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

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

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.

1. Stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry to the tune of millions of dollars every year.
2. 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.
3. 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"

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.

How much is enough to conserve grizzly bears?

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

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.

Waiting, waiting, waiting ... gone

A recent Calgary Herald article about Alberta's ailing grizzly bear population quotes the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development's senior "issues manager" Dave Ealey saying that the province is awaiting the study's final results from the Grande Cache area and will not weigh in on the issue until all the facts are known. "We've made it quite clear that we are not going to be revisiting the status of grizzly bears until we have the appropriate review of the information," he said.

The fact is, the facts have been known for quite some time. Although the final population census report for the Grande Cache area won't be submitted until later this month, it has become common knowledge for at least a year that there are less than 500 grizzly bears in Alberta. I've heard grizzly bear researcher Gord Stenhouse, who was the government's grizzly bear "specialist" until he spoke openly and honestly about the fact there are too many roads in grizzly bear habitat, say as much (and more) at several public presentations over the years.

Ealey goes on to say, "It's not just numbers. In what way are they connected with the grizzly population in B. C.? What sort of genetic information have we gained from the DNA work, and should these bears be looked at as isolated populations?"

These are all good questions, but they are questions that have been answered already. Michael Proctor, who has analyzed hundreds of DNA samples taken from grizzly bears from Yellowstone to the Yukon, already has shown that grizzly bear populations in southern B.C. and southwest Alberta are becoming fragmented into smaller and smaller units. Of particular interest are the population units between Highway 16 and Highway 11, and between Highway 11 and Highway 1, which are being isolated by a combination of the rugged nature of the continental divide and by traffic and development associated with major highways. Each of these subpopulation units in Alberta contain less than 100 bears which, in the face of high levels of intense industrial and recreational use, are at risk of extirpation outside of the national parks.

I can assure that SRD Minister Ted Morton and his "issues managers" already understand the implications of the facts before them. But rather than quickly and efficiently implement an effective recovery plan, they have chosen to focus on "reframing" the issue. Rather than focus on how many bears there are in Alberta, which was how they talked about it BEFORE the DNA-based population estimate, when they were certain that there were more than 1000 bears, Morton recently said that the issue is how many bears there are in western Canada.

Alberta policy indicates the Alberta government is obligated to ensure a viable and healthy grizzly bear population remains in Alberta. Immigration from B.C. (and Montana and the national parks) will not be enough to ensure grizzly bears remain part of the Alberta landscape.

Besides, for a province and a people that prides itself for being independent and resourceful and self-sufficient, it seems a little odd that we would rely on the (more responsible) management regimes in neighbouring jurisdictions to prop up the health of a grizzly bear population that we are putting at serious risk.

It just ain't right. We've made poor choices and we need to be responsible for them. That means cleaning up the mess that we've made. Time to get busy.

Fooling the people won't work forever

Alberta's Tories (and even their federal counterparts, Harper's Conservatives) would do well to pay attention to the implosion of the G.O.P. south of the border.

As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."

The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."

Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.

As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”

The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.

It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.

No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.

When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."

The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.

But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.

I just hope we don't wait too long.

The semantics of successful grizzly bear recovery in Alberta

This news release just arrived in my inbox, and I thought I'd share it with y'all. Sadly, it was sent anonymously, but it does provide some interesting new information on the ongoing attempt to recover Alberta's grizzly bear population.


Calgary, Alberta; May 1, 2009 -- After a seven-year recovery process, Alberta’s grizzly bears have now been successfully recovered. This is the startling finding from the Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program, a new study by researchers at the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence (AIAE).

“We knew that recovery of grizzlies was being hampered by motorized vehicle access,” says AIAE spokesman Dr. Charles Brain. “So we decided to re-define the term ‘motorized vehicle’. And then we decided to re-define ‘recovery’.”

Those re-definitions were so effective that the Institute is now working on re-defining ‘grizzly bear’ to ensure that the province’s grizzly bear recovery process is even more successful.

The pioneering Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program began in 2008, when the term “motorized vehicle” was re-defined to mean “vehicle with a motor, more than 92 inches wide, with more than seven wheels. And red.” As a result, motorized vehicle access into grizzly habitat was immediately and considerably reduced.

Following the success of this initial re-definition, AIAE moved quickly to re-define the word “recovery.” The word now officially means “doing exactly what we were doing before, but with the word sustainable in front it.” Once again, grizzly bear recovery immediately took an enormous step forward.

AIAE is now drafting a new definition for grizzly bear. “Once restricted to refer to a member of the species Ursus arctos, the new working definition for ‘grizzly bear’ is now ‘hairy or non-hairy animal that may or may not have antlers’,” said Dr. Brain. “Or wheels.”

