I just wanted to let you know that I'm having a family — and my partner is a robin. Kind of like Horton Hears a Who, but with a bird.
Two weeks ago, a beautiful, mottled female thrush (aka American robin) started to build a nest on a tiny little shelf just outside my front door, but after a week of tireless work, she was getting nowhere. The shelf was just too small, and the beginnings of the nest kept falling down every few hours. But she just kept on returning with mud and grass, over and over and over again, seemingly oblivious to the futility of it all.
So one night at two in the morning, after I’d had a few at the local pub with my friends Karsten and Gareth and Heather, I decided to play GOD.
I had always been taught not to interfere, to let nature take it's course, but it seemed ridiculous not to lend a helping hand, like a good neighbour at a barn raising. So I scraped the meagre accumulation of mud off the shelf and tacked up a small blue plastic plate, which considerably expanded the foundation for her new house. I replaced the mud (about a tablespoon) and topped it off with some of the two square feet of grass, tinsel and string she had accumulated on my front porch.
I was worried that my “intervention” might send her packing, but I consoled myself with the fact that if I didn’t help out, she’d still be building her nest on my front porch when the snow arrived in November.
By the time I looked again at noon the next day, she had pitched all the grass (and tinsel and string) back onto the porch and built an entire cup-shaped nest out of mud (and a little grass). She left for a couple of days (presumably to look for some rousing good sex), but she eventually came back to sit our nest, just waiting to lay her eggs.
A week later, I peeked into the nest while she was out grocery shopping. There were four beautiful, blue eggs. We're just waiting for them to hatch.
I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Do whatever your soul demands you to, even if it seems hopeless. The universe will eventually help you out. Oh, and one small action can make a world of difference.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Saturday, May 09, 2009
A safe world for our precious children
In a recent New York Times essay about the legacy of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Saro-Wiwa's son spoke about the tension between doing "what's best" for our children in the short term versus doing what's best for them (and the next six generations) in the long term.
“All of us have a choice, to make our children safe in the world or to make the world safe for our children, and there are implications to that,” Mr. Wiwa said, referring to others he has met who share his situation, like Nelson Mandela's daughter Zindzi and Nkosinathi Biko, the son of the South African activist Steve Biko. “Our fathers chose a different path.”
Wiwa, of course, was speaking about the choices these famous parents made to fight violence, injustice and oppression and replace it with peace and equality, which their children and many millions of others might enjoy though their parents did not. In the short term, the price of doing so was unimaginably high: Biko was tortured and murdered by the South African security police, Mandela spent almost 30 years in horrendous prisons on unethical charges, and Saro-Wiwa, of course, was put to death by the Nigerian government on trumped up murder charges. Their efforts, especially those of Biko and Mandella, have already borne fruit, helping, for instance, to begin the transformation of South African society.
They and their children made sacrifices, of course. Dead or in jail, these men could not be the fathers they may have wanted, but they obviously believed the price was worth it, if only to make the world a better place for their sons and daughters and those that would come after them. It was an investment, in other words, in the future, even if it meant sacrifices, even the ultimate sacrifice, in the short term.
This is a question I struggle with almost every day. I have been a writer and a conservationist most of my adult life, challenging and resisting the dominant narrative of greed, self-interest and unlimited economic growth that is destroying our environment and marginalizing people everywhere. While I am fortunate and grateful to live in a country that does not imprison or kill outspoken critics of the status quo, choosing such a path does come with a price.
When I finished my master's degree in environmental studies, the first thing my father said was, "Now you can get a job working for an oil and gas company," helping them "green" their business practices. I had toyed with the idea. Wouldn't it be nice to make more money than you spend every month? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to visit my daughter, who lives 3,680 kilometres away, more than once or twice a year? Wouldn't it be nice to know your employer is contributing to your pension in a bank somewhere?
I just couldn't do it. The social and environmental problems we face today are every bit as serious and unconscionable as those faced by the Bikos and Mandelas and Saro-Wiwas of the world. In our failing democracies in the West, especially in Alberta, which eco-philosopher Joanna Macy recently called "the belly of the beast," it is our duty to challenge the status quo, even if it means we cannot holiday in Hawaii with our children or send them to private school. What good is a private school education if our children are forced to live in a world of environmental degradation and political instability?
There are a number of ways we can help transform our unsustainable society into a sustainable one based on respect and responsibility. We can choose not to work for or support the corporations and political parties that are at the root of so many of our problems. This, it seems to me, is the least we can do. Don't work for Shell, for instance, which is in court in New York this month for its role in Ken Saro-Wiwa's death. Don't work for the forestry companies that are imperilling Alberta's grizzly bear and caribou populations. Don't work for the oil companies that are turning the tar sands -- an area the size of Florida -- into a toxic wasteland that is in many ways very similar to the Niger Delta Saro-Wiwa gave his life for. And don't work for (never mind vote for) the Tory government that allows such unsustainable and irresponsible activities to happen in the first place.
What would happen if we all simply said no, we're not going to work for corporations or governments that do not promote the best interests of our planet and ALL the people (and plants and animals) that call it home? It would be revolutionary. Yes, it would require some (perceived) sacrifices for us and our children in the short term, but our actions would quickly result in changes that would benefit all living things everywhere, far into the future.
Instead, we could choose work that enriches us not in the monetary sense, but in the meaningful sense. Use your skills and expertise to challenge these giants of unsustainability and irresponsibility. Work or volunteer for a non-profit organization working for environmental health or human rights. Or for a company that is promoting the use of alternative energy rather than the coal and oil and gas that are killing our planet.
The biggest benefit of speaking out against greed and unsustainability and working toward equality and sustainability is that we teach our children not only how to do it, but how important it is to do.
Ken Saro-Wiwa's son wrote a memoir about his experiences and is now writing a novel, but he has also felt compelled to carry on his father’s environmental and human rights work. He warns that the ecological and human devastation in the Niger delta, one of the world’s largest wetlands, is worse than ever. And so he keeps fighting.
Is this not what all parents should be teaching their children?
“All of us have a choice, to make our children safe in the world or to make the world safe for our children, and there are implications to that,” Mr. Wiwa said, referring to others he has met who share his situation, like Nelson Mandela's daughter Zindzi and Nkosinathi Biko, the son of the South African activist Steve Biko. “Our fathers chose a different path.”
Wiwa, of course, was speaking about the choices these famous parents made to fight violence, injustice and oppression and replace it with peace and equality, which their children and many millions of others might enjoy though their parents did not. In the short term, the price of doing so was unimaginably high: Biko was tortured and murdered by the South African security police, Mandela spent almost 30 years in horrendous prisons on unethical charges, and Saro-Wiwa, of course, was put to death by the Nigerian government on trumped up murder charges. Their efforts, especially those of Biko and Mandella, have already borne fruit, helping, for instance, to begin the transformation of South African society.
They and their children made sacrifices, of course. Dead or in jail, these men could not be the fathers they may have wanted, but they obviously believed the price was worth it, if only to make the world a better place for their sons and daughters and those that would come after them. It was an investment, in other words, in the future, even if it meant sacrifices, even the ultimate sacrifice, in the short term.
