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.

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The post Buffalo Lessons appeared first on Alberta Views.

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).

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

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The post MELTDOWN appeared first on Alberta Views.

A few days later I got a panicked phone call from a member of an environmental group I was in touch with. Was I aware that the United Conservative Party government had just opened up one of Alberta’s most beloved landscapes to coal mining I was not. It seemed newsworthy and I started writing about it. Others joined in, and you all know what happened next. Probably the greatest environmental backlash this province has ever seen eventually forced the government to back down. At least for a little while.

But let’s compare the rollout of the coal policy rescission with another major Alberta land-use move, the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan. That plan governs energy development, water use, farming and ranching, recreation, forest management and nature-based tourism over a huge part of southern Alberta. It was released in 2014 after five years of study. Thousands of Albertans made themselves heard during three rounds—three rounds!—of public consultation. The legally binding plan remains in place and is relied on for guidance by everyone from municipalities to NGOs.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the distance we’ve travelled. We once made policy using the classic conservative virtues of careful thought and consultation. We now have top-down fiats delivered from on high.

You are not about to listen to a research paper. I’m going to speak from personal memory and experience, as someone who has travelled this distance I speak of. That journey has led me to a few conclusions. What I’ve seen is that at a time of environmental crisis, when cities are literally burning and major watersheds drying, our governments are denying us the conversations we need to have. They’re drawing the blinds on our window into policy, they’re closing the shutters on our view into decision-making and they’re bricking up our doorways into understanding.

I came to the Edmonton bureau of the Canadian Press in 1994 and worked there until I retired in September 2024. I arrived back in the days of Ralph Klein. I didn’t agree with a lot of what that government did, but I will say this for Ralph: when the legislature was in session, he would show up regularly in the press gallery media theatre at 1:30 and take questions. And not just a few, for there were a lot of us back then. Ralph would stand there and field everything we threw at him. We’d shout out questions from the floor and he’d take them on. Some of those press conferences went on for over an hour. It got to be a bit of a press gallery joke—keep Ralph talking and eventually he’d say something newsworthy. Nor was Ralph the only open-access politician back then. Ministers were buttonholed daily in freewheeling scrums. Often they granted personal interviews, in person or on the phone. And after the hurly-burly of a big day, a throne speech or a budget, reporters and politicians would gather at a bar across 109th St. from the legislature for beers. Those were the days.

Compare that to a Danielle Smith presser. First, they’re rare. Smith prefers to address Albertans through social media or her radio show. Second, they’re short—in my experience, rarely more than 20 minutes or so. Many times I was still in the question queue when things wrapped up. Third, they’re highly managed. Government communications staff choose the questioners, putting control in their hands. Chosen reporters are then limited to two questions each. If a politician can’t bat aside two questions with message-track responses, they’re in the wrong job. Almost all UCP press conferences follow this pattern. So do those of many other politicians, Liberal and Conservative. They all do it that way now because it works. It keeps things under control.

If that were my only complaint, I wouldn’t be speaking with you here today. No doubt some form of order needed to be imposed on us unruly reporters, especially as more and more of us dial in rather than show up. Press conferences have always been part theatre, and are not a reporter’s most important source of information. But the noose on access has been pulled much tighter than just that.

Part of a reporter’s job is to collect as many different sides to a story as can be crammed into the copy. It was routine for me, after I’d listened to someone’s concerns or read some new research, to go to the government for its side. Back in the day, I could usually get someone on the phone who understood and could actually explain the policy in question. Sometimes I could get the minister. Even press secretaries would answer a verbal back-and-forth with on-the-record responses.

By the end of my career, explanation and response had deteriorated into “comment.” If I wanted “comment” I had to email a question or two to the requisite press sec and wait for a response. It normally came right on my deadline, generally three or four sentences of motherhood statements that a colleague of mine used to call “banana mumble chicken.” There was little chance for follow-ups or clarification. Take what you get and be grateful for it. Often, the responses didn’t even address the questions I’d raised and were simply partisan jabs—government good, opponents bad. It was often a challenge to find something actually usable for my story. Again, this is not unique to Alberta. It started with Stephen Harper in Ottawa, and they all do it now. But Alberta seems uniquely enthusiastic about emailed “comment.” For example, the head of communications at the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) once told me bluntly that the institution’s policy is that all communications are conducted through email. Nobody is allowed to talk to anyone, under any circumstances, lest they say something.

Cabinet ministers Forget about it. Over my career, I interviewed, repeatedly, every single environment minister from Ralph Klein onward. Some of them I was on pretty good terms with. The UCP have had two environment ministers—Jason Nixon and Rebecca Schulz. I once got five minutes on the phone with Nixon. Despite dozens of requests, Schulz never spoke with me. Not once.

Nor is the clampdown limited to politicians and political staff. I used to be on a first-name basis with some of the Alberta government’s top scientists, and we have had some really good ones working for us. If I needed information on say, caribou populations, or chronic wasting disease in deer, I could go straight to the expert right away. By the time I left the Canadian Press, it took elaborate, secretive machinations on the level of a spy novel to talk to actual scientists. For good reason. One researcher refused to speak to me at all about a published paper he had co-authored, for fear of repercussions from Alberta, even though he no longer worked for the government and lived in the US.

And then there’s FOIP. It’s supposed to stand for freedom of information but may have been better summed up by a Klein-era cabinet minister as “Fuck off, it’s private.” FOIP searches used to be extremely useful to me. I got all kinds of stuff—draft reports on sour gas releases written before the bureaucrats had had a chance to water them down, for example. Some of my first oil sands stories, back in the late 1990s, were based on internal environmental impact studies I’d gotten through FOIP. I understand that not everything can or should be released. But over the years, the redactions just kept getting bigger. I think peak redaction was achieved the day I got a FOIP response consisting of 300 completely blank pages. Yes, I did write a story about it.

There are still reporters doing excellent FOIP work, God love ’em, but it’s getting harder. The Globe and Mail has declared Alberta the most secretive jurisdiction in a secretive country, and recently things have gotten worse. The UCP has introduced legislation that would extend exemptions from the law to political staff, keeping more people nice and warm under a blanket of secrecy.

The flipside of ignoring troublesome questions is cherry-picking whom to listen to. This also happens. Look at the recent study on reforms to the AER, written by a pair of long-time insiders and containing no input from civil society. Look who has standing before the regulator’s hearings—unless you are literally next door to a project, you have no voice. Look at the Siksika First Nation, forced into court over broken government consultation promises. And if I may leave purely environmental concerns for a moment, consider the government’s recent report into its COVID response, headed by a former UCP nomination candidate and dismissed by medical professionals as misinformation.

Maybe you’re saying “So what. Governments are elected to govern, and that means making choices that not everyone’s going to be happy about. Majority rules, and if you don’t like it, try again in the next election.” I would suggest that’s a grade-school understanding of democracy. Governments are entitled to act on their agendas, but they are not entitled to pretend those who don’t agree don’t exist. Mature administrations try to find some compromise, to bring everyone along and to govern for everyone. It’s the difference between parliamentary democracy and an elected monarchy.

I would argue further that broad discussion among an informed public is particularly crucial in environmental issues. Decisions about the health of a river or a forest, the integrity of a landscape or the abundance of wildlife last for generations. A law on tax policy can be changed after the next election if it doesn’t work out. A law that allows the removal of a mountaintop alters Alberta forever.

