The Grizzly Blog

Battle for Breakfast (Excerpt #2)

2010-05-10T08:56:00.000-06:00

We pull over and climb the steep path onto a hillside that offers a spectacular view of the entire valley. At six o’clock on a May morning, the Lamar Valley is blissfully quiet. Through our spotting scopes, we see camouflaged elk browsing the high ridges on the far side of the valley. Closer to hand, Soda Butte Creek meanders through this wide, flat basin with the rhythmic beat of a metronome set slow. Big, dark bison crop new-growth grass on the far bank, and sandhill cranes stand stock-still in the shallows, hunting. Only a meadowlark dares break the stillness with its flutish song.

More than two dozen “watchers” bundle thick against the cool morning air for the chance to see a grizzly bear or a wolf. We are part of an annual pilgrimage to the mecca of accessible American wilderness. People journey here, hundreds of them, from all over Canada and the United States to answer a deep-seated desire to connect with wildness. For many, it has become an obsession.

“We’ve been comin’ here, oh, 15-odd years now,” says one of the watchers, a 74-year-old retired rancher named Les Smith, pointing to his wife, Clare. “We’ve watched [some of Yellowstone’s] bears since they was cubs.”

Among us, too, are the filmmakers, journalists and writers that have come for the media tour – some from as far away as Los Angeles, some from such prestigious magazines as Time. Several well-known wildlife biologists are also here to act as our guides and expert witnesses as we muddle our way through the biology and politics of grizzly bear conservation.

A shout breaks the still morning air. One of the watchers has spotted wolves. Four members of the Druid Peak pack trot west along Soda Butte Creek before huddling around a dark shape 500 metres from our vantage point. They have found the bison carcass and all lean down to rip and tug at what I imagine is frozen flesh. They take turns lifting their heads to survey the valley, looking and smelling for anything that might usurp their caloric bonanza.

A few minutes later, another shout announces a grizzly sow and her three yearling cubs lumbering eastward toward the wolves. The sow is dark brown, her guard hairs tipped with the grey-gold that gives these bears their “grizzled” look. Her cubs are the size of domestic dogs. They are all hungry.

Behind me, the biologists banter back and forth like mill workers arguing about which team will win the Stanley Cup. On one side are the “risk takers,” who think the sow, only recently out of the den and famished after a foodless winter, might just challenge the wolves for the much-needed protein. On the other side are the “risk avoiders,” who conclude (rather emphatically, it seems to me, given the uncertain circumstances) that the sow’s concern for the safety of her cubs will lead her to forsake the opportunity to pilfer the prize from the much smaller wolves. One voice confidently says that as an organic whole, a healthy wolf pack sits firmly atop the food chain here. They have been known to attack, even kill, grizzly bears.

I am astonished to learn that anything but a high-powered rifle or a speeding vehicle could kill a grizzly bear. After all, grizzly bears did win out over sabre-toothed tigers and a whole horde of fierce competitors who vanished when humans showed up in North America about 11,000 years ago. In fact, grizzlies arrived 15,000 years before humans; their bad tempers and poker-faced bluff charges allowed them to thrive in a world full of giant short-faced bears, American lions and packs of dire wolves much larger than this one. Less confident in my predictions than the scientists, I keep my thoughts to myself and just sit, watch and listen. Grizzlies are nothing if not resilient, though, so with quiet confidence I know I side with the bears.

At first it seems the “risk avoiders” are right about the mother bear’s caution. The sow and her cubs pass within 15 metres of the wolf-covered carcass, but it does not appear as though she intends to challenge the wolves. The grizzly doesn’t even seem to look at them as she waddles by, though the black wolf, his head hung low, watches her with a vigilance reserved for the wise or the fearful.

“See?” boasts the confident voice behind me. “I told you. No way. It’s too risky.”

As the word “risky” trails off into the wind, the sow whirls around and charges the wolves with the speed and intensity of a middle linebacker blitzing an unprotected quarterback, her cubs following close behind her. When she reaches the dark mound of dead bison, the wolves scatter like leaves in the wind. She climbs atop the carcass and whirls this way and that to face them, each wolf taking a turn to dart in and nip at her or grab a cub. She whirls and whirls, the cubs plastering themselves to their mother’s gyrating haunch, hoping she can fend off the wolves.

After a few swats of her giant paws, the wolves relent. They are patient, if nothing else, and there is time. They hunker down in the long grass to watch the grizzly quartet tear bright red flesh from white bones. She has won the carcass, at least for now.

Hunting for Grizzlies (Excerpt #1)

2010-05-07T09:23:00.001-06:00

This is the first of many short excerpts from The Grizzly Manifesto I will be posting until the official book launch on May 25.

Near Yellowstone National Park, 2001: I wake up in the cold and the dark of my Cooke City motel room, the air redolent of two-stroke oil and gasoline. Cooke City, on the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, is more village than city. Every winter it is overrun by thrill-seeking snowmobilers, some of whom had obviously used my room as a repair shop. I stumble around for the light switch and immediately put on a pot of coffee before hunting the oil-stained carpet for my clothes. It’s 5:23. I have seven minutes to get ready. We’re on the hunt for grizzlies.

Louisa Willcox had invited me to attend her annual media tour to learn about the plight of Yellowstone’s grizzlies, a population of 600 or so bears that has been listed as endangered since 1975. Now that the population has more than tripled in size, the US government wants to remove the protections afforded it by the US Endangered Species Act. Willcox believes, with the conviction of an evangelical preacher, that this move is a mistake.

As a lowly reporter at a weekly newspaper in Canmore, Alberta, I often covered the lives and deaths of grizzly bears in and around Banff National Park. Willcox, on the other hand, is the grande dame of grizzly bear conservation in North America. Thin and wiry-strong, the former monkey-wrencher and National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) guide has more energy than a wolverine. She has worked to protect Yellowstone’s grizzly bears for more than 25 years. When Willcox found out I often wrote about bears and the politics that decide their fates, she thought I should come down to witness what was happening in Yellowstone.

To my great dismay, I had learned the night before at the “meet and greet” that the best time to locate Yellowstone’s more mythical beasts is during the auroral hinge that joins night and day. Despite my vampire-like aversion to early morning wake-up calls, I manage to find my way into the parking lot before the last vehicle has left. I stumble into a red minivan driven by a genial documentary filmmaker from Bozeman, Montana. As we pull onto US 212 in the tepid daylight, I take a long pull on the coffee steaming from my travel mug. Ten minutes later, we are in the park. As we approach our destination – a roadside pullout near the carcass of a bison killed by wolves the day before – a coyote dashes across the road and a golden eagle glides insouciantly over the car. It feels like we are on an African safari.

The next excerpt – "Arrival of the Great Bear" – will appear
on Monday, May 10.

To order The Grizzly Manifesto in one, easy-to-hold-in-your-hands package, visit Rocky Mountain Books. Or you can wait until May 20, when it will be in your local bookstore. Thanks for your interest.

"My Canada doesn't include Alberta"

2010-04-13T15:11:00.001-06:00

I ran across a blog today that kind of turned the world on its head.

I often struggle with the fact I'm from Alberta, which is one of the least progressive, least sustainable, least environmentally friendly places on the earth. And yet it's part of Canada, which, despite some similar problems of its own, still has a lot going for it.

Back to the blog. After reading an article in Explore Magazine about the slaughter of wild horses in Alberta, the anonymous blogger wrestles with the same demons for awhile and then declares: "Yes, I'm proud to be Canadian. But my Canada doesn't include Alberta."

Have a look for yourself. It's quite brilliant.

The Grizzly Bear Manifesto Word Cloud

2010-04-12T18:47:00.003-06:00

Albertans, not just grizzly bears, need Knight in shining armour

2010-04-10T17:07:00.002-06:00

Today, Calgary Herald columnist Robert Remington suggested that "the optics give the distinct impression the Alberta government is not serious about protecting the iconic grizzly, as evidenced by its decade of dithering over listing the grizzly as a threatened species, contrary to the recommendations of its own advisers and scientists.

"One would think that Knight would want to live up to his title as the sustainable resources minister, as one national newspaper so wryly editorialized recently, but he shows the typical Alberta government inability to make a bold decision with his continued waffling on a threatened status for the grizzly, even when that decision should be a snap in the face of the evidence."

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mr. Remington's "impression" is bang on, though I would suggest that it is much more than just a matter of "optics." The evidence of mismanagement goes far beyond the government's dithering on the decision to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species. So far, there is plenty of evidence that the government has no intention of implementing the various strategies set out in the recovery plan it adopted in 2009. In fact, even a cursory reading of the plan indicates that the government has not invested the human and financial resources the plan stipulates would be necessary (see pages 39-42).

The real reason that Minister Knight and his predecessors -- Ted Morton and Mike Cardinal -- haven't taken any meaningful steps to recover grizzly bears is because to do so means a wholesale change in the way they manage the landscape. In fact, an entire library of scientific research conducted over the last two decades indicates that it would likely be impossible to honour all the current Forest Management Agreements and oil and gas leases on the books today and recover grizzly bears. (Click here for one example.) The two are simply incompatible; current and future levels of development will not allow us to maintain grizzly bears in Alberta outside of national parks. This would seem to be in direct contravention of Alberta's legislation and policy, and the overwhelming wishes of the citizenry.

Of course, the impacts of such unsustainable levels of development won't stop with grizzly bears. It will also extirpate mountain caribou, decrease the number of elk and other species that hunters value, and significantly decrease the quantity and degrade the quality of the clean and abundant water that is the foundation of our society.

Believe it or not, listing the grizzly bear as a threatened species will do little to benefit Alberta's grizzly bears. Because Alberta doesn't have species-at-risk legislation, the listing of the grizzly bear as "threatened" does not require the government to do anything: hunters could still shoot threatened grizzlies and unsustainable levels of industrial activity could still take place in critical grizzly bear habitat, which (as Mr. Remington points out) is the real death knell for Alberta's grizzly bears. However, listing the iconic grizzly bear as a threatened species would be a symbolic act, a formal recognition of a much bigger problem.

Like canaries in coal mines, the grizzly bear is warning us about our overzealous industriousness. We simply cannot continue to treat our foothills and forests, our mountains and our valleys, like factories that churn out products and profits for us to consume like locusts. Alberta, it seems, is The Lorax made manifest.

As Mr. Knight's boss, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, often likes to say, we must balance the needs of the economy with the needs of the environment on which we all depend. When Premier Stelmach invokes this phrase, it's usually a cliche meant to justify further industrial development. We need our legal and political systems to reflect the opposite, that economic activity must take place within the very real limits that nature imposes on us. There is no more room for industrial development in the Eastern Slopes, Swan Hills and other places that support grizzly bears and clean water. In fact, we have a long road ahead of us just to repair the damage that the Tory's populist politics have inflicted on our province.

It's not just grizzly bears but all Albertans who need leadership from Mr. Knight. If we are to maintain the things we value in this province -- grizzly bears, clean and abundant water, healthy fisheries and game populations -- we are going to have to make hard decisions about how much more of the landscape we can industrialize and urbanize. We also need stronger legislation to protect these values, and we need a far greater degree of transparency in our democracy.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get busy.

For more information on the politics of grizzly bear conservation (not to mention a great read), pick up The Grizzly Manifesto at your local bookshop in May. Visit the The Grizzly Manifesto webpage to learn more and read an excerpt.

