Banff Archives - Alberta Views

Buffalo Lessons

Pamela Banting — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:55 +0000

How Bison Returned to Banff National Park
by Karsten Heuer;
foreword by Leroy Little Bear;
introduction by Harvey Locke
GREYSTONE BOOKS
2026/$28.95/192 PP.

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail. In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

The chapters are sequenced chronologically as the project unfolds and are titled as a series of the “lessons” Heuer and his small team learned both from experienced buffalo managers and from the animals themselves. Some of the titles sound managerial (“Seize Opportunity,” “Leverage Your Success”) and others more like insights into bison psychology (“Embrace Individuality,” “Make Your Idea Their Idea”). Given that an attempt in the 1970s by Parks Canada to restore bison to Jasper National Park failed when the animals dispersed way beyond the park, Heuer undertook a lot of research and preparation in advance. While the book might work too as a manual for wardens and ranchers, its scientific, ecological and even spiritual material makes it a compelling read akin to the works of Alberta naturalists Andy Russell and Charlie Russell, former park warden Sid Marty and UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard. It also reminded me powerfully of Freeman House’s Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, another rich account of species restoration.

For a book that details the reintroduction of these animals, it is surprising when the prologue begins with Heuer having to shoot one of the buffalo whose life story he had been party to from its birth. But it has ventured beyond the invisible, largely unfenced boundaries of the park, a trespass the Alberta government will not forgive. Even prior to the first chapter, then, two deaths, both premature, have been recorded or anticipated: that of this young wayfaring bull and that of the author himself. Heuer wrote the book during the final months of his life, and it has been published posthumously. The loss of this man who, together with Allison, in essence apprenticed himself to other-than-human animals to understand their specific ways of being, is deeply tragic.

Throughout, Heuer details the remarkable amount of labour involved in this ambitious project. I was blown away by the physical work, skill range and stamina demanded of the wardens, and the logistics. Heuer had to plan for everything from age, number, biological sex and genetics right down to rubber tubing for the animals’ horns so they would not gore one another during transport from Elk Island to Banff National Park. First Nations’ managerial and spiritual expertise with the buffalo were also integral to this project of ecological restoration and reconciliation. Heuer writes that when not sorting animals “I helped erect teepees, partook in pipe ceremonies and listened to prayers, speeches and songs to bless the animals and the upcoming transfer [from Treaty 6 to 7]…. Looking across the teepees and feeling the drumbeats of Native singers in my chest, I saw I was just a Parks Canada pawn in something much larger about to play out: the prophecy of bison returning from the sky and the mountains.” Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese characterized humility as “the ability to see yourself as an essential part of something larger. It is the act of living without grandiosity.” This sense of humility with which Heuer approached the world, allowing him to enter at times into profound relationship with the land, also finds ironic expression in his mildly self-deprecating humour about his role in parks bureaucracy and playing “poker” with wily bison.

Buffalo Lessons does not aspire to didacticism but to be a gift to those who come after in the same way as the buffalo are a gift to the land and the people who live here. Printed on FSC-certified glossy paper with lots of photographs of the bison and some of the wardens, including Heuer, who reintroduced the animals into their ancestors’ territory and witnessed how they transitioned to a free-roaming life in the mountains, this book represents only part of Karsten Heuer’s legacy of science, activism and commitment to the multispecies world we inhabit, whether we realize it or not. Buffalo are now living wild in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta!

Pamela Banting writes articles about park warden literature, multispecies studies and ecocriticism.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Buffalo Lessons appeared first on Alberta Views.

Wildfire in the Bow Valley

Adrienne Mason — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:01 +0000

Across the valley, on the slopes of the Colin Range, Jasper National Park is burning—and my boyfriend is helping to ignite it. Using a torch dripping a flaming mixture of diesel and gasoline, he and his park warden colleagues set a line of fire that’s snaking up the slope.

I’m watching from a pullout down on the Yellowhead Highway. As a young keener with a summer job as a park interpreter, I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire. Visitors are confused, sometimes angry, almost always annoyed that the smoke now swelling up the slope in menacing black plumes threatens to ruin their holiday.

It’s May 1989 and this purpose-lit fire—a carefully planned prescribed burn—is an early effort by Canada’s national parks to bring wildfire back into a landscape where for over a century it’s been largely banished. Fire is as natural as wind and rain across most of Canada’s forests, which have evolved to be recycled and renewed by periodic burns. Trees such as lodgepole pine, for instance, require heat to melt the resin that tightly binds the scales of their cones, releasing the seeds inside.

Since the 1980s, Jasper National Park has been a leader in reintroducing fire and in acknowledging that fires are necessary—and inevitable. It’s a challenging choreography, since what can renew can also destroy. In addition to letting some wildfires safely burn and lighting others purposely to reduce fuels and break up similarly aged stands of densely packed trees, Parks Canada has been actively mitigating wildfire risk around the built environment. They have created fire breaks, thinned and limbed trees, and removed deadfall and woody debris. During my time in Jasper in the late 1980s, for instance, Parks Canada cut trees on the Pyramid Bench behind the townsite, hauling the logs out by horse and snowmobile.

In July 2024, over 35 years after the Colin Range prescribed burn, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I watched—from a distance and through digital screens—as Jasper burned again. On the evening of July 22, in the forest alongside the Jasper–Banff Parkway about 22 kilometres south of town, lightning struck three times in three minutes. Fire hazard was extreme, following a month-long drought and with temperatures reaching 38°C. Within 10 minutes fire had reached the crowns, rendering it virtually unfightable. Gusts of wind as strong as 87 kilometres per hour energized the blazes, and they soon merged into one fire and advanced north up the valley. In the end, the inferno covered about 33,000 hectares—about 40 per cent the size of Calgary—and destroyed 358 structures in the Jasper townsite.

I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire.

The Jasper wildfire held national and international attention—for a while. Almost two years on, other news floods the airwaves, even as our fire risk persists. In 2025 more than 6,000 wildfires burned across this country, making it Canada’s second-worst wildfire season. (Only 2023, the year before Jasper, was worse.) The threat continues to resonate, however, south of Jasper, in the Bow Valley. If a wildfire could so quickly reach one mountain town, despite decades of preparedness on the ground, could it do the same in Banff?

For Marie-Pierre Rogeau, there’s no question. She is a Banff resident and wildfire research scientist who for over 30 years has studied Alberta’s fire history, including that of Jasper and Banff national parks. “We’ve gone so far without having any fire at all,” she says. “[It] isn’t just a probability; it’s a 100 per cent chance.”

Rogeau’s fire history studies, along with those of Cliff White—a leader in fire management, both regionally and nationally, now retired from Parks Canada—show that until around the 1880s, forests and grasslands in the Bow Valley burned about every 20 to 200 years, depending in part on the elevation. The valley bottom burned regularly. Intervals were longer on cooler, moister slopes.

While lightning did ignite wildfires, this wasn’t as prevalent as is often assumed. A band roughly 20 kilometres wide on the east side of the Continental Divide, including the Bow Valley, is in a “lightning strike shadow.” Instead, human-lit fires were prevalent land-management tools. They were part of the “seasonal rounds” as Indigenous people moved across their territories to hunt and gather, explains White. “[The strategy was] to burn early and burn often,” he says. Regular, low-intensity fires, usually ignited during the spring or fall, were used to herd bison or other wildlife, renew grazing meadows and berry patches, open areas for easier travel, and for dozens of other applications.

The fires created a medley of habitats with different species and ages across the landscape. Natural fires—often igniting during the hotter days of summer—might then burn less intensely, since fuel hadn’t accumulated. Trees with multiple fire scars, for instance, reveal they’d seen many fires but none severe enough to kill them.

Colonization doused the flames. Settlers used fire initially to clear the land, and construction of the national railway sparked the occasional blaze. But once crops were planted, fences were built, homes and businesses became permanent settlements and forests started to be seen as a resource to extract, fire was deemed a menace. With the creation of Banff National Park in 1885, Indigenous cultural fire was banned.

Fire threatened “pristine wilderness.” Fire detection and suppression became a primary duty of the national park warden service, which was established in 1909. The men hired as fire and game wardens rose to the task and fanned out across parks to help protect the forests and “their primeval charms.”

“Culturally, we flipped so fast,” says White. In just a century, after generations of living with wildfire, humans effectively took it away. In a study of wildland fires in Banff National Park, White tracked their decline. In the decade 1880 to 1889, an estimated 37,050 hectares burned; by 1980 to 1989, it was down to zero.

Now, after more than a century of fire suppression—compounded by more droughts and erratic weather thanks to climate change—fire is back with a vengeance.

Instead of burning in a patchwork landscape with varying levels of flammability—grasslands and open meadows, willow fields, stands of leafy green aspen and balsam poplar, clusters of lodgepole pine or Douglas fir—21st-century fires feed off densely packed, fuel-rich forests dominated by 125–175-year-old lodgepole pine primed to burn.