This is a question I struggle with almost every day. I have been a writer and a conservationist most of my adult life, challenging and resisting the dominant narrative of greed, self-interest and unlimited economic growth that is destroying our environment and marginalizing people everywhere. While I am fortunate and grateful to live in a country that does not imprison or kill outspoken critics of the status quo, choosing such a path does come with a price.
When I finished my master's degree in environmental studies, the first thing my father said was, "Now you can get a job working for an oil and gas company," helping them "green" their business practices. I had toyed with the idea. Wouldn't it be nice to make more money than you spend every month? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to visit my daughter, who lives 3,680 kilometres away, more than once or twice a year? Wouldn't it be nice to know your employer is contributing to your pension in a bank somewhere?
I just couldn't do it. The social and environmental problems we face today are every bit as serious and unconscionable as those faced by the Bikos and Mandelas and Saro-Wiwas of the world. In our failing democracies in the West, especially in Alberta, which eco-philosopher Joanna Macy recently called "the belly of the beast," it is our duty to challenge the status quo, even if it means we cannot holiday in Hawaii with our children or send them to private school. What good is a private school education if our children are forced to live in a world of environmental degradation and political instability?
There are a number of ways we can help transform our unsustainable society into a sustainable one based on respect and responsibility. We can choose not to work for or support the corporations and political parties that are at the root of so many of our problems. This, it seems to me, is the least we can do. Don't work for Shell, for instance, which is in court in New York this month for its role in Ken Saro-Wiwa's death. Don't work for the forestry companies that are imperilling Alberta's grizzly bear and caribou populations. Don't work for the oil companies that are turning the tar sands -- an area the size of Florida -- into a toxic wasteland that is in many ways very similar to the Niger Delta Saro-Wiwa gave his life for. And don't work for (never mind vote for) the Tory government that allows such unsustainable and irresponsible activities to happen in the first place.
What would happen if we all simply said no, we're not going to work for corporations or governments that do not promote the best interests of our planet and ALL the people (and plants and animals) that call it home? It would be revolutionary. Yes, it would require some (perceived) sacrifices for us and our children in the short term, but our actions would quickly result in changes that would benefit all living things everywhere, far into the future.
Instead, we could choose work that enriches us not in the monetary sense, but in the meaningful sense. Use your skills and expertise to challenge these giants of unsustainability and irresponsibility. Work or volunteer for a non-profit organization working for environmental health or human rights. Or for a company that is promoting the use of alternative energy rather than the coal and oil and gas that are killing our planet.
The biggest benefit of speaking out against greed and unsustainability and working toward equality and sustainability is that we teach our children not only how to do it, but how important it is to do.
Ken Saro-Wiwa's son wrote a memoir about his experiences and is now writing a novel, but he has also felt compelled to carry on his father’s environmental and human rights work. He warns that the ecological and human devastation in the Niger delta, one of the world’s largest wetlands, is worse than ever. And so he keeps fighting.
Is this not what all parents should be teaching their children?
Friday, May 08, 2009
Waiting, waiting, waiting ... gone
A recent Calgary Herald article about Alberta's ailing grizzly bear population quotes the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development's senior "issues manager" Dave Ealey saying that the province is awaiting the study's final results from the Grande Cache area and will not weigh in on the issue until all the facts are known. "We've made it quite clear that we are not going to be revisiting the status of grizzly bears until we have the appropriate review of the information," he said.
The fact is, the facts have been known for quite some time. Although the final population census report for the Grande Cache area won't be submitted until later this month, it has become common knowledge for at least a year that there are less than 500 grizzly bears in Alberta. I've heard grizzly bear researcher Gord Stenhouse, who was the government's grizzly bear "specialist" until he spoke openly and honestly about the fact there are too many roads in grizzly bear habitat, say as much (and more) at several public presentations over the years.
Ealey goes on to say, "It's not just numbers. In what way are they connected with the grizzly population in B. C.? What sort of genetic information have we gained from the DNA work, and should these bears be looked at as isolated populations?"
These are all good questions, but they are questions that have been answered already. Michael Proctor, who has analyzed hundreds of DNA samples taken from grizzly bears from Yellowstone to the Yukon, already has shown that grizzly bear populations in southern B.C. and southwest Alberta are becoming fragmented into smaller and smaller units. Of particular interest are the population units between Highway 16 and Highway 11, and between Highway 11 and Highway 1, which are being isolated by a combination of the rugged nature of the continental divide and by traffic and development associated with major highways. Each of these subpopulation units in Alberta contain less than 100 bears which, in the face of high levels of intense industrial and recreational use, are at risk of extirpation outside of the national parks.
I can assure that SRD Minister Ted Morton and his "issues managers" already understand the implications of the facts before them. But rather than quickly and efficiently implement an effective recovery plan, they have chosen to focus on "reframing" the issue. Rather than focus on how many bears there are in Alberta, which was how they talked about it BEFORE the DNA-based population estimate, when they were certain that there were more than 1000 bears, Morton recently said that the issue is how many bears there are in western Canada.
Alberta policy indicates the Alberta government is obligated to ensure a viable and healthy grizzly bear population remains in Alberta. Immigration from B.C. (and Montana and the national parks) will not be enough to ensure grizzly bears remain part of the Alberta landscape.
Besides, for a province and a people that prides itself for being independent and resourceful and self-sufficient, it seems a little odd that we would rely on the (more responsible) management regimes in neighbouring jurisdictions to prop up the health of a grizzly bear population that we are putting at serious risk.
It just ain't right. We've made poor choices and we need to be responsible for them. That means cleaning up the mess that we've made. Time to get busy.
The fact is, the facts have been known for quite some time. Although the final population census report for the Grande Cache area won't be submitted until later this month, it has become common knowledge for at least a year that there are less than 500 grizzly bears in Alberta. I've heard grizzly bear researcher Gord Stenhouse, who was the government's grizzly bear "specialist" until he spoke openly and honestly about the fact there are too many roads in grizzly bear habitat, say as much (and more) at several public presentations over the years.
Ealey goes on to say, "It's not just numbers. In what way are they connected with the grizzly population in B. C.? What sort of genetic information have we gained from the DNA work, and should these bears be looked at as isolated populations?"
These are all good questions, but they are questions that have been answered already. Michael Proctor, who has analyzed hundreds of DNA samples taken from grizzly bears from Yellowstone to the Yukon, already has shown that grizzly bear populations in southern B.C. and southwest Alberta are becoming fragmented into smaller and smaller units. Of particular interest are the population units between Highway 16 and Highway 11, and between Highway 11 and Highway 1, which are being isolated by a combination of the rugged nature of the continental divide and by traffic and development associated with major highways. Each of these subpopulation units in Alberta contain less than 100 bears which, in the face of high levels of intense industrial and recreational use, are at risk of extirpation outside of the national parks.
I can assure that SRD Minister Ted Morton and his "issues managers" already understand the implications of the facts before them. But rather than quickly and efficiently implement an effective recovery plan, they have chosen to focus on "reframing" the issue. Rather than focus on how many bears there are in Alberta, which was how they talked about it BEFORE the DNA-based population estimate, when they were certain that there were more than 1000 bears, Morton recently said that the issue is how many bears there are in western Canada.
