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.
Showing posts with label bears. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bears. Show all posts
Friday, May 08, 2009
Friday, May 01, 2009
The semantics of successful grizzly bear recovery in Alberta
This news release just arrived in my inbox, and I thought I'd share it with y'all. Sadly, it was sent anonymously, but it does provide some interesting new information on the ongoing attempt to recover Alberta's grizzly bear population.
Calgary, Alberta; May 1, 2009 -- After a seven-year recovery process, Alberta’s grizzly bears have now been successfully recovered. This is the startling finding from the Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program, a new study by researchers at the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence (AIAE).
“We knew that recovery of grizzlies was being hampered by motorized vehicle access,” says AIAE spokesman Dr. Charles Brain. “So we decided to re-define the term ‘motorized vehicle’. And then we decided to re-define ‘recovery’.”
Those re-definitions were so effective that the Institute is now working on re-defining ‘grizzly bear’ to ensure that the province’s grizzly bear recovery process is even more successful.
The pioneering Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program began in 2008, when the term “motorized vehicle” was re-defined to mean “vehicle with a motor, more than 92 inches wide, with more than seven wheels. And red.” As a result, motorized vehicle access into grizzly habitat was immediately and considerably reduced.
Following the success of this initial re-definition, AIAE moved quickly to re-define the word “recovery.” The word now officially means “doing exactly what we were doing before, but with the word sustainable in front it.” Once again, grizzly bear recovery immediately took an enormous step forward.
AIAE is now drafting a new definition for grizzly bear. “Once restricted to refer to a member of the species Ursus arctos, the new working definition for ‘grizzly bear’ is now ‘hairy or non-hairy animal that may or may not have antlers’,” said Dr. Brain. “Or wheels.”
"We are proud to bring Alberta’s Grizzly Bear Recovery process to such a successful conclusion,” said Doris Klein, spokesman for Alberta Sustained Resource Development (AbSuRD). “We are now looking forward to completing successful recovery programs for all endangered wildlife in the province, including woodland caribou, black-footed ferret and wooly mammoth.”
Coming soon, the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence will be using lessons learned from its Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program to solve the thorny old problems of climate change and death.
Calgary, Alberta; May 1, 2009 -- After a seven-year recovery process, Alberta’s grizzly bears have now been successfully recovered. This is the startling finding from the Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program, a new study by researchers at the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence (AIAE).
“We knew that recovery of grizzlies was being hampered by motorized vehicle access,” says AIAE spokesman Dr. Charles Brain. “So we decided to re-define the term ‘motorized vehicle’. And then we decided to re-define ‘recovery’.”
Those re-definitions were so effective that the Institute is now working on re-defining ‘grizzly bear’ to ensure that the province’s grizzly bear recovery process is even more successful.
The pioneering Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program began in 2008, when the term “motorized vehicle” was re-defined to mean “vehicle with a motor, more than 92 inches wide, with more than seven wheels. And red.” As a result, motorized vehicle access into grizzly habitat was immediately and considerably reduced.
Following the success of this initial re-definition, AIAE moved quickly to re-define the word “recovery.” The word now officially means “doing exactly what we were doing before, but with the word sustainable in front it.” Once again, grizzly bear recovery immediately took an enormous step forward.
AIAE is now drafting a new definition for grizzly bear. “Once restricted to refer to a member of the species Ursus arctos, the new working definition for ‘grizzly bear’ is now ‘hairy or non-hairy animal that may or may not have antlers’,” said Dr. Brain. “Or wheels.”
"We are proud to bring Alberta’s Grizzly Bear Recovery process to such a successful conclusion,” said Doris Klein, spokesman for Alberta Sustained Resource Development (AbSuRD). “We are now looking forward to completing successful recovery programs for all endangered wildlife in the province, including woodland caribou, black-footed ferret and wooly mammoth.”
Coming soon, the Alberta Institute for Anecdotal Evidence will be using lessons learned from its Grizzly Bear Re-definition Program to solve the thorny old problems of climate change and death.