This is what happened in the forest around Jasper. Hot and dry conditions; a continuous source of fuel, including mountain-pine-beetle-killed trees; rapid ignition; and strong convective winds sent the fire into the crowns, where it spread rapidly tree to tree. The fire generated its own weather, including tornado-like winds of nearly 200 kilometres an hour, in places ripping centuries-old Douglas firs out by their roots and levelling the forest, wrenching metal fire grates and bear-proof garbage cans from their concrete pads and even levitating a 3,000-kilogram construction waste bin and tossing it into the Athabasca River. Instead of a mixed-severity fire with the flames moving between the ground and crowns—calming down in places, flaring up in others, burning with varying intensities throughout—fires like Jasper’s level the forest, replacing entire stands, in places incinerating the soil and exposing bedrock.

Today, we’re in a worst-case scenario, says White. After removing human-caused fires, “Now we’re walking into climate change.”

“Fire has a way,” says Rogeau. “It’s like a wick. It will find whatever path… can burn.” The challenge for communities built in the middle of fire-shaped landscapes—such as the Bow Valley towns of Lake Louise, Banff and Canmore—is to employ strategies that trim the wicks and reduce the pathways.

But how do you fireproof a valley?

For one, you can fight fire with fire. About 75 years after the creation of the Park Warden Service, which had so effectively removed fire from wildlands, it was also park wardens who started bringing fire back. Cliff White helped write Banff National Park’s fire management plan and was on the ground at the park’s first prescribed burn, three hectares in size, near Two Jack Canal in 1983. Since then, the park has burned about 31,000 hectares.

One of the largest burns was in the Fairholme Range in 2003. It was a gutsy move. The prescribed fire was on the eastern edge of the national park, near the highway and between Banff and Canmore. Ecologically, the fire aimed to restore the historic landscape by reducing dense lodgepole pine growth and expanding meadows, and to get ahead of a beetle infestation. It also provided protection for Harvie Heights, a small cluster of homes on the park boundary. The project took years to plan and included an extensive fuel break about 500 hectares in size—larger than the Banff townsite. Within the burn, the forest was thinned and grasses and understory—including highly volatile juniper—were burned off.

The Fairholme Fire was a success. For White, it stands as a great example of how agencies and communities can work together to both restore fire-dependent ecosystems and protect communities.

But 23 years later, there’s still so much work to be done. As we walk the fuel break in October 2025—now a field of dry, golden grass and post-fire regrowth of shoulder-high lodgepole pines studded with large old-growth Douglas firs that were protected—White explains that prescribed fires aren’t just “one and done.” Follow-up burns remove the charred wood and dense stands of pine that regenerate in the fire’s wake. “The first [fire] is interesting,” he says. “But it’s the second one that’s really something.” Burning sooner, and with some regularity, maintains a break’s functionality. The longer you wait, the more challenging the job, says White. “If you wait 30 or 40 years, it will be huge.”

Parks Canada has had a reburn of Fairholme on the books as a priority for years, but, to date, it hasn’t occurred. The agency’s communications team says only that “the project is currently under expansive planning and will proceed once conditions are met.”

Despite the success of the initial Fairholme fire and a management plan that supports burning, prescribed fires haven’t been used extensively in the front country of the national park in recent years. A small area was burned near the Banff airport in 2022 and another nearer to town in 2023—controversially so, as it escaped containment—but other than that, there hasn’t been a prescribed fire in the Bow Valley since 2014.

With prescribed fire seemingly on the back burner, another tool has rolled into the valley to help reduce fuel and “cool” the landscape, one that not long ago would have seemed incongruent with the philosophy of parks: logging equipment.

Above the Lake Louise village, Parks Canada is constructing a community fire guard. Averaging 400 to 500 metres wide, the guard stretches from behind the Chateau Lake Louise down to the village and across the highway to the parking lot of Lake Louise ski hill. The lake on one side of the valley and the tree-free alpine of Whitehorn Mountain on the other anchor the guard with two fire-resistant landscape features.

In the upper section of the guard, completed in the winter of 2024–25, a lone tree stands in a snow-covered clearcut. Left as a bird perch and habitat for cavity nesters, the snag is a sign that logging—or mechanical tree removal, as the agency prefers to call it—within a national park comes with a particular set of rules.

Shelley Tamelin, the wildfire risk reduction project manager for Lake Louise as well as for Yoho and Kootenay national parks, explains the strict parameters for the company contracted to do the work—everything from leaving wildlife trees and buffers around wetlands to working only when the ground is frozen. Roads are carefully planned, constructed and mitigated, and contractors are required to place spill trays under equipment that’s not in use, to catch fuel or oil drips.

Despite their name, fuel breaks or fire guards can’t be counted on to suddenly stop a fire. “The guard gives our operations folks a place to work,” says Tamelin. This can mean laying down sprinkler lines to wet the forest or assets such as critical infrastructure, or lighting a fire in the direction of the approaching fire, consuming the fuel in the process.

The Lake Louise Community Fire Guard is just one of several along the Bow Valley within the confines of Banff National Park. In addition to the guards already built, “risk-reduction projects” involving forest thinning and log hauling were completed over the winter of 2025–26 on Tunnel Mountain and the Spray Valley–Middle Springs area near the Banff townsite as well as in multiple smaller sites within a 15-kilometre radius of the townsite.

Jasper’s wildfire held national and international attention for a while. Now other news floods the airwaves.

Farther down the valley, the Town of Canmore, Municipal District of Bighorn and the Kananaskis Improvement District are building the Bow Valley Community Fireguard. Construction started in winter 2024, with support through the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta Community Fire Guard Program. When completed, the guard will surround Canmore, the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park and the communities within the Municipal District of Bighorn, including Harvie Heights and Deadman’s Flats. The program has had full co-operation from the province to allow logging within provincial parks.

Despite the idea of logging in parks being anathema, White suggests we might need to do even more of it to protect the Bow Valley and the towns and infrastructure within it. He proposes the creation of a not-for-profit society to oversee the ongoing work of maintaining fuel breaks and fuel-reduction programs just beyond community boundaries under the guidance of professional foresters and in concert with community fire departments. Income generated from log sales would go back into the program to maintain it over the long term. In time, he says, these areas could be maintained through periodic burning. Carefully done, this could serve as a prototype for how to both live with wildfire and protect communities from it.

Ultimately, though, efforts to mitigate and hopefully minimize the impact of wildfire on towns like Banff and Canmore lie within those communities themselves. Wildfire will come; there’s no doubt. Fire guards may or may not help slow fires’ approach. And while “fear is a good starter, [it’s] a poor finisher,” White said in a recent presentation. The key for people is to put their fear into action.

The Jasper townsite didn’t burn because a wall of flames surged into town. It ignited after an aerial ember attack. Flaming branches, burning pinecones, moss, bark and other firebrands rained down like an assault of arrows. Wooden rooftops were the first to ignite, then decks, debris-filled eaves, bark mulch, fences, trees. Soon multiple buildings were aflame and the fire was spreading from structure to structure.

Ember showers are one of the most frightening aspects of wildfires. Fuelled by strong winds—fire weather generated by the blaze itself—embers can leap ahead by as much as 17 kilometres. They’re the reason an otherwise natural wildland fire can morph into a disaster. We wouldn’t be talking about the 2024 Jasper fire today if embers hadn’t ignited the town.

In Banff ember showers could come from any direction, but Sulphur Mountain is a commonly cited vector. White often refers to the mountain on the south side of town as “Banff’s volcano.” If fire coming from the Spray Valley breaches Sulphur Mountain, it could volley embers onto the community below.

The threat of ember showers in communities on the edge of wildlands is the impetus behind the FireSmart program. The national initiative gives dozens of actionable steps to reduce the wildfire risk to homes and properties.

Wildfire will come to Banff; there’s no doubt. The key will be for people to put their fear into action before it’s too late.

Chris Worobets has lived at the base of Sulphur Mountain for almost 30 years; the threat of wildfire is quite literally in his backyard. For several years he’s been helping to reduce the wildfire risks in Valleyview, the townhouse development in Banff where he lives. He’s clear-eyed about his chosen home. “We [built] in a forest,” he says. “This isn’t an urban centre.” As such, he sees homeowners as critical partners in fire prevention.

Worobets chairs the FireSmart committee at Valleyview and has been helping with mitigation since 2006, when the townhouse replaced its highly flammable cedar shingle roof. Volunteers have since moved combustible items away from structures, removed and limbed trees, planted low-risk deciduous trees, purchased sprinklers, held work bees to remove debris such as cones and needles and are working on making all decks and outbuildings built to FireSmart standards. It’s a slow process, though, even for a neighbourhood that’s largely onboard with the idea.