Says Sid Marty, "Gailus delivers a left hook to Parks Canada's bogus claims to put conservation ahead of tourist development, and gives a well deserved right cross to our cynical Alberta Government, which seems bent on letting grizzly bears blink out into oblivion. If you care about wild bears and wild lands, read this book."

Minister Knight, will you please stand up and take responsibility for your actions

2010-04-08T19:01:00.004-06:00

One of the first things my parents taught me as a young lad growing up in Alberta was to take responsibility for my actions. So when I, as a five-year-old, went next door with a friend of mine and broke every window in my neighbour's two-story playhouse, I had to pay to clean up my mess.

I remember sitting on the thinly carpeted basement floor with my angry father, emptying my two-foot-tall Santa Claus piggy bank onto the floor in our basement. It was all the money I had in the world, and I had just invested it in learning a very important lesson: Either don't make a mess in the first place, or be prepared to clean it up when you do.

I always thought it couldn't get any worse than former Alberta Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mike Cardinal, who once explained to the CBC that "natural resources had to be developed because natural resources had to be developed." This was in response to a news story about the killing of a famous grizzly bear near Hinton. Her name was Mary, and she had been poached from a road and left to rot by someone who apparently didn't much care for grizzly bears and all that they represent. The journalist had done her homework and knew that too many roads were the problem, so she had asked Minister Cardinal about the situation in Alberta. He said then that roads weren't a problem, and besides, they were here to stay because natural resources had to be developed because natural resources had to be developed. Such is the logic here in Alberta.

Now Minister Knight in Shining Spin has to deal with the enviromental debt racked up by Minister Cardinal and the rest of his Tory antecedents, who are intent on turning every hecatre of Alberta forest into money just as fast as they can. For more than thirty years now, the Tory government has allowed unrestricted forestry and oil and gas development to destroy Alberta's mountain, foothills and boreal ecosystems. What little is left of them are the only places left for grizzly bears to live, and Knight knows better than anyone that he's been left to clean up the mess made by his Tory cronies.

Like his outbursts toward anti-tar sands advocates, he's sounding a little frustrated these days. Today he suggested that conservation groups should help fund government efforts to protect grizzly bears. “They’re keen in buying advertising, maybe they could think of a better way to use that money,” he told The Calgary Sun.“If they felt that $150,000 wasn’t enough, perhaps they’d like to bring some contributions to the table.”

I'm not sure what political science courses Mr. Knight took in university, but he seems to forget that it's HIS responsibility to manage the provincial budget so that he can afford to pay for wildlife management and, when he and his Tory bedfellows don't plan very well, to recovery species that they've pushed to the edge of extirpation.

There's only one way for Mr. Knight to ensure that grizzly bears remain a part of Alberta's cultural and natural heritage. Grizzly bears can only survive in areas with very low road densities, and the road densities in Alberta's grizzly bear habitat are off the charts thanks to the Tory's policy of unregulated industrial development.

Knight and his SRD minions have tried to trick Albertans into believing that the government can recover grizzly bears (and caribou) by "bar[ring] access to roads built in sensitive areas," but such promises are nothing more than pipedreams. For one thing, trying to make ammends in a few "sensitive areas" is not going to recover grizzly bears. That would have been like me replacing one of the two dozen windows I had broken and calling it good. If grizzlies are to be saved in this province, it will require a hell of a lot more work (and money) than that.

The other hole in Knight's pipedream promises is that there is no way to "bar access" to enough of the tens of thousands of kilometres of roads and trails and cutlines that criss-cross western and northern Alberta. It just can't be done. When the U.S. government started its grizzly bear recovery program, it tried to do just what Mr. Knight wished he could do. But they couldn't. It just cost too much money to put armed guards at the entrance to every road 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So they just removed the roads and didn't build any more.

Our American neighbours invented what used to be everywhere and called them "roadless areas." That's right Mr. Knight: other politicians, with the same pressures to provide ordinary people with jobs and rich people with more of what they already have too much of, choose to make sure a good deal of the land they oversee has NO ROADS. Why, just today, The Denver Post wrote an editorial supporting a government plan to keep 4.2 million acres of public land free of roads. That's 17,000 square kilometres, Mel, the size of Banff and Jasper national parks combined. In a state roughly one-third the size of Alberta. Closer to home, Montana has more than 20,000 square kilometres of roadless areas.

They do this because they know that it is unhealthy and unwise to road, timber, drill, mine and otherwise make a mess of every square inch of your backyard. If you do, wildlife populations disapper, water quality and quantity declines, and soil begins to fill your streams, destroying fisheries. Roadlesss areas help to protect all of these things, which Albertans have said over and over and over again that they value. And you and your people just ignore us and continue flushing it all down the toilet.

And now you want Alberta's grossly unfunded environmental groups to pay to clean up your mess? You've got to be kidding.

Let's make no bones about it: The Alberta Tories have made a huge mess and it will cost them millions of dollars every year from now until my daughter is an old woman to fix it.

The first thing they can do, of course, is stop building more roads in the first place, but as I pointed out in an earlier post, Mr. Knight's ministry is at this very moment allowing Foothills Forestry Products (and probably Weldwood too) to build an ecologically unsutainable network of roads in core grizzly bear habitat, even though Alberta's grizzly bear recovery plan stipulates that it's not allowed.

Once they've stopped building more roads, they can get out their wallets and start paying to clean up the mess they have made. Now that we're all in the business of telling other people how to spend their money, here's a few suggestions for No-Money Mel.

Stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry to the tune of millions of dollars every year.
Charge more royalties for the trees and oil and gas that you're giving away to the corporations that are destroying our forests and wetlands.
And if that doesn't work, why don't you and your fellow MLAs, who are after all the ones calling the shots, just take it out of your pensions?

After all, it's your mess, and you're going to have to clean it up somehow. Got a piggy bank?

Read more about the Torie's failure to make room for grizzly bears in Alberata in The Grizzly Manifesto.

Grizzly bear recovery in Alberta a "sham"

2010-04-06T15:02:00.003-06:00

Albertans (and Canadians as a whole) should be very concerned about the Alberta government's disengenuos approach to grizzly bear recovery. Like oil-addicted Pinnochios, Alberta politicians and bureaucrats tout their successful efforts to responsibly manage and recover Alberta's beleaguered grizzly bear population when nothing could be further from the truth.

The latest sign of spin was on April 3, when Minister of (un)Sustainable Resource Development Mel Knight told CBC National, “We see success with these programs, and we’re going to continue to operate these programs.”

The programs to which he refers have done nothing to recover Alberta's grizzly bear population. While the government has adopted a recovery plan and drawn up maps of core grizzly bear habitat, little if anything has improved on the ground in the eight years since Alberta's Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species.

In fact, neither of SRD's two webpages devoted to grizzly bear management and recovery even mentions what the government's recent status report calls the single most important aspect of grizzly bear conservation and recovery: limiting road density and motorized access into grizzly bear habitat.

Not surprisingly, things have actually gotten worse over the last eight years. During a recent Google search, I discovered that Knight's Ministry of Sustained Untruths recently approved a Forest Management Plan that ignores its own grizzly recovery plan and puts grizzly bears at greater risk of extirpation. The plan is for the E8 Forest Management Area, which is located just south of Knight's electoral riding, in one of the most productive grizzly bear population units in the province.

Despite the fact that nearly all of the E8 Forest Management Area has been designated core grizzly bear habitat, the forest management plan allows Foothills Forest Products to exceed the road density thresholds for core habitat as stipulated by the grizzly recovery plan. The density of roads that Foothills Forest Products will build over the next 10 years likely will not allow grizzly bears to persist in this area.

The government also brags about its supposed Bear Smart Program, but it is really nothing more than a website and a few pamphlets. The government claims to spend $150,000 a year on its Bear Smart Program, but this insufficient token is nothing compared to the millions of dollars the Alberta government spends every year on other publicly funded education programs.

The only real Bear Smart improvements in Alberta communities (like Canmore) have been because of the commitment and hard work of local citizens, and have very little to do with the efforts of Minister Knight and his SRD minions. This is something that George Hamilton, priority species manager with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, admitted at a 2008 forestry workshop I attended and wrote about (read Bearly With Us).

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that even if Minister Knight in Shining Spin does decide to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species, the decision will afford no protection whatsoever to our grizzly bears. Unlike any other place on the planet, the Alberta government could still allow hunters to kill threatened grizzly bears. And Knight will almost certainly allow forestry and oil and gas companies to continue to build roads and otherwise destroy the critical habitat on which Alberta's grizzly bear depends.

The good news is that not everyone's a two-faced L*@!. The only honest spokesperson in Alberta's Ministry of Species Extinction appears to be its priority species manager, the aforementioned George Hamilton, who told The Edmonton Journal that, in fact, "the Alberta government has finally decided that it does not want to recover grizzlies."

As for investing enough money into the actual recovery of Alberta's grizzly bears, well, Mel Knight, a senior politician in one of the wealthiest jurisdictions on the planet, told CBC that those nasty conservation groups should foot the bill. Nothing like passing the buck, Mel!

Want more details? Look for The Grizzly Manifesto on store shelves in mid-May.

"Brack Country" earns honourable mention

2010-03-20T12:33:00.000-06:00

Have a look at Canada's only inland salt water marsh!

Divided and Diminished: A Requiem for the Grizzly Bear

2010-03-17T08:11:00.004-06:00

Canada is the second largest country in the world, one that most people perceive as a vast and well-managed wilderness. However, increasing levels of industrial development, such as the tar sands and the Mackenzie Natural Gas Pipeline, is fragementing Canada's forests and wetlands into a "divided and diminished" shadow of its former self.

David Quammen, in Song of the Dodo, uses the metaphor of a Persian carpet being hacked to piece. "Let's start indoors. Let's start by imagining a fine Persian carpet and a hunting knife. The carpet is twelve feet by eighteen, say. That gives us 216 square feet of continuous woven material. Is the knife razor sharp? If not, we hone it. We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, total them up--and find that, lo, there's still nearly 216 square feet of recognizably carpet like stuff. But what does it amount to? Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart."

Today, New York Times columnist Olivia Judson published an insightful piece about the impacts of our propensity to fragment terrestrial ecosystems into worthless little pieces: "Small islands are simpler, less ecologically interesting places than big islands. When we break up rainforests or steppes, or build roads through pristine landscapes, we start to fray the fabric of nature. We may not see the full impact today, tomorrow, or next year. But we know what the long-term effects will be. By fraying nature we make the planet a simpler, duller, diminished place."

Nowhere is this happening faster and more ruthlessly than in Alberta, where the grizzly bear teeters on the edge of the proverbial abyss.

How do we turn science into policy in a timely way?

2010-02-05T08:48:00.005-07:00

We consider ourselves to be rational beings with a fondness for "facts" derived from scientific research. And yet when it comes to public policy, it often takes decades for these "facts" to influence the way politicians make decisions in the public interest.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times indicates that we've known for 80 years that repeated concussions in professional athletes who box or play football can lead to hemorrhages and long-term brain damage. A 1928 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association warned that “There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages. ... The condition can no longer be ignored by the medical profession or the public.”