As well, you may have noticed that the world is changing. Climate change will eventually force a worldwide shift away from high-carbon energy, the kind of energy our province produces. We will not have a choice in this. It will happen, for the alternative does not bear thinking about. We all know the extent to which this province depends on oil and gas. But for the first time we can see that this industry that has powered our province for so long is vulnerable. We desperately need to have honest conversations about where we’re going, how long it will take to get there and what this place will look like when we arrive. Instead, it’s an information-free zone. Instead, we get “ethical oil,” as if the jet stream or the oceans cared about our human rights laws. Instead, we get bromides about “world-class” regulatory systems, as if unreclaimed wells and tailings ponds don’t dot our landscape.

Instead, we get what happened to Alberta’s renewables industry. Some said the developments would use too much farmland, or that wind turbines are too hard to reclaim. Those objections were all pretty much refuted, some by researchers at this school [U of C]. But reality-based information didn’t matter. The decisions were made behind closed doors on the advice of nobody knows who. The most promising parts of the province are now shut off to the renewables industry, and money is fleeing elsewhere.

Finally, I would argue environmental decisions reveal important things about Albertans as a people. Choosing what to exploit and what to preserve shows what we value and who we care about. This land is our home. And like a home long lived in, how it looks reflects its residents. When we allow one more bit of caribou habitat to wink out or one more trout stream in the foothills to silt up, we lessen ourselves. And we lessen following generations. I’m going to argue that what we do to our home, our province, we do to ourselves. Surely we should all be around the table to talk about that.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that this is my experience. I’m sure other reporters see things differently. I’m not arguing with them, I’m just telling you what it’s been like for me. And this is what I’ve seen in 25 or 30 years on the environment beat in Alberta—fewer chances for public input, fewer answers from government, and a gradual restriction of public space while decision-making concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.

So where does this leave us Fortunately, with a number of bright spots. While our country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is nowhere to be seen on this issue, good environmental journalism is being done by many mainstream news organizations. And independent media that take environmental issues seriously are a rising force. I’m thinking of the National Observer, The Tyee, Hakai magazine and of course The Narwhal—which is, astonishingly, only seven years old and already inflecting the national conversation.

Another hopeful sign is what I call the democratization of data. Our governments may be increasingly close-mouthed, but in a way that matters less and less. As I speak, dozens of satellites orbit overhead monitoring a whole range of environmental benchmarks, from greenhouse gas emissions to clear-cutting. And they’re doing it in real time at a level of precision that boggles the mind. Ten years ago, data like this was precious and rare. Now, it’s a commercial product you can go out and just buy, or acquire from sources like the European Space Agency or NASA. Environmental groups have become expert at using this data to ground-truth government claims. They use geomatics with impressive accuracy and speed. I remember that during the initial controversy about Alberta’s coal policy the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society made maps of all the coal exploration leases that were much more comprehensive and useful than anything released by the government. Similarly the late, lamented Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project carefully documented the size and extent of the lingering impacts of the energy industry, a great service to us all. Scientists themselves are becoming increasingly outspoken about the consequences of our current path.

So despite government attempts to direct the environmental conversation, they are increasingly unable to. That’s good.

Still, environmental journalism is always going to be a tough row to hoe. Nobody likes the environmental reporter. In good times, you’re a buzzkill. In bad times, you’re a job-killer. You’re always kind of a scold. And it ain’t glamorous. You’re not out there with hip waders, shoulder-to-shoulder in the swamp with the intrepid field biologist. No, you’re back in the newsroom, going through court judgments and regulatory documents, because that’s where we really decide who gets to do what to whom. You’re adding up and staring at long columns of figures until a pattern emerges or your eyes cross, whichever comes first. And it takes resources to do this, the chief among them time. In a newsroom, time is the most precious commodity of all. As journalism resources shrink, there’s less of that precious commodity for everyone.

It takes a personal toll as well. There aren’t too many good-news stories on this beat and you always seem to be writing about loss. That weighs on you after awhile. It weighed on me.

But that’s the world we live in. What we make of it is up to us, reporters and members of an engaged public. And before I close, I’d like to remind you of what still can be made. I’d like to return to the event with which I started this talk—the coal policy rescission.

It didn’t take long for news of the government’s plan to spread. My colleagues and I got the information out as quickly as we could, and I have never seen anything like what happened next. It was clear Albertans felt a sacred trust had been breached and that their sense of themselves, who they were and where they lived, had been attacked. Within days, ranchers, big-city nature-lovers, small-town mayors, scientists and country music stars banded together and forced the UCP government to backtrack. We demanded, and got, a seat at the table and a forum for our voices. We demanded, and got, policy that protected what we loved and wanted for our children. It was maybe the most inspiring story I ever covered and made me realize how much, despite everything, I love this place.

Now, you may say the coal threat is back. Yes it is, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. As the writer Jane Rule tells us, politics is like housework: Just because you swept the dirt out last week doesn’t mean it doesn’t need doing again. The point is that it can be done. It can be done when the facts are on the table, and it can be done when people are heard. It can be done, and it must be done. It’s hard and disheartening and it never seems to end, I know. But in the words of the great Lyle Lovett, what would you be if you didn’t even try?

Bob Weber is a retired environment reporter formerly with the Canadian Press. The Edmonton-based Weber started at CP in 1996 and specialized in environmental coverage and Arctic issues

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by Richard Kelly Kemick
BIBLIOASIS
2024/$22.95/248 pp.

Hello, Horse is ex-Calgarian and new-ish Vancouverite Richard Kelly Kemick’s first collection of short fiction, which is not to say he isn’t seasoned at the short story. Nine of these 11 collected stories have been previously published, with the tenth shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s novella contest. His other books include I Am Herod (Goose Lane, 2019), a comical look at the Badlands Passion Play, and Caribou Run (Goose Lane, 2016), a collection of poems.

What makes Kemick a powerful writer is his range of emotional depth and subject matter, and the speed at which he establishes his narrative worlds. He wastes no time introducing a story; rather, he assumes the reader’s intelligence, beginning most stories at a healthy trot and some, such as “Our Overland Offensive to the Sea,” at a gallop.

Love (or longing for love), as well as a persistent sense that we are both snared by and performing within our environments, are key themes that emerge throughout the collection. Kemick’s characters seem to love while in another’s shadow. In the titular story, “Hello, Horse,” a young woman can’t quite tame and make tender a wild thing full of grief. Her revelation is that others exist outside of herself, within their own pain. In “Patron Saints,” our narrator loves a newly famous author whose memoir records a tragic love story that will forever shadow theirs. Our narrator waits in Paris for his lover to return from a high-profile book tour while a Bengal tiger prowls, loose from the zoo, both hunting and being hunted: “There’s a certain respect you’ve got to have for something that sticks around so long where it obviously shouldn’t.” In “Sea Change,” two British Columbia teachers attending a conference in politically tense Cuba flirt with adultery. Their affair never transpires, remaining constantly in a state of delay, but their ruminations on how their lives have led to this moment spark two very different personal revolutions. A young man is captivated by an older magician in “The Great and the Gone,” becoming her lover and her assistant. There’s a palpable distance between them, however, caused by a great loss: the only thing the magician has managed to make disappear but never find again is her own daughter.

Alongside explorations of lovers and longing, each story in Kemick’s collection is disarmingly comical, emotionally rich apart from and as a product of that comedy, and delightfully absurd. Throughout the book is a masterful tension in the idea that reality is always already stranger than it seems. From talking dogs to brutal, cross-checking nuns, Hello, Horse is smart writing.