- 30 -
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Creating Doubt 101
I was wondering how long it would take the National Post to wade into the fray on the status and future of Alberta’s ailing grizzly population. On Sunday, the Post, Canada’s national (neo) conservative journal of record did not disappoint, dishing up a manly helping of misinformation and decontextualization that would make Nick Naylor proud. Because after all, “No one knows for certain.”
Not surprisingly, the Post’s lengthy opinion piece on the grizzly issue was brilliantly crafted by Kevin Libin, the founding editor-in-chief of the Calgary-based Western Standard, a neoconservative/libertarian e-rag that unfortunately has a strong following in Alberta. I say brilliantly because Libin’s column, already making the rounds on the Internet, is an excellent example of how neoconservatives (especially) try to create “artificial or manufactured controversy” in an effort to undermine the influence of science on politicized issues that challenge corporatist hegemony in favour of such mundane things as human and environmental health.
What is surprising is that the Post would print Libin’s column as a piece of journalism when such works of “truthiness” are usually reserved for dishonest presidents, public relations firms and other artisans of the politically fanciful. Holocaust deniers, for instance, have been using this same strategy almost since the end of the Second World War.
Perhaps the most egregious example, at least until the politicization of climate change, is the one portrayed in the movie Thank You for Smoking. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the tobacco lobby literally created controversy over the now well-accepted causal link between cigarette smoking and cancer. According to an internal document from Brown and Williamson, a now-defunct American tobacco company: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won’t know what to believe.”
More recently, the oil, gas and coal industries – with the help of the neoconservative think tanks they continue to fund – have helped to create uncertainty around the cause, even the existence of climate change. According to the now famous memo from influential political strategist Frank Luntz, consultant to the U.S. Republican Party, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.... You need to be more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message.... If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.”
Let’s see how Libin does this in “Alberta’s Grizzly Debate.” Rather than interview and quote a reputable grizzly bear biologist or political ecologist who has been intimately involved in the Alberta recovery planning process – Gord Stenhouse, say, or Dr. Mark Boyce or Dr. Robert Barclay or Dr. Mike Gibeau or Dr. Michael Proctor – he relies on Barry Cooper, a fellow neoconservative and political scientist at the University of Calgary – and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute who has been involved in researching and writing contrarian studies on grizzly bears and climate change.
Cooper has written similar ideologically based op-eds of his own for the Calgary Herald and various other think tanks and conservative publications, all of which indicate he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about when it comes to grizzly bears, though he obviously knows a thing or two about how to manipulate public opinion.
Herein, Cooper suggests that there is “no such thing as an Alberta grizzly bear population,” which is correct as far as it goes. Bears, like butterflies and sparrows, don’t much care for our political divisions, and move across borders if they can. (More on that later.) What is absent from Cooper’s submission, however, is that wildlife in Canada are managed largely by the provinces, not the federal government.
While it is true there are some 50,000 grizzly bears in North America – and more than 100,000 in Europe and Asia – Mr. Cooper surely must know, as an esteemed expert in the “science” of all things political, that Section 3.1.1 of the Fish and Wildlife Policy for Alberta (1982) indicates that “…the primary consideration of the Government is to ensure that wildlife populations are protected from severe decline and that viable populations are maintained….” The government of Alberta, therefore, is obligated to ensure that a “viable” population of grizzly bears is maintained within the boundaries of the political jurisdiction of Alberta, whether or not there are a bazillion grizzly bears elsewhere.
For his token biologist, Libin chooses Dr. Charles Kay, a controversial figure whose contrarian views are often quoted by – you guessed it – the Fraser Institute and conservative newspapers in the North American West. Kay is to wildlife management, in other words, what Tim Ball is to climate change.
Again, Libin chooses to forego the expertise and excellent reputations of Dr. Stephen Herrero and the other biologists mentioned above. Why? Because Kay’s “opinion” adds another piece of “evidence” in Libin’s attempt to undermine the science and more commonly understood expert opinion on the history, status and future of Alberta’s grizzly bear population. And as you will see, it is purely for economic (i.e. ideological) reasons rather than ethical or ecological ones.