Alberta policy indicates the Alberta government is obligated to ensure a viable and healthy grizzly bear population remains in Alberta. Immigration from B.C. (and Montana and the national parks) will not be enough to ensure grizzly bears remain part of the Alberta landscape.
Besides, for a province and a people that prides itself for being independent and resourceful and self-sufficient, it seems a little odd that we would rely on the (more responsible) management regimes in neighbouring jurisdictions to prop up the health of a grizzly bear population that we are putting at serious risk.
It just ain't right. We've made poor choices and we need to be responsible for them. That means cleaning up the mess that we've made. Time to get busy.
Monday, May 04, 2009
Shoot at will, there are plenty of grizzlies
I have a daughter about the same age as Joe Lucas's son, Kyle. We have spent plenty of time in the field watching both grizzly and black bears. And I have been charged to within 20 metres by a sow with two tiny cubs-of-the-year because of my own stupidity.
But my stupidity in that case was nothing compared to Roper Joe Lucas, who carried no bear spray in grizzly habitat and kept a camp that was so messy it would have sent Andy Russell into a rage. Instead of taking the necessary precautions and basing his decisions on a MODERN understanding of bear behaviour, he just went ahead and shot, broadside, from long distance, a very valuable, cub-producing member of Alberta's threatened grizzly bear population because he thought it posed a threat to the life of his son.
Puh-lease.
He may be able to fool the judge and the rest of the urban public who have never even seen a grizzly bear, but he can't fool me or any bear biologist who has spent more than a season in the field. Clearly, Judge Reilly hasn't been keeping up on the research, relying instead on the journals of ancient explorers from the nineteenth century. A simple Google search would have provided more than enough information to find Lucas guilty of reckless endangerment and the wanton killing of a threatened species (if only the government would list it is as such).
To be fair, Judge Reilly has a long-standing reputation for making good decisions based on good 'ol Alberta "common sense," but this time he stepped over the line into mythology and nonsensical sense. I always thought that judges were supposed to rule on the evidence set out before them, not their own personal "opinions" about the matters at hand. To think that Judge Reilly, because he "lives in the mountains," would know more about grizzly bear behaviour than Dr. Mike Gibeau and the other experts that testified on behalf of the dead (some might say "murdered") grizzly bear is ridiculous.
Judge Reilly's comments in this and other newspaper articles indicates he has very little understanding about grizzly bear behaviour. I could enlist any number of bear biologists and ethologists to provide a litany of evidence that would all but prove that the bear in question was not a threat to Roper Lucas and his son. The fact their camp was full of unsecured attractants and they weren’t even carrying bear spray indicates they have absolutely no respect for the environment in which they live and work. That alone should have earned them a stiff penalty.
This is a blatant example of the old school, frontier mentality that allows uninformed "mountain men" like Lucas to kill grizzly bears at will. Had this been in the U.S., where wildlife management and prosecution is actually based on science and evidence, Lucas would be facing a $5,000 fine. Not so in Alberta, where even the judges can't see beyond the stereotypes and mythologies we ascribe to ourselves.
I expected more from you, Judge Reilly. This ruling sets a precedent allowing anyone with a gun to shoot a grizzly on a whim. Shame on you. As for you Lucas, I hope this is a lesson to you. If you're going to take your son into grizzly country, spend the fifty bucks on a can of bear spray and keep your camp clean. And leave your rifle at home. That way you can teach him what it means to be a "mountain man" in the twenty-first century.
But my stupidity in that case was nothing compared to Roper Joe Lucas, who carried no bear spray in grizzly habitat and kept a camp that was so messy it would have sent Andy Russell into a rage. Instead of taking the necessary precautions and basing his decisions on a MODERN understanding of bear behaviour, he just went ahead and shot, broadside, from long distance, a very valuable, cub-producing member of Alberta's threatened grizzly bear population because he thought it posed a threat to the life of his son.
Puh-lease.
He may be able to fool the judge and the rest of the urban public who have never even seen a grizzly bear, but he can't fool me or any bear biologist who has spent more than a season in the field. Clearly, Judge Reilly hasn't been keeping up on the research, relying instead on the journals of ancient explorers from the nineteenth century. A simple Google search would have provided more than enough information to find Lucas guilty of reckless endangerment and the wanton killing of a threatened species (if only the government would list it is as such).
To be fair, Judge Reilly has a long-standing reputation for making good decisions based on good 'ol Alberta "common sense," but this time he stepped over the line into mythology and nonsensical sense. I always thought that judges were supposed to rule on the evidence set out before them, not their own personal "opinions" about the matters at hand. To think that Judge Reilly, because he "lives in the mountains," would know more about grizzly bear behaviour than Dr. Mike Gibeau and the other experts that testified on behalf of the dead (some might say "murdered") grizzly bear is ridiculous.
Judge Reilly's comments in this and other newspaper articles indicates he has very little understanding about grizzly bear behaviour. I could enlist any number of bear biologists and ethologists to provide a litany of evidence that would all but prove that the bear in question was not a threat to Roper Lucas and his son. The fact their camp was full of unsecured attractants and they weren’t even carrying bear spray indicates they have absolutely no respect for the environment in which they live and work. That alone should have earned them a stiff penalty.
This is a blatant example of the old school, frontier mentality that allows uninformed "mountain men" like Lucas to kill grizzly bears at will. Had this been in the U.S., where wildlife management and prosecution is actually based on science and evidence, Lucas would be facing a $5,000 fine. Not so in Alberta, where even the judges can't see beyond the stereotypes and mythologies we ascribe to ourselves.
I expected more from you, Judge Reilly. This ruling sets a precedent allowing anyone with a gun to shoot a grizzly on a whim. Shame on you. As for you Lucas, I hope this is a lesson to you. If you're going to take your son into grizzly country, spend the fifty bucks on a can of bear spray and keep your camp clean. And leave your rifle at home. That way you can teach him what it means to be a "mountain man" in the twenty-first century.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Fooling the people won't work forever
Alberta's Tories (and even their federal counterparts, Harper's Conservatives) would do well to pay attention to the implosion of the G.O.P. south of the border.
As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."
The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."
Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.
As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”
The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.
It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.
No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.
When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."
The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.
But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.
I just hope we don't wait too long.
As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."
The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."
Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.
As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”
The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.
It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.
No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.
When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."
The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.
But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.
I just hope we don't wait too long.
Friday, May 01, 2009
The semantics of successful grizzly bear recovery in Alberta
This news release just arrived in my inbox, and I thought I'd share it with y'all. Sadly, it was sent anonymously, but it does provide some interesting new information on the ongoing attempt to recover Alberta's grizzly bear population.
Calgary, Alberta; May 1, 2009 -- After a seven-year recovery process, Alberta’s grizzly bears have now been successfully recovered. This is the startling finding from the Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program, a new study by researchers at the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence (AIAE).