Colby Clair Stolson is a writer from Ponoka.
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by Margaret Macpherson
NEWEST PRESS
2022/$24.95/296 pp.

Novelist Margaret Macpherson wrote Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood to understand “the insidious ways systemic racism shaped my youth in Yellowknife” during the 1960s and 1970s. Macpherson draws from first-hand experiences to “reveal how my thinking about Indigeneity in those days was warped by stereotype, prejudice and white privilege.” If settlers can name their participation in past injustices, she writes, “only then can we make way for a right and equitable future as true Treaty People.”

Macpherson’s personal history begins with her family moving to Yellowknife, where her father worked as a school principal and later as a federal bureaucrat. The memoir’s structure tracks a series of incidents from her early childhood to late adolescence. From the jokes she hears about a woman living in a hotel, to uncomfortable play dates with a scooped neighbourhood girl, to a pair of cringe-inducing sleepovers, her anecdotes reveal the sometimes subtle but always toxic sting of interpersonal racism.

Other moments explore the complicated relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In a scene near the end of high school, Macpherson goes on one last date with a young Dene man from the Akaitcho First Nation. Their dialogue brims with adolescent longing and confusion. They camp beneath the stars and then go their separate ways, with no dramatic conclusion or goodbye. The author renders moments like these with a natural authenticity, casting aside stereotypes.

Macpherson is less effective at scrutinizing systemic racism. Though she hints at broader patterns of institutional practices, she never examines them or their impacts in detail. Consider when she was 13 and wrote a story for a class assignment. Her submission appropriated Indigenous history and used several racist typecasts. Macpherson takes personal responsibility for writing the story. But she was 13, still young and impressionable. No doubt several forces influenced her thoughts and actions, but these go unexamined. Where did she learn the stereotypes she used Who or what taught her that appropriation was okay

These and other social factors are a discernible gap throughout the memoir. Macpherson never tells what her school curriculum taught her about Indigenous peoples. We learn almost nothing about the hostel next to her school that housed Indigenous youth. She divulges little about her father’s job managing Indigenous education in the North. Her stated purpose at the outset is to understand how systemic racism shaped her youth, but these institutional details are largely absent. As important as personal accountability is, Macpherson takes on more than her fair share while letting the surrounding racist structures off the hook.

Andrew Torry is a curriculum designer for the City of Calgary.

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by Edward Struzik
Island Press
2021/$39.95/256 pp.

There’s no scarcity of books written about landscapes and ecosystems of obvious beauty and ecological importance, such as the majesty of the Rocky Mountains or the giant cedars that stand sentinel in British Columbia’s old growth forests. But few books attempt to do what Ed Struzik’s latest book, Swamplands, does so well: taking the reader knee-deep into an ecosystem that few ever think about, let alone possess the desire (or nerve) to travel to, or rally around.

Swamplands documents Struzik’s journey into the “ambiguous, elusive, dangerous, sublime” world of wetlands in an effort to illuminate their important role. Struzik asks readers to look closer at the way healthy wetlands mitigate the impact of climate change by storing carbon, buffering against and slowing the advance of wildfires, filtering microbes and contaminants from water that “hundreds of millions of people drink,” while providing habitat to a rich biodiversity of flora and fauna, including migratory birds, caribou, denning polar bears and rattlesnakes.

Struzik’s eureka moment came when his water filter failed during a 66-day solo kayak trip along the Mackenzie River. In the end Struzik was saved by cold, clear stream water, purified by a peatland buffering the riverbanks. Contrary to perceptions of being “barren,” Struzik “saw more signs of life in those four or five hours of sloshing through peat and crunching across lichen” than he had in his entire journey. This spurred his quest to travel to more than 30 fens, bogs, swamps and saltwater marshes from the Rockies to below sea level in the Mojave Desert, to the Great Dismal Swamp, to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, to a richly biodiverse fen on the outskirts of Edmonton.

Struzik braves storms of blackflies and emerges with stories of the few unsung heroes—botanists, biologists, bryologists, entomologists and landowners—who work to study, protect and restore the world’s peatlands. Herein lies the book’s strength: frontline stories from a motley crew of characters who are quietly dedicating their careers (on shoe-string budgets) to protecting, advocating for and re-establishing wetlands.

Struzik travels to North Carolina to shine a spotlight on a US wildlife biologist’s exhaustive attempts to reintroduce the red wolf, an endangered species, into the peatlands of Pocosin Lakes despite public backlash. In Kauai readers meet a surfer-rock climber-botanist working to document and preserve rare native plants on the brink of extinction in the Alaka‘i Swamp. In Alberta’s Wagner Fen, he spends a day with an impassioned entomologist in pursuit of the elusive Aweme borer, a moth so rare some think it extinct.

Struzik’s research on global peatlands is so exhaustive that, at times, the central narrative—and the voices of the characters he seeks to amplify—is bogged down by the sheer density of information. Conversely, there are also some omissions: Swamplands would’ve benefited from the inclusion of first-hand Indigenous voices on the cultural significance of mashkiig (the Cree and Ojibwe word for “muskeg”) and the ways that communities are blending traditional knowledge and western science to protect and restore wetlands.

But overall Swamplands is a timely cry against the ongoing consequences of draining wetlands for farmland and commercial development, and of stripping peatlands for fuel and fertilizer. Struzik asks us to pay attention to the ecological borderlands, the spaces that are neither water nor land “but water and land sharing dominance, like the marginal world of a tidal zone.” Indeed, humble peat may just help us mitigate the effects of a rapidly warming planet.

Trina Moyles is the author of Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (Penguin, 2021).

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The worst possible answer—to deny any such problems exist—is embodied by the current premier of Alberta. Jason Kenney’s refusal to acknowledge that the source of Alberta’s prosperity is leading the planet to ruin has become his strongest claim to greatness; he has transcended political calculation to become an avatar of human self-destruction. That much is obvious. Exactly which alternative to denial constitutes the best path forward, however, is anything but clear.

Outside the premier’s office, a bewildering array of prospective solutions—political, technological and cultural—all clamour for attention. Some are complementary, like wind power and vegetarianism, but many are mutually exclusive, like biomass energy and forest protection. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how replacing a billion internal combustion engines with a billion Teslas could be problematic.

It gets confusing fast. But for all their diversity, the countless paths to ecological sustainability fall into two broad categories that boil the whole mess down to a single clarifying question: reform or revolution

It so happens that another Albertan avatar has come to represent the first of those two options. Somewhat ironically, that man is the polar opposite of Jason Kenney. Just three years older than the current premier, Mark Carney is a soft-spoken, cerebral consensus builder who studied economics at Harvard and Oxford. His global-mindedness and “keep calm and carry on” manner have led him ever further from the province he grew up in. Kenney doesn’t hold so much as a bachelor’s degree, didn’t grow up in Alberta and is a provincial, brawling populist. Carney, with his unflappable public demeanour and family-man decency, is more like Canada’s Obama—adored by the centre-left, distrusted by progressives and universally loathed by conservatives. He clearly enjoys a standing invitation to join the federal Liberals if he’s ever so inclined. But it seems that no political office, nor any one nation, is grand enough to contain Carney’s ambitions, which amount—if not quite in his own words—to rescuing the planet.