"We are proud to bring Alberta’s Grizzly Bear Recovery process to such a successful conclusion,” said Doris Klein, spokesman for Alberta Sustained Resource Development (AbSuRD). “We are now looking forward to completing successful recovery programs for all endangered wildlife in the province, including woodland caribou, black-footed ferret and wooly mammoth.”

Coming soon, the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence will be using lessons learned from its Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program to solve the thorny old problems of climate change and death.

- 30 -

Creating Doubt 101

I was wondering how long it would take the National Post to wade into the fray on the status and future of Alberta’s ailing grizzly population. On Sunday, the Post, Canada’s national (neo) conservative journal of record did not disappoint, dishing up a manly helping of misinformation and decontextualization that would make Nick Naylor proud. Because after all, “No one knows for certain.”

Not surprisingly, the Post’s lengthy opinion piece on the grizzly issue was brilliantly crafted by Kevin Libin, the founding editor-in-chief of the Calgary-based Western Standard, a neoconservative/libertarian e-rag that unfortunately has a strong following in Alberta. I say brilliantly because Libin’s column, already making the rounds on the Internet, is an excellent example of how neoconservatives (especially) try to create “artificial or manufactured controversy” in an effort to undermine the influence of science on politicized issues that challenge corporatist hegemony in favour of such mundane things as human and environmental health.

What is surprising is that the Post would print Libin’s column as a piece of journalism when such works of “truthiness” are usually reserved for dishonest presidents, public relations firms and other artisans of the politically fanciful. Holocaust deniers, for instance, have been using this same strategy almost since the end of the Second World War.

Perhaps the most egregious example, at least until the politicization of climate change, is the one portrayed in the movie Thank You for Smoking. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the tobacco lobby literally created controversy over the now well-accepted causal link between cigarette smoking and cancer. According to an internal document from Brown and Williamson, a now-defunct American tobacco company: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won’t know what to believe.”

More recently, the oil, gas and coal industries – with the help of the neoconservative think tanks they continue to fund – have helped to create uncertainty around the cause, even the existence of climate change. According to the now famous memo from influential political strategist Frank Luntz, consultant to the U.S. Republican Party, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.... You need to be more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message.... If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.”

Let’s see how Libin does this in “Alberta’s Grizzly Debate.” Rather than interview and quote a reputable grizzly bear biologist or political ecologist who has been intimately involved in the Alberta recovery planning process – Gord Stenhouse, say, or Dr. Mark Boyce or Dr. Robert Barclay or Dr. Mike Gibeau or Dr. Michael Proctor – he relies on Barry Cooper, a fellow neoconservative and political scientist at the University of Calgary – and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute who has been involved in researching and writing contrarian studies on grizzly bears and climate change.

Cooper has written similar ideologically based op-eds of his own for the Calgary Herald and various other think tanks and conservative publications, all of which indicate he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about when it comes to grizzly bears, though he obviously knows a thing or two about how to manipulate public opinion.

Herein, Cooper suggests that there is “no such thing as an Alberta grizzly bear population,” which is correct as far as it goes. Bears, like butterflies and sparrows, don’t much care for our political divisions, and move across borders if they can. (More on that later.) What is absent from Cooper’s submission, however, is that wildlife in Canada are managed largely by the provinces, not the federal government.

While it is true there are some 50,000 grizzly bears in North America – and more than 100,000 in Europe and Asia – Mr. Cooper surely must know, as an esteemed expert in the “science” of all things political, that Section 3.1.1 of the Fish and Wildlife Policy for Alberta (1982) indicates that “…the primary consideration of the Government is to ensure that wildlife populations are protected from severe decline and that viable populations are maintained….” The government of Alberta, therefore, is obligated to ensure that a “viable” population of grizzly bears is maintained within the boundaries of the political jurisdiction of Alberta, whether or not there are a bazillion grizzly bears elsewhere.

For his token biologist, Libin chooses Dr. Charles Kay, a controversial figure whose contrarian views are often quoted by – you guessed it – the Fraser Institute and conservative newspapers in the North American West. Kay is to wildlife management, in other words, what Tim Ball is to climate change.

Again, Libin chooses to forego the expertise and excellent reputations of Dr. Stephen Herrero and the other biologists mentioned above. Why? Because Kay’s “opinion” adds another piece of “evidence” in Libin’s attempt to undermine the science and more commonly understood expert opinion on the history, status and future of Alberta’s grizzly bear population. And as you will see, it is purely for economic (i.e. ideological) reasons rather than ethical or ecological ones.