This warning was ignored for 80 years, and it's only this season that the N.F.L., for instance, issued new rules limiting players with head injuries from returning to the field. Why? Probably a whole lot of institutionalized denial. Like the tobacco industry, the NFL chose to run and hide from the problem rather than look out for the best interest of its players by addressing it as quickly as possible.

Even after the N.F.L. finally conceded that concussions “can lead to long-term problems,” one of the league’s longtime brain injury experts, Dr. Ira Casson, told a Congressional panel that there is not enough “valid, reliable or objective scientific evidence” showing that repeated blows to the head could cause permanent brain damage.

Sound familiar? The biggest example of the "denial strategy" is climate change. We've known since at least 1895 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the earth. And yet here we are, in 2010, 115 years later, still failing to put together a global climate change strategy that will meaningfully reduce GHG emissions enough to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change. Why? Perceived corporate self-interest defaulted to denial in response to calls for change.

So we shouldn't be surprised that Alberta's supposedly "science-based" grizzly bear recovery plan doesn't utilize even the most basic scientific understanding about how to recover ailing grizzly bear populations. For at least 20 years we've known that the minimum amount of secure core habitat needed to protect and recover grizzly bears is approximately 57 to 68 per cent of the recovery area (Mace et. al 1996, Mace and Manley 1993, Mattson and Haroldson 1985). Basically, this means that 57 to 68 per cent of the landscape needs to be managed at road densities at or below 0.6 kilometres per square kilometre.

What did the Alberta recovery plan stipulate after eight years of delay? That only 20 per cent of the recovery area be managed as core habitat, a far cry from the thresholds scientists have told us are necessary. In fact, if the recovery plan were ever actually implemented, secure core grizzly bear habitat would be approximately 50 per cent less than it is today.

This problem is not unique to Alberta. According to How much is enough? The recurrent problem of setting measurable objectives in conservation, over a quarter of the recovery plans for federally threatened and endangered species in the U.S. set quantitative recovery objectives at or below the species' existing population size or number of populations (Tear and colleagues, 1993, 1995). These objectives are likely low because they were politically palatable (Scott et al. 1995).

Deciding where grizzly bears will be allowed to survive in Alberta is a socio-political issue to be sure. But hiding behind a recovery plan based on false optimism and/or outright deceit will only result in further declines in grizzly bears and public trust in government. Let's at least put the facts on the table and make conscious decisions based on the best available information. That's not only good for grizzly bears, it's good for governance.

How much is enough to conserve grizzly bears?

2010-02-04T12:45:00.007-07:00

A new report by released a consortium of environmental organizations suggests that fifty per cent of the landbase needs to be managed for conservation in light of the threats posed by our warming climate.

Authored by senior forest ecologist Dr. Jim Pojar, A New Climate for Conservation states that intact forests play key roles in storing carbon, mitigating climate impacts and conserving biodiversity. The report calls on the B.C. government to implement a climate conservation strategy that includes managing at least 50 per cent of the province's land base for these objectives.

“A minimum conservation target of 50 per cent is what's necessary to give our plants and animals a fighting chance to adapt while also keeping and drawing more carbon out of the atmosphere so that over time, we can slow and reduce climate change,” Pojar told The Globe and Mail recently.

Although some people may find the number — 50 per cent! — rather large, it really should not come as a surprise, and it likely applies to most of Canada, not just B.C. Numerous reports and studies have suggested that even without considering the impacts of climate change, reducing the egregious rate of biodiversity loss we're experiencing will require the protection or conservation management of much more land (and water) than we are today.

Svancara and colleagues (2005), for instance, showed that while policy-based approaches are very close to achieving the well-known (but largely politically expedient) target of protecting 10 to 12 per cent of the landbase, evidence-based approaches called for targets between 30.6 and 41.6 per cent. (See How much is enough? The recurrent problem of setting measurable objectives in conservation.)

Relatively successful efforts to recover grizzly bears in the United States suggests that 68 per cent of the landbase must be managed for the needs of grizzly bears. This largely depends on managing road densities where grizzly bears are to be allowed to persist. (See Roads Kill: Grizzly Bears and the Effects of Human Access for more information.)

Alberta, where grizzly bears have been recognized as a threatened species, has a long way to go to reach these targets. Given that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, there's no better time to start than now.

The Grizzly Manifesto

2010-02-02T13:30:00.005-07:00

Well, it's finally happening.

In May 2010, my first book, The Grizzly Manifesto, will be published by Rocky Mountain Books. It is not the first book about bears I started, but it is the first one to see its way into print, and given the importance of the subject matter – namely, grizzly bear conservation in western North America – I’ll be embarking on a book and media tour shortly after its release.

This book is unique, I think, because it blends all that’s special and important about grizzly bears with my personal experiences as a journalist and conservationist. I've spent much of the last ten years learning about the people and political processes that are supposed to preserve grizzly bears and the habitat on which they depend. Sadly, the system seems terribly broken and ineffective, especially in Canada. As it's name suggests, it also provides a blueprint of sorts that will prevent the grizzly’s decline and possible disappearance if we don't change our ways.

The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of humanity’s growing appetite for natural resources — and of the difficulty our wealth-addicted society has in changing its ways.

North America’s grizzlies survived the arrival of spear-wielding humans 13,000 years ago, outlived the short-faced bear, the dire wolf and the sabre-tooth cat—not to mention mastodons, mammoths and giant ground sloths the size of elephants—but a growing wave of urbanization and industrialization continues to push the Great Bear further north and west, just as it has since Europeans arrived in its home 400 years ago.

Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears’ decline in Canada continues largely unchecked. The front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.

I’m hoping to partner with conservation organizations, independent bookstores, and/or universities/colleges in major towns and cities in both the U.S. and Canada. Potential stops include Jackson Hole, Bozeman, Missoula, Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, Jasper, Canmore, Banff, Vancouver, Victoria, and even Seattle. If (you or someone you know) might be interested in helping organize an event in your area in May/June/July, please contact me for more information.

Blue Plate Special

2009-05-18T10:12:00.002-06:00

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.

A safe world for our precious children

2009-05-09T10:35:00.006-06:00

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?

Waiting, waiting, waiting ... gone

2009-05-08T09:23:00.005-06:00

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.

Shoot at will, there are plenty of grizzlies

2009-05-04T21:35:00.004-06:00

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.

Fooling the people won't work forever

2009-05-02T09:39:00.010-06:00

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.

The semantics of successful grizzly bear recovery in Alberta

2009-05-01T10:24:00.007-06:00

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.

- 30 -

Creating Doubt 101

2009-04-28T17:40:00.007-06:00

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.

Does Canmore need a grizzly zoo?

2009-04-25T14:03:00.004-06:00

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.

Give Albertans a real chance

2009-04-25T13:02:00.008-06:00

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.

To hunt or not to hunt?

2006-03-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

As the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service defends its proposal to delist grizzlies in the Yellowstone recovery area, and Wyoming drools over the return of hunting the Great Bear, Alberta suspends its own much-coveted spring hunt. Here is a quick and dirty analysis of why it was the only answer to a complex problem.

As predicted, rhetoric about the impact of hunting on the Alberta grizzly bear population started to fly as freely as fur in a catfight when the government suspended the spring hunt in early March. Despite disparate opinions, and the complexity of the issue, the significance and righteousness of suspending the spring grizzly bear hunt are pretty clear.

(I should point out right off the top that I am not opposed to people hunting grizzly bears. I wouldn't do it, of course, and I think in many ways it's deplorable, but we live in a complex society where many different values need to coexist. If some people want to get off by hunting bears, then so be it--as long as the population is large enough and healthy enough to sustain itself and absorb the extra mortality.)

First, just for fun, let's review the government's rationale for hunting grizzly bears, which I began to do in a previous post ("David Coutts’ Top 8 reasons to continue the grizzly hunt"). These reasons include the fact that the government believes there is a "small annual surplus of male bears" available to hunt, which I already addressed in that post as hogwash, and which the latest DNA-based population estimates have only served to corrobrate. So, Strike One.

What of the other reasons? According to the government's website, these include: that the population growth rate is potentially increased by killing adult males that kill and eat young grizzlies; that hunting helps reduce problem bears by killing those that are least wary and most likely to become nuisances; that hunted populations are more wary of people and therefore more likely to avoid undesirable interactions with humans; that hunting harvest provides information about bears (e.g., data on distribution and age); that hunting maintains a knowledgeable group of people who are strong advocates for Alberta's grizzly population; that hunters, through licence fees, contribute financially to conservation and management of grizzlies; and that there is a long-standing hunting tradition and a high demand.

You can add to this list the recent comment, made by SRD Minister David Coutts in a Pincher Creek Post article, about why hunting grizzly bears is important. Said Coutts, “The hunt has always been part of bear management in this province. It helps get rid of older bears, particularly the boars that may have diseases and leave the females.” The first part of this statement is true, of course, but doesn't in and of itself provide a rationale for hunting grizzly bears. The second part is sheer nonsense and hardly deserves a comment. So, Strike Two.

None of the government's other rationale is based in fact, except perhaps that "hunting harvest provides information about bears (e.g., data on distribution and age)" and that "there is a long-standing hunting tradition and a high demand." While hunting may provide limited information at no cost to the government, it is also contributing to the decline of the species as it does so. Rather like shooting passenger pigeons by the millions so you can count them while they fall. I'll admit that hunting, around for at least 11,000 years, is a long-standing tradition in Alberta, but I'm not sure that 2500 (the approximate number of people who applied for a hunting tag) is "high demand," at least not compared to the 20,000+ that have sent Premier Klein a letter asking him to suspend the hunt. While I will assess no strike here, these seem like pretty weak arguments to want to hunt grizzly bears.

Indeed, available scientific information directly contradicts most of the government's other claims. A recent paper by Robert Wielgus and others biologists tested and rejected the hypothesis that the mortality of adult males in the sport hunt resulted in increased production and survival of young bears. Instead, the research suggested that the mortality of resident adult males actually resulted in increased immigration by other potentially infanticidal males, which in turn increased segregation between males and females, reducing reproduction, population growth, and persistence. Strike Three.

There is no evidence, either, that hunting keeps bears wary and people safe. Indeed, this doesn't really make sense if you think about it: One, the bears that are killed in the hunt die, so they are unable to learn anything about the lethality of people or pass that knowledge on to their offspring. Two, the bears that are killed by hunters are in remote places that are distant from human communities. These bears likely are already wary and are, in fact, the "good" bears; the "problem" bears live close to and frequent places like Blairmore and Canmore and Hinton, and are not subject to hunting. So, Strikes Four and Five.

Does the hunt "maintain a knowledgeable group of people who are strong advocates for Alberta's grizzly population"? While I know many, many conservation-oriented hunters, none of them would even think of hunting grizzly bears. The Alberta Fish and Game Association, on the other hand, ostensibly the (very influential) lobby group representing the hunting community in Alberta, has continually exaggerated the number of grizzly bears in the province and lobbied to continue hunting a potentially threatened species, (based on many of the same reasons I've discredited here). And I guarantee that the vast majority of the people who sent those 20,000+ letters to the premier do not hunt grizzlies. Steee-rrrriiiike Six

Hunters, through licence fees, do contribute financially to conservation and management of grizzlies, but the amount ($30,000) is so miniscule as to be inconsequential. So Strike Seven.

