and agricultural and industrial ones by 5 per cent, but it generated tens of millions of dollars for work that improves water security.

The new government also started to pay landowners for environmental conservation. Farmers and ranchers can now stabilize and improve their incomes by earning money not just for crops but also by providing habitat for endangered species, restoring and protecting wetlands and increasing carbon sequestration through grassland and forest restoration.

Again, that costs money. And again the government found sensible ways to fund it: a carbon levy that increases annually, surcharges on gas-powered vehicles, new taxes on pesticides and a modest tax increase on large corporations.

Half a century later, the changes are inspiring. Once-vanishing species like the burrowing owl, bull trout and bank swallow are out of danger. Despite the ongoing climate challenge, we see a small but important increase in water supply from rivers draining from the Eastern Slopes and less severe spring floods. And so many young adults, having worked together in the ACCC to restore our headwaters region, are now motivated to collaborate in creating even more solutions in their communities. Alberta not only hums with optimism but is again the diverse and beautiful place it was meant to be.

Grandma and Grandpa, my profound thanks for your decisions to reject despair, reject politicians who offered only old non-solutions, and enable the future my generation is now living. You made Alberta possible again.

Kevin Van Tighem’s Wild Roses Are Worth It: Reimagining the Alberta Advantage was published in spring 2021 by RMB.

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