Then, astonishingly, he chooses Quentin Bochar to comment on whether Alberta’s grizzly bear population is “sustainable.” Bochar is not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination. He works in the oil and gas industry and is a quad-loving hunter and the president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association, who has publicly stated that he doesn’t want to give up his “right” to ride his motorized horse wherever he wants just for the chance to kill himself a grizzly bear. I’m not necessarily opposed to hunting, but that’s not the point here. The point is that of all the people Libin could have asked whether 300 (or even 500) grizzly bears, widely dispersed across the road-infested Eastern Slopes, constitutes a sustainable population, Quentin does not rank in the top 100. It’s rather like asking the Pope if Jesus was actually the Son of God. Or if a bear shits in the woods.

So, Libin picks and chooses his experts to support his implied hypothesis that grizzly bears in Alberta are either doing just fine or not worth recovering (it’s tough to tell which he would like us to believe). What about the “scientific information” he presents? Not surprisingly, there is a lot of picking and choosing in this department, too, which amounts to a whole lot of journalistic dishonesty.

Libin starts by characterizing pre-colonial Alberta as a veritable wasteland comprised of “bald prairie and swampland ... glaciers, muskeg and ... deserts” in an effort to convince his readers that “the province’s population of a few hundred ... may be natural.” How does he come to this conclusion? Because, he says, our estimates of historical populations are based on “anecdotal and theoretical evidence.” This isn’t to say he, or Kay, have better evidence, or that the “theoretical” evidence is wrong. It’s just that we can’t “prove” anything. Because “no one knows for certain.”

In actuality, grizzly bears evolved in the tundra plains south of the ice sheets in Eurasia, coming to North America in several waves between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. The first grizzlies to make it south of the ice sheets arrived in Alberta some 26,000 years ago. Over time, the Great Plains evolved to teem with the wildlife we are familiar with: vast herds of bison and elk, packs of wolves, grizzlies. The parkland in central Alberta would have provided suitable habitat, too, the boreal less so. But be certain: there were grizzlies in the unmountainous parts of Alberta, probably thousands of them.

But Libin enlists Kay, the expert, to help him make his case otherwise. It is interesting how Kay/Libin phrase their “opinion” of the historical numbers of grizzly bears in Alberta: “there is no evidence that the Alberta bears ever lived in large numbers away from the Rockies.” Again, this is correct in so far as the oversimplification goes. There is, in fact, no direct evidence for any particular number. We simply don’t have enough data. Kay prefers low numbers because he believes (rather than knows) that Aboriginal people had laid waste to wildlife populations before Europeans arrived. But there is no evidence, either, that there weren’t 100,000 grizzlies in Alberta at one time, although that is highly unlikely.

(There is no evidence, either, that focusing government policy on maximizing economic output and monetary wealth is in the best interests of Canadians or the rest of humanity, and yet we do so, despite the obvious social and environmental problems such a strategy causes, with a zealousness usually reserved for fundamentalist Christians and Islamic terrorists – with the gleeful applause of people like Libins and Cooper.)

I have considered the question of how many bears might have roamed Alberta and the rest of the Great Plains as I research and write a book about the Great Plains grizzly bear. After consulting with numerous scientists and a significant body of scientific literature, the scientific consensus seems to be that there were probably somewhere between 17,500 and 30,000 grizzlies on the Great Plains, perhaps 5000 to 10000 of which made their homes in Alberta (which also includes a significant amount of parkland and boreal forest). The point is that had Libin asked Dr. Herrero or Dr. Chris Servheen or Dr. David Mattson, who has considered this matter perhaps more than anyone else, he would have got a different but likely more reputable answer.

But the reality is that it doesn’t really matter how many there were in 1690, when Kelsey first spotted one in what is now southern Saskatchewan. Given Alberta policy, it seems clear that we are obligated, at the very least, to make sure they remain a healthy part of Alberta no matter how many there were 220 years ago and how many there are in the world around us.

Which is really the point. Not only how many bears are left, but how many bears we need to ensure that the population in Alberta “remains viable.” Not surprisingly, Libins picks what he wants and then leaves out some of the most important details. He does mention some good science, quoting one study, the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project, which Cooper and Libin’s other Fraser Institute buddies roundly panned in a similar spate of misinformation a few years ago. It found, as Libins noted, that the population under study was growing at an annual rate of four per cent.