The Town of Banff is a booster for the FireSmart program and is implementing the program’s protocols, including tree removal, on municipal property. The town’s full-time FireSmart coordinator, Chris Pottie, provides free FireSmart assessments to homeowners—conducting over 150 in 2025—after which residents can apply to the town for discounted rooftop sprinklers, $1,200 roof-replacement rebates and financial support for coniferous tree removal. Pottie says there was a definite uptick in interest in the FireSmart program after Jasper townsite burned, and in 2025 the rebates were fully utilized.

While this is something, on the ground it means 120 sprinklers installed, 15 roofs replaced and 173 trees removed. Some private citizens do their own hazard reduction work even without the rebates, including Rogeau, who replaced her deck and removed trees. But for a town with almost 3,000 residences, it’s a long way from being well protected from flaming embers.

Effectively fireproofing a community requires widespread buy-in from residents, something that can be a hard sell in places famed for their natural beauty. And it’s frustrating to spend time, money and effort fireproofing your property if your neighbour does nothing. To date, the “stick” used by municipalities like Banff is more like a pool noodle—focusing on education and nudging people into doing the right thing.

The approach is toughening, though. Any new construction in Canmore and Banff is subject to building and landscaping requirements that mitigate risk from wildfires, including use of Class A roofing materials, which have the highest fire resistance. And Banff revised its community standards bylaw to mandate the removal of fire hazards such as dead trees, long grass, bark mulch and other combustibles within 10 metres of structures. In the end, insurance companies may provide the incentive that inspires action. Claims from wildfires are increasing, insurance premiums are rising, and money talks. Co-operators, for instance, offers a discount in Canada for FireSmart-certified properties.

Even though the loudest narrative coming out of the 2024 Jasper fire is that one-third of the community burned, it’s important to emphasize that two-thirds of it didn’t, including the critical infrastructure such as wastewater treatment needed for the town to function and rebuild. An extensive Natural Resources Canada report detailing the event acknowledged that more than 20 years of hazard-reduction treatment by Parks Canada around the townsite had moderated fire behaviour. It specifically noted that the town had made more fuel mitigation efforts than any other Canadian community under threat of wildland fire. (Although the report specifically mentions Parks Canada, FireSmart measures have been ongoing for over two decades.) These treatments helped reduce fire intensity in parts of town, knocking it out of the crowns and onto the ground, where it was easier to fight, ultimately reducing the spread of embers and saving structures.

The resounding message to be learned in Banff from understanding the history and role of fire on the landscape, and from the analysis that has come out of Jasper, is that the world of today isn’t the world of a century ago—or even 20 years ago. Wildfire suppression has only made our forests more combustible. Now, with the climate warming and becoming less predictable, fire seasons are longer and fires are more intense and harder to control. The risk to Banff is urgent.

Fire historian Stephen Pyne has coined a term for our era: the Pyrocene. “We’ve made an alliance with fire,” he writes. “It took us to the top of the food chain and now threatens to unhinge the planet.”

Adrienne Mason is a former Jasper National Park interpreter and now a full-time science writer and editor living in Tofino.

____________________________________________

June 22-26, 2026

Alberta Views — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:56:56 +0000

Monday, June 22: Hospital and Surgical Health Services minister Adriana LaGrange announces the province is pausing proposed changes to integrated fire and ambulance services. The changes would have required seven municipalities to choose between receiving less provincial funding or letting the province take over services.

Crossing the Line

Jeff Gailus — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:00:48 +0000

I came of age in the heyday of globalization and easy travel. I didn’t feel the slightest fear about crossing a border—not when I visited Dubrovnik at the end of the Croatian War of Independence, not when I was dragged off a train by armed Slovakian border guards. But everything changed when I wanted to visit Canada, my homeland, in April 2025.

President Donald Trump was wreaking havoc on the centuries-old American traditions of the rule of law and the accommodation of the tired, poor, huddled masses “yearning to breathe free” from persecution in their native lands. His administration unleashed an army of masked ICE agents to round up and deport non-citizen residents, both legal and illegal, to prisons in countries run by dictators. Even green-card-holding permanent US residents like myself were suddenly being denied re-entry or detained and threatened with expulsion.

I’ve made Montana my home for 20 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Calgary in 1993. I was drawn here by the chance to attend graduate school on a scholarship, then grew enraptured by the immensity of accessible wildlands, the progressive vibe of an American university town, and the beautiful and smart Swedish American mycologist I’d met. We married in 2011 and I happily set down roots for good.

Suddenly I’d be risking everything—first by trying to cross into Alberta, and then by trying to get back into my adopted US.

As a permanent resident I have most of the rights of a citizen. Because I can’t vote, I take seriously my other rights and responsibilities, namely the freedom to critique, challenge and condemn the government. In the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1918 that “it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about [the president] than about anyone else,” I’ve protested the new regime and stood up for the victims of its extrajudicial decisions. A homemade “Free Mahmoud Khalil” poster is taped to my front window and a “MAGA is American Fascism” banner hangs on my house in Missoula.

I work for a small conservation organization to restore wildlife connectivity along a transportation corridor between Glacier National Park and the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the only wound in the otherwise intact transborder Crown of the Continent ecosystem that stretches from Crowsnest Pass to Missoula’s doorstep. This work is both practical and symbolic to me, a way to knit a tiny bit of the world together at a time when it’s falling apart.

In late April, Banff was hosting a wildlife connectivity conference, Canada’s first, and I wanted to meet up with colleagues and old friends. But I feared the not insignificant chance that the capricious Trump administration would separate me from my lovely wife and my adult daughter, who lives in Arizona. It might prevent me from ever again seeing the 115-year-old home in Missoula I’d just renovated—painting it Falu red in honour of Sweden’s successful experiment with social democracy, a subtle rebuke to Trump’s lurch into autocracy.

Stuck on the American side watching the chaos unfurl, I began to have serious second thoughts. For the first time, I felt a tinge of the anxiety, insecurity and fear that millions of people around the world live with every day.

Premier Smith announced a new border security team—51 sheriffs with dogs and drones and the power to make warrantless arrests.

I’ve crossed the Alberta–Montana border more times than I can remember. It must be at least 100 times, maybe 150. It started when I was a young boy in the mid-1970s. My mother and father moved my brother and me from the blandness of Scarborough, Ontario, to a booming Calgary in 1971, the beginning of the glory days of Alberta’s enrichment and bedevilment by oil.

My father, when he wasn’t selling Sweda cash registers, became obsessed with slo-pitch. As a German refugee, his eastern Canadian childhood hadn’t included much fun. Life was simply work, school and church in the ghetto that was Cabbagetown. The move cross-country freed my father from the judgments of aging German relatives and sparked a new life in the thrall of southern Alberta slo-pitch.

Between the ages of 6 and 14 my brother and I spent more time at ballparks than in school, and every summer we’d travel to Great Falls, Montana, for the Can-Am Slo-Pitch Tournament. For my father and his middle-class, middle-aged teammates on the Calgary Jaycee men’s slo-pitch team, to cross the Medicine Line and defeat the Americans at their own game, on their own soil—this was their World Series. For my brother and me, it was a chance to chew grape Bubble Yum, which we smuggled back to Canada, and to stay in a hotel with a cloverleaf indoor pool, where we escaped the unrelenting Great Plains heat and played tag with the other slo-pitch orphans.

On one these trips, we got stuck at the border behind what would now be considered a vintage early-’70s Ford Econoline van painted tangerine. Four men with long hair and jeans—“hippies,” Dad called them—were standing on the tarmac laughing while the US border agents inspected their credentials. The hippies asked if I’d take a photo of them leaning against the van, as if they were going to be frisked; in mid-shutter, three border guards interrupted their fun.

“You think this is a joke?” one of the guards said, wresting the camera from my hand, while the others cuffed the hippies’ hands behind their backs and took them who knows where. “Do you think this is a joke?!”

But as the years and crossings passed, it seemed to me that traversing “the world’s longest undefended border” was, if not a joke, a mere technicality. As an adult looking much like those long-haired hippies, I’ve crossed the border in three vintages of Volkswagen vans (1968, 1974, 1991), and the only time I was ever checked for drugs was by the Canadians. The border agents wiped the blade of my pocketknife and the entire inside of the front window and then tested the dusty cloth for drugs. It was negative—and a warning to never smoke pot in my vehicle.

It wasn’t until September 11, 2001, that I realized how seriously the Americans take our common border. On that day, some colleagues and I, after a conference in Kalispell, were checking out of our hotel. There were many guests and too few staff, and I grew impatient, so I wandered back up to my room and turned on the TV. United Airlines Flight 175 had just turned the World Trade Center’s South Tower into a pillar of flame and billowing black smoke. I slumped on the bed and gaped. A replay of the first attack on the North Tower made it clear these were no accidents. The world had changed.

We drove three hours to the Sweetgrass border crossing, a place I knew well. But it was now occupied by Humvees and body-armoured soldiers, probably from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls. And there was a Black Hawk.

It’s a peculiar fact that the American military names their combat helicopters after Native Americans, purportedly as a sign of respect for the peoples and cultures the American military tried to wipe off the face of the earth. Of the five helicopters named for Native Americans, only the Black Hawk is named for an individual: a highly respected Sauk war chief who for decades battled his American antagonists. He fought for the British in the long War of 1812, which saw the White House and the Capitol burned to the ground.