In the end, the only valid reason to hunt grizzly bears (at least as presented by the provincial government) is because, well, we've always hunted grizzly bears. But like the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage, things change, often for the better. Now that we've determined there's no moral or biological imperative to continue to hunt grizzlies, let's move on to the impact of the hunt to date.

It's not as easy a question to answer as it might appear. In terms of the actual number of bears killed by hunters, it is relatively small. The accepted "estimate" of the number of grizzlies in Alberta by almost all biologists (if not the government) is about 500. The average number of grizzlies killed in the sport hunt in the last four years is 15, which I think is consistent for the last 10-15 years. This is 3 percent of the population. The well-established sustainable/acceptable rate of human-caused morality is 6 percent, so hunting-related mortality is well below that threshold.

The trouble is, many other grizzly bears die as a result of other human causes (habituated animals that have to be killed, trains/cars, poaching, self-defense, etc...). In each of the last 4 years, an average of 17.5 grizzlies was KNOWN to have been killed by other causes. This is 3.5 percent of the population. In addition to this, scientific research indicates that twice as many grizzlies bears are killed (by poachers, trains, etc...) than we ever know about (see, for instance, "Rates and Causes of Grizzly Bear Mortality in the Interior Mountains of Western North America," by Bruce McLellan). So, add another 17.5 grizzlies to the total of dead bears, on average, each year. This brings us to a total, on average, of 50 dead grizzlies every year, a human-caused mortality rate of 10 percent, way above the acceptable limit. If we subtract the sport hunt mortalities, the death rate becomes 7 percent, much closer to the acceptable threshold.

So, why suspend the sport hunt and not try to reduce other sources of mortality? The sport hunt is easy to deal with--you just don't allow it--and it doesn't cost a lot of money. The revenue from the sport hunt is something like $35,000, which likely doesn't even cover the cost of administrating it. So the government loses $35,000 but doesn't have to spend any money to either adminitrate or eliminate the hunt.

The other sources of mortality, on the other hand, are much more difficult and expensive to control. Bear-proof waste management systems would prevent deaths caused by habituated bears in communities, but would cost tens of thousands of dollars per community to implement. The only way that has been demonstrated to effectively reduce other sources of mortality is to limit access to grizzly bear habitat, by limiting/reducing the number of roads. This prevents people from going everywhere, and gives grizzly bears secure places to which they can retreat when people are around. But given the number of dirt and gravel roads the government has allowed to permeate Alberta's grizzly habitat, this would cost millions of dollars to do. So, the bottom line is the government just isn't willing to spend that kind of money just to keep grizzly bears around.

While the sport hunt isn't the only cause of grizzly bear mortality, it is the easiest (and cheapest) to control, and allowing it to continue would have a very detrimental impact on a species that reproduces very slowly. So kudos to the government for realizing that its rationale for continuing the hunt was very weak, and that the available evidence supported stopping it.

Of course, the real issue is not the hunt but habitat protection. Read my features in the April 2006 issue of Avenue Magazine and in the December 2005 issue of AlbertaViews Magazine on that and other issues surrounding Alberta's threatned grizzly bear.

If Yellowstone’s the perfect model, why aren’t we following it?

2006-03-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

The Calgary Herald editorial applauding the provincial government’s “prudent” (if somewhat tardy) decision to suspend the spring grizzly bear hunt last week (“Prudence rules in grizzly decision,” March 5, 2006) is just the latest indication of wide-spread public support for grizzly bear conservation in Alberta. Unfortunately, it also is indicative of a misunderstanding about the status of Alberta’s “threatened” grizzly bear population and the means by which it can be successfully recovered.

As the Herald editorial recognizes, and as I have written in numerous magazine articles and opinion pieces, grizzly bear recovery in and around Yellowstone National Park is the best model for Alberta to follow. Indeed it is the only example in the world of actually beginning to recover a grizzly bear population in decline. Over the last 20 years, wildlife management officials have watched the population triple from about 200 animals to almost 600, and now they are debating whether to remove the Yellowstone grizzly from the threatened species list and re-open a hunting season on the Great Bear.

But this success has had very little to do with suspending the hunt or counting bears. No, the Yellowstone success story is based on limiting human activity in grizzly bear habitat. Just ask Dr. Charles Schwartz. He is one of two experts who the Alberta government has turned to for advice on their recovery efforts. Dr. Schwartz is the leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, which conducts research used in the recovery of the threatened grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The GYE, as it is known, is an area the size of Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay national parks combined. Half of it is protected as Yellowstone National Park and the other half is what we call “the working landscape.” Dr. Schwartz’s advice? Don’t put too much faith in the suspension of the hunt to give Alberta’s grizzlies a fresh start.

“‘Regulated hunting’ and ‘sustainable harvests’ are not the ‘cause’ of grizzly bear declines in Alberta,” he wrote in a recent review of Alberta’s draft grizzly bear recovery plan. “Closing hunting seasons gives the false impression to the public that all will be well for the bears if hunting is stopped. Hunting is in fact a very minor symptom of a much greater erosion of habitat by humans.”

According to Dr. Schwartz, it is not even necessary to know exactly how many grizzly bears there are everywhere in the province before meaningful recovery efforts begin. “Recovery was accomplished in Yellowstone,” he wrote in his comments, “with no [precise] information on population size.”

Don’t get me wrong. Suspending the hunt is an essential part of grizzly bear recovery in this province, not because we don’t know how many bears there are everywhere, but because we do know, based on the government’s own data, that in some places there are fewer than half the number that sparked the listing debate in the first place. And because we do know that grizzly bear habitat in Alberta is some of the most heavily developed in North America.

The key, as biologists have known for more than a decade, is not managing bears but managing people. In the GYE, this has meant maintaining what biologists call “habitat security” by limiting the amount of development in grizzly bear habitat, especially roads and cutlines that allow heavily armed men to drive four-wheel drive vehicles wherever they want to go. Dr. Schwarz defines “secure habitat” as “any [roadless] area 10 acres or larger [that is] 500 meters or more from a road.” Secure habitat, he says, is a key indication of survival.

We already know, based on studies done to date, that the amount of secure habitat in Alberta is perilously low. Consider: Secure habitat in the Yellowstone area averages 86 per cent. Secure habitat in Kananaskis Country, for example, is a measly 52 per cent. Obviously insufficient.
The government is quick to list its efforts to protect grizzlies in this province, but very few of these “actions” have done anything to stop the bleeding, either from the bears themselves or from the habitat on which they depend. As in caribou recovery efforts in this province, the habitat issue is one the government refuses to tackle, despite the fact it has been identified as the key factor in every one of its reports on grizzly bears in the last 16 years: the 1990 grizzly bear management plan, the 2002 status report, the draft recovery plan, even its own website. In fact, things have only become worse for bears while we sit around and argue about how many there are—or were.

Readers with an inherent trust in government may scoff at my cynicism, and ask, “Why would the government not do the right thing for grizzly bears?”

I think the reason is fairly simple: ideology. Like U.S. President George Bush’s policies on Iraq and climate change, and despite the Herald editorial board’s optimistic interpretation of the hunt announcement, the Alberta government’s recalcitrant stance on grizzly bear management is based not on “prudence” and the precautionary interpretation of “sound data.” It is based on the pre-conceived and immutable, if less than rational belief of its leaders, that nature cannot stand in the way of progress. And in Alberta, progress (at least so far) has meant lots and lots of roads and clearcuts and oil wells (tens of thousand every year, in fact) and very few areas managed for the habitat security grizzly bears will require if they are to survive in this province.

As every grizzly bear biologist knows, including the one that was fired by the provincial government for daring to speak of what he knew, this will mean developing, funding and implementing a recovery plan that is similar in scope and detail to the Yellowstone recovery plan that has proven so successful to date. Considering where we are, and how far we have to go, dozens of dedicated staff and millions of dollars will be required every year for decades to get the job done here, as it was in Yellowstone. (Even Ontario, with no grizzly bears and a large and healthy black bear population, spends millions of dollars each year to reduce human-bear conflicts.)

Inevitably, this will require Albertans to restrain some of our activities in grizzly bear habitat and to repair decades of damage that has been ignored for far too long. But in the long term, the investment will have been worth it, for as Andy Russell wrote more than 40 years ago, grizzly bears can teach us something of what it means to live with nature. Which is something we will be forced to learn, whether we like it or not.

Alberta's Grizzly Century

2005-12-06T15:23:00.000-07:00

When Andy Russell died on June 1, 2005, nature honoured him with a tempest the likes of which he had never seen in southwest Alberta during his 89 years. Rain fell like lead shot for almost a week. Mother Nature sent a once-in-200-year deluge, flooding towns and homes along the eastern slopes. By the day of the funeral, the Oldman River, a river Russell fought long and hard (though ultimately unsuccessfully) to save from damming, had breached its banks.

Russell was himself a force of nature. Originally a guide-outfitter with a penchant for storytelling, Russell produced 12 feature-length films, including Grizzly Country, and published 13 books and more than 100 articles and essays. He was an outspoken advocate for wilderness and wildlife, especially the grizzly bears he grew to love during decades spent among them in Alberta and British Columbia. On his death, the Pincher Creek Echo reported that Russell admitted to being “a thorn” in the province’s side at times, a man who never hesitated to “raise a little hell” when necessary.

Despite the downpour, more than 200 people turned up at the Pincher Creek Community Hall to celebrate Russell’s life. Most of his family was there (except his son Charlie, who was in Kamchatka raising grizzly bear cubs), as were life-long friends Sid Marty, Judy Huntley and Beth Russell-Towes. In a sense, Andy attended his own funeral. His son Gordon read from a letter Andy had written for the occasion. In typical Andy Russell fashion, he beseeched his friends, relatives and admirers to “let this be a celebration of my leaving on another expedition.”

Never one to pass up a good party, Premier Ralph Klein braved the weather and raging rivers to see Russell off on his last great adventure. Klein honoured Russell, calling him a “true Albertan original,” someone who “was a living symbol of the values that define the province.”

The words themselves are appropriate enough, given Russell’s legacy, but what do they really mean? Like most political rhetoric, Klein’s kind words are fraught with contradiction. How can one of the Canada’s greatest environmental activists stand for an empire with an environmental track record that makes George W. Bush’s Republicans look like Greenpeace? And what do Klein’s opportunistic remarks say about the future of Russell’s grizzly bears–and Alberta?

To read the rest of this article, buy the December issue of AlbertaViews magazine or visit www.albertaviews.ab.ca/index.html next month when it will be accessible on-line.

Was killer Canmore handled properly?

2005-06-07T17:53:00.000-06:00

The headline in today’s (June 7, 2005) Calgary Herald – “Was the killer bear handled properly?” – only hints at the complexity of factors that led to the tragic deaths of Isabelle Dubé and Bear #99 last Sunday. The real question, and answer, may rely less on handling bears than it does on handling people and human development.

There is more than a little irony at the centre of this tragedy. Isabelle was a friend of mine. Our daughters are about the same age, and we would run into each other at birthday parties and soccer games. We mountain biked and skied together, or at least as together as my tired old legs would allow. On more than one occasion we talked about the growing conflict between wildlife and recreation. She was concerned, and rightfully so, that rampant development had given golfers and homeowners the lion’s share of the land and left the rest of us to fight over the scraps.

For years, a war of sorts has been raging in Canmore, one I wrote about in Explore magazine in 2002. Starting in the 1970s, the government of Alberta has sold off thousands of acres of Crown land surrounding the town of Canmore, hoping it would grow into a tourist destination to rival Banff.