Then, astonishingly, he chooses Quentin Bochar to comment on whether Alberta’s grizzly bear population is “sustainable.” Bochar is not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination. He works in the oil and gas industry and is a quad-loving hunter and the president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association, who has publicly stated that he doesn’t want to give up his “right” to ride his motorized horse wherever he wants just for the chance to kill himself a grizzly bear. I’m not necessarily opposed to hunting, but that’s not the point here. The point is that of all the people Libin could have asked whether 300 (or even 500) grizzly bears, widely dispersed across the road-infested Eastern Slopes, constitutes a sustainable population, Quentin does not rank in the top 100. It’s rather like asking the Pope if Jesus was actually the Son of God. Or if a bear shits in the woods.
So, Libin picks and chooses his experts to support his implied hypothesis that grizzly bears in Alberta are either doing just fine or not worth recovering (it’s tough to tell which he would like us to believe). What about the “scientific information” he presents? Not surprisingly, there is a lot of picking and choosing in this department, too, which amounts to a whole lot of journalistic dishonesty.
Libin starts by characterizing pre-colonial Alberta as a veritable wasteland comprised of “bald prairie and swampland ... glaciers, muskeg and ... deserts” in an effort to convince his readers that “the province’s population of a few hundred ... may be natural.” How does he come to this conclusion? Because, he says, our estimates of historical populations are based on “anecdotal and theoretical evidence.” This isn’t to say he, or Kay, have better evidence, or that the “theoretical” evidence is wrong. It’s just that we can’t “prove” anything. Because “no one knows for certain.”
In actuality, grizzly bears evolved in the tundra plains south of the ice sheets in Eurasia, coming to North America in several waves between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. The first grizzlies to make it south of the ice sheets arrived in Alberta some 26,000 years ago. Over time, the Great Plains evolved to teem with the wildlife we are familiar with: vast herds of bison and elk, packs of wolves, grizzlies. The parkland in central Alberta would have provided suitable habitat, too, the boreal less so. But be certain: there were grizzlies in the unmountainous parts of Alberta, probably thousands of them.
But Libin enlists Kay, the expert, to help him make his case otherwise. It is interesting how Kay/Libin phrase their “opinion” of the historical numbers of grizzly bears in Alberta: “there is no evidence that the Alberta bears ever lived in large numbers away from the Rockies.” Again, this is correct in so far as the oversimplification goes. There is, in fact, no direct evidence for any particular number. We simply don’t have enough data. Kay prefers low numbers because he believes (rather than knows) that Aboriginal people had laid waste to wildlife populations before Europeans arrived. But there is no evidence, either, that there weren’t 100,000 grizzlies in Alberta at one time, although that is highly unlikely.
(There is no evidence, either, that focusing government policy on maximizing economic output and monetary wealth is in the best interests of Canadians or the rest of humanity, and yet we do so, despite the obvious social and environmental problems such a strategy causes, with a zealousness usually reserved for fundamentalist Christians and Islamic terrorists – with the gleeful applause of people like Libins and Cooper.)
I have considered the question of how many bears might have roamed Alberta and the rest of the Great Plains as I research and write a book about the Great Plains grizzly bear. After consulting with numerous scientists and a significant body of scientific literature, the scientific consensus seems to be that there were probably somewhere between 17,500 and 30,000 grizzlies on the Great Plains, perhaps 5000 to 10000 of which made their homes in Alberta (which also includes a significant amount of parkland and boreal forest). The point is that had Libin asked Dr. Herrero or Dr. Chris Servheen or Dr. David Mattson, who has considered this matter perhaps more than anyone else, he would have got a different but likely more reputable answer.
But the reality is that it doesn’t really matter how many there were in 1690, when Kelsey first spotted one in what is now southern Saskatchewan. Given Alberta policy, it seems clear that we are obligated, at the very least, to make sure they remain a healthy part of Alberta no matter how many there were 220 years ago and how many there are in the world around us.