“We knew that recovery of grizzlies was being hampered by motorized vehicle access,” says AIAE spokesman Dr. Charles Brain. “So we decided to re-define the term ‘motorized vehicle’. And then we decided to re-define ‘recovery’.”
Those re-definitions were so effective that the Institute is now working on re-defining ‘grizzly bear’ to ensure that the province’s grizzly bear recovery process is even more successful.
The pioneering Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program began in 2008, when the term “motorized vehicle” was re-defined to mean “vehicle with a motor, more than 92 inches wide, with more than seven wheels. And red.” As a result, motorized vehicle access into grizzly habitat was immediately and considerably reduced.
Following the success of this initial re-definition, AIAE moved quickly to re-define the word “recovery.” The word now officially means “doing exactly what we were doing before, but with the word sustainable in front it.” Once again, grizzly bear recovery immediately took an enormous step forward.
AIAE is now drafting a new definition for grizzly bear. “Once restricted to refer to a member of the species Ursus arctos, the new working definition for ‘grizzly bear’ is now ‘hairy or non-hairy animal that may or may not have antlers’,” said Dr. Brain. “Or wheels.”
"We are proud to bring Alberta’s Grizzly Bear Recovery process to such a successful conclusion,” said Doris Klein, spokesman for Alberta Sustained Resource Development (AbSuRD). “We are now looking forward to completing successful recovery programs for all endangered wildlife in the province, including woodland caribou, black-footed ferret and wooly mammoth.”
Coming soon, the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence will be using lessons learned from its Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program to solve the thorny old problems of climate change and death.
Calgary, Alberta; May 1, 2009 -- After a seven-year recovery process, Alberta’s grizzly bears have now been successfully recovered. This is the startling finding from the Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program, a new study by researchers at the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence (AIAE).
“We knew that recovery of grizzlies was being hampered by motorized vehicle access,” says AIAE spokesman Dr. Charles Brain. “So we decided to re-define the term ‘motorized vehicle’. And then we decided to re-define ‘recovery’.”
Those re-definitions were so effective that the Institute is now working on re-defining ‘grizzly bear’ to ensure that the province’s grizzly bear recovery process is even more successful.
The pioneering Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program began in 2008, when the term “motorized vehicle” was re-defined to mean “vehicle with a motor, more than 92 inches wide, with more than seven wheels. And red.” As a result, motorized vehicle access into grizzly habitat was immediately and considerably reduced.
Following the success of this initial re-definition, AIAE moved quickly to re-define the word “recovery.” The word now officially means “doing exactly what we were doing before, but with the word sustainable in front it.” Once again, grizzly bear recovery immediately took an enormous step forward.
AIAE is now drafting a new definition for grizzly bear. “Once restricted to refer to a member of the species Ursus arctos, the new working definition for ‘grizzly bear’ is now ‘hairy or non-hairy animal that may or may not have antlers’,” said Dr. Brain. “Or wheels.”
"We are proud to bring Alberta’s Grizzly Bear Recovery process to such a successful conclusion,” said Doris Klein, spokesman for Alberta Sustained Resource Development (AbSuRD). “We are now looking forward to completing successful recovery programs for all endangered wildlife in the province, including woodland caribou, black-footed ferret and wooly mammoth.”
Coming soon, the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence will be using lessons learned from its Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program to solve the thorny old problems of climate change and death.
- 30 -
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Creating Doubt 101
I was wondering how long it would take the National Post to wade into the fray on the status and future of Alberta’s ailing grizzly population. On Sunday, the Post, Canada’s national (neo) conservative journal of record did not disappoint, dishing up a manly helping of misinformation and decontextualization that would make Nick Naylor proud. Because after all, “No one knows for certain.”
Not surprisingly, the Post’s lengthy opinion piece on the grizzly issue was brilliantly crafted by Kevin Libin, the founding editor-in-chief of the Calgary-based Western Standard, a neoconservative/libertarian e-rag that unfortunately has a strong following in Alberta. I say brilliantly because Libin’s column, already making the rounds on the Internet, is an excellent example of how neoconservatives (especially) try to create “artificial or manufactured controversy” in an effort to undermine the influence of science on politicized issues that challenge corporatist hegemony in favour of such mundane things as human and environmental health.
What is surprising is that the Post would print Libin’s column as a piece of journalism when such works of “truthiness” are usually reserved for dishonest presidents, public relations firms and other artisans of the politically fanciful. Holocaust deniers, for instance, have been using this same strategy almost since the end of the Second World War.
Perhaps the most egregious example, at least until the politicization of climate change, is the one portrayed in the movie Thank You for Smoking. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the tobacco lobby literally created controversy over the now well-accepted causal link between cigarette smoking and cancer. According to an internal document from Brown and Williamson, a now-defunct American tobacco company: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won’t know what to believe.”
More recently, the oil, gas and coal industries – with the help of the neoconservative think tanks they continue to fund – have helped to create uncertainty around the cause, even the existence of climate change. According to the now famous memo from influential political strategist Frank Luntz, consultant to the U.S. Republican Party, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.... You need to be more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message.... If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.”
Let’s see how Libin does this in “Alberta’s Grizzly Debate.” Rather than interview and quote a reputable grizzly bear biologist or political ecologist who has been intimately involved in the Alberta recovery planning process – Gord Stenhouse, say, or Dr. Mark Boyce or Dr. Robert Barclay or Dr. Mike Gibeau or Dr. Michael Proctor – he relies on Barry Cooper, a fellow neoconservative and political scientist at the University of Calgary – and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute who has been involved in researching and writing contrarian studies on grizzly bears and climate change.
Cooper has written similar ideologically based op-eds of his own for the Calgary Herald and various other think tanks and conservative publications, all of which indicate he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about when it comes to grizzly bears, though he obviously knows a thing or two about how to manipulate public opinion.
Herein, Cooper suggests that there is “no such thing as an Alberta grizzly bear population,” which is correct as far as it goes. Bears, like butterflies and sparrows, don’t much care for our political divisions, and move across borders if they can. (More on that later.) What is absent from Cooper’s submission, however, is that wildlife in Canada are managed largely by the provinces, not the federal government.
While it is true there are some 50,000 grizzly bears in North America – and more than 100,000 in Europe and Asia – Mr. Cooper surely must know, as an esteemed expert in the “science” of all things political, that Section 3.1.1 of the Fish and Wildlife Policy for Alberta (1982) indicates that “…the primary consideration of the Government is to ensure that wildlife populations are protected from severe decline and that viable populations are maintained….” The government of Alberta, therefore, is obligated to ensure that a “viable” population of grizzly bears is maintained within the boundaries of the political jurisdiction of Alberta, whether or not there are a bazillion grizzly bears elsewhere.
For his token biologist, Libin chooses Dr. Charles Kay, a controversial figure whose contrarian views are often quoted by – you guessed it – the Fraser Institute and conservative newspapers in the North American West. Kay is to wildlife management, in other words, what Tim Ball is to climate change.