Rightfully concerned with the effect of rampant development on their community, Canmore residents demanded that limits be placed on development to ensure that enough of the surrounding landscape was maintained in its natural state for the use of recreationists and wildlife. Several studies, hearings and open houses were conducted on the issue, and all recommended that functional wildlife corridors be maintained to keep wildlife populations healthy and, more important, to keep people safe.

An example: In 1993, Martha McCallum and Dr. Paul Paquet conducted a study and wrote a wildlife management plan for Stone Creek Properties, now (ironically) SilverTip, the community behind which Isabelle was killed. McCallum and Paquet wrote: “The provision of wildlife corridors is probably the most important mitigation measure to protect people from bears (my italics) by providing the option of an undeveloped travel route for bears.”

They go on to say that “functional wildlife corridors require both protection of continuous corridors and prevention of wildlife disturbance within the corridors.… Wildlife corridors can be protected from human disturbance by providing adequate park and recreation facilities adjacent to corridor areas. This approach will reduce the demand for recreation within the corridors and provide a transitional buffer between the corridors and other human development.”

This sage advice, provided 12 years ago, was largely ignored. Alberta’s provincial government knowingly approved wildlife corridors that didn’t meet the minimum recommendations set out by some of North America’s best biologists, and it approved development plans that were sure to create conflicts between user groups and between people and wildlife.

This, accompanied by less than precautionary human and bear management practices, has led to many a dead grizzly bear and several human injuries since 2000, and is as much to blame for Isabelle’s death as the handling of Bear #99 in June 2005. These tragedies will only continue as more houses are built and more people squeezed into the Bow Valley.

As McCallum and Dr. Paquet prophesied those many years ago, the heedless development and poor planning that characterize Canmore inevitably breeds conflict. Environmentalists blame developers for destroying wildlife habitat and the critters that call(ed) it home. Developers claim they’re being prevented from earning a fair return on their investment, and the provincial government berates town council for being obstructionists. Recreationists attack environmentalists for putting the needs of animals ahead of those of people. And then people and bears start bumping into each other in what little space is left and eventually, inevitably, someone, a caring mother and a beautiful friend, dies. All because of poor planning and more than a tinge of greed.

The real question, and one I think Isabelle would like us to answer, is: What now? How can we prevent a similar tragedy from happening again?

Canmore must become a truly BearSmart community. This can be accomplished by adopting and implementing well-recognized BearSmart guidelines that allow people and bears to co-exist. It won’t be easy and it will take leadership (and money) from the instigators of this fiasco, the government of Alberta. But that is the “obligation” that accompanies the “right” to turn an important wildlife movement corridor into a resort community that will one day rival the great excesses of Aspen and Vail.

We don’t have a choice, not really. Sitting, as it does, on the doorsteps of Banff National Park, Canmore will never be able to entirely rid itself of bears—I’ve had the pleasure, on a run of my own, of watching a sow and her cubs dashing through the nearby forests on more than one occasion—and we’ve long since matured past the point of shooting every bear that dares wander into plain view. But we can make the Bow Valley safer for both people and the bears with which we share it.

The good news is we’re almost there. Canmore has already done an excellent job of securing the attractants—garbage, bird feeders, compost—that once lured bears into town. Now we need to develop a plan that will minimize human-bear conflict in the wildlife corridors.

This is where Alberta Fish and Wildlife can do a much better job of keeping bears and people apart. When a bear is in the area, signs must be posted to warn residents and trail users to stay away, and trails (and golf courses) must be physically closed to human use so the bear has a chance to move on without getting into trouble. If the bear insists on crossing the boundary into town, bear-human co-existence specialists must monitor it around the clock, delivering aversive conditioning (noise, rubber bullets, barking bear dogs) until it learns to move on (which may take up to a week).

Only if the bear continues to be a nuisance should it be relocated within its home range–and continuously monitored and aversively conditioned if it tries to return. Had these precautions been taken with #99, a young sub-adult ripe for a firm tutorial in the ways of living with people, this tragedy may well have been avoided.

A very few bears will not graduate from the program. If, after a continued and intensive effort, the bear can’t learn to live in the world we have created for it, it will have to be destroyed. But by doing everything possible to keep people out of its path, this last resort will rarely need to be executed.

All of these recommendations have been made and ignored before, largely, perhaps, because they are expensive to implement. But it is also because government officials are gun-shy after some people fiercely opposed the management (and limitation) of human use in the wildlife corridors around Canmore. People, including recreationists, can help prevent a similar tragedy, and ensure Isabelle did not die in vain, by encouraging the government to implement a bear-human conflict management plan and by supporting the limitations on human-use that will necessarily be a part of it.

Like it or not, we must play the game with the cards we have been dealt, and the name of the game now is keeping people safe and bears alive in a poorly planned municipality smack dab in the middle of bear country. The lion’s share of this task is the responsibility of the provincial government, but it will require the cooperation of the entire community. It doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the amenities Canmore has to offer, but it will mean we—golfers and mountain bikers and developers alike—will need to exercise a little more restraint.

Under the circumstances, I think Isabelle would have wanted us to at least try.

The Myth of Hunting Bears (Reasons 2-4)

2005-06-01T11:30:00.000-06:00

After a "number of bear attacks" in Canada over the past couple of weeks, the Globe and Mail decided to ask its readers whether "hunting should be stepped up in the name of public safety." Presumably the editors meant bear hunting, and not an open-season on people in bear habitat, which would certainly reduce the likelihood of bear-human conflicts by keeping all but the most die-hard Rambos out of the woods, thus leaving bear habitat to the bears.

Which leaves one to wonder: Why, given the multitude of factors that lead to bear-human conflicts (and thus attacks), would the Globe default to shooting bears as a means to prevent it? Is the editorial board composed entirely of bear hunters? Is it really just an underground arm of Alberta Fish and Game? No, the more likely reason is this poll is simply a reflection of our culture's relationship to not only bears, but the entirety of nature. If a conflict develops between people and nature, the first thing to do is to transform (or kill) nature. Pine beetles, water, wolves in cattle country, they all suffer the harsh hand of man as an answer to problems that could be better solved not by trying to get nature to change her ways, but by asking Man to change his (and hers).

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that hunting "increases public safety." Presumably, one can assume the editors didn't meant to suggest that hunters should kill all the bears in Canada, thus eliminating a potential (but extremely miniscule) threat to public safety. Presumably, the intent was to suggest that hunting bears would make them more wary of humans and thus less likely to attack them.

This is the same argument made by the Alberta government, which claims that hunting grizzly bears actually improves the health of this threatened population. But this claim, like the one implicit in the Globe poll, is as weak as a bear trap made of balsa wood.

It is possible to aversively condition bears. Karelian bear dogs, rubber bullets, cracker shells and a variety of other pyrotechnic tools have been used to good effect to teach bears where they can be and where they can't. It is much like teaching a dog, only harder. But if you kill the bear during the process of aversive conditioning, it cannot learn. It cannot change its behaviour next time because there is no next time, and it cannot pass its lesson on to its cubs because dead bears don't have cubs. So the claim that "hunted populations are more wary of people and therefore more likely to avoid undesirable interactions with humans" is a non sequitur.

Some, like the Alberta government, argue that "hunting helps reduce problem bears by selecting those that are least wary and most likely to become nuisances," but there is no evidence to suggest this is true and, in fact, it likely isn't. For one, it's impossible to say what makes one bear "more likely" to become a "problem" than another, exept perhaps the bad luck to have a home range shared by people, which in Alberta (and much of Canada) is almost everywhere. To hunt and kill all bears in ths unfortunate situation would mean the end of most of Canada's bears.

Two, hunters head out into the wilderness, usually on ATVs or in trucks, looking for bears; they don't usually hunt around communities, which is where habituated bears hang out. And they're actively pursuing their quarry for the purpose of killing it, so a good hunter is just as likely to locate and track and kill a (potentially) "wary" bear as an "aggressive" one.

The claim that bear "population growth rate is potentially increased by harvest of adult males that kill and eat young grizzlies" is also without merit. The only scientific study I'm aware of, conducted (if memory serves) by renowned B.C. bear biologist Bruce McLellan, indicates the opposite, that killing mature adult male bears allows sub-adult males to take over the dead bear's home range, access bred females with cubs, and kill those cubs to stimulate her desire to breed again, this time with new male.

No, hunting simply puts more people into bear habitat, people armed with guns. This in itself is not a bad thing. Many of us enjoy spending time in bear habitat, and some of us live in bear habitat. But the more people (especially those armed with guns) in bear habitat, the more bear-human interactions there will be. And a very small percentage of those interactions will be conflicts, and an even smaller number will be attacks.

The way to increase public safety and reduce stress on bear populations has almost nothing to do with bears and everything to do with people. If we were serious about it, we'd provide bears with the undisturbed habitat they need to live, educate people about how to behave in bear habitat, and fund and implement bear-human conflict management plans for communities in bear habitat like Whistler and Canmore. It will take time and cost money, but it is the only way to do it. The question is, Do we have it in us?

David Coutts’ Top 8 reasons to continue the grizzly hunt

2005-03-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

There has been no shortage of attention on the grizzly bear hunt since Minister of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD) Dave Coutts announced on February 1, 2005 that it would continue this year. The announcement came despite the recommendations of three government advisory committees (the Endangered Species Conservation Committee, its scientific subcommittee, and the Grizzly Bear Recovery Team) and a group of 19 independent scientists who published a public letter asking the minister to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species (which would in essence put the brakes on the hunt).

The question remains: Why continue to allow sportsmen to shoot grizzly bears for the purposes of fun and enjoyment when so many knowledgeable people suggest otherwise? Let’s see if the clear, lucid light of the facts can't help us answer it.

The government’s website lists eight reasons why it “continues to provide grizzly hunting opportunity [sic]” as part of its self-proclaimed “science-based, proactive and conservative” approach to grizzly bear management. These reasons can be broken down into three main categories.

There are enough bears to sustain a limited hunt.
1. There is a small annual surplus of male bears available to support the season.

Hunting actually provides conservation benefits to grizzly bears.
2. Hunting helps reduce problem bears by killing those that are least wary and most likely to become nuisances.

3. The population growth rate is potentially increased by killing adult males that kill and eat young grizzlies.

4. Hunted populations are more wary of people and therefore more likely to avoid undesirable interactions with humans.

5. Hunting harvest provides information about bears (e.g., data on distribution and age).

6. Hunting maintains a knowledgeable group of people who are strong advocates for Alberta's grizzly population.

7. Hunters, through licence fees, contribute financially to conservation and management of grizzlies.

Albertans enjoy and have a right to hunt bears.
8. There is a long-standing hunting tradition and a high demand.

Today we’ll consider number one, the “surplus of bears” argument. The best-available scientific research indicates Alberta provides relatively poor habitat for grizzly bears, which results in relatively low densities, extremely low reproductive rates, and, to the best of our knowledge, a relatively small population. (See, for instance, the out-of-date but still somewhat useful status report completed by the government in 2001.)

Despite being a “may be at risk species” for years, and despite a 1990 Grizzly Bear Management Plan that highlighted, 15 years ago, the need for an accurate population census, there isn’t one. The government has begun one, but it won’t be finished until 2011, at least. (I'd post a link to the management plan but the government hasn't put it up on its website yet.)