It’s reasonable to doubt that Black Hawk would have approved of his name being attached to a flying fortress of war and a menacing symbol of American military might, but one thing is certain: Black Hawks are impressive to behold. I’ll wager that few Canadian civilians have experienced the ferocious visage and the deep, earth-shaking sound of a heavily armed Black Hawk in action, and fewer still at an Alberta border crossing.

On this day the Black Hawk—machine guns visible in both side doors, its rotors thumping out the sound of doom—hung about 50 feet off the ground, precisely over the crosshair created by the last yards of Interstate 15 and the 49th parallel. It pronounced, unequivocally, how easily the longest undefended border in the world could be militarized.

The line was long, the going slow. We were tense and uncertain, and anxiety—ours and theirs—hung thick in the air. Usually it’s the Canadian border guards that size you up when you’re travelling north. Now, in 2001, the Americans wanted to know who was leaving their country. But on that particular day of infamy, a car full of aging white men, one of whom had renounced his US citizenship and moved to Canmore in protest of the Vietnam War, didn’t sufficiently alarm them.

A six-metre-wide cutline comprises much of the Canada–US border, including between Alberta and Montana. The border has been undefended, but our provincial and federal governments are now spending big to “secure” it against trumped-up threats.

A week before the Banff conference was to start in spring 2025, I decided I would cross the border. I knew there was some risk of being denied re-entry into Montana. Trump’s raging hadn’t ended with illegal mass deportations. The US Border Patrol was harassing visitors and legal residents as they tried to enter the US; even unflattering opinions of the president on your smartphone could get you in trouble. But I wasn’t about to let some wannabe dictator in the White House determine whether I, a lawful, taxpaying citizen, could return to my country of birth to attend a conference among good people doing good works.

Besides, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to investigate premier Danielle Smith’s new interest in international border security. Traditionally, nation states secure their own borders against illegal incursions, but Trump was blackmailing the Canadian government with tariffs unless Canada “beefed up” its security to “protect” Americans against what he claimed was a scourge of fentanyl and illegal immigrants flowing across the border. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of America’s border problems knew Trump’s allegations were preposterous. Smith, however, jumped at the chance to impress a pathological liar who, we now know, was going to impose tariffs no matter what Canada did to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Ever keen to encroach on federal jurisdiction and embarrass prime minister Justin Trudeau, premier Smith announced, on December 12, 2024, a $29-million “investment” in a brand new border security team. Fifty-one new provincial sheriffs would use dogs and drones and be given the power to make warrantless arrests to help make America safe again. Eventually Canada’s federal government acquiesced to the premier’s request to outfit the Alberta RCMP with one of Black Hawk’s eponymous war machines. All of this, supposedly, to appease Trump’s threat of tariffs by securing the Alberta–Montana border against an alleged wave of fentanyl and illegal immigrants.

“If we succeed and maintain proper border security,” Smith said in a live announcement, doing her best to imitate the head of state of a nation at war, “I expect we’ll have a very strong relationship with the United States, as we always have.”

I got a late start from Missoula on April 22, Earth Day, and when I approached the Carway crossing the late afternoon was already casting long shadows. It looked deserted. No cars or trucks. No border guards up and about on the US side. I crossed the line onto Canadian/Albertan soil and pulled up to the window. I pushed my sunglasses onto my forehead and handed my Canadian passport to a kindly female federal border agent.

“Where are you headed?”
“Banff National Park, for a conference.”
“How long will you be staying?”
“Five days.”
“Do you have any guns, alcohol, tobacco or marijuana?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Here you go. Have a nice day.”

I drove north into my homeland, the rugged rangelands of the Blackfeet Nation fading into green circles of irrigated cropland. Not a sheriff, dog, drone or helicopter in sight.

There are actually six crossings along the 298-km Alberta–Montana border. Most people use Carway–Piegan or Coutts–Sweetgrass, or, in summer, Chief Mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park. Few people live along either side of the border, where Coutts, with a mere 300 souls, is the biggest urban centre. On the US side, just east of Sweetgrass, a 10-mile stretch of Border Road connects to local roads in Alberta and Montana as if the border doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the area is now being described like a war zone. Trump said in his first Oval Office press conference in 2025 that Canada, like Mexico, was allowing a plague of fentanyl to cross the border, “killing Americans” and “destroying families.” He said Canada was allowing “mass numbers of people” across the border. As a consequence, he announced a plan for a crippling 25 per cent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s words have little relationship to reality. Between 2022 and 2024, the US Customs and Border Patrol seized 61,900 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border, which is massive. At the entire Canadian border, a measly 59 pounds was found—less than 0.1 per cent of Mexico’s. The same pattern goes for unlawful border crossings. The number of illegal entries into the US from Canada has increased, from approximately 110,000 in 2022 to 200,000 in 2024, but this pales in comparison with the 2.3 million crossings per year from Mexico.

If US border agents were to search my computer, they could at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me.

A 2022 report of the US’s Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking concluded that “Canada is not known to be a major source of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids or precursor chemicals to the US.” The US Drug Enforcement Agency, with its $2.6-billion budget and some 5,000 special agents, doesn’t even mention Canada in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment; Mexico, however, is mentioned 85 times. Likewise Canada isn’t cited in the US Customs and Border Protection’s May 2025 report America’s Frontline Against Fentanyl—but we do learn that the US spends $7.3-billion per year to “secure” the Mexico border, and has invested in “123 large-scale drive-through X-ray systems… to significantly increase vehicle and truck scanning rates across the southwest border.”

In spite of the facts, our own federal government at the time—with an election on the horizon and Pierre Poilievre claiming he’d follow Trump’s lead and send thousands of Canadian troops, agents and helicopters to “take back control of the border”—decided it had to do something. “Whether some of the allegations about what is going on at the border are accurate or not, or credible or not, I don’t have the luxury not to take it seriously,” Marc Miller, Canada’s immigration minister, grumbled in an interview.

A month after premier Smith had beaten them to the punch with her $29-million “investment,” the federal government announced its own $1.3-billion enhanced border security plan, which included 60 drones equipped with thermal cameras and two Black Hawk helicopters, one of them allocated to Alberta. It tightened requirements for the temporary visas that some visitors were using to arrive in Canada legally but then enter the US illegally. It introduced its Strong Borders Act to anoint a so-called “border czar,” presumably the first such czar in Canadian history.

Carway is Alberta’s second-busiest crossing: 4,000 vehicles daily.

Premier Smith, not to be outdone by the feds, threw in an additional $15-million to set up three more Check Stop-like vehicle inspection stations in Alberta, two of them kilometres distant from the border. She then channelled a maxim from historical US oil magnate John D. Rockefeller—“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing”— and invited Fox News to come up “to enjoy some world-class Alberta beef” and to show Trump—and sympathetic members of her own UCP—how quickly she’d done Trump’s bidding. “That’s what I think the president wants to see,” she said. “That we’re taking this seriously, that we’re going to stop the flow of drugs and guns and people across the border.”

Canadian security experts were underwhelmed. There is a degree of “border security theatre,” said Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation. “We’re putting up hardware into the sky [such] as Black Hawks. We’re promising 24/7 surveillance designed to appease the United States.”

“If the premier wants to send sheriffs to the border, well, good on [her],” added Richard Huntley, who managed southern Alberta’s Inland Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) office in Calgary for 30 years. “But I can almost bet, in a year, they won’t have caught too much. I doubt it, sincerely.”

Predictably, both Smith’s and the federal government’s expensive efforts failed to appease Trump. His tariffs on Canadian goods not covered in the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement increased to 35 per cent on August 1. Why Because, according to a “Fact Sheet” seemingly conceived in an alternative universe, Canada deigned to retaliate with tariffs of our own (now cancelled) and continued in our “failure to arrest traffickers, seize illicit drugs, or coordinate with US law enforcement.”

It’s unclear how long Alberta’s border farce is meant to last, but it’s already proved fruitless and expensive. If Alberta’s sheriffs prove as adept at finding contraband as Canada’s federal border agents (which is doubtful), Smith’s “crackdown” will cost the public about $5-million per pound of fentanyl recovered. Alberta might also manage to detain and return a few terrified refugee families fleeing into Alberta, so that masked ICE agents can send them to whatever lawless hellhole the Trump administration has in mind.

The 24/7 Coutts crossing is Alberta’s busiest, especially in summer.

The wildlife connectivity conference in Banff was excellent. I asked my Alberta colleagues what they thought of their province’s foray into international border security. Most of them, if they knew anything about it at all, just rolled their eyes and sighed. Some expressed dismay at the similarities between Trump’s and Smith’s relentless performative politics. As I left, they wished me luck getting back across the border. Some offered me a place to stay if I couldn’t return to my wife and Falu-red home.