Again, Libin chooses to forego the expertise and excellent reputations of Dr. Stephen Herrero and the other biologists mentioned above. Why? Because Kay’s “opinion” adds another piece of “evidence” in Libin’s attempt to undermine the science and more commonly understood expert opinion on the history, status and future of Alberta’s grizzly bear population. And as you will see, it is purely for economic (i.e. ideological) reasons rather than ethical or ecological ones.
Then, astonishingly, he chooses Quentin Bochar to comment on whether Alberta’s grizzly bear population is “sustainable.” Bochar is not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination. He works in the oil and gas industry and is a quad-loving hunter and the president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association, who has publicly stated that he doesn’t want to give up his “right” to ride his motorized horse wherever he wants just for the chance to kill himself a grizzly bear. I’m not necessarily opposed to hunting, but that’s not the point here. The point is that of all the people Libin could have asked whether 300 (or even 500) grizzly bears, widely dispersed across the road-infested Eastern Slopes, constitutes a sustainable population, Quentin does not rank in the top 100. It’s rather like asking the Pope if Jesus was actually the Son of God. Or if a bear shits in the woods.
So, Libin picks and chooses his experts to support his implied hypothesis that grizzly bears in Alberta are either doing just fine or not worth recovering (it’s tough to tell which he would like us to believe). What about the “scientific information” he presents? Not surprisingly, there is a lot of picking and choosing in this department, too, which amounts to a whole lot of journalistic dishonesty.
Libin starts by characterizing pre-colonial Alberta as a veritable wasteland comprised of “bald prairie and swampland ... glaciers, muskeg and ... deserts” in an effort to convince his readers that “the province’s population of a few hundred ... may be natural.” How does he come to this conclusion? Because, he says, our estimates of historical populations are based on “anecdotal and theoretical evidence.” This isn’t to say he, or Kay, have better evidence, or that the “theoretical” evidence is wrong. It’s just that we can’t “prove” anything. Because “no one knows for certain.”
In actuality, grizzly bears evolved in the tundra plains south of the ice sheets in Eurasia, coming to North America in several waves between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. The first grizzlies to make it south of the ice sheets arrived in Alberta some 26,000 years ago. Over time, the Great Plains evolved to teem with the wildlife we are familiar with: vast herds of bison and elk, packs of wolves, grizzlies. The parkland in central Alberta would have provided suitable habitat, too, the boreal less so. But be certain: there were grizzlies in the unmountainous parts of Alberta, probably thousands of them.
But Libin enlists Kay, the expert, to help him make his case otherwise. It is interesting how Kay/Libin phrase their “opinion” of the historical numbers of grizzly bears in Alberta: “there is no evidence that the Alberta bears ever lived in large numbers away from the Rockies.” Again, this is correct in so far as the oversimplification goes. There is, in fact, no direct evidence for any particular number. We simply don’t have enough data. Kay prefers low numbers because he believes (rather than knows) that Aboriginal people had laid waste to wildlife populations before Europeans arrived. But there is no evidence, either, that there weren’t 100,000 grizzlies in Alberta at one time, although that is highly unlikely.
(There is no evidence, either, that focusing government policy on maximizing economic output and monetary wealth is in the best interests of Canadians or the rest of humanity, and yet we do so, despite the obvious social and environmental problems such a strategy causes, with a zealousness usually reserved for fundamentalist Christians and Islamic terrorists – with the gleeful applause of people like Libins and Cooper.)
I have considered the question of how many bears might have roamed Alberta and the rest of the Great Plains as I research and write a book about the Great Plains grizzly bear. After consulting with numerous scientists and a significant body of scientific literature, the scientific consensus seems to be that there were probably somewhere between 17,500 and 30,000 grizzlies on the Great Plains, perhaps 5000 to 10000 of which made their homes in Alberta (which also includes a significant amount of parkland and boreal forest). The point is that had Libin asked Dr. Herrero or Dr. Chris Servheen or Dr. David Mattson, who has considered this matter perhaps more than anyone else, he would have got a different but likely more reputable answer.
But the reality is that it doesn’t really matter how many there were in 1690, when Kelsey first spotted one in what is now southern Saskatchewan. Given Alberta policy, it seems clear that we are obligated, at the very least, to make sure they remain a healthy part of Alberta no matter how many there were 220 years ago and how many there are in the world around us.
Which is really the point. Not only how many bears are left, but how many bears we need to ensure that the population in Alberta “remains viable.” Not surprisingly, Libins picks what he wants and then leaves out some of the most important details. He does mention some good science, quoting one study, the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project, which Cooper and Libin’s other Fraser Institute buddies roundly panned in a similar spate of misinformation a few years ago. It found, as Libins noted, that the population under study was growing at an annual rate of four per cent.
What Libin doesn’t mention is that the study area was comprised largely of protected areas in K-Country and Banff National Park, which one would expect to harbour a growing population, hopefully faster than four percent. What he also doesn’t include, interestingly enough, was that the results of that study indicated that because the population was so small, it was one dead female per year away from a declining population, and this in a largely protected landscape. He also forgets to mention that much of the rest of the Eastern Slopes outside of protected areas is so criss-crossed with roads, and the mortality risk is so high, that very sophisticated and reliable computer models indicate that grizzly bears will be all but eliminated from much of their current range outside of Alberta’s protected areas.
He also fails to mention that, at the larger scale, some of the most cutting-edge DNA work on any wildlife species anywhere indicates that Alberta’s diminutive grizzly bear population (in the strictly bio-political sense of the term, to keep Cooper and Kay happy) is being split into several isolated sub-populations. Darcy Whiteside, one of many Nick Naylors working for the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development, contends that grizzlies move between Alberta and B.C. And they do. But I’ve heard from no reputable scientists (and Libin doesn’t provide a reference) that the number of bears immigrating into Alberta from elsewhere has been identified as “10 percent.”
We do know that grizzlies fairly regularly move back and forth across the continental divide south of Highway 1. But between Highway 1 and Highway 16, the continental divide is rugged enough to be an almost impermeable barrier to grizzly bear movement. And so are Highways 1, 11 and 16, which leaves two small populations of less than 100 animals each to fend for themselves in a heavily impacted landscape, which is about as far from sustainable as a grizzly bear population gets. (A recent study from Spain suggests that the minimum size of a viable population in the short term is 200 animals.)
I think that’s enough. You get the point. Even Libin and Cooper, if they dare read this, should be sufficiently cowed. Libin could have, if he’d chosen, to provide what journalist Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Instead, he crafted his ideologically derived pseudo-truth to serves the ideological purposes of his neoconservative clansmen (and, sadly, women).
The truthiest thing that Libin has to say is that recovering grizzlies will require not only slowing the rampant industrialization of Alberta’s forests and foothills, but the rehabilitation of the damage that has been wrought under this government’s 37-year reign. “This, most everyone agrees, is the real root of the province's wariness to rush to declare the grizzlies threatened.”