He’s been at it for over a decade now. In 2011 a Maclean’s headline described Carney as “The Canadian hired to save the world.” Back then, the crisis appeared to be primarily financial. Carney, while still governor of the Bank of Canada, had been named chairman of the Financial Stability Board, a Swiss-based institution created in the wake of the Great Recession to coordinate policy among central banks and regulators so that global cash flow would never again dry up the way it so calamitously did in 2008.

The Great Recession wiped some two trillion US dollars off the map. Ten years of roaring growth later, that figure sounds like chump change—at Glasgow, Carney announced that $130-trillion US is now ready for deployment in the war on climate change. Many were quick to point out that not a penny of that incomprehensible sum has actually been committed (more on that in a moment), but the fact that $130-trillion of investable cash is standing by for anything at all makes clear that one thing Earth isn’t running out of is money.

In 2013 Carney moved from the Bank of Canada to the Bank of England, where he navigated Brexit and the Eurozone crisis. He left in 2020, then whipped off a 600-page manifesto called Value(s) while he pondered his next moves. Carney is now firmly ensconced as global capitalism’s messiah for climate action. He is the UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance; was Boris Johnson’s finance adviser for COP26; stood side by side with Justin Trudeau in Glasgow to call for a global price on carbon; and spearheaded the Glasgow Financial Alliance of Net Zero (GFANZ), a coalition of central banks, asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies whose collective worth as of COP26 added up to that $130-trillion Carney touted on day three at Glasgow.

In Mark Carney’s opinion, there’s no need to overthrow life as we know it in order to preserve the biosphere. We just need to regulate global finance and force business leaders to stop treating the natural world as an externality; that is, as a cost not priced into the final goods. If we make these critical reforms, Carney insists, we can “turn climate change from an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time, transforming financial peril into moral progress.”

I can’t think of another living soul I want so badly to believe in while distrusting so completely.

He is Canada’s Obama—adored by the centre-left, distrusted by progressives and universally loathed by conservatives.

There is, of course, no objection I could raise that Carney hasn’t already responded to.

“Markets alone won’t solve our most intractable problems,” he acknowledges at the outset of Value(s). “We need political processes to define our goals and objectives—to set our values. Markets can then be marshalled to help discover and drive solutions in a form of mission-oriented capitalism.” Don’t worry, Carney’s saying, he knows “the market simply cannot be the answer to every question.”

This pre-emptive assurance comes just after an anecdote about lunching with Pope Francis in the Vatican. Before they ate, the Pope shared a parable comparing wine and grappa to humanity and markets. Wine, the Pope said, “is many things. It has a bouquet, colour and richness of taste that all complement the food. It has alcohol that can enliven the mind.” This was very different from the grappa they would have at the end of their meal. “Grappa is just one thing: alcohol. Grappa is wine distilled.” Just so, the Pope intoned, “Humanity is many things—passionate, curious, rational, altruistic, creative, self-interested. But the market is one thing: self-interest. The market is humanity distilled.” Francis then told Carney and his fellows seated around the table, “Your job is to turn grappa back into wine, to turn the market back into humanity.”

This is Carney the Renaissance Man talking. It’s a version of himself that reappears throughout the book—when he invites Greta Thunberg to see all the useless gold stored beneath the Bank of England and ruefully reflects how “with her, you are always conscious of misplaced priorities, of the time slipping away, of the need to rearrange national priorities and act. Now.”  Carney the Renaissance Man rejects GDP as a measure of economic health, laments the corruption of Wall Street and the inequality it has spawned, and decries how “the price of everything is becoming the value of everything,” a sly reprise of Oscar Wilde’s definition of cynicism. This Carney wants you to know he’s a John Stuart Mill guy; he rejects Jeremy Bentham’s robotic view of human nature by quoting Mill’s celebration of

“…the love of beauty, the passion of the artist, the love of order, of congruity, of consistency in all things, and conformity to their end; the love of power, not in the limited form of power over other human beings, but abstract power, the power of making our volitions effectual; the love of action, the thirst for movement and activity, a principle scarcely of less influence in human affairs than its opposite, the love of ease…”

And when Carney turns his gaze to the ecological consequences of unregulated capitalism, he seems genuinely horrified. He notes that the world’s animal population has shrunk by an estimated 70 per cent since he was born, catalogues the barrage of fire and flood and drought that has swept the world over the past decade, and exclaims, “What had been biblical is becoming commonplace.” His description of climate science reflects a deep familiarity with the issue and leads him to insist that “net zero isn’t a slogan, it’s an imperative of climate physics.”

But another version of Carney undercuts the Renaissance Man’s message in a hundred subtle ways, including his opening assurance that markets aren’t always the answer. Carney may honestly believe that, but markets are his only answer. Carney urges honesty, a sense of social duty, ethics and integrity on his readers and the leaders of capitalism alike, but nowhere in the 600 pages of his book does he urge anyone to simplify their lives. At no point does he suggest buying or driving or flying a little bit less. At no point does he entertain the possibility that an economic system built on the pursuit of infinite growth might have made a fundamental error.

Quite the opposite. Consider his passage on Greta Thunberg: “Like many, I am persuaded by the force of [Thunberg’s] logic and her cry for intergenerational justice,” Carney writes. “We diverge, however, on how to solve this immense problem… Continued growth isn’t a fairy tale; it’s a necessity.”

He’s quick to add, “But not just any growth,” and clarifies, “We need a world where we are no longer guided solely by measures like GDP, that were devised a century ago when the earth seemed immortal and when the social norms of the market felt immutable.” But in the prescription that follows, Carney the Renaissance Man gives way to Carney the Technocrat—the dispassionate expert who occupies a world of logic and numbers, untouched by human imperfections like desire. When this Carney takes over, his language grows detached and clinical, bereft of urgency: “The policies for achieving our climate goals should be designed to encourage the economic adjustments and technological innovations at the least possible cost,” he writes. “The critical success factors are the establishment of a broad social consensus, the use of clear, consistent communications and the building of credible and predictable track records for government and regulatory policies.”

In Carney the Technocrat’s mouth, the fact that one million species are now teetering on the brink of extinction becomes “our failure to treat nature as an asset and its loss as an asset-management problem.” The sociopathy of Exxon and other oil majors, who spent decades lying about climate change and who continue to obstruct decarbonization at every possible turn, leads Carney to conclude that “the valuations of existing reserves and the scale of new investments still appear inconsistent with timely attainment of net zero.”

That’s not the voice of someone confronting an existential crisis. It’s the sound of a shareholder report being read out loud by someone who believes that no matter how the company fares, they themselves will be all right.

Carney insists we can “turn climate change from an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time.”

It’s not that Carney is sitting idle or acting in bad faith. He is totally engaged, working his incomparable contact list and sleeping less, I’m sure, than I do. In the middle of July, while I was on vacation and reading the immense book Carney had just published on the subject dearest to my heart—a book most authors would have spent months promoting—Carney was tweeting out images of himself in conversation with Boris Johnson, whom he appears to have converted to the cause. (Whatever else you want to say about Johnson, he has consistently fought for more stringent climate action than his own party feels comfortable with, and has worked to accelerate policies that have already dropped the UK’s emissions more than 40 per cent below 1990 levels.) Carney hasn’t wasted a nanosecond since. However cynical one feels about his proposal that capitalism can be employed to solve the problems capitalism has produced, there can be little doubt that Carney is himself a true believer.

But in what, exactly Is he trying to save the world from the worst excesses of capitalism, as he and his fans might insist Or is he trying to save capitalism itself?