I tried to clear my digital devices of disparaging remarks about Herr Trump. The task proved impossible. As an amateur scholar on the rise of fascism in my paternal family’s Germany, I’m acutely aware of—and have researched and documented—America’s slide toward authoritarianism and the Trump administration’s use of fascist strategies to foment fear and consolidate power. When I moved to Missoula 20 years ago, I became acutely aware of the racism, militarism and jingoism that imbued American society, not to mention the trove of military-grade firearms that have been stockpiled by civilians. I began to warn my American friends that their homeland was ripe for an authoritarian turn. They mostly said I was nuts.

I’ve sent countless messages and emails and made innumerable social media posts about the dangers posed by Trump and his ilk. Before I left Banff I stored as much as I could on the amorphous “cloud” and deleted most apps from my phone. My laptop, however, held an enormous trove of “treasonous” material I was loathe to part with.

The problem is that by the time you get to the US border agents, you’re already in US territory. You can’t just turn around and go back if you sense trouble. If agents were to search my computer, there’s every reason to think they would at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me. And they might choose to teach me a lesson, to strike more fear into me or anyone who learned of my situation—which, after all, is why authoritarians stoke fear in the first place.

I wanted to try to cross at Coutts. Ironically, this is the site of the trucker protests in 2022, when 1,000 trucks blocked cross-border traffic for two weeks, and where the RCMP seized guns, body armour, a machete and a hoard of ammunition and high-capacity magazines. All of this was far more dangerous than a trickle of drugs and illegal immigrants. Yet premier Smith not only condoned the Coutts blockade but supported it.

Just as Highway 4 bends from south to east and I caught sight of the town of Coutts, I entered the Red Zone, a 596-km² quasi-military area within two kilometres of the border, along the entire Alberta–Montana border, where sheriffs on Alberta’s new Interdiction Patrol Team can make their warrantless arrests, just like ICE does in Trump’s America. Legal experts say the Red Zone—enabled by provincial legislation in January 2025—is unconstitutional. “How did we get here?” asked professor Shaun Fluker on the University of Calgary’s law faculty blog. “This is the stuff of authoritarian dictatorships.”

Coutts mayor Scott MacCumber said some of his neighbours share Fluker’s concerns. They’re worried they could be apprehended while out for a walk or riding their quad. “What will constitute suspicious activity to the sheriff patrols and what will not?” MacCumber asked.

As I turned south, the border crossing looming, my amygdala fired up like a welding torch. My heart rate quickened. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and thought about those fun-loving hippies being cuffed and dragged away.

And then, finally, there he was—a US border agent who had the power to ruin my life. I slowed to a stop and looked into the booth. My heart sank. With his long bushy beard and dark uniform, the man sitting before me looked like a Three Percenter hooligan in the insurrectionist mob that broke into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to hang Mike Pence.

I smiled and handed him my passport, my green card tucked between its pages.

“Howdy,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“Missoula.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Twenty years.”
“You have any alcohol or tobacco?”
“No, sir.”
He handed back my identification.
“Have a good day.”
“You too.”

A mile or two on, once I’d passed out of sight, I pulled over and leaned my head on the steering wheel. My cheeks streamed with tears. Not from the stress of the moment or the joy of making it back over the line, but because of the embodied knowledge that those bastards on both sides of the border are only just getting started.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil (RMB).

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Crossing the Line appeared first on Alberta Views.

Understory

Trina Moyles — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:00:40 +0000

by Kevin Van Tighem
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2025/$28.00/320 pp.

Kevin Van Tighem is one of Alberta’s most prolific and influential conservation writers. His latest book, Understory, however, is his deepest, most profound work yet. The book is a searingly honest journey into the author’s life from boyhood to adolescence to a young man coming up the ranks of Parks Canada to become the superintendent of Banff National Park. Visceral and poetic, it delves beneath the surface, exploring Van Tighem’s own family history as settlers in southern Alberta, a wider culture of patriarchy and violence, and the tangled legacy that Judeo-Christianity, national parks and resource economy politics have left on Alberta’s landscape.

Understory begins with the unforgettable image of a Brewer’s blackbird, doused in oil from a refinery near Calgary, held in a young boy’s hands. For Van Tighem it marked “the beginning of the end of innocence,” from idyllic days marked by fishing for cutthroat trout with his father in southern Alberta, to searching for ways to repair a damaged world. Van Tighem writes about his young adulthood in the 1970s and early ’80s—hitchhiking to BC, skipping classes to study birds, and dropping LSD—at a time when Alberta seemed hell-bent on bulldozing roads and seismic lines and extracting a drug of a different kind: oil. The author’s coming-of-age realization that the land he loved was also abused was difficult for him to reconcile.

At times he was drawn to activism. In the chapter “Rivers,” Van Tighem shares memories from the fight to protect the Oldman River from being dammed in the 1980s. Paddling the waters and meeting and organizing with people who lived along the river’s banks helped catalyze Van Tighem’s writing career. In the battle to protect Alberta’s last major free-flowing river, he realized both the power of the pen and that “a river is more than just water.”

Perhaps most illuminating is Van Tighem’s unflinchingly honest look at his decades-long career with Parks Canada in Jasper, Waterton and Banff national parks. He confronts mistakes and assumptions he made, and that’s precisely what makes Understory such a satisfying read. The “fundamental mission” of the parks, he writes, should be to draw visitors into a more respectful relationship with nature. At times they do—in the chapter “Grey Ghosts” he describes a hauntingly close encounter with a caribou in Jasper National Park: “We were no longer separate, but together,” he writes. “I felt like this quiet animal had granted me a gift of belonging.” But his description of the politics governing woodland caribou management also shows how we’ve allowed this species to hurtle toward extinction. The parks are failing, he asserts, to change how we care for land and wildlife outside park boundaries.

Understory also questions the darker legacy of national parks, in which Indigenous communities were displaced from their lands and ways of life when the parks were created. In a closing chapter, Van Tighem focuses on a story from his final year as superintendent of Banff National Park, and the rebuilding of a relationship with the Iyarhe Nakoda First Nations, who were excluded from the park in the late 1880s. In 2010 Parks Canada signed a memorandum of understanding with the Iyarhe Nakoda to end their exclusion from the park—signalling a new way forward together. “Eight years after the Stoney people were finally welcomed home, the bison came home too,” writes Van Tighem. Now, over 100 bison roam the mountain valleys. Reconciliation, says Van Tighem, requires the painful task of trying to make sense of our individual and collective narratives on the landscape. “Stories can lead us home,” he writes. “I used to think I knew where that was. Now I listen and hope to learn.”

A lyrical reckoning that burns with honesty and a poetic balm for these perilous times, Understory is a book that will belong on my bookshelf for decades to come.

Trina Moyles is an author and journalist from Peace River.

_______________________________________

MELTDOWN

Lynn Martel — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:00:24 +0000

The mood was celebratory. The smoked salmon appetizers were scrumptious, washed down with wine. Oohs and aahs filled the gallery as the buzz intensified while a lineup waited outside the Whyte Museum in the winter air. The launch event of MELTDOWN: A Drop in Time, an exhibition of large-scale photographs of glacial landscapes, was a resounding success.

The images were downright jaw-dropping. Giant prints—some wider than many living room walls—featured sculpted, polished and glimmering blue glacier ice, some resembling splendid precious gems. Others showed no ice at all. Dry rock, bare, sharp ridgelines, rubbly moraine slopes, naked cliff bands. Dark, dirty, dry and withered ice. Dying ice. On one hand, the ultimate eye candy for a glacier lover; on the other, a bitter aftertaste of reality.

MELTDOWN was conceived by Jim Elzinga. A groundbreaking Rockies-based alpinist since the 1970s, Elzinga led the 1986 team that supported Canmore’s Sharon Wood to become the first North American woman to summit Mount Everest, climbing a never-repeated route. Elzinga followed up with a 25-year international career as an organizational development consultant.

Now, with his hardest climbs behind him, the glacier-draped peaks and ice cliffs he ascended are diminishing too.

The loss of these inspired him to found Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit focused on the steadily shrinking Columbia Icefield as indicator of the worldwide climate crisis. Spanning approximately 200 km² atop the Continental Divide where Jasper and Banff parks meet, that icefield is a significant bellwether of Earth’s warming climate.

“One of the many reasons I want still photography to be part of the Guardians project is the ability to make large high-quality prints that immerse the viewer, like an IMAX film,” Elzinga said. “I feel this is the best way to create an emotional connection with the viewer and provide an experience as if they’re actually in the mountains. Our purpose is to effectively engage the public to build support for a low-carbon future.”

Using a high-resolution Phase One medium format camera, Elzinga partnered with friend and cinematographer Roger Vernon. To create each image required three people—one to hold the camera, another to recalibrate the settings on a laptop, and a third to pilot the helicopter.