But it isn’t a lack of “firm evidence,” as Libin contends, that’s at the heart of the Alberta government’s foot-dragging. After all, we know from the Yellowstone experience how to recovery a grizzly bear population from the brink. No, it’s not an absence of facts, but an absence of integrity and a plethora of greed that prevents the ideologues in Edmonton from doing their job and protecting the grizzly bear from further decline. For to do so is to admit to the world that their Lorax-like industrialization of the Alberta landscape has left an almost incalculable environmental debt that we may never be able to repay.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Post would publish such drivel. The worst part, perhaps, is that the Alberta government, from Darcy Whiteside on up, has been complicit in the foot-dragging and the lies. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise either, given that Ted Morton, Minister of Sustainable Resource Development and former fellow at the Fraser Institute, has been part of the same disinformation campaign for years.
In an effort to set the record straight, I suggest you read any of several articles I have written on the fate of Alberta's grizzly bear.
Not surprisingly, the Post’s lengthy opinion piece on the grizzly issue was brilliantly crafted by Kevin Libin, the founding editor-in-chief of the Calgary-based Western Standard, a neoconservative/libertarian e-rag that unfortunately has a strong following in Alberta. I say brilliantly because Libin’s column, already making the rounds on the Internet, is an excellent example of how neoconservatives (especially) try to create “artificial or manufactured controversy” in an effort to undermine the influence of science on politicized issues that challenge corporatist hegemony in favour of such mundane things as human and environmental health.
What is surprising is that the Post would print Libin’s column as a piece of journalism when such works of “truthiness” are usually reserved for dishonest presidents, public relations firms and other artisans of the politically fanciful. Holocaust deniers, for instance, have been using this same strategy almost since the end of the Second World War.
Perhaps the most egregious example, at least until the politicization of climate change, is the one portrayed in the movie Thank You for Smoking. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the tobacco lobby literally created controversy over the now well-accepted causal link between cigarette smoking and cancer. According to an internal document from Brown and Williamson, a now-defunct American tobacco company: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won’t know what to believe.”
More recently, the oil, gas and coal industries – with the help of the neoconservative think tanks they continue to fund – have helped to create uncertainty around the cause, even the existence of climate change. According to the now famous memo from influential political strategist Frank Luntz, consultant to the U.S. Republican Party, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.... You need to be more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message.... If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.”
Let’s see how Libin does this in “Alberta’s Grizzly Debate.” Rather than interview and quote a reputable grizzly bear biologist or political ecologist who has been intimately involved in the Alberta recovery planning process – Gord Stenhouse, say, or Dr. Mark Boyce or Dr. Robert Barclay or Dr. Mike Gibeau or Dr. Michael Proctor – he relies on Barry Cooper, a fellow neoconservative and political scientist at the University of Calgary – and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute who has been involved in researching and writing contrarian studies on grizzly bears and climate change.
Cooper has written similar ideologically based op-eds of his own for the Calgary Herald and various other think tanks and conservative publications, all of which indicate he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about when it comes to grizzly bears, though he obviously knows a thing or two about how to manipulate public opinion.
Herein, Cooper suggests that there is “no such thing as an Alberta grizzly bear population,” which is correct as far as it goes. Bears, like butterflies and sparrows, don’t much care for our political divisions, and move across borders if they can. (More on that later.) What is absent from Cooper’s submission, however, is that wildlife in Canada are managed largely by the provinces, not the federal government.
While it is true there are some 50,000 grizzly bears in North America – and more than 100,000 in Europe and Asia – Mr. Cooper surely must know, as an esteemed expert in the “science” of all things political, that Section 3.1.1 of the Fish and Wildlife Policy for Alberta (1982) indicates that “…the primary consideration of the Government is to ensure that wildlife populations are protected from severe decline and that viable populations are maintained….” The government of Alberta, therefore, is obligated to ensure that a “viable” population of grizzly bears is maintained within the boundaries of the political jurisdiction of Alberta, whether or not there are a bazillion grizzly bears elsewhere.
For his token biologist, Libin chooses Dr. Charles Kay, a controversial figure whose contrarian views are often quoted by – you guessed it – the Fraser Institute and conservative newspapers in the North American West. Kay is to wildlife management, in other words, what Tim Ball is to climate change.
Again, Libin chooses to forego the expertise and excellent reputations of Dr. Stephen Herrero and the other biologists mentioned above. Why? Because Kay’s “opinion” adds another piece of “evidence” in Libin’s attempt to undermine the science and more commonly understood expert opinion on the history, status and future of Alberta’s grizzly bear population. And as you will see, it is purely for economic (i.e. ideological) reasons rather than ethical or ecological ones.
Then, astonishingly, he chooses Quentin Bochar to comment on whether Alberta’s grizzly bear population is “sustainable.” Bochar is not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination. He works in the oil and gas industry and is a quad-loving hunter and the president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association, who has publicly stated that he doesn’t want to give up his “right” to ride his motorized horse wherever he wants just for the chance to kill himself a grizzly bear. I’m not necessarily opposed to hunting, but that’s not the point here. The point is that of all the people Libin could have asked whether 300 (or even 500) grizzly bears, widely dispersed across the road-infested Eastern Slopes, constitutes a sustainable population, Quentin does not rank in the top 100. It’s rather like asking the Pope if Jesus was actually the Son of God. Or if a bear shits in the woods.
So, Libin picks and chooses his experts to support his implied hypothesis that grizzly bears in Alberta are either doing just fine or not worth recovering (it’s tough to tell which he would like us to believe). What about the “scientific information” he presents? Not surprisingly, there is a lot of picking and choosing in this department, too, which amounts to a whole lot of journalistic dishonesty.
Libin starts by characterizing pre-colonial Alberta as a veritable wasteland comprised of “bald prairie and swampland ... glaciers, muskeg and ... deserts” in an effort to convince his readers that “the province’s population of a few hundred ... may be natural.” How does he come to this conclusion? Because, he says, our estimates of historical populations are based on “anecdotal and theoretical evidence.” This isn’t to say he, or Kay, have better evidence, or that the “theoretical” evidence is wrong. It’s just that we can’t “prove” anything. Because “no one knows for certain.”
In actuality, grizzly bears evolved in the tundra plains south of the ice sheets in Eurasia, coming to North America in several waves between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. The first grizzlies to make it south of the ice sheets arrived in Alberta some 26,000 years ago. Over time, the Great Plains evolved to teem with the wildlife we are familiar with: vast herds of bison and elk, packs of wolves, grizzlies. The parkland in central Alberta would have provided suitable habitat, too, the boreal less so. But be certain: there were grizzlies in the unmountainous parts of Alberta, probably thousands of them.
But Libin enlists Kay, the expert, to help him make his case otherwise. It is interesting how Kay/Libin phrase their “opinion” of the historical numbers of grizzly bears in Alberta: “there is no evidence that the Alberta bears ever lived in large numbers away from the Rockies.” Again, this is correct in so far as the oversimplification goes. There is, in fact, no direct evidence for any particular number. We simply don’t have enough data. Kay prefers low numbers because he believes (rather than knows) that Aboriginal people had laid waste to wildlife populations before Europeans arrived. But there is no evidence, either, that there weren’t 100,000 grizzlies in Alberta at one time, although that is highly unlikely.
(There is no evidence, either, that focusing government policy on maximizing economic output and monetary wealth is in the best interests of Canadians or the rest of humanity, and yet we do so, despite the obvious social and environmental problems such a strategy causes, with a zealousness usually reserved for fundamentalist Christians and Islamic terrorists – with the gleeful applause of people like Libins and Cooper.)