Carney’s life has been one of tremendous affluence and power. For all his public modesty, there’s a fine line separating his personal fortune from the greed that he identifies as a core problem of modern economics. He regards his settling for the paycheques of a public servant as just that—a sacrifice—despite earning over £800,000 (C$1.35-million) a year throughout his eight-year tenure as governor of the Bank of England. True, he could have made far more if he’d stuck to his initial trajectory in private finance (Carney spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs before entering public life). But by any rational measure he’s an extraordinarily wealthy man, and has been for almost all his adult life. Nor should we forget that he’s currently on the payroll at Brookfield Asset Management as vice-chair and head of transition investing, where, it seems safe to assume, his income once again transcends that of the best-paid public servants on earth. His interest in money is not just academic.

That doesn’t necessarily contradict his message that the world needs more integrity. Honesty and honour aren’t incompatible with a certain degree of wealth, and perhaps Carney is still on the right side of that dividing line. He wants us all, especially the leaders of business and politics, to care about our fellow humans, including those not yet born. That’s a noble, needed message, especially when backed by the rules and regulations that Carney has a track record of advocating. What it isn’t is a message of revolution.

And that’s precisely what makes Carney a figure I long to believe in, yet can’t trust. I’m a middle-class white guy living a middle-class white guy life. My comfort zone extends to the edge of rapid reform and not much beyond it. What Carney’s telling me without ever quite saying so is that that’s all right. He’s saying, “I get you.” We come from the same place. We both grew up in Edmonton, middle-class white boys with fathers who taught at the University of Alberta. We became men in a time and place of unparalleled opportunity for people who look and speak like us. Our lives diverged radically as adults, but for both of us, effort and intention have been rewarded with positive outcomes. That’s more than a great many humans have been able to count on, and you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire for it to colour your expectations of the future.

I would like it very much if all that were required of me and the society I live in were to replace bitumen mines with wind farms, retrofit our houses, switch from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, maybe eat less meat and pay a bit more tax. I want Mark Carney to be right. But that’s not where the numbers are pointing.

The numbers are pointing to an abrupt and overwhelming collapse of life as we know it on earth. This collapse isn’t some future prospect. Eastern Canada already lost its cod. Alberta is about to lose its caribou. The Fraser River that runs through Vancouver, where I live, has, in just the past decade, lost what used to be one of the world’s most prolific sockeye salmon runs. These are a minuscule handful of examples of a catastrophe too large to contemplate.

The destruction of the biosphere is poised to translate into something far more severe than what the pandemic has just wrought—and let’s not forget that the pandemic itself is one manifestation of the destruction I’m describing, since habitat destruction has quadrupled the rate at which new infectious diseases emerge in the past 80 years. That’s an almost impossible message to internalize, even for someone like me who has spent the better part of his own adult life spreading it. I tend to water it down just when thinking about it. I err on the side of optimism when writing about it or discussing it in public. In private and in public, I’m afraid to look too closely.

“In matters of money, there is no room for doubt,” Carney writes, and true to form the man emanates more confidence than almost any other figure in the climate saga—certainly far more than I have ever felt. Radiating certainty is a core part of his job—people who aren’t sure of themselves don’t attract trillions of dollars—and Carney performs it to perfection. But I can’t help wondering: Is there an element of performance here Does he in fact harbour any doubts about his mission, somewhere deep inside?

Put another way, has he ever been afraid for his life?

That’s the question I would love to ask him, the one query I’ve never heard him confront. Has he ever been physically afraid of death, and how did that feeling compare to the sensation he gets when contemplating climate change A person who feels fear needn’t panic or lose their cool, but their voice might take on a certain urgency, a timbre of passion, that conveys an impression of vulnerability. A sense that they have just as much to lose as you or I. Which, for all his unimpeachable commitment to the cause, is a sense I never get from Mark Carney.

Well, I’ve never heard a cat erupt in song, either. Why should I expect a lifelong money manager to start talking like David Suzuki Should I not be happy that the most highly regarded banker in the world has devoted himself, at the height of his powers, to convincing his colleagues that climate change is real Isn’t his voice the best we could have hoped to emerge from the world he inhabits Shouldn’t we all take the $130-trillion he’s rallied to our cause and run with it as far as we can?

Probably. Let’s just not pretend that the $130-trillion Carney gathered at Glasgow is about to be spent on wind turbines and solar panels. It isn’t necessarily about to be spent on anything. All it amounts to is a promise from the institutions holding that money to start keeping track of the carbon they put into the sky—a promise that doesn’t stop them from putting that carbon into the sky if investors decide they’re alright with that.

Some investors are increasingly not okay with that. By the eve of COP26, the fossil-fuel divestment movement had diverted $39-trillion from investments in coal, oil and gas. This shift from carbon-intensive to carbon-free finance can only work if the carbon is carefully accounted for in the first place. That accounting is precisely what the Glasgow Financial Alliance of Net-Zero is promising.

“It’s not blah, blah, blah,” Carney insisted when he made his announcement in Glasgow. “The money is there for the transition.” It’s important to acknowledge that accomplishment. It’s also dangerous to suppose it’s enough.

Arno Kopecky grew up in Edmonton and lives in Vancouver. His latest book is The Environmentalist’s Dilemma (ECW Press).

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Minister Savage and Premier Jason Kenney obviously underestimated the wrath of the Downstreamers. While there are many valid reasons to be concerned about coal mines in Alberta’s Eastern Slopes, the primary one seems to be the health and cleanliness of the streams and rivers that flow out of the Rocky Mountains through rolling ranchlands and the increasingly crowded exurbs, suburbs and urban areas of Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary. Local alt-country music sensation Corb Lund summed it up best: “I know there’s always two stories, and there’s always different values to balance. But I gave it my best shot, and I took in all the information for weeks and studied it. And I got to tell you, I’m kind of pissed off.”

He’s not alone. The new Protect Alberta’s Rockies and Headwaters (PARH) Facebook group grew to more than 35,000 members, 10 times more supporters than various Alberta-based “Stop the Tar Sands” groups. These PARH groupies responded to Minister Savage’s announcement with a flurry of heart and thumbs-up emojis as Alberta’s growing anti-coal movement rejoiced. A few days later, however, when the smoke had cleared and the twin blinders of euphoria and optimism had worn off, it became crystal clear that the return of the coal policy and the promise of future public consultation would do little to halt the revival of coal mining on a massive scale in Alberta’s sublime southern Rockies.

“Cancel all exploration permits and revoke all leases on the Eastern Slopes,” posts David Patterson every chance he gets. Patterson, a former engineer with Syncrude Canada, lives in Edmonton, some 300 km downstream of the Obed Mountain, Coal Valley and Vista coal mines near Hinton. “Anything else is just a BS con game.”

PARH has several seasoned veterans in its ranks, including a former Banff National Park superintendent, a few current or former professional environmentalists and a couple of biologists that used to work for the provincial government, but it’s obvious many of its members are brand new to the deadly serious game of environmental politics. Despite living in a democracy that often acts like a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, these folks are totally unfamiliar with the laws and regulations that determine whether and how industrial projects are allowed to proceed, never mind the history of overly discretionary policy processes that have allowed unchecked industrial development to spread like a cancer across our public lands. For some, it has come as quite a shock to learn that the politicians they voted for in the last election—politicians who campaigned on expanding the already toxic and destructive oil sands—would allow foreign-owned coal companies to set up shop in the mountains they can see from their doorsteps.