What Libin doesn’t mention is that the study area was comprised largely of protected areas in K-Country and Banff National Park, which one would expect to harbour a growing population, hopefully faster than four percent. What he also doesn’t include, interestingly enough, was that the results of that study indicated that because the population was so small, it was one dead female per year away from a declining population, and this in a largely protected landscape. He also forgets to mention that much of the rest of the Eastern Slopes outside of protected areas is so criss-crossed with roads, and the mortality risk is so high, that very sophisticated and reliable computer models indicate that grizzly bears will be all but eliminated from much of their current range outside of Alberta’s protected areas.

He also fails to mention that, at the larger scale, some of the most cutting-edge DNA work on any wildlife species anywhere indicates that Alberta’s diminutive grizzly bear population (in the strictly bio-political sense of the term, to keep Cooper and Kay happy) is being split into several isolated sub-populations. Darcy Whiteside, one of many Nick Naylors working for the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development, contends that grizzlies move between Alberta and B.C. And they do. But I’ve heard from no reputable scientists (and Libin doesn’t provide a reference) that the number of bears immigrating into Alberta from elsewhere has been identified as “10 percent.”

We do know that grizzlies fairly regularly move back and forth across the continental divide south of Highway 1. But between Highway 1 and Highway 16, the continental divide is rugged enough to be an almost impermeable barrier to grizzly bear movement. And so are Highways 1, 11 and 16, which leaves two small populations of less than 100 animals each to fend for themselves in a heavily impacted landscape, which is about as far from sustainable as a grizzly bear population gets. (A recent study from Spain suggests that the minimum size of a viable population in the short term is 200 animals.)

I think that’s enough. You get the point. Even Libin and Cooper, if they dare read this, should be sufficiently cowed. Libin could have, if he’d chosen, to provide what journalist Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Instead, he crafted his ideologically derived pseudo-truth to serves the ideological purposes of his neoconservative clansmen (and, sadly, women).

The truthiest thing that Libin has to say is that recovering grizzlies will require not only slowing the rampant industrialization of Alberta’s forests and foothills, but the rehabilitation of the damage that has been wrought under this government’s 37-year reign. “This, most everyone agrees, is the real root of the province's wariness to rush to declare the grizzlies threatened.”

But it isn’t a lack of “firm evidence,” as Libin contends, that’s at the heart of the Alberta government’s foot-dragging. After all, we know from the Yellowstone experience how to recovery a grizzly bear population from the brink. No, it’s not an absence of facts, but an absence of integrity and a plethora of greed that prevents the ideologues in Edmonton from doing their job and protecting the grizzly bear from further decline. For to do so is to admit to the world that their Lorax-like industrialization of the Alberta landscape has left an almost incalculable environmental debt that we may never be able to repay.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Post would publish such drivel. The worst part, perhaps, is that the Alberta government, from Darcy Whiteside on up, has been complicit in the foot-dragging and the lies. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise either, given that Ted Morton, Minister of Sustainable Resource Development and former fellow at the Fraser Institute, has been part of the same disinformation campaign for years.

In an effort to set the record straight, I suggest you read any of several articles I have written on the fate of Alberta's grizzly bear.

Does Canmore need a grizzly zoo?

As if the ever-expanding town of Canmore wasn't already a bad example of how to co-exist with the natural world. Now some enterprising locals want to turn Cross Zee Ranch, on the town's northeast boundary, into a wildlife "conservation" center featuring five "trained" and "performing" bears.

According to the Calgary Herald, the bears would be housed in a 1.7-hectare enclosure on the ranch, which would become a "world-renowned centre for teaching conservation." Ruth Labarge, a wildlife trainer involved in the project, said shows would allow people to see live bears and learn about bear safety. "These bears are spokespersons for their wild brothers. Their drives and focuses are not like a real bear.... Our bears are like small children that enjoy performing, and their health issues are non-existent."

Do we really need another "conservation" zoo to teach us about bears? I doubt it. The facade of "education = conservation" for too long has been used to justify projects whose primary aim it to provide decent returns for their "investors." How can displaying (albeit captive-bred) wild animals in a town that has destroyed more grizzly bear habitat than your average gas field teach anyone about conservation? Isn't this rather like bombing for peace?

Besides, it is not more knowledge of bears -- never mind the chance to watch them "perform" like enslaved whores -- that will encourage our conservation of them. No, it is not how much (more) we know of them but how we choose to think of them that will determine whether or not Alberta's threatend grizzly bear will survive in the Bow Valley and the rest of Alberta's dwindling wilderness.

And how we choose to think of them is nothing more than taking a quiet moment and "simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me." (David Foster Wallace)

Preventing captive bears from becoming a defining element of Canmore's evolving gestalt may be one of the last opportunities to save the town's wayward soul. Please, take a moment to think about it.