Which is really the point. Not only how many bears are left, but how many bears we need to ensure that the population in Alberta “remains viable.” Not surprisingly, Libins picks what he wants and then leaves out some of the most important details. He does mention some good science, quoting one study, the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project, which Cooper and Libin’s other Fraser Institute buddies roundly panned in a similar spate of misinformation a few years ago. It found, as Libins noted, that the population under study was growing at an annual rate of four per cent.
What Libin doesn’t mention is that the study area was comprised largely of protected areas in K-Country and Banff National Park, which one would expect to harbour a growing population, hopefully faster than four percent. What he also doesn’t include, interestingly enough, was that the results of that study indicated that because the population was so small, it was one dead female per year away from a declining population, and this in a largely protected landscape. He also forgets to mention that much of the rest of the Eastern Slopes outside of protected areas is so criss-crossed with roads, and the mortality risk is so high, that very sophisticated and reliable computer models indicate that grizzly bears will be all but eliminated from much of their current range outside of Alberta’s protected areas.
He also fails to mention that, at the larger scale, some of the most cutting-edge DNA work on any wildlife species anywhere indicates that Alberta’s diminutive grizzly bear population (in the strictly bio-political sense of the term, to keep Cooper and Kay happy) is being split into several isolated sub-populations. Darcy Whiteside, one of many Nick Naylors working for the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development, contends that grizzlies move between Alberta and B.C. And they do. But I’ve heard from no reputable scientists (and Libin doesn’t provide a reference) that the number of bears immigrating into Alberta from elsewhere has been identified as “10 percent.”
We do know that grizzlies fairly regularly move back and forth across the continental divide south of Highway 1. But between Highway 1 and Highway 16, the continental divide is rugged enough to be an almost impermeable barrier to grizzly bear movement. And so are Highways 1, 11 and 16, which leaves two small populations of less than 100 animals each to fend for themselves in a heavily impacted landscape, which is about as far from sustainable as a grizzly bear population gets. (A recent study from Spain suggests that the minimum size of a viable population in the short term is 200 animals.)
I think that’s enough. You get the point. Even Libin and Cooper, if they dare read this, should be sufficiently cowed. Libin could have, if he’d chosen, to provide what journalist Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Instead, he crafted his ideologically derived pseudo-truth to serves the ideological purposes of his neoconservative clansmen (and, sadly, women).
The truthiest thing that Libin has to say is that recovering grizzlies will require not only slowing the rampant industrialization of Alberta’s forests and foothills, but the rehabilitation of the damage that has been wrought under this government’s 37-year reign. “This, most everyone agrees, is the real root of the province's wariness to rush to declare the grizzlies threatened.”
But it isn’t a lack of “firm evidence,” as Libin contends, that’s at the heart of the Alberta government’s foot-dragging. After all, we know from the Yellowstone experience how to recovery a grizzly bear population from the brink. No, it’s not an absence of facts, but an absence of integrity and a plethora of greed that prevents the ideologues in Edmonton from doing their job and protecting the grizzly bear from further decline. For to do so is to admit to the world that their Lorax-like industrialization of the Alberta landscape has left an almost incalculable environmental debt that we may never be able to repay.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Post would publish such drivel. The worst part, perhaps, is that the Alberta government, from Darcy Whiteside on up, has been complicit in the foot-dragging and the lies. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise either, given that Ted Morton, Minister of Sustainable Resource Development and former fellow at the Fraser Institute, has been part of the same disinformation campaign for years.
In an effort to set the record straight, I suggest you read any of several articles I have written on the fate of Alberta's grizzly bear.
Not surprisingly, the Post’s lengthy opinion piece on the grizzly issue was brilliantly crafted by Kevin Libin, the founding editor-in-chief of the Calgary-based Western Standard, a neoconservative/libertarian e-rag that unfortunately has a strong following in Alberta. I say brilliantly because Libin’s column, already making the rounds on the Internet, is an excellent example of how neoconservatives (especially) try to create “artificial or manufactured controversy” in an effort to undermine the influence of science on politicized issues that challenge corporatist hegemony in favour of such mundane things as human and environmental health.