Few of the PARH groupies, for example, were even aware that the owners of the proposed Grassy Mountain (photo p 27) coal mine, 7 km north of Blairmore in the Crowsnest Pass, had applied for a mining permit six years ago, during the NDP’s tenure in power, and have been building roads and drilling exploratory boreholes ever since. Ranked #6 on Mining magazine’s “Top 10 Mining Projects to watch in 2021,” Grassy Mountain is proposed by Benga Mining Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Riversdale Resources, an Australian company. Benga/Riversdale proposes to remove the top 430 metres of Grassy Mountain and extract some 93 million tonnes of metallurgical coal over 23 years, bringing with it “much-needed foreign investment to the Canadian economy along with the creation of hundreds of jobs in Alberta.”

Grassy Mountain is the test case in the UCP government’s Black New Deal with the coal industry, and it’s already in the final stage of a multi-year environmental impact assessment. Although conducted on behalf of both the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, the joint review is basically run by and for the AER, an industry-funded agency responsible for regulating oil and gas activity and coal mining in Alberta. The AER has frequently been criticized for failing to provide adequate oversight.

The Grassy Mountain environmental impact assessment is overseen by a three-member joint review panel chaired by Alex Bolton. Bolton, the AER’s chief hearing commissioner, like most hearing commissioners, has a long history regulating or working for the drillers and diggers of fossil fuels. Having chaired the joint review panel for Teck’s Frontier oil sands mine and been a member of the panel that assessed Shell Canada’s Jackpine oil sands mine, Bolton knows more than a thing or two about the social and environmental impacts associated with giant industrial energy projects. If there is an Alberta-trained master at this game, Bolton is it.

Despite constant claims that Alberta has a “world-class regulatory regime,” environmental protection in this province is weak, which may be why we don’t have our own environmental impact assessment legislation. The provincial Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act does include an “environmental assessment process” to evaluate “plans to mitigate any adverse impacts from the proposed activity,” but it’s worded in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with our Coal Conservation Act (or our Oil Sands Conservation Act), the purpose of which is “to ensure orderly, efficient and economic development of Alberta’s coal [or oil sands] resources in the public interest.” In short: The starting point of AER hearings is that coal mines are de facto in the public interest.

Thankfully for those Albertans opposed to new coal mines, the federal government has the ability and arguably the obligation to wield a bigger and better stick on behalf of those who care about, say, clean water and the recovery of species at risk. It was known as the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012, recently replaced by the Liberals’ new Impact Assessment Act, 2019, which Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has asked a court to denounce as unconstitutional to prevent the feds from interfering in his plans for the coal industry.

The main purpose of both the former Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the current Impact Assessment Act was and is “to protect the components of the environment… that are within the legislative authority of Parliament [things like threatened and endangered fish species and the habitat they depend on] from significant adverse environmental effects caused by a designated project,” followed closely by an obligation to “ensure that designated projects… are considered in a careful and precautionary manner to avoid significant adverse environmental effects.”

With such an experienced joint review panel chair and the strong arm of the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA), what could possibly go wrong?

The lengthy drama of formal environmental impact assessment in Canada has three acts. Act I involves a company proposing a “designated project” and hiring an army of consultants to assess the project’s potential adverse environmental effects. In the case of Grassy Mountain, Riversdale (in Canada, Benga Mining operates as Riversdale) submitted an environmental impact statement of thousands of pages in August 2016, along with applications for the permits it would need from federal and provincial government agencies to build the mine. These company-generated analyses are notorious for being overly optimistic and grossly incomplete, and Riversdale did not disappoint.

Of the 162 identified possible negative effects on everything from old-growth forests and wildlife to air and surface water quality, apparently not a single one would be significant. The impact statement proposed that any and all impacts that would occur, including the total destruction of portions of streams that are listed as critical habitat for Alberta’s SARA-listed westslope cutthroat trout, could be tidied up and mitigated away when the mining is finished and the landscape reclaimed.

This is what the late, great David Schindler, who passed away in early March (see p 24), recognized as far back as 1976 as “The Impact Statement Boondoggle.” Industry consultants, he wrote in the journal Science, write “large, diffuse reports containing reams of uninterpreted and incomplete descriptive data, and in some cases construct ‘predictive’ models irrespective of the quality of the data base.” These short-sighted simulacra of rigour “seldom receive the hard scrutiny that follows the publication of scientific findings in a reputable journal.” Nothing much has changed since.

In the fall of 2020, just as social media began to ignite the digital tinder of public outrage, it was time for Act II, the public hearing. This is the heart and soul of any environmental impact assessment, whereby members of the public, especially those who can demonstrate they would be “directly affected,” weigh in on the inevitably sanguine conclusions in the environmental impact statement. For the first time in Alberta history, the process was live-streamed on YouTube for all to see.

Gary Houston, Riversdale’s vice-president of external affairs, set the tone of the proceedings on October 25, two days before the actual hearing began. “We’ve filed 20,000 pages, we’ve been under the scrutiny of dozens of federal and provincial regulatory agencies,” he told the Calgary Herald. “I can’t imagine there are many questions left to be asked. Nonetheless, the process needs to be completed, and based on the work that we’ve done, we’re ready to put our best foot forward.”

For the next five weeks, Riversdale’s lawyers and experts tried to bolster the idea that the digging of a coal mine would do little harm to the stream beds and ecosystems it would strip away in the headwater tributaries of one of southern Alberta’s most important waterways, the Oldman River. On the other side of the virtual courtroom, lawyers and ranchers and scientists queried and countered Riversdale’s claims and promises, all in an attempt to point out that the mine would harm many of the things they cared about: dark skies and quietude; clean, selenium-free water; open rangelands and intact ecosystems; the need to quickly lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce our reliance on coal to maintain some semblance of a stable climate.

They were right to be suspicious. Right next door, just over the Continental Divide from the proposed Grassy Mountain mine, the BC and federal governments have allowed Teck Resources to construct the coal mining equivalent to the oil sands: five giant open-pit or mountaintop-removal mines in the Elk Valley, despoiling the area. Predictably these gaping holes have created many of the problems Grassy Mountain’s decriers foresee. Perhaps the most relevant is the poisoning of the Elk River and its tributaries with toxic amounts of selenium which are now 75 times the limit set out in BC’s water quality guidelines, reducing westslope cutthroat trout populations by 93 per cent.

On day one of the Grassy Mountain hearing, Margaret Fairbairn, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s acting regional director, got straight to the point: The model Benga/Riversdale used to calculate the selenium limit in the effluent it wants to pour into Blairmore Creek “is based on assumptions… that decrease our confidence in the limit’s ability to ensure protection to the aquatic ecosystem” and “we have no basis upon which to validate any conclusions put forward by Benga regarding selenium….” Which is a polite way for a bureaucrat to say your predictive models aren’t near good enough for us to allow you to build a mine.

A month later, on November 24, the Grassy Mountain public hearing zeroed in on the future prospects of Alberta’s westslope cutthroat trout. Three expert witnesses for opponents of the mine—a hydrogeologist, a fisheries biologist and an aquatic ecologist—testified about the inadequacies of Riversdale’s models, the overly optimistic conclusions about their ability to mitigate their impacts, and the federal government’s legal obligations to protect Alberta’s ailing westslope cutthroat trout, whose range has declined by 80 per cent over the last century because of, among other things, the destruction of its habitat by the very atrocities Riversdale’s promoters are proposing to impose on Grassy Mountain.