Leanne Allison, Jim Elzinga, Roger Vernon and Tiffany Shaw. Whyte Museum

That January 2025 night at the Whyte, however, was more than a photo exhibit. It was also the official launch for the Canadian branch of the 2025 United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The IYGP was proposed in 2022 by Tajikistan, whose 13,000 glaciers supply the mountain headwaters for Central Asia and some two billion people downstream.

The IYGP Canada co-chair is long-time Canmore resident Bob Sandford, senior government relations liaison on Global Climate Emergency Response at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Most of the world’s glaciated countries are participating, and with Switzerland’s glaciers having lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years alone—2022 and 2023—that country and France have announced major commitments. “But even countries without glaciers, like Holland, are participating in the full realization of how much glacial ice contributes to the thermoregulation of the entire global climate system,” Sandford said.

The purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system.

Western Canada’s mountains (combined with the US northwest) comprise one of 19 regions around the world represented in the IYGP, alongside New Zealand, Greenland, Antarctica and the southern Andes. The Year’s purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system and water cycle, as well as the far-reaching impacts of rapid glacier melt.

A full quarter of Earth’s remaining ice is found in Canada, with some 18,000 glaciers in the mountain west. Alberta’s Rockies hold more than 1,100, including the best-known and most accessible glaciers in the country. This makes Alberta the natural centre for the Canadian IYGP initiative. “The latest scientific research regarding the state and fate of our glaciers originates here,” Sandford said. “As Parks Canada rolls out its 2025 UN Glacier Year program, Canadians all across the country will learn what the Dutch already know: that even if there isn’t one nearby, glaciers contribute enormously to the stability of the global climate.”

Canada’s IYGP objectives include promoting Canadian snow and ice research to improve scientific understanding of climate change impacts and recognizing snow and glacier ice as more than just water resources, with an emphasis on artistic and Indigenous perspectives.

“Terminus.” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

MELTDOWN’s image titles speak volumes: “Terminus,” “The Black Hole,” “Battered Hero.” The latter depicts Mount Athabasca, a peak that’s been trod by countless crampons since J. Norman Collie and Herman Woolley were most likely the first to stand on its summit in 1898. Reaching the mountain back then took 19 arduous days on horseback from Lake Louise; nowadays it’s a two-hour drive. From that summit, they viewed the massive Columbia Icefield, noting that its meltwater flows to three oceans—the Arctic via the Sunwapta, Athabasca and Mackenzie rivers; the Atlantic via the North Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers; and the Pacific via the Columbia River.

More ice melted from the glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years.

Compared to historical photos in the Whyte’s bookshop showing Athabasca’s slopes blanketed in plush white snow and ice during Collie’s time, the MELTDOWN image shows dingy ice clinging to rocky slopes like a threadbare sheet.

Climbers and tourists remain drawn to these peaks. The Columbia Icefield Centre (CIC), located where the Athabasca Glacier terminated a century ago, now hosts nearly a million visitors annually, with more than 400,000 riding specialized snowcoaches onto the glacier. Hundreds more join walking tours, whose guides safely lead them to peer into crevasses and experience coursing meltwater streams close enough to get splashed. MELTDOWN images are now on display at the CIC’s Glacier Gallery having left the Whyte.

Jasper is one of seven national parks—along with BC’s Glacier National Park—where hundreds of glaciers are carefully monitored by Parks Canada. Geological Survey of Canada and Parks Canada researchers recorded more ice melt from the Athabasca Glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years. In Glacier, as of 2018, 129 glaciers remained, down from 337 in 1978. The next survey is planned for 2026. Scientists estimate that if all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, the area’s creeks and streams would carry one-third less water. Many could disappear completely.

“By partnering in the IYGP, Parks Canada can encourage hundreds of thousands of Canadians to reflect on the importance of glaciers and the role of protected areas,” said Louis-René Sénéchal, a Parks Canada manager. “We want to inspire them to do something about climate change and share with them the knowledge to make a difference.”

If all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, local creeks and streams could carry one-third less water.

The 2023 NFB film Losing Blue was playing continuously behind a privacy screen at the Whyte. Visually exquisite, poetic and soul-stirring, the 16-minute film by Canmore’s Leanne Allison (whose previous award-winning films include Being Caribou and Finding Farley) posed the question “What does it mean to lose a colour?” The narrator references how the world’s glacier-fed lakes are losing their beguiling turquoise hues as glacial content declines. Drone imagery brings viewers seemingly close enough to touch the glaciers, soaring mere centimetres above an ice cave—which I recognized as Peyto Glacier’s toe, which has since melted and flowed onward to Hudson Bay.

“The ancient bond between glaciers and lakes is ending—the bond that gives the lakes their otherworldly blue,” states the narrator.

A smaller gallery presented an exhibition of images by Canmore’s Glen Crawford titled Etched in Ice. The photos shared perspectives captured by drone at his backcountry lodge in the Rockies north of Golden, BC. Intimate and abstract, their subtlety balanced the raw power of the MELTDOWN images. Dull-grey ice, bisected by a long, skinny strand of whitish snow dribbling into a dingy-green meltwater pool. Pebbles and dirt filling the creases of dark, scrawny ice. Ice resembling hammered metal, scratched and beaten.

“I’ve been very fortunate to live in the Bow Valley and explore the nearby mountain wilderness for 50 years. Glaciers are an integral part of this landscape,” Crawford told me. “They’re also key in helping understand how climate change has an effect worldwide. With potentially 15,000 years of climate record stored in glaciers, they’re a natural archive that is now endangered. I hope the UN IYGP promotes awareness, discussion and motivation that help enact change.”

That hope is shared by other IYGP partners, including Tim Patterson, an IYGP Canada ambassador. A member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band of the Interior Salish-speaking peoples of BC, Patterson is a hiking guide who owns and operates Zuc’min Guiding—the name means “red ochre,” with which Indigenous people painted their faces before entering the mountains.

By sharing Indigenous perspectives with his clients—including during walks on the Athabasca Glacier—Patterson aims to foster Indigenous perspectives and knowledge of Canada’s glaciers, water, ice and snow among international travellers and Canadians alike.

While many of the IYGP Canada team members are Albertans, Québécoise ambassador Caroline Côté shares perspectives as a polar expedition guide. Long before her first Arctic expedition, she was awed by remnants of an ancient glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada 20,000 years ago.

“Glaciers are at the centre of my life,” she said. “But I also believe that they are, and must be recognized as, the centre of every Canadian’s life. If you head east of Baie-Comeau, you can still see traces of the last glaciation. What struck me the most was the sheer power of ice, its ability to move mountains and carve valleys, leaving its mark on the rock. Our world, as we know it, was shaped by glaciers thousands of years ago.”

“Battered Hero” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

Early in her career, Côté dreamed of exploring Antarctica, a dream she felt fortunate to fulfill. But she later realized Canada was home to more than 20,000 glaciers, and she needn’t travel so far. “To protect glaciers, my goal in the coming years is to reduce my travel and make more conscious choices.”

During the formal launch of the main UN IYGP in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 21, Canmore resident John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology and its Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, spoke in his role as IYGP advisory board co-chair. He laid it bare. “Global concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 315 to 425 parts per million, and as a result winter temperatures in northern Canada have risen over 6ºC during my lifetime. Counterfactual industries and regimes around the world would deny these measurements, but they can’t deny their culpability in the destruction of glaciers that’s occurring before our eyes. Glaciers don’t care if we believe in science; they just melt in the heat for all to see. The International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation provides a mechanism to kick-start renewed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the science and adaptation necessary to prepare for a warmer, less icy world. There is still time to turn this around.”

This statement brought me to a MELTDOWN image titled “After the Heat Dome.” Dark, severe, rough broken rock dominate the frame, with a thin layer of glacier ice resting on the highest ridgetop, its days obviously numbered.

A 2015 study established that western Canada could lose 60 to 80 per cent of its glacier ice by 2100, and the bulk of the melting would happen between 2020 and 2040. Since then I’ve had one question. What would the melting look like?

For decades, I’ve skied across glaciers and icefields in winter and hiked among them with my camera in summer. The 2021 heat dome that engulfed Alberta and BC was a regional gamechanger, breaking temperature records and being cited as a leading cause of some 600 deaths. It accelerated the deaths of our glaciers too.

On June 30, 2021, Jasper reached 40.8ºC, its hottest temperature ever recorded. The resulting flooding caused by rapidly melting snow and ice resulted in catastrophic damage to trails and bridges in the area; the Berg Lake trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park is still under repair. Heat-absorbing soot from wildfires—including the 2024 Jasper fire—coats glacier surfaces and accelerates melting. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded—after 2023, which had set the previous record—all directly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

In a handful of years, glacier loss has become visible to the naked eye.

Western Canada’s glaciers had been gracing paintings since before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885. In decades since, photographers, filmmakers and writers have shown us this icy landscape. Adventurers have skied across glaciers for days, weeks, sleeping in tents or snow caves. Guides earn their living on glaciers. We create memories on them.

As they melt, we can honour glaciers by sharing these stories and artworks.