In the meantime, grizzly bear experts in Alberta from both the government and academic institutions estimate there are approximately 700 grizzly bears in Alberta, including about 215 grizzly bears in Alberta’s national parks. That leaves less than 500 grizzly bears (to hunt) on provincial lands, a population 10 per cent the size of Alberta’s Woodland Caribou, which has been listed as a threatened species for 18 years (but still doesn’t have a recovery plan).

Given such uncertainty, the provincial government has explained that it dutifully uses “other sources” of information to make its decisions. Namely, anecdotal evidence of local experts who live and work in the field, which they share with grizzly bears.

Local knowledge and expertise can be valuable. The accumulated wisdom of First Nations people, often called Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), has proven to be reasonably accurate. I once spoke with some Dene people in the Yukon who were very interested in the future of the caribou, because their livelihoods depend on it. They had made a video comparing the knowledge of their elders to the results of a 20-year research study about the caribou’s migration routes. Without ever seeing the research results, the quiet and wizened elders who still lived out on the land drew virtually the same lines on the map as the scientists who had spend two decades and God knows how many thousands of dollars studying the issue. So it can work. Sometimes.

On Wednesday, February 2, 2005, Donna McElligot devoted part of her Wild Rose Country noon-hour show to the grizzly bear hunt. Donna Babchishin, director of communications for SRD, told McElligot that grizzly bear experts weren’t the only people consulted during the decision-making process; “local experts” were also involved. To support her claim, she said there were more than 300 reported sightings of grizzly bears last year. She implied, if not stated, that the number alone means there are lots of bears in Alberta, or at least enough to hunt.

Sightings? She wasn’t clear as to whether that was 300 people who reported seeing the same bear, or 300 different bears seen by the same person at the same and place. Or a combination of the two. But given the shaky value of such poorly collected and analyzed anecdotal evidence, it is tough to understand how it can outweigh the insight of the numerous scientifically trained experts that populate the advisory committees that continually recommend the suspension of hunting a potentially threatened species.

In a recent article in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Ray Makowecki, a wildlife biologist, former regional wildlife director for the province, and past president of the Alberta Fish & Game Association, said the Alberta grizzly bear population was at least sable, and perhaps increasing. How does he know?

"There is [sic] some anecdotal, very important indicators of trends, and these are the people who are outdoors, the conservation officers, the biologists, outfitters and hunters,” Makowecki said. “If you talk to someone who's spent 30 years in the bush, there's no question but that there are more grizzlies.

Luckily, we are able to test the value of anecdotal evidence with respect to grizzly bear numbers, just as the Dene did with their caribou. Two weeks ago, on Feb. 24, 2005, Dr. Stephen Herrero released the results of a nine-year (1993-2002) study on grizzly bears in the Bow Valley watershed, which includes parts of Banff National Park and Kananaskis Country. In a nutshell, the results indicated that the population for this area was increasing at a rate of four per cent per year. However, during the two years following the study, 11 grizzly bears in that same area were killed, seven of them as a result of human causes, which suggests the population most likely has been stable over the last decade. (It’s important to point out here that this population is not hunted; had hunting been allowed, the population would assuredly have been declining.)

In contrast, the “anecdotal” evidence suggests grizzly bears are on the increase to the point of becoming a nuisance. Rick Guinn is an outspoken guide-outfitter whose family has lived in the Kananaskis Valley for at least three generations. He has hunted in K-Country for years and, on occasion, has had to shoot a grizzly bear in self-defence. He has maintained for as long as I can remember that there are so many grizzly bears in K-Country they are coming out of the woodwork. In response to the findings of Dr. Herrero’s study, the A-Channel, which describes Guinn only as a “farmer,” quotes him as saying:

"It's obvious for anyone who spends time in the bush that the grizzly bear population is strongly increasing."

What are you going to believe? The results of one of the longest-running and most diligently conducted grizzly bear research projects in the world? Or the back-of-the-envelope predictions of people who have a vested interest in the continuation of the hunt?

The more important question, of course, is which information should the government use to make policy decisions that will determine the future of the grizzly bear?

The troubling conclusion is that the government seems intent on using whatever information it needs to use to justify its decisions, which are made not in the interests of grizzly bears or the people of Alberta, but in the interests of adhering to a seventeenth century worldview (see John Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government”) that will surely lead to the disappearance of the grizzly bear from the province of Alberta.

Stay tuned for a consideration of the rest of the government’s Top 8 list of reasons to continue hunting grizzly bears.

Why should we save grizzly bears?

2005-02-14T22:21:00.001-07:00

A woman called a friend of mine the other day. She wanted to know why we should spend any time worrying about grizzly bears when they didn't really seem to make our lives any better. Sure they were magnificent and all that, she said, but they didn't seem to be earning anyone any money. A conservationist working on carnivore issues in Alberta, my friend was aghast. But it is a question worth pondering.

On the surface of things, where most people seem to spend most of their time, she is right, especially when you consider only direct, short-term benefits. Grizzly bears are so few and far between in Alberta, and the habitat to which they have been relegated so thick with trees that you'd go bankrupt in a month if you tried to make a living from a bear-viewing operation.

One could argue that people do choose to visit beautiful natural places like Banff simply because they still boast grizzlies, which there is a chance, however small, of glimpsing from the comfort and safety of your car, a Starbuck's skim milk latte tucked safely between your thighs. However, Yosemite National Park and other tourist hotspots demonstrate that people, especially tourists, are extremely adaptable; beautiful scenery and luxury accommodations seem to compensate rather nicely for the absence of even the most charismatic of critters.

The reality is that grizzly bears in Alberta will never be able to compete with oil & gas development, forestry, or resort tourism as an economic driver. We have to look elsewhere for a rationale for allowing grizzly bears to persist in the face of so many other "social and economic values" (as the Alberta government refers to unrestricted resource development and off-highway recreation) that can be mutually exclusive to the persistence of the Great Bear.

There are three reasons for restraining our activities to share the land with grizzlies. The first is a moral one. It is unconscionable, I think, in this day and age to knowingly allow any species, let alone one as majestic and as symbolic as the grizzly bear, to disappear from the landscapes in which we live and work. As fellow creatures, they deserve to survive, if not each and every one of them, then certainly as a species everywhere they now exist. It is one thing for a starving sailor to eat the last great auk during a pre-combustion-engine sea voyage, or for an aristocratic sycophant to shoot the last passenger pigeon on the continent. Those were different days; they knew little and cared less. But this is the twenty-first century. Millions of people love grizzlies, and we have studied them, almost to death, for two decades. We know what wiped them out and what it takes to keep them on the landscape, even how to recover flagging populations. We've seen it work in the Yellowstone area of the United States. In this affluent, post-industrial world of ours there is no excuse, save greed, to decide otherwise.

The second reason has to do with the kind of world we want to leave for our children and grandchildren. Do we really believe we need to pump every drop of oil, cut every stick of timber as fast as our technology allows us? Should we not consider, for more than a moment, what kind of a world we're going to leave behind? I'm reminded of Dr. Seuss's The Lorax every time I see a press release or hear a spokesperson from the Alberta government. Given current trends, the corridor between Edmonton and Calgary will look like Los Angeles in 50 years, and the entire province will be criss-crossed with roads, riddled with dry wells, and scarred with clearcuts. Climate change will have turned southern Alberta into a (semi) desert and all the ranchers will have sold out to land developers. And there will be no grizzly bears, certainly not south of the Trans-Canada Highway. Do we really want to choose to leave that kind of world for our children?

The third, and perhaps most important reason just might have to do with the health and survival of our own species. Extirpating grizzly bears from Alberta will not in and of itself compromise our ability, as a species, to survive, but it likely will be accompanied by a dramatic decline in the quantity and quality of things like clean water, fresh air, and soul-inspiring wilderness. A canary in a coal mine if there every was one.

You see, this is a test. Albertans and Canadians are being challenged to constrain our activities and behaviours to within limits imposed on us by nature, in this case by grizzly bears. It will require constraint: grizzly bears can co-exist with a strong, vibrant economy, but they cannot compete with unrestricted industrial development. It is not either/or; it is about balance.

To date, we have not proven up to the task. The Alberta Tories, which Albertans vote into power every chance they get, have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt they are not interested in doing what it takes to keep grizzly bears on the landscape. Their decisions over the last 15 years make it clear that the sooner they can be rid of the bears, the better.

But here's the rub: if we refuse to constrain our activities to within the limits of nature, nature will come back to bite us in the ass. If we continue to fail these tests -- grizzly bears, climate change, population, consumption -- nature will unleash its unfeeling power and burn, perhaps extinguish Homo sapiens sapiens, just as it did the dinosaurs. (This would be a bad thing, unless of course you believe, like some U.S. senators and congressmen do, in The Rapture.)

No, we will learn this lesson. Sooner or later, we will realize that our obsessive and compulsive appetites will kill us as surely as they did John Belushi and Jim Morrison and Jimmy Hendrix. Why not kick the addiction now?

Why the Alberta government won’t protect its grizzly bears

2005-02-03T21:44:00.000-07:00

On February 1, 2005 the government of Alberta announced grizzly bears were once again on the menu for sportsmen who want to try their luck at bagging one of North America's largest land carnivores. This is disappointing news for all Albertans, not just those who care about the future of our grizzly bears. It is disappointing not so much because the hunt, which no less than three advisory committees have recommended against while Alberta's meager grizzly bear population recovers to respectable levels, continues, but because of the apparent incompetence or blatant dishonesty (it's difficult to tell which) that seems to inform the government's policy decisions.

The press release announcing the 2005 grizzly bear hunt claims that continuing to allow hunters to kill grizzly bears for sport is part of its "conservative approach" to managing what is perhaps the best indicator of ecological health and is certainly the greatest remaining symbol of the West (after the bison). The communiqué goes on to say that "the Alberta government's approach to the grizzly bear hunt makes conservation the top priority." As you will see, these statements ring hollow as an empty sewage pipe struck with the heavy hand of zealotry.

As always, it is important to understand the one thing citizens rarely get from the media these days: context. The Fish and Wildlife Policy of Alberta explicitly states the government is obligated to maintain a viable population of grizzly bears. According to Section 3.1.1, "Resource Protection", "the primary consideration of the Government is to ensure that wildlife populations are protected from severe decline and that viable populations are maintained."

To this end, the government, through the Wildlife Act, created the Endangered Species Conservation Committee (ESCC) to advise the provincial government about what to do with plants and animals that were facing extinction from Alberta's lakes, rivers, mountains and prairies. This is not a bunch of tree-hugging hippies. It is a multi-stakeholder group of people representing the government, the scientific, conservation, and hunting communities, and the province's main industrial players, including ranchers, timber companies, and oil & gas interests. It is a microcosm of Alberta society, the weight of which, if anything, seems inclined toward development rather than conservation.

According to the ESCC's policy statement, the conservation and recovery of threatened and endangered species are shared values of the committee and Albertans. The statement goes on to say that "the biological status of species should be determined by independent scientists using the best available science" and that "in accordance with the precautionary principle as stated in the Accord for Protection of Species at Risk in Canada, where the balance of scientific information indicates a species is at risk, conservation and protective measure will be taken."