Who cares about trout when an entire mountain ecosystem is at risk Lawyers.

Unlike in the Elk River watershed in BC, Alberta’s cutthroat trout population is listed as “threatened” under the federal Species at Risk Act. And unlike other environmental laws and regulations, both provincial and federal, SARA obligates (rather than simply empowers) the government to protect
their habitat.

The trout’s federal recovery strategy has identified a host of streams and creeks along the Eastern Slopes—specifically at and around the proposed mine site—that are critical to the species’ survival. SARA, unlike the federal Fisheries Act or any provincial legislation, prohibits any person (or corporation) from “destroying the functions, features and attributes” of Gold Creek and its tributaries and the Oldman River and its tributaries (and many more waterways in the area). The punishment for doing so is a fine up to a million dollars or up to five years imprisonment.

“I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the prognosis for viable westslope cutthroat trout will certainly worsen if the footprint of mining development in the southern East Slopes is enlarged,” said John R. Post, a University of Calgary professor and co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada’s freshwater fish specialist subcommittee. He added that the Grassy Mountain mine will destroy more critical habitat than Riversdale’s consultants estimate. “The project will involve a net harmful alteration and disruption or destruction of fish habitat, and therefore fails to ensure the distributional and population objectives for the SARA-listed species and will jeopardize the survival of the species.”

So why would Benga’s corporate executives even propose to build a mountaintop-removal mine in critical habitat for a SARA-listed species Because they think the federal government will let them get away with it.

The public hearing for the Grassy Mountain coal mine adjourned with a click on December 2, though the public could submit further concerns until January 15, 2021. “I think we made a bit of history here in conducting such a large and complex hearing in a fully online format,” Alex Bolton said before signing off and blinking out.

It won’t be surprising if that’s the most exceptional outcome of the Grassy Mountain environmental impact assessment. Bolton’s panel has until June 18, 2021, to submit its final report to Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, who will then have 150 days to issue a decision statement from cabinet. Unless another coal mine tailings dam collapses and releases another 670 million litres of toxic wastewater into a nearby river, as happened at the Obed coal mine near Hinton in 2013—or by some miracle Jason Kenney has a revelation from God about the evils of coal—history indicates it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Bolton’s panel will conclude three things in its final report:

One, that regrettably and with a heavy heart, the project will likely have some significant adverse environmental impacts on a long list of things Albertans thought were protected by law, as well as on Indigenous land use, rights and culture.

Two, that the mitigation measures proposed by the owners of the mine are not proven to be effective.

And three, that in spite of all of these effects and the lack of a plausible mitigation plan, the project will provide significant economic and employment benefits, and therefore, under our authority as the AER, we consider these effects to be justified and the project to be in the public interest.

This is more or less the language used by Bolton and his AER colleagues to justify the approval of the last two oil sands mines, Shell’s Jackpine expansion (2013) and Teck’s Frontier (2019). Teck ultimately pulled the plug on its Frontier mine before the federal government decided whether to approve it, but Trudeau’s cabinet likely would have given it the thumbs up even though it would have been among the most destructive oil sands projects assessed to date.

Unsurprisingly, the Harper cabinet readily approved the Jackpine expansion, a project that required the diversion of a major river in the region and destroyed woodland caribou critical habitat, which species the federal government has so far refused to protect on provincial land with an emergency order under SARA.

Compared to Benga’s proposed mine in the Crowsnest Pass, each of these projects is enormous, and the impacts that had to be “justified in the circumstances” were far more devastating than those that would accompany the decapitation of Grassy Mountain. Such is the absurdity of the environmental assessment process in Canada, which purports to protect the environment (among other things) but rarely does any such thing.

Almost without exception, huge industrial projects that impose egregious impacts on Indigenous people, sensitive ecosystems and imperilled species, often in contravention of federal and provincial laws, policies and guidelines, are approved with an unapologetic shrug. The benefits of jobs and tax revenues always outweigh the social and environmental costs.

It gets worse. Once these projects are established, the conditions under which they were approved are often ignored or entirely rearranged in an alchemical process known as “adaptive management.” Oil sands tailings ponds, for instance, are not supposed to leak, and yet they do, seeping as much as 11 million litres of toxic waste into the underlying groundwater every day. A recent report by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation found that even when the seepage was acknowledged in environmental impact assessments and scientific studies, the federal government failed to enforce the pollution prevention provisions of its own Fisheries Act.

Plans for tailings treatment and management at Shell’s Jackpine mine and Muskeg River mine, now owned by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., have been approved by the AER even though they don’t meet the criteria of AER’s existing approvals and fail to meet AER’s requirements and government policy. Now, the provincial and federal governments are preparing regulations to allow oil sands companies to treat and release tailings wastewater into the Athabasca River even though the conditions of their initial approvals prohibited the release of treated tailings into the river.

Coal miners too take advantage of the loosey-goosey nature of Canada’s regulatory system. When Grande Cache Coal reported that selenium levels downstream of its mine in Beaverdam Creek were high enough to pose a risk to native fish populations, AER pointed to the adaptive management provision in their environmental impact assessment and asked the company to install selenium treatment technology. Grande Cache Coal refused because, well, it was just too darn expensive.

Riversdale’s environmental impact statement refers to “adaptive management” over 500 times, a code phrase for “we’ll deal with it when we get there, even if it means reneging on the promises we made.”

It’s no wonder the creeks and rivers downstream from Alberta’s current coal mines already show signs of selenium pollution, and Indigenous people downstream of the oil sands live with the fear of elevated incidence of rare and deadly cancers. The only real surprise is that the PARH groupies and the Downstreamers are so shocked that the provincial government wants to build yet another mine in yet another important watershed—and that there are few legal ways to stop it.

Despite the doom and gloom of history, there is a glimmer of hope. Grassy Mountain and its precious streams may yet be spared. If my predictions are correct, and Bolton’s panel finds Riversdale’s pet coal project very much in the public interest despite the obvious problems it presents, the federal cabinet could decline to approve it because it would destroy or otherwise put at risk critical habitat of Alberta’s SARA-listed westslope cutthroat trout, and because the economic benefits of coal these days are just too meagre to justify the mine in the circumstances.

This welcome miracle would set a long-awaited precedent whereby the federal government chooses to give primacy to its legal obligation to protect environmental values under its jurisdiction rather than simply deferring to Alberta’s provincial prerogative for relentless industrial development no matter the cost. Such a move would give pause to other coal companies whose plans involve building mines in the critical habitat of threatened species.

Either way, the decision will likely end up in court. In the unlikely case the federal cabinet refuses to approve the mine, Riversdale and the Alberta government will no doubt take the federal government to court to have the decision reversed. On the other hand, if the feds approve the mine, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans issues a section 73 permit under SARA authorizing Riversdale to destroy critical habitat of a SARA-listed species, environmental groups will likewise ask the courts to overturn the decision because it’s unlawful.

Who knows how a single hypothetical judge would rule in either case. What is obvious, however, is how farcical it is that the fate of a highly destructive industrial project with a multitude of significant environmental impacts hinges on whether or not it destroys a few hundred metres of critical trout habitat—and that far larger industrial projects that don’t involve SARA-listed aquatic species, like oil sands mines, get a free pass.