I have considered the question of how many bears might have roamed Alberta and the rest of the Great Plains as I research and write a book about the Great Plains grizzly bear. After consulting with numerous scientists and a significant body of scientific literature, the scientific consensus seems to be that there were probably somewhere between 17,500 and 30,000 grizzlies on the Great Plains, perhaps 5000 to 10000 of which made their homes in Alberta (which also includes a significant amount of parkland and boreal forest). The point is that had Libin asked Dr. Herrero or Dr. Chris Servheen or Dr. David Mattson, who has considered this matter perhaps more than anyone else, he would have got a different but likely more reputable answer.
But the reality is that it doesn’t really matter how many there were in 1690, when Kelsey first spotted one in what is now southern Saskatchewan. Given Alberta policy, it seems clear that we are obligated, at the very least, to make sure they remain a healthy part of Alberta no matter how many there were 220 years ago and how many there are in the world around us.
Which is really the point. Not only how many bears are left, but how many bears we need to ensure that the population in Alberta “remains viable.” Not surprisingly, Libins picks what he wants and then leaves out some of the most important details. He does mention some good science, quoting one study, the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project, which Cooper and Libin’s other Fraser Institute buddies roundly panned in a similar spate of misinformation a few years ago. It found, as Libins noted, that the population under study was growing at an annual rate of four per cent.
What Libin doesn’t mention is that the study area was comprised largely of protected areas in K-Country and Banff National Park, which one would expect to harbour a growing population, hopefully faster than four percent. What he also doesn’t include, interestingly enough, was that the results of that study indicated that because the population was so small, it was one dead female per year away from a declining population, and this in a largely protected landscape. He also forgets to mention that much of the rest of the Eastern Slopes outside of protected areas is so criss-crossed with roads, and the mortality risk is so high, that very sophisticated and reliable computer models indicate that grizzly bears will be all but eliminated from much of their current range outside of Alberta’s protected areas.
He also fails to mention that, at the larger scale, some of the most cutting-edge DNA work on any wildlife species anywhere indicates that Alberta’s diminutive grizzly bear population (in the strictly bio-political sense of the term, to keep Cooper and Kay happy) is being split into several isolated sub-populations. Darcy Whiteside, one of many Nick Naylors working for the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development, contends that grizzlies move between Alberta and B.C. And they do. But I’ve heard from no reputable scientists (and Libin doesn’t provide a reference) that the number of bears immigrating into Alberta from elsewhere has been identified as “10 percent.”
We do know that grizzlies fairly regularly move back and forth across the continental divide south of Highway 1. But between Highway 1 and Highway 16, the continental divide is rugged enough to be an almost impermeable barrier to grizzly bear movement. And so are Highways 1, 11 and 16, which leaves two small populations of less than 100 animals each to fend for themselves in a heavily impacted landscape, which is about as far from sustainable as a grizzly bear population gets. (A recent study from Spain suggests that the minimum size of a viable population in the short term is 200 animals.)
I think that’s enough. You get the point. Even Libin and Cooper, if they dare read this, should be sufficiently cowed. Libin could have, if he’d chosen, to provide what journalist Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Instead, he crafted his ideologically derived pseudo-truth to serves the ideological purposes of his neoconservative clansmen (and, sadly, women).
The truthiest thing that Libin has to say is that recovering grizzlies will require not only slowing the rampant industrialization of Alberta’s forests and foothills, but the rehabilitation of the damage that has been wrought under this government’s 37-year reign. “This, most everyone agrees, is the real root of the province's wariness to rush to declare the grizzlies threatened.”
But it isn’t a lack of “firm evidence,” as Libin contends, that’s at the heart of the Alberta government’s foot-dragging. After all, we know from the Yellowstone experience how to recovery a grizzly bear population from the brink. No, it’s not an absence of facts, but an absence of integrity and a plethora of greed that prevents the ideologues in Edmonton from doing their job and protecting the grizzly bear from further decline. For to do so is to admit to the world that their Lorax-like industrialization of the Alberta landscape has left an almost incalculable environmental debt that we may never be able to repay.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Post would publish such drivel. The worst part, perhaps, is that the Alberta government, from Darcy Whiteside on up, has been complicit in the foot-dragging and the lies. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise either, given that Ted Morton, Minister of Sustainable Resource Development and former fellow at the Fraser Institute, has been part of the same disinformation campaign for years.
In an effort to set the record straight, I suggest you read any of several articles I have written on the fate of Alberta's grizzly bear.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Does Canmore need a grizzly zoo?
As if the ever-expanding town of Canmore wasn't already a bad example of how to co-exist with the natural world. Now some enterprising locals want to turn Cross Zee Ranch, on the town's northeast boundary, into a wildlife "conservation" center featuring five "trained" and "performing" bears.
According to the Calgary Herald, the bears would be housed in a 1.7-hectare enclosure on the ranch, which would become a "world-renowned centre for teaching conservation." Ruth Labarge, a wildlife trainer involved in the project, said shows would allow people to see live bears and learn about bear safety. "These bears are spokespersons for their wild brothers. Their drives and focuses are not like a real bear.... Our bears are like small children that enjoy performing, and their health issues are non-existent."
Do we really need another "conservation" zoo to teach us about bears? I doubt it. The facade of "education = conservation" for too long has been used to justify projects whose primary aim it to provide decent returns for their "investors." How can displaying (albeit captive-bred) wild animals in a town that has destroyed more grizzly bear habitat than your average gas field teach anyone about conservation? Isn't this rather like bombing for peace?
Besides, it is not more knowledge of bears -- never mind the chance to watch them "perform" like enslaved whores -- that will encourage our conservation of them. No, it is not how much (more) we know of them but how we choose to think of them that will determine whether or not Alberta's threatend grizzly bear will survive in the Bow Valley and the rest of Alberta's dwindling wilderness.
And how we choose to think of them is nothing more than taking a quiet moment and "simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me." (David Foster Wallace)
Preventing captive bears from becoming a defining element of Canmore's evolving gestalt may be one of the last opportunities to save the town's wayward soul. Please, take a moment to think about it.
According to the Calgary Herald, the bears would be housed in a 1.7-hectare enclosure on the ranch, which would become a "world-renowned centre for teaching conservation." Ruth Labarge, a wildlife trainer involved in the project, said shows would allow people to see live bears and learn about bear safety. "These bears are spokespersons for their wild brothers. Their drives and focuses are not like a real bear.... Our bears are like small children that enjoy performing, and their health issues are non-existent."
Do we really need another "conservation" zoo to teach us about bears? I doubt it. The facade of "education = conservation" for too long has been used to justify projects whose primary aim it to provide decent returns for their "investors." How can displaying (albeit captive-bred) wild animals in a town that has destroyed more grizzly bear habitat than your average gas field teach anyone about conservation? Isn't this rather like bombing for peace?