So, in 2002, the ESCC was brought together, funded by taxpayers' dollars, to decide the fate and future of Alberta's grizzly bear. It based its decision on the advice of the Endangered Species Conservation Committee's "scientific subcommittee," a collection of some of the province's best biologists who use the best available science and the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) criteria to assess the status of plants and animals at risk of extinction in Alberta.

Not surprisingly, both groups recommended the province's grizzly bear population be listed as a threatened species, that the sport hunt for this magnificent mammal be suspended, and that a recovery plan be developed and implemented as soon as possible. This recommendation was based on the following facts: the best available estimate indicated there were fewer than 1000 grizzly bears in Alberta, about half the number of bears required to keep the grizzly bear off the threatened species list (according to the IUCN criteria); too many grizzlies were being killed by men with guns every year; and the grizzly bear's remaining habitat was being chewed up by more and more roads, clearcuts, coal mines, oil wells, and coal-bed methane developments, not to mention rampant illegal camping and off-road vehicle activity. And so they recommended protection.

For the first time ever, the government refused to adopt the ESCC's recommendation. Instead, the government has allowed the hunt to continue while convening, at taxpayers' expense, a grizzly bear recovery team, another multi-stakeholder group charged with developing a recovery plan for a species that apparently didn't warrant listing as either threatened or endangered. Why develop a recovery plan for the grizzly bear without listing it as threatened? Because according to the Wildlife Act, a "threatened" designation would legally require the government to suspend the hunt and implement a recovery plan. As it stands, the government can take its time, doing as much, or as little, as it likes.

The draft version of the recovery plan has been sitting on the Minister of Sustainable Resource Development's (now Dave Coutts) desk since December 2004. The plan, as written, is weak. In "off-the-record" conversations I've had with grizzly bear experts, they call it "shameful," they say that the government has already decided to let grizzly bears go, that if industry continues "business as usual" it will eliminate grizzly bears from most of their current range in Alberta. But it does recommend, in no uncertain terms, that the hunting of grizzly bears be suspended immediately.

Even the editorial boards of Alberta's usually conservative newspapers climbed on the bandwagon. The more centrist Edmonton Journal asked the government to follow the recommendations of the ESCC and list the grizzly bear as a threatened species, as did the Red Deer Advocate. Even the Calgary Herald, often rabidly anti-environment, suggested it might be prudent to suspend the hunt until we figured out how many bears there are and how well they are actually doing.

One might be excused for seeing consolation in the government's apparent demonstration of precautionary conservatism. After all, although the government has circumvented the normal policy process by refusing to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species, it has begun to develop and implement a recovery plan. Surely this will provide a future for Alberta's grizzly bear. What more could one want?

One need only look back to 1990, when the Alberta government "formulated" a "comprehensive" grizzly bear management plan for grizzly bears. Compiled largely by John Gunson, somewhat of a legend in Alberta's wildlife management circles, it is 185 pages long. Although the goal of the plan (to increase the number of grizzly bears in Alberta to 1000, which is still only half the number required to keep it from being declared threatened according to the IUCNs threatened species criteria) is far too conservative, the plan itself does contain much good information and many good ideas. It states, for instance, that "an extensive program of conservation and management must be undertaken if grizzly bears are to survive in significant numbers in Alberta." Such a plan was to include "educational programs and legislation" to reduce the number of non-sport hunting mortalities, and agricultural, recreational and resource development activities on lands within and adjacent to occupied grizzly bear ranges "must be tailored to reduce bear-man conflicts." Habitat, that most cherished of all things to a grizzly bear, must be "maintained and restored to allow grizzly bear recovery to meet provincial goals," and resource exploration and development activities "must proceed in a manner that is sensitive to and compatible with the needs of grizzly bears and other wildlife."

These are all laudable statements, located on page 152, in the section on "Management Plan Application." But the two most important sentences were inserted way back on page xx, in the preface: "Implementation will be subject to divisional priorities established during the budget process." It obviously wasn't a priority. Had it been implemented, we probably wouldn't be in the predicament we are today. But it wasn't, not in any meaningful way, and so now we're out on the proverbial slippery slope to extinction.

What the government did, then as now, was reduce the number of grizzly bear tags. Given that success rates for hunting grizzly bears are around 15 per cent, this had the desired effect of reducing the number of grizzly bears killed during the legal hunt. They dropped from a high of 44 in the 1980s to a low of six last year. The current average for 1997 to 2003 is 13.7. The total number of bears killed by people, as high as 67 (1987) in the 1980s, has dropped to an average of 26 from in the last seven years.

All this proves is that the fewer the number of tags are issued, the fewer the number of grizzly bears are killed. But the number of dead bears is still excessively high. Up to 50 per cent of grizzly bear deaths go unreported, making total mortalities closer to 60 dead grizzlies (on average) today, and over 100 per year in the late 1980s. It's important to remember that grizzly bears reproduce very slowly, and Alberta's bears, because of the relatively poor habitat here, are the slowest of the slow. This means that grizzly bears can only sustain a mortality rate equal to or less than 2.8 to 4 per cent of the population. Even by the most liberal estimate of 1000 grizzly bears in Alberta, more than six per cent of the population is dying each and every year, more than 90 per cent of them near roads.

The fact is, despite the recommendations in the 1990 management plan, things have gotten progressively worse for grizzly bears since it was committed to paper in the late 1980s. Thousands of oil and gas wells and hundreds of thousands of roads and seismic lines have been built in grizzly bear habitat since the 1990 Grizzly Bear Management Plan was drafted. This has allowed more and more and more people to work, live and recreate in grizzly bear habitat, which means more and more people (largely men with guns) encounter grizzly bears, which means more and more bears die from bullet wounds. In the meantime, during the most affluent years of Alberta's existence, the government has cut funding to the ministries and departments responsible for the management of grizzly bears and other wildlife resources and reduced the number of conservation officers on the ground. "Business as usual" and then some.

How do we know? A 2002 report issued by the Grizzly Bear Technical Committee at the request of, you guessed it, then Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mike Cardinal, responding to recommendations from the ESCC, indicated that things were not well in grizzly country. Grizzly bears weren't being managed or recovered. If anything, they were being ignored.

The litany of charges in the "Report on Alberta Grizzly Bear Assessment of Allocation" is a long one. It claimed the process used since 1988 to determine the annual population status of grizzly bears in Alberta involved "questionable practices" that "are not scientifically defensible" and that potentially led to predictions that are "not biologically possible." This led to an erroneous overestimation of the number of grizzly bears that potentially has "serious" consequences for population management.

It also recognized that too many female grizzly bears are being killed, and in many areas their average age is declining, representing a "potentially serious management concern" that may indicate the population is collapsing. And despite the fact "problem bear management will play a key role in the long-term conservation" of grizzly bears, the province's "current management approach to bear problems in these areas appears to be inadequate and that new approaches or efforts are required."

That's why the population, now estimated at between 500 and 700 bears, hasn't increased since the plan was drafted 15 years ago.

Decades of research on grizzly bears in North America has revealed that the best way to keep grizzly bears safe and alive is to limit the number of roads in grizzly bear habitat. More than 90 per cent of grizzly bear mortalities take place within 500 metres of a road. Road densities over (approximately) 0.6 km/sq. km generally mean the slow but steady disappearance of grizzly bears from a given area, both because wary bears leave and unwary bears are killed.

"By building these roads we provide access into bear habitat where there hasn't been human access before," said Gord Stenhouse, the provincial government's resident grizzly bear expert, in a 2002 CBC TV news report aired after a high-profile bear named Mary was killed by a poacher near Hinton, Alberta. "Roads provide access for people who are poachers. They have more opportunity to move into areas previously not gone into before, to look for elk or sheep or grizzly bears."

"At this rate the species just can't survive," said Stenhouse, of the high mortality rate people inflict on the grizzly bear population.

The answer? Either don't build roads, or take them out once industry is done using them to extract the oil and gas and cut the timber. That is the cost of doing business in a place that is still fortunate enough to boast grizzly bears.

"It comes down to this," said landscape ecologist Brad Stelfox in the same CBC news report. "The average Albertan should not be able to drive everywhere all the time for all reasons."

But for some reason the government refuses to fulfill its obligation to the people of Alberta and ensure a future for grizzly bears. Why? Because what is required, restraint, runs counter to everything the Alberta government stands for. It requires protecting critical habitat that might otherwise be "better" utilized as clearcuts or gas fields. It means reclaiming roads in areas that have been cut over or drilled for oil, which costs money. It means employing enough conservation officers to enforce legislation preventing motorized vehicles and random campers from overrunning Alberta's precious wildlands. It means caring for what makes Alberta special, our natural resources.

Industry seems willing to help. Representatives from both the oil & gas and timber industries have publicly stated their willingness to take out roads and manage access, but they have also said they need the government's help, and that hasn't happened.

Perhaps the best insight into the mindset of the G-men who are driving Alberta's grizzly bear population into the ground occurred during the same CBC newscast in which Stenhouse and Stelfox pointed out the problems, and solutions, that are hurting the grizzly bear. An interview with then Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mike Cardinal revealed that the government isn't interested in managing roads or human access into grizzly bear habitat. Why? Money.

"[A law to manage roads and access] could have a negative impact on the economy and we have to keep the balance," said Cardinal. "We're used to a certain lifestyle in Alberta. It costs about $20 billion a year to run the province and we have to keep developing our resources because the worst (thing) for the environment is poverty and the only way to eliminate poverty is to get people working."

The government would like you to believe they're doing the right thing. That's why it spends so much time and money on "communications," spinning its own version of the great bear story in the media. Spiders spinning a very optimistic but less than complete web, one that cannot stand up to the winds of scrutiny.

The Alberta government is not doing the right thing for grizzly bears or Alberta. We all know that Alberta is anything but balanced; it is a hold over of the Wild West, a twenty-first century political economy guided by the exuberant ignorance of the seventeenth century, when natural resources were deemed inexhaustible and moral obligations to preserve them non-existent.

The world is a different place today. We can see the end of the industrial rainbow and it ain't all gold, and people understand the need to preserve what's left of the natural world. The choice is not between grizzly bears and a strong economy. The choice is between responsibly managing our resources in a truly sustainable fashion, one that allows both economic development and grizzly bears to remain a part of Alberta's heritage, and a neoconservative agenda that seems intent on sacrificing everything at the alter of Mammon.

Alberta, one of the richest political jurisdictions in the world, can have grizzly bears and a strong economy, if it wants. You, the voter, have to make the government do it. And when they don't, remind them with a vote for the other team during the next election.

While the grizzly sleeps

2005-01-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

It snowed last night, another day of quiet cover. The ground is white, the house cold. From the kitchen window I can hear last night’s stories rising from the snow like steam from a hot spring.

I live in a small town in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Behind my house is a yard, and beyond that a shallow ravine, a remnant strip of forest in a valley once owned by the trees and the wild things that lived among them. It has since been subdivided, and is now owned, at least for the moment, by the people whose houses line the streets. One of them is mine.

Some animals have adapted to this new order; the signs are everywhere. In the summer I watch squirrels scamper through the high branches, and black-capped chickadees flit from bush to bush. Sometimes I’ll hear woodpeckers – hairy, downy, pileated – knocking on the trees, asking permission to enter. Occasionally I’ll see a herd of elk, or a lone mule deer, browsing low shrubs or stripping bark from trembling aspen trunks. Once in rare while a black bear trundles into the yard, looking for a handout. The grizzlies, warier, have left for good.