If Albertans truly care about clean water, healthy fish populations and species at risk—and the maintenance of a modestly stable climate that won’t wreak hell on earth for our children and grandchildren—they would do well to look beyond their parochial concern for what happens on their doorsteps and instead focus on strengthening the laws that govern industrial development and environmental protection. Without such laws, politicians and joint review panels will continue to prioritize corporate profits and environmental destruction. 

Jeff Gailus moved from Alberta to Montana 15 years ago, only to find politicians and voters there to be just as short-sighted and obtuse as they are at home. So it goes.

The post Why Coal Mines Always Get Approved appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Ian Mosby, Sarah Rotz and Evan D.G. Fraser
University of Regina Press
2020/$27.95/256 pp.

By 2050 somehow we’ll need to feed 10 billion humans while also having reduced the vast harms of food production, not least its water pollution, deforestation and contributions to climate change. It’s a daunting prospect—or, if you like, a worthy challenge. Uncertain Harvest critiques various ways we might get there, from “precision” industrial agriculture done by self-driving, data-harvesting tractors, to one- to two-acre organic farming, to lab-grown meat, photosynthesis-hacked rice and powdered crickets.

In lively writing, academics Ian Mosby (Ryerson), Sarah Rotz (York) and Evan D.G. Fraser (Guelph) explore food production across the world but use many Canadian examples. They lay out the global situation and near-term environmental projections, then set context in a short “history of the future of food.” This includes Thomas Malthus’s “unrelentingly grim” 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population; Haber, Bosch and Borlaug’s Green Revolution; utopian visions of a humanity fed by yeast and algae; Rachel Carson’s sobering Silent Spring.

Contemporary issues are framed by foods that lend each chapter its title. “Caribou” shows northern Indigenous people in Canada grappling with the loss of their traditional diets even as southerners “promote the warming Arctic as an agricultural and energy frontier.” The chapter “Millet” asks what role technology will play in parts of the world where subsistence farming dominates. In “Tuna” we learn how relentless deregulation by corporate-friendly governments makes food production less transparent and food contamination more common (e.g., one in five Canadian sausages contain a meat not listed among the ingredients).

“Kale” explores the sustainability of farming in Canada, where startup costs, debt, acreage and farmers’ ages creep ever upward, while consolidation, chemical-use and dependence on foreign workers expand. The authors’ analysis of small organic farming shows lower profits but better margins, less debt and more appeal to young farmers. If billions of dollars in public subsidies to industrial farming were ended and externalities better priced in, they argue, food would cost more but the drift to “corporate, concentrated and exploitative” farming would reverse. (Higher prices would also cut Canadians’ shocking rate of food waste.)

“Crickets” covers alternatives to CO₂-intensive beef and to fish (whose wild stocks are collapsing), including bug-protein, test-tube meat and plant-based burgers. The authors largely dismiss these; too expensive, too weird, beans already exist, we’ll learn to eat less meat. But the scarcely believable claims being made about these products’ minuscule water, CO₂ and land footprints warranted a more critical and thorough analysis.

Other questions aren’t addressed. What does science say about the nutritional worth of organic vs. conventional vs. GMOs How does “lab meat” compare nutritionally to lentils or grass-finished beef The aim of food production can’t only be to maximize calories or shrink land use; a book on the future of food should be as curious about the quality of what we eat.

Uncertain Harvest sees much modern technology (especially GMOs) as overrated or irrelevant to humanity’s urgent needs. The authors argue strongly for a renewed role for government—tougher carbon pricing, strict food safety regulations and changes to intellectual property laws that now enrich corporations and help keep farmers deep in debt. But in late chapters “Milk” and “Rice” they’re bullish on the use of robots in dairy farming and on the potential widespread adoption both of gene-edited rice—which uses far less water and fertilizer—and Sierra Mixe corn, native to Mexico, which fixes its own nitrogen from the air, no chemicals or gene-splicing required. An existential crisis requires critical faculties and an open mind.

Evan Osenton is the editor of Alberta Views.

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The rest is history. Or will be, once the dust settles.

But this is actually nothing new. It’s just that the remarkable advances our species made in the 20th century, both in public health practice and the science of medicine, means we’ve forgotten what pestilence is like. Even the oldest of us have only the faintest of memories of outbreaks of scarlet fever, mumps and other such diseases.

No surprise that we thought we were exempt. But we aren’t; we’re just out of practice. Disease outbreaks are part of nature, and so are we.

We don’t need to look too far back down the trail to start seeing past epidemics. It’s hard to be objective about our own situation, so it might be better to look at other species.

When fur trader David Thompson crossed the Rockies into the upper Columbia River valley in 1807, he and his men nearly starved. There was plenty of habitat but no big game. Several years later James Hector, naturalist with the Palliser expedition, heard from the Stoney people about a mysterious plague that had swept through the Rockies, killing most of the large ungulates. Whatever caused that plague remains unknown, but it likely originated in Europe and was transferred here in domestic livestock. North America’s deer, elk, moose and caribou hadn’t built up immunity to tuberculosis and other domestic animal diseases. Those diseases would have migrated across the continent easily, arriving in the Rockies well before the people who first brought them to the far Atlantic shore.

Eventually Europeans got here too. It didn’t take long before bighorn sheep—which had been isolated from foreign relatives until settlers brought domestic sheep and goats—started dying off as well. At least three times in Alberta’s history, plagues of pneumonia-causing pathogens have almost wiped out our wild bighorn herds. That’s why, in the late twentieth century, the Alberta government declared the forest reserves along the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies out of bounds for domestic sheep. That physical isolation worked; our bighorn populations are thriving again now that they no longer have any risk of touching noses with the wrong animal.

The remarkable advances in health and science in the 20th century made us forget what pestilence is like.

A recent example of a wildlife epidemic has an eerie parallel to our own COVID-19 in that it arose when a pathogen jumped from one species to another. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) first appeared in a Colorado research herd of elk and mule deer in 1967. The facility had previously held domestic sheep. CWD appears to be a variant of scrapie, a brain-wasting disease found in sheep and caused by a rogue protein that attacks the nervous system. When that disease mutated and jumped into deer and elk, it became CWD. Like mad cow disease, to which it is also closely related, it has the potential to be lethal to humans who eat the meat or use antler velvet from infected animals. So far there’s no evidence of that—fortunately, because CWD has now spread across the continent. In eastern Alberta it’s now an epidemic, spreading inexorably west towards the foothills and mountain national parks.

Epidemics are often triggered by a new pathogen finding hosts where endemic populations haven’t experienced it before. It spreads through the group, killing the most vulnerable and sparing those fortunate enough to have strong immune systems or the right gene combinations to resist it. The diseases sometimes miss parts of the population because of isolation or because local conditions don’t favour the microbe in question. The survivors reproduce, the group builds resistance and eventually the outbreak ends. The disease doesn’t necessarily go away, but the species it attacks ceases to be quite so vulnerable. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Where plagues are concerned, we’ve had plenty. Smallpox, tuberculosis and other pathogens to which Europeans had built up varying levels of immunity were utterly unknown to the Indigenous peoples of North America. Entire Indigenous communities were wiped out by the new diseases, often before their members had even seen their first European. An unfamiliar microbe can be deadly.

Even so, elk, deer, moose and bighorn sheep populations are thriving today. Smallpox and tuberculosis have been mostly relegated to history. CWD hasn’t run its course yet, but science is running to intercept it. Devastating at the time, epidemics pass, and usually nature comes out stronger than before. And we continue the journey together, because that’s how nature works. 

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