“In this coming year, we will celebrate Canadian researchers and institutions studying snow and ice, and honour writers, poets, artists and photographers working to help us understand what the loss of glacier ice means,” Sandford said. “The UN Glacier Year allows us to halt backsliding in terms of climate action by learning more about what we face, and provides an opportunity to shine on the world stage as an example of everything we stand for.

“After the Heat Dome” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

“We want to be able to tell the world that we as Canadians listened for an entire year to what the disappearing ice was trying to tell us.”

At the Whyte Museum that night, I listened as Alberta-based Métis artist Tiffany Shaw explained how she created her glass sculptures from casts taken from the Athabasca Glacier. “I think these will last longer than the glacier,” she said, “which is really sad.”

Lynn Martel is writer in residence for IYGP Canada, an accredited hiking guide, and the author of three books about local mountain culture, including Stories of Ice (RMB, 2020).

____________________________________________

Read more from the archive “Goodbye to Peyto Glacier” September 2022.

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post MELTDOWN appeared first on Alberta Views.

Senescence / Travels Up the Creek

Jenna Butler — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:00:22 +0000

by Amal Alhomsi
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2024/$20.00/184 pp.

by Lorne Fitch
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2024/$25.00/232 pp.

Both Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, by Amal Alhomsi, and Travels Up the Creek: A Biologist’s Search for a Paddle, by Lorne Fitch, published by Rocky Mountain Books in the fall of 2024, are thoughtful and passionate engagements with the mountains and prairies of Alberta. Although Alhomsi and Fitch are devoted to similar landscapes, their approach to the land and to the environmental concerns at the centre of their books, as well as the language they employ in connecting to place, couldn’t be more different.

Senescence explores the process of aging and setting down new roots in a place when one has come from another landscape entirely. Alhomsi is a Syrian writer and artist who has lived in Banff since 2018. His debut book is written in layered, lyric dialogue with the land and water; at the same time, it is in constant conversation with other writers and thinkers whose work explores the natural and the spiritual. Considering the state of a heat dome summer, the Bow Valley landscape around him turning sere and brittle, he reflects, “Nearly 40 degrees C. Nearly Riyadh’s weather. I would look at a tree and wonder: How is it not on fire Is it not just dry sap and timber I have never seen things rattle without being touched by wind. Natalie Rice writes, ‘Grass is a fire / before it knows it is a fire.’ So are the mayflies, so is this body; lumps of damp mud left until they turn into tar, until they’re burnt out of their clinging.” The language in Senescence is exquisite, delving into the intimate connections between the human and the more-than-human, forging elegant links between the aging body and the land suffering through the climate crisis.

Alhomsi’s language may be rich with image and sound play, but it loses none of its power to convince. This is a book exploring the gorgeousness of the earth, but it’s also one that looks clear-eyed at the devastation wrought upon the land—in particular, by those nations whose primary drive is to consume, and at the more-than-human world that pays the price of that hunger. Alhomsi warns, “Since the 1500s, over 140 species of birds have gone extinct, 80 mammals, 10 per cent of all insects, and around 600 plants. There seems to be not enough world for what we want from the world. These horrifying statistics are not, as many believe, an accidental consequence of industrialization or pollution. They are as purposeful and methodical as tides.” As readers, we find ourselves drawn in by the sensuousness of the author’s language, and we quickly come to understand that it is underlain by a keen intellect constantly aware of the larger world.

Similar in focus but vastly different in register, Lorne Fitch’s Travels Up the Creek uplifts both land and community from the perspective of a professional biologist and co-founder of the riparian stewardship organization Cows & Fish. Over his long career in Alberta, Fitch has forged deep connections with communities of ranchers, farmers and researchers. Travels Up the Creek is both a celebration of the land—from places such as Hidden Creek in the eastern slopes through to the prairies and forests into which the mountain streams and rivers flow—and an unveiled look at the impacts of the climate crisis and the devaluation of scientific inquiry. Fitch is equally adept at recounting stories of the lands he’s known and worked with much of his life as he is at calling for awareness of political grandstanding and social media misinformation; the book blends research and narrative with aplomb. A story well told and intelligently and accurately sourced, he argues, can prove compelling to those who have not yet decided to take action in their own lives in support of the land: “Stories tell truths about place and the ways place can affect us. Our minds are shaped by place, as they are by our genes. Stories are the threads that connect our intellect, locate common ground and find the linkages between our history and our future. Richard Kearney wrote, ‘Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.’ Maybe they can help us treasure the place where we live and treat it kindlier.”

Toward this, Fitch recounts many of his own experiences with community (both human and more-than-human), from the rivers and fish to those whose work is intimately linked to the health of the nearby waterways. He’s generous with his stories of learning from the land and from the farming and ranching communities around him, and realistic in terms of the impacts of the changing climate on these same lands and communities. But he doesn’t leave the reader in the gloom without rescue. The book itself is the proverbial paddle in its title, an informed and thoughtful steering mechanism to help us right ourselves and move toward a more sustainable future. “If the contents of this book help educate you on environmental issues, inspire you, anger you and ultimately motivate you to act,” he writes, “my job is temporarily done.”

Alhomsi’s and Fitch’s books take different approaches and stem from different communities, but both are deeply grounded in engagement with the more-than-human world. Ultimately, both authors alight on the same point: that close attention to the world is imperative, and that even at this late date, there’s still time to lean in, attend and change.

Jenna Butler is an author and scholar near Barrhead. Her most recent book is Revery: A Year of Bees (Wolsak & Wynn).

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Senescence / Travels Up the Creek appeared first on Alberta Views.

Should National Parks Have Entrance Fees?

Kevin Van Tighem and Ian Urquhart — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:57 +0000

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.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Should National Parks Have Entrance Fees? appeared first on Alberta Views.

How to Quash a Mine

Ted Morton — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:26 +0000

Most accounts of a minister’s career are based on what he or she achieves in terms of new policies. But what the public usually doesn’t see—which is often just as important—are the policies or decisions a minister prevents. For me, this was the proposed Micrex Mine—a proposal to build an open-pit magnetite mine on the flanks of the Livingstone Range. The Micrex file came across my desk the first year I was at SRD (Sustainable Resource Development)—2007—and, as it turned out, was the last thing I did going out the door in December 2010.

Magnetite is a heavy magnetic iron ore used for coal upgrading and steel production. It is not in short supply and so is relatively cheap. To be profitable, a magnetite mine needs to be large to benefit from economies of scale. That is what did not make sense about the Micrex proposal. Their original plan called for a mine to cover 13 kilometres of public lands in the Livingstone Range. But by the time I became minister, the proposal had been scaled down to just 5.5 hectares—barely larger than a football field. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out why. At that reduced size, it did not trigger a legal requirement for an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the Public Lands Act. However, Micrex had actually purchased 36 square miles, or 56,909 acres of land. The smaller, revised proposal looked suspiciously like a toe-in-the-door strategy that would lay the foundation for future expansion.

There were good reasons for Micrex to avoid any type of EIS. The Livingstone Range is certainly the steepest and arguably the most dramatic front range in all of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. If you’ve never expeOttawa

More Alberta, Less Ottawarienced it, view the online video provided by the Livingstone Landowners’ Group. Or drive down the North Burmis Road, just to the west of Highway 22. Better yet, go for a hike there, or take a trail ride with one of the local outfitters.

The proposed mine was in the middle of the designated DU Ranch Heritage Viewscape. It provides home habitat to a prolific mix of bighorn sheep, elk, moose, deer and the usual mix of predators that feast on them—grizzly bears, black bears and cougars. The proposed smaller mine site was adjacent to the spring lambing grounds of a resident herd of 200 bighorn sheep. The access roads required by the mine would destroy native grasses that would be difficult if not impossible to restore. Storing topsoil on slopes that regularly experience 100-kilometre-an-hour winds would be either impossible or very expensive. The new access roads would also increase hunting pressure on the wildlife mentioned above—especially by Indigenous hunters who are not subject to legal limits or seasons and can hunt year-round. And of course, there are water issues. The Micrex properties cover much of the headwaters of the Connelly Creek watershed, a significant tributary to the Crowsnest River, which flows into the Oldman and then the Bow. Erosion from the mine and the access roads would inevitably degrade water quality.

It quickly became evident that Micrex did not make sense either economically or environmentally. Even at full production, the proposed mine would pay virtually nothing in Crown royalties—several million dollars a year—and create fewer than 10 full-time jobs. The bottom line was neatly summarized by a letter to minister Knight, myself, and other ministers, signed by 125 local residents in the Livingstone Landowners Group: “There is a proven economy in this area already…. It is based on ranching, home businesses, tourism, hunting, fishing and equestrian outfitting—all things that would be negatively impacted by a mine, no matter its size.”