While you may see these animals during the pleasant days of summer, you rarely witness the wild drama that is their lives. Approached, they disappear without a trace, their secrets reserved for the cold, white months of winter, while the grizzly sleeps. There are fewer people here then, and most of them keep to the warmth and comfort of their houses, leaving the woods to the wild beasts and their curious followers. And there’s snow, telling stories the eyes must look hard to hear.

This morning, from the window, I saw footprints in the snow, the third day in a row. The tracks were dog-like, nails showing in the snow, but laid down in a straight line and smaller, more efficient, than my own lab’s well-bred snowshoes.

Closer inspection revealed another pattern. The prints followed the same route as yesterday, and the day before: up from the ravine, across the yard, through the garden, under the porch, along the side of the house, stop. Back through the yard, through the shrubs, into the ravine, through the trees, gone.

Coyote, hunting the margins for house cats. A new game.

Once, the snow told of the tables being turned. In the ravine, the big fat tracks of a cougar – almost the size of a person’s hand – overlapped a coyote’s. Travelling together, perhaps, to protect themselves against the cold darkness of the night? Not likely. Cougars hunt coyotes, which also brings them into yards and onto balconies after dogs. They are quieter than stars, but their tracks give them away, unsettling the new residents on the forest’s edge.

There are other, wilder stories. One winter, not far from my home, in Banff National Park, researchers stumbled upon the body of a cougar, its body riddled with puncture wounds and its tail ripped clean off. The bare-boned but unburied carcass of an elk lay in the woods nearby.

Pound for pound, the cougar is one of the deadliest predators on the planet. A 100-pound female can take down a moose or an elk many times its own size. Not even a Siberian tiger can make that claim. But a cougar, even a grizzly bear, is sorely outmatched against a well-organized pack of wolves.

A quick examination of the snow-bound evidence told the story: The cougar had killed the elk and eaten her fill. Meat drunk, her instincts deadened by a belly full of flesh, she lay resting near the elk. When eleven winter-hungry wolves stumbled upon the scene, they thrashed her. In the wild, especially during the lean months of winter, there is no quarter.

One thing seems clear: The better you comprehend the workings of nature, the better the tales winter tells. And another: wilder landscapes make for wilder stories.

A friend, Wayne, showed me one of the wildest snow stories I have ever seen. Wayne, once a logger, is now a part-time trapper, a photographer, an author, and a full-time conservationist. He wears a police officer’s moustache and his eyes are keen as an eagle’s.

Wayne lives part of the year in a cabin by a lake. There are no subdivisions and his “yard” is more than a million acres of B.C.’s Muskwa-Kechika wilderness. He has spent more nights in the wild than I have in a bed.

What is it? he asked, handing me a colour photo of a winter landscape. What happened here? Tell me the story.

The story was invisible, silent. All I could see was the stage: the flat, white, frozen lake covered with snow, surrounded by a solid green forest of conifers. A line started in the foreground, at the edge of the lake, and ended at a small disturbed patch in the middle, like the big hand on the face of a watch. It was a set of tracks, the disturbance a mystery.

Look carefully, he said. What kind of tracks are these? I started to guess. Wolverine? Porcupine? Marten? Yes, marten. See how they move, lunging through the snow, two by two by two. Marten.

What happened here? he asked, pointing to the patch of disturbed snow in the middle of the frozen lake.

The tracks seemed to stop in the middle of the lake. A bird, a hawk, came down out of the sky and grabbed the marten, I said. After a short scuffle, it flew off with the marten. The story was rising from the ground. Hot steam.

Close, Wayne said. It was probably an owl. But the marten tracks go both ways. It went out to the middle of the lake and came back alive. What are these marks flanking the tracks?

It looked like something, a toque perhaps, had been dragged along the surface of the snow. But as far as I knew neither marten nor owls wore hats.

How ‘bout this? Wayne said, his weathered hands turning the photograph to the light. One night, under cover of darkness, a marten left the cover of the forest to cross the lake. As he reached the middle of the lake an owl dropped from the sky, intent on airlifting his dinner to the nearest tree. A scuffle ensued. The marten, hungry and afraid, twisted in the owl’s grasp and bit into the soft flesh beneath its beak. As it died, the owl’s grip loosened. The marten dragged the owl back to the forest and ate it.

But martens, I knew, preferred the dark safety of the forest. Why would one try to cross the white mirror of the lake? I looked up “marten” in Ben Gadd’s Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, what many of us in this part of the world know as The Bible.

“Not many predators will take on a marten, for they are quite nasty in the clinch. The jaws of these beasts are deadly weapons, full of sharp teeth. But fishers, lynx and great horned owls will.”

Perhaps this one was hunting owls.
END

2004: Year of the grizzly?

2004-12-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

The end of every calendar year brings three things: holidays, skiing, and reflection.

When you're working on grizzly bear conservation, one thing you want to know as you reflect on the year is how many grizzlies died as a result of human activity. Last year in Alberta it was more than 40, an extremely large number given the estimated number of bears in the province (500-700). Research indicates that for every grizzly we know was killed, another one probably died out of sight and out of mind, so these numbers (as high as 80+) are way too high when we know that grizzly bears can sustain no more than a four per cent rate of human-caused mortality.

This year, the number is ... unknown. Despite the fact grizzlies have been denned up for at least a month, the government hasn't released the data yet, and it's always hard to get, like pulling an abcessed tooth from the mouth of a grumpy grizzly. Like every year at this time, I sent off an e-mail to Bruce Treichel, asking him for the grizzly bear mortality statistics for the year. And like every year, I prepare to wait and wait and wait. Treichel is a provincial wildlife allocation specialist with Alberta's Ministry of Sustainable Development. He is the go-to guy for this kind of information.

Down in the U.S., this kind of information is readily available, part of a more robust democratic process that allows citizens and citizen groups to access the information they need to actively participate in the management of their natural resources. (See the New York Times for the most recent article on grizzly bear mortality this year.)

But here in Alberta, this information is hard to come by. Data and data layers gathered about public lands and issues using public money are difficult or impossible to access. Why? Because information is power, and in Alberta the government likes to keep as much of that as they can for themselves. The gov doesn't want the public to know how poorly it has been managing Alberta's resources, and how degraded Alberta's natural capital has become over the last thirty years. This points as much to the democratic deficit here in Alberta as it does to Alberta's inadequate land use policies and the government's irresponsible and negelectful management of our precious natural assets.

Bruce will eventually cough up the number of grizzly bears that were killed this year. Rumour has it that only six grizzlies were killed in the officially sanctioned hunt, and 12 more were killed as a result of self-defence, cars and trains, poaching, and so-called "problem" animals that got into garbage or posed a threat to human safety or property. This is less than half the number killed last year, which is good news. But with a small population eeking a living out of a highly compromised landscape, it may still be too high.

Have a grizzly Christmas

2004-12-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

After a hard year, most grizzly bears have decided to pack it in and find a den for the winter. If the females are fat enough, the blastocycsts (fertilized eggs) that have been waiting around all summer will fasten to the uterus wall and voila, one to three cubs will be born in the den. These tiny, blind babes will nurse until spring, when they will be big enough to exit the den and scour the landscape for food with their mothers: winter-killed elk, leftover berries, roadkill, and hedysarum roots.

But don't count on a bumper crop of bear cubs next year. A berry crop failure through most of the Rocky Mountain West left bears starving. This drove them into communities and backyards in search of whatever they could find, which led to record numbers of human-bear conflicts and grizzly bear deaths in the Yellowstone and Glacier areas of the U.S. While the numbers aren't available in Alberta yet (democracy works a might slower north of The Border), we'll likely see a similar pattern here. (Hopefully, this will be somewhat compensated by fewer bears killed in the hunt, which was cut-back this year.) In any event, less food means skinnier bears which inevitably means fewer cubs, which is not what the struggling Alberta population needs.

In other news, the process to develop a recovery plan for a species the government has so far refused to recognize as threatened continues. A draft version of Alberta's Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan is sitting on Dave Coutts's, the new SRD minister, desk as I type this. Coutts is a vast improvement over Mike Cardinal, the former SRD minister who didn't have much time for grizzly bears in Alberta. Coutt's will have to decide what to do with the draft recovery plan (approve it or ditch it) before the bears come out of their dens in the spring.

A grizzly future for Alberta

2004-11-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

It’s 9:00 p.m. and as I write this the provincial election results are pouring in. Not surprisingly, the Alberta Tories are heading for another major majority. This is bad news for Alberta’s grizzly bears, which shouldn’t come as a surprise either. But there is hope hidden in the numbers if one cares to look close enough.

The PC Alberta website claims that Ralph Klein’s government has protected the environment while enhancing economic development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the Alberta Tories took power in the early ‘70s, they have sacrificed the province’s abundant natural assets at the altar of unfettered economic development. And no PC premier has done it better or more efficiently than King Ralph.

Under the tutelage of the Tories, Alberta has become one of the wealthiest political jurisdictions in the world, but it has also become one of the worst stewards of the environment found anywhere. If one compared Alberta to the countries of the world, it would be very near the top in per capita GDP (our prime indicator of wealth) and very near the bottom in terms of amount of the landbase protected (a good indicator of commitment to environmental protection).

The Tories have only protected 1.4 per cent of Alberta’s landscape, a number so low that most developing countries exceed it by orders of magnitude. True, the federal government was farsighted enough to establish national parks in what became Alberta, and they are big and bountiful and beautiful. But they are few, and they are not enough to protect things like biodiversity and water, which are at the very heart of Alberta’s long-term prosperity.
This is not the whole story, but it is a pretty good indication of what is and is not important to Ralph’s PC Party. And the grizzly bear is not. There are only 500-700 grizzlies left in Alberta, an extremely small population of North America’s most sensitive carnivore. The Tories were forced to recognize this in the late 1980s, when they drastically reduced the number of hunting tags that were handed out. But that has been the extent of the efforts made to make a place for grizzly bears in Alberta.

The government did develop a grizzly bear management plan in 1990, but it was never implemented. More recently, the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the government list the grizzly as a threatened species, but this too has fallen largely on deaf ears. Hunting permits were reduced again, but a near-record number of grizzlies were killed anyway. A recovery team was brought together to develop a recovery plan (for a species that hasn’t even been recognized as threatened), but it was so dominated by industry and government officials that it is so weak it will do little to address the issues that imperil the grizzly bear today.

No, it’s obvious that grizzly bears are not high on the Tories’ priority list.

But the good news is that the Tories’ grip on power has weakened; democracy seems to have returned to Alberta. It’s not over yet, but the Tories appear to have lost 10 seats and 20 per cent of the popular vote. David Swann replaced Mark Hlady, giving Calgary its first Liberal candidate in years, and Mark Norris, the Tories’ minister of economic development, looks like he’ll be looking for a new job tomorrow. The Liberals and the NDP together will hold one-third of the seats in the legislature, providing a much-needed opposition to a Tory majority that has steamrolled across Alberta for 30 years.

While this won’t likely change much over the next four years, it just may bode well for the next election and the distant future. For this a few grizzly bears may be dancing in their dens.

Check back on Election Night (Nov 22) for the first post to GrizzlyBlog

2004-11-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

It will be worth the wait.