What is surprising is that the Post would print Libin’s column as a piece of journalism when such works of “truthiness” are usually reserved for dishonest presidents, public relations firms and other artisans of the politically fanciful. Holocaust deniers, for instance, have been using this same strategy almost since the end of the Second World War.
Perhaps the most egregious example, at least until the politicization of climate change, is the one portrayed in the movie Thank You for Smoking. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the tobacco lobby literally created controversy over the now well-accepted causal link between cigarette smoking and cancer. According to an internal document from Brown and Williamson, a now-defunct American tobacco company: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won’t know what to believe.”
More recently, the oil, gas and coal industries – with the help of the neoconservative think tanks they continue to fund – have helped to create uncertainty around the cause, even the existence of climate change. According to the now famous memo from influential political strategist Frank Luntz, consultant to the U.S. Republican Party, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.... You need to be more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message.... If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.”
Let’s see how Libin does this in “Alberta’s Grizzly Debate.” Rather than interview and quote a reputable grizzly bear biologist or political ecologist who has been intimately involved in the Alberta recovery planning process – Gord Stenhouse, say, or Dr. Mark Boyce or Dr. Robert Barclay or Dr. Mike Gibeau or Dr. Michael Proctor – he relies on Barry Cooper, a fellow neoconservative and political scientist at the University of Calgary – and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute who has been involved in researching and writing contrarian studies on grizzly bears and climate change.
Cooper has written similar ideologically based op-eds of his own for the Calgary Herald and various other think tanks and conservative publications, all of which indicate he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about when it comes to grizzly bears, though he obviously knows a thing or two about how to manipulate public opinion.
Herein, Cooper suggests that there is “no such thing as an Alberta grizzly bear population,” which is correct as far as it goes. Bears, like butterflies and sparrows, don’t much care for our political divisions, and move across borders if they can. (More on that later.) What is absent from Cooper’s submission, however, is that wildlife in Canada are managed largely by the provinces, not the federal government.
While it is true there are some 50,000 grizzly bears in North America – and more than 100,000 in Europe and Asia – Mr. Cooper surely must know, as an esteemed expert in the “science” of all things political, that Section 3.1.1 of the Fish and Wildlife Policy for Alberta (1982) indicates that “…the primary consideration of the Government is to ensure that wildlife populations are protected from severe decline and that viable populations are maintained….” The government of Alberta, therefore, is obligated to ensure that a “viable” population of grizzly bears is maintained within the boundaries of the political jurisdiction of Alberta, whether or not there are a bazillion grizzly bears elsewhere.
For his token biologist, Libin chooses Dr. Charles Kay, a controversial figure whose contrarian views are often quoted by – you guessed it – the Fraser Institute and conservative newspapers in the North American West. Kay is to wildlife management, in other words, what Tim Ball is to climate change.
Again, Libin chooses to forego the expertise and excellent reputations of Dr. Stephen Herrero and the other biologists mentioned above. Why? Because Kay’s “opinion” adds another piece of “evidence” in Libin’s attempt to undermine the science and more commonly understood expert opinion on the history, status and future of Alberta’s grizzly bear population. And as you will see, it is purely for economic (i.e. ideological) reasons rather than ethical or ecological ones.
Then, astonishingly, he chooses Quentin Bochar to comment on whether Alberta’s grizzly bear population is “sustainable.” Bochar is not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination. He works in the oil and gas industry and is a quad-loving hunter and the president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association, who has publicly stated that he doesn’t want to give up his “right” to ride his motorized horse wherever he wants just for the chance to kill himself a grizzly bear. I’m not necessarily opposed to hunting, but that’s not the point here. The point is that of all the people Libin could have asked whether 300 (or even 500) grizzly bears, widely dispersed across the road-infested Eastern Slopes, constitutes a sustainable population, Quentin does not rank in the top 100. It’s rather like asking the Pope if Jesus was actually the Son of God. Or if a bear shits in the woods.
