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.

Waiting, waiting, waiting ... gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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