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.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Friday, February 05, 2010
How do we turn science into policy in a timely way?
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Fooling the people won't work forever
Alberta's Tories (and even their federal counterparts, Harper's Conservatives) would do well to pay attention to the implosion of the G.O.P. south of the border.
As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."
The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."
Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.
As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”
The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.
It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.
No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.
When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."
The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.
But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.
I just hope we don't wait too long.
As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."
The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."
Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.
As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”
The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.
It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.
No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.
When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."
The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.
But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.
I just hope we don't wait too long.
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