So, Libin picks and chooses his experts to support his implied hypothesis that grizzly bears in Alberta are either doing just fine or not worth recovering (it’s tough to tell which he would like us to believe). What about the “scientific information” he presents? Not surprisingly, there is a lot of picking and choosing in this department, too, which amounts to a whole lot of journalistic dishonesty.
Libin starts by characterizing pre-colonial Alberta as a veritable wasteland comprised of “bald prairie and swampland ... glaciers, muskeg and ... deserts” in an effort to convince his readers that “the province’s population of a few hundred ... may be natural.” How does he come to this conclusion? Because, he says, our estimates of historical populations are based on “anecdotal and theoretical evidence.” This isn’t to say he, or Kay, have better evidence, or that the “theoretical” evidence is wrong. It’s just that we can’t “prove” anything. Because “no one knows for certain.”
In actuality, grizzly bears evolved in the tundra plains south of the ice sheets in Eurasia, coming to North America in several waves between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. The first grizzlies to make it south of the ice sheets arrived in Alberta some 26,000 years ago. Over time, the Great Plains evolved to teem with the wildlife we are familiar with: vast herds of bison and elk, packs of wolves, grizzlies. The parkland in central Alberta would have provided suitable habitat, too, the boreal less so. But be certain: there were grizzlies in the unmountainous parts of Alberta, probably thousands of them.
But Libin enlists Kay, the expert, to help him make his case otherwise. It is interesting how Kay/Libin phrase their “opinion” of the historical numbers of grizzly bears in Alberta: “there is no evidence that the Alberta bears ever lived in large numbers away from the Rockies.” Again, this is correct in so far as the oversimplification goes. There is, in fact, no direct evidence for any particular number. We simply don’t have enough data. Kay prefers low numbers because he believes (rather than knows) that Aboriginal people had laid waste to wildlife populations before Europeans arrived. But there is no evidence, either, that there weren’t 100,000 grizzlies in Alberta at one time, although that is highly unlikely.
(There is no evidence, either, that focusing government policy on maximizing economic output and monetary wealth is in the best interests of Canadians or the rest of humanity, and yet we do so, despite the obvious social and environmental problems such a strategy causes, with a zealousness usually reserved for fundamentalist Christians and Islamic terrorists – with the gleeful applause of people like Libins and Cooper.)
I have considered the question of how many bears might have roamed Alberta and the rest of the Great Plains as I research and write a book about the Great Plains grizzly bear. After consulting with numerous scientists and a significant body of scientific literature, the scientific consensus seems to be that there were probably somewhere between 17,500 and 30,000 grizzlies on the Great Plains, perhaps 5000 to 10000 of which made their homes in Alberta (which also includes a significant amount of parkland and boreal forest). The point is that had Libin asked Dr. Herrero or Dr. Chris Servheen or Dr. David Mattson, who has considered this matter perhaps more than anyone else, he would have got a different but likely more reputable answer.
But the reality is that it doesn’t really matter how many there were in 1690, when Kelsey first spotted one in what is now southern Saskatchewan. Given Alberta policy, it seems clear that we are obligated, at the very least, to make sure they remain a healthy part of Alberta no matter how many there were 220 years ago and how many there are in the world around us.
Which is really the point. Not only how many bears are left, but how many bears we need to ensure that the population in Alberta “remains viable.” Not surprisingly, Libins picks what he wants and then leaves out some of the most important details. He does mention some good science, quoting one study, the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project, which Cooper and Libin’s other Fraser Institute buddies roundly panned in a similar spate of misinformation a few years ago. It found, as Libins noted, that the population under study was growing at an annual rate of four per cent.
What Libin doesn’t mention is that the study area was comprised largely of protected areas in K-Country and Banff National Park, which one would expect to harbour a growing population, hopefully faster than four percent. What he also doesn’t include, interestingly enough, was that the results of that study indicated that because the population was so small, it was one dead female per year away from a declining population, and this in a largely protected landscape. He also forgets to mention that much of the rest of the Eastern Slopes outside of protected areas is so criss-crossed with roads, and the mortality risk is so high, that very sophisticated and reliable computer models indicate that grizzly bears will be all but eliminated from much of their current range outside of Alberta’s protected areas.