Besides, it is not more knowledge of bears -- never mind the chance to watch them "perform" like enslaved whores -- that will encourage our conservation of them. No, it is not how much (more) we know of them but how we choose to think of them that will determine whether or not Alberta's threatend grizzly bear will survive in the Bow Valley and the rest of Alberta's dwindling wilderness.
And how we choose to think of them is nothing more than taking a quiet moment and "simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me." (David Foster Wallace)
Preventing captive bears from becoming a defining element of Canmore's evolving gestalt may be one of the last opportunities to save the town's wayward soul. Please, take a moment to think about it.
Give Albertans a real chance
I was sitting here minding my own business yesterday when the CKUA news subjected me to the Alberta government's latest attempt to embarrass the people it represents. As if spending $25 million on a branding campaign to convince the rest of the world we're not what we are wasn't enough. Now they're trying to convince the rest of the world to follow our lead and not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
With the plaintive cry of a child who can't have any more candy, Alberta Energy Director of Communications Jason Chance complained that California's attempt to pass the U.S. 's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) "wasn't fair."
Alberta Energy's version of Nick Naylor (think: Thank You for Smoking), Chance was the mouthpiece for Alberta government officials in California this week wasting taxpayers' money (and political capital and international standing) trying to convince the state's air-quality regulator that banning carbon-heavy fuels singles out Canadian exports of oilsands-derived crude.
In a "historic vote," California's Air Resources Board passed the implementing regulations for the nation's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) by an overwhelming 9-1. This vote will put into action the LCFS first proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger as a key policy for meeting California's global warming goals. This precedent setting environmental policy will favor cleaner fuels over high carbon fuels such as Canadian tar sands, liquid coal and oil shale.
"Low carbon fuel standards are a critical complementary measure to a cap on global warming pollution," writes Liz Barrat-Brown, a senior attorney with NRDC. "The LCFS requires that the carbon content of fuels decline over the next decade, paving the way for lower carbon fuels, such as next generation biofuels, and other measures to reduce global warming pollution from our transportation sector.
"The approval of the California LCFS regulations gives a huge boost to efforts to pass a similar measure nationally. Today all eyes will turn to Washington D.C. where the House Energy and Commerce Committee will debate a national LCFS."
Despite Chance's ideologically motivated protests of "unfairness," the beauty of the LCFS is "it does not pick favorites," says Barrat-Brown. "Instead it provides a more level playing field for lower carbon fuels to compete against dirtier fuels. It does this by relying on a straight forward concept - determining how much carbon is embedded in the fuel through lifecycle assessment, an accounting measure that evaluates emissions from the production through to the combustion of a fuel."
How long is it going to take the dinosaurs in the Alberta legislature to realize that the world has changed? Despite the Alberta Tories' apparent apathy (if not outright disdain) for the environment around them, most of the rest of the world, including the U.S., our favourite trading partner and the world's most voracious consumer of oil, has decided that climate change is very real and very serious, and as such must be stopped with a vigour usually reserved for martial enemies.
“Let’s be clear,” Dr. David Keith prophesied last year. “A lot of Albertans, people who are members of APEGGA, for instance, the engineer and geophysicist group in Alberta, don’t believe that climate change is a problem, and quite a few members of our cabinet don’t believe it’s a problem. But what they believe doesn’t actually matter. We’re going to be regulated from the outside. The U.S. is moving [climate change] regulations through the House and the Senate that are very serious. Sometimes you may wish the world is one way. You may wish you don’t have a problem. But we do."
And as Keith points out, it's not just the environment Albertans should be concerned about. It's our entire economy: “I think people are frighteningly naive about what the impacts of this could be. Serious carbon regulation [in the U.S.] could have people walking away from their mortgages the way they did here in the early 1980s. Alberta needs to make some strategic investments to protect itself against carbon regulation, and ... right now, [the government is] just dropping the ball.”
Albertans could be global leaders in the fight against climate change, if only Premier Ed Stelmach would give us a different kind of chance -- one that involves honesty and integrity and transparency rather than shady PR campaigns and obstructionist government intervention.
With the plaintive cry of a child who can't have any more candy, Alberta Energy Director of Communications Jason Chance complained that California's attempt to pass the U.S. 's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) "wasn't fair."
Alberta Energy's version of Nick Naylor (think: Thank You for Smoking), Chance was the mouthpiece for Alberta government officials in California this week wasting taxpayers' money (and political capital and international standing) trying to convince the state's air-quality regulator that banning carbon-heavy fuels singles out Canadian exports of oilsands-derived crude.
In a "historic vote," California's Air Resources Board passed the implementing regulations for the nation's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) by an overwhelming 9-1. This vote will put into action the LCFS first proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger as a key policy for meeting California's global warming goals. This precedent setting environmental policy will favor cleaner fuels over high carbon fuels such as Canadian tar sands, liquid coal and oil shale.
"Low carbon fuel standards are a critical complementary measure to a cap on global warming pollution," writes Liz Barrat-Brown, a senior attorney with NRDC. "The LCFS requires that the carbon content of fuels decline over the next decade, paving the way for lower carbon fuels, such as next generation biofuels, and other measures to reduce global warming pollution from our transportation sector.
"The approval of the California LCFS regulations gives a huge boost to efforts to pass a similar measure nationally. Today all eyes will turn to Washington D.C. where the House Energy and Commerce Committee will debate a national LCFS."
Despite Chance's ideologically motivated protests of "unfairness," the beauty of the LCFS is "it does not pick favorites," says Barrat-Brown. "Instead it provides a more level playing field for lower carbon fuels to compete against dirtier fuels. It does this by relying on a straight forward concept - determining how much carbon is embedded in the fuel through lifecycle assessment, an accounting measure that evaluates emissions from the production through to the combustion of a fuel."
How long is it going to take the dinosaurs in the Alberta legislature to realize that the world has changed? Despite the Alberta Tories' apparent apathy (if not outright disdain) for the environment around them, most of the rest of the world, including the U.S., our favourite trading partner and the world's most voracious consumer of oil, has decided that climate change is very real and very serious, and as such must be stopped with a vigour usually reserved for martial enemies.
“Let’s be clear,” Dr. David Keith prophesied last year. “A lot of Albertans, people who are members of APEGGA, for instance, the engineer and geophysicist group in Alberta, don’t believe that climate change is a problem, and quite a few members of our cabinet don’t believe it’s a problem. But what they believe doesn’t actually matter. We’re going to be regulated from the outside. The U.S. is moving [climate change] regulations through the House and the Senate that are very serious. Sometimes you may wish the world is one way. You may wish you don’t have a problem. But we do."
And as Keith points out, it's not just the environment Albertans should be concerned about. It's our entire economy: “I think people are frighteningly naive about what the impacts of this could be. Serious carbon regulation [in the U.S.] could have people walking away from their mortgages the way they did here in the early 1980s. Alberta needs to make some strategic investments to protect itself against carbon regulation, and ... right now, [the government is] just dropping the ball.”
Albertans could be global leaders in the fight against climate change, if only Premier Ed Stelmach would give us a different kind of chance -- one that involves honesty and integrity and transparency rather than shady PR campaigns and obstructionist government intervention.
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