I agreed! And so it’s time again for full disclosure. I know this area and many of its landowners quite well. My colleague and friend Rainer Knopff has lived there on and off since 1992. Through Rainer I met Dan and Puff McKim, who operate the historic DU Ranch, a purebred Hereford bull operation just off North Burmis Road. With Rainer and his sons, I have hunted the Livingstone slopes for elk, moose, deer and grouse. In the summer my wife joins us for hikes above the DU Ranch and fly-fishing in the Crowsnest River. The McKims are active in the Livingstone Landowners Group.

In the 2008 Alberta election, many of these same people helped to elect Evan Berger as the new MLA for Livingstone-Macleod. I had met Evan during my 2003 “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” speaking tour, and he had helped in my 2006 leadership bid. Evan, a third generation Alberta rancher, runs a mixed livestock–grain operation west of Claresholm. I immediately appointed Evan as my parliamentary assistant because I knew he could be a constructive bridge to the rural landowners as we implemented the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, which included all of Livingstone-Macleod. Evan was an effective advocate for his constituents, almost all of whom opposed the mine.

In my mind’s eye, when I imagined the Micrex Mine, what I saw was a second industrial scar on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes—like the Lafarge limestone quarries and cement plant in Exshaw. The Lafarge plant is located 80 kilometres west of Calgary, at the gateway to Banff, Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest cement plant in Canada. It’s located less than a mile from the Trans-Canada Highway, so you can’t miss it as you approach Canmore. And it is just plain ugly and totally out of place—a huge scar on the face of the Rockies, with large stacks belching smoke.

In 1906, when the mine and plant were first opened, it made good sense. Alberta was the poorest of all the Canadian provinces, with a mostly rural population of less than 200,000. And the Lafarge plant has served Alberta well, providing most of the cement that has built the province into the wealthiest province in Canada with a population of 4.8 million. One hundred years later, however, you would never build the same plant at the gateway to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So I decided that such a thing damn well wasn’t going to happen again on my watch.

The question was how. While I could have engaged either or both the energy and the environment ministers (there was overlapping jurisdiction), I decided the path of least resistance was simply to rope-a-dope it to death with one administrative delay after another. Without initial public-lands sign-off from SRD, it couldn’t go anywhere. While most of the delays were achieved simply by foot-dragging on administrative technicalities, there were two potential deal-stoppers for Micrex. One was the then-pending South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP), being developed under the newly adopted Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA). The SSRP encompasses all the watersheds feeding the Bow, Elbow, Sheep, Highwood, Crowsnest and Oldman rivers—basically everything south of Calgary and the Trans-Canada. The advisory committee for the SSRP, which I had hand-picked, would never recommend approval of project like Micrex, as it failed both the Act’s environmental (water and wildlife) and economic criteria.

When I imagined the Micrex Mine, I saw an industrial scar on Alberta’s eastern slopes.

The second trump card that I could have played was to refer the entire project for a full cost-benefit analysis by Alberta’s Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB). The NRCB reviews non-oil and gas natural resource development projects and any other development projects referred to it by cabinet. At a minimum this would have added at least another year to the approval process. It was also highly unlikely that Micrex could ever pass a full NRCB cost-benefit analysis, and the Micrex team knew this. Just the referral would have been enough to kill the project.

While I never played either of these cards in my multiple meetings with the Micrex lobbyist, I made her aware that I considered them as viable options. This worked as long as I was minister, but that came to an end in January 2010, when I was moved to Finance. My replacement at SRD was Mel Knight. Mel was a northerner and had little interest in either ALSA or conservation issues in southern Alberta. In the thinly populated north, when someone wants to invest millions of dollars in a new mine, they are welcomed. The Micrex promoters were alert to the opportunity presented by a new minister and were quickly in Mel’s office lobbying for SRD sign-off.

For the rest of 2010, I was much too busy at Finance to pay any attention to the Micrex file. I spent 12 months trying (unsuccessfully) to build a two-step budget process to get us “back in the black” by Budget 2012—an election year. In addition to four painful weeks lost to shingles in May, I was immersed in budget meetings with my officials and Treasury Board. But as December approached I was informed by Evan Berger, now minister of agriculture, that Mel was getting ready to approve the Micrex licence. Mel subsequently confirmed this to me, stating that the government could not and should not stop all development in the province until the land use planning process was completed. I responded that while this was true in the abstract, it was completely unacceptable in the specific context of Micrex. But Mel was not persuaded.

I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing?

The Federal, Provincial, Territorial (FPT) Finance Ministers semi-annual meeting was in Kananaskis on December 19 and 20. So, as I prepared for my second (and presumably last) FPT meeting, I decided to do something I had never done before—leak a self-serving story to the media. There were several cabinet ministers who did this regularly to curry favourable treatment by the legislative reporters. We all knew who they were, and I held them in contempt. However, given that I had already made my decision to resign from cabinet the following month, I figured I had nothing to lose.

I phoned Kelly Cryderman, then the legislative reporter for the Calgary Herald. Kelly is a cousin of Sonia Arrison, whom I knew through her public policy work at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. I had developed a cordial professional relationship with Kelly, so I was comfortable asking her for a favour: Would she mind asking me a question about how minister Knight was handling the Micrex file She responded, correctly, that this had nothing to do with the FPT meeting and would violate the unspoken rule of ministers not publicly commenting on each other’s work. I replied simply that I was asking a favour.

The FPT meeting in Kananaskis went according to schedule. As is customary at the end, there was a joint media scrum. Most questions focused on the about-face that federal minister of finance Jim Flaherty had done on Canada Pension Plan reforms—now favouring Alberta’s position of allowing private sector alternatives rather than increasing CPP premiums. But, just as the scrum was breaking up, Cryderman asked me about Micrex. She then did me the favour of quoting me verbatim in her subsequent Calgary Herald article: “Morton said, ‘It would be premature to approve a project like this before the regional plan for the South Saskatchewan region is finalized. … If you look at the policy document for the land-use framework, it identifies the Eastern Slopes in terms of priority use, as watershed and recreation—not mining.’ … Morton suggests the company’s application may be subject to review by the province’s Natural Resources Conservation Board.”

Less than 24 hours later I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing I replied that I was just repeating what I had told him before the Christmas break. He was not impressed. While this tactic unfortunately cost me my friendship with Mel, it did get the policy results I wanted. Cryderman’s article triggered a flood of phone calls and emails to both Knight’s office and the premier’s office—all opposing the Micrex mine. It took several months to grind through the formal process, but in April SRD announced cabinet approval of an order-in-council mandating a full NRCB review of the Micrex proposal. But it never happened. Knowing that it could never pass the NRCB review, Micrex placed the project on hold.

So how was I able to block the Micrex mine I’d like to say because it was so clearly without merit. But we all know that governments routinely enact poor policy. Just look at the Stelmach government’s New Royalty Framework and North West Upgrader. The primary factors in the Micrex defeat were that it did not have any champions in the cabinet, in the civil service, or in any influential business stakeholder groups. Contributing factors were the lobbying and public relations efforts of local residents—the Livingstone Landowners Group—which were effectively communicated by their MLA, Evan Berger. While these factors probably would not be enough to establish a new program, they were sufficient to allow a motivated minister—me—to block a project that clearly violated our government’s stewardship and conservation goals.

After the 2012 election, in which both Evan Berger and I were defeated, Micrex almost succeeded in resurrecting their mining project. They applied for a mining permit on a piece of property adjacent to their earlier proposal. Since it was a different block of land, the requirement for the NRCB review did not technically apply to it. The Livingstone Landowners Group communicated this to me in November 2012, and I immediately passed on their concerns to Ken Hughes, the new minister of energy in the Redford government. Ken was a long-time friend of mine. He had grown up on a ranch near Longview, where his family had settled in the 1890s. He knew and loved the Foothills. I pointed out that the “new” Micrex proposal was not new at all, but just a clever attempt to bypass the requirement of the NRCB review. All the environmental issues were the same. Once Ken became aware of this, the permit was denied.

Ted Morton is a former Alberta MLA, cabinet minister and political science professor at U of C. This piece is an excerpt from Strong and Free: My Journey in Alberta Politics, U of C Press, 2024.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post How to Quash a Mine appeared first on Alberta Views.

Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie

Sid Marty — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:07 +0000

Alberta’s renewable power industry was purring pleasantly along on the evening of August 1, 2023, and no wonder: our province was home to 90 per cent of Canada’s new wind and solar projects. But it proved to be a reluctant host. For on August 2 the industry awoke with a start to find itself flailing in the political wind of the UCP government’s if-it-ain’t-broke-break-it parallel reality. Premier Danielle Smith et al. had suddenly announced a seven-month “pause” on all new renewable energy projects. In the interim, the Alberta Utilities Commission was to propose some new guidelines on development. The pause drew sharp rebukes from industry players and clean-energy advocates. According to the Pembina Institute, 53 projects were “abandoned” after the UCP moratorium was announced, putting at risk $33-billion in investments and 24,000 job-years. It turns out that trying to rebottle the green genie can be very expensive.

Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024. (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

The post Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie appeared first on Alberta Views.