He also fails to mention that, at the larger scale, some of the most cutting-edge DNA work on any wildlife species anywhere indicates that Alberta’s diminutive grizzly bear population (in the strictly bio-political sense of the term, to keep Cooper and Kay happy) is being split into several isolated sub-populations. Darcy Whiteside, one of many Nick Naylors working for the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development, contends that grizzlies move between Alberta and B.C. And they do. But I’ve heard from no reputable scientists (and Libin doesn’t provide a reference) that the number of bears immigrating into Alberta from elsewhere has been identified as “10 percent.”
We do know that grizzlies fairly regularly move back and forth across the continental divide south of Highway 1. But between Highway 1 and Highway 16, the continental divide is rugged enough to be an almost impermeable barrier to grizzly bear movement. And so are Highways 1, 11 and 16, which leaves two small populations of less than 100 animals each to fend for themselves in a heavily impacted landscape, which is about as far from sustainable as a grizzly bear population gets. (A recent study from Spain suggests that the minimum size of a viable population in the short term is 200 animals.)
I think that’s enough. You get the point. Even Libin and Cooper, if they dare read this, should be sufficiently cowed. Libin could have, if he’d chosen, to provide what journalist Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Instead, he crafted his ideologically derived pseudo-truth to serves the ideological purposes of his neoconservative clansmen (and, sadly, women).
The truthiest thing that Libin has to say is that recovering grizzlies will require not only slowing the rampant industrialization of Alberta’s forests and foothills, but the rehabilitation of the damage that has been wrought under this government’s 37-year reign. “This, most everyone agrees, is the real root of the province's wariness to rush to declare the grizzlies threatened.”
But it isn’t a lack of “firm evidence,” as Libin contends, that’s at the heart of the Alberta government’s foot-dragging. After all, we know from the Yellowstone experience how to recovery a grizzly bear population from the brink. No, it’s not an absence of facts, but an absence of integrity and a plethora of greed that prevents the ideologues in Edmonton from doing their job and protecting the grizzly bear from further decline. For to do so is to admit to the world that their Lorax-like industrialization of the Alberta landscape has left an almost incalculable environmental debt that we may never be able to repay.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Post would publish such drivel. The worst part, perhaps, is that the Alberta government, from Darcy Whiteside on up, has been complicit in the foot-dragging and the lies. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise either, given that Ted Morton, Minister of Sustainable Resource Development and former fellow at the Fraser Institute, has been part of the same disinformation campaign for years.
In an effort to set the record straight, I suggest you read any of several articles I have written on the fate of Alberta's grizzly bear.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Does Canmore need a grizzly zoo?
As if the ever-expanding town of Canmore wasn't already a bad example of how to co-exist with the natural world. Now some enterprising locals want to turn Cross Zee Ranch, on the town's northeast boundary, into a wildlife "conservation" center featuring five "trained" and "performing" bears.
According to the Calgary Herald, the bears would be housed in a 1.7-hectare enclosure on the ranch, which would become a "world-renowned centre for teaching conservation." Ruth Labarge, a wildlife trainer involved in the project, said shows would allow people to see live bears and learn about bear safety. "These bears are spokespersons for their wild brothers. Their drives and focuses are not like a real bear.... Our bears are like small children that enjoy performing, and their health issues are non-existent."
Do we really need another "conservation" zoo to teach us about bears? I doubt it. The facade of "education = conservation" for too long has been used to justify projects whose primary aim it to provide decent returns for their "investors." How can displaying (albeit captive-bred) wild animals in a town that has destroyed more grizzly bear habitat than your average gas field teach anyone about conservation? Isn't this rather like bombing for peace?
Besides, it is not more knowledge of bears -- never mind the chance to watch them "perform" like enslaved whores -- that will encourage our conservation of them. No, it is not how much (more) we know of them but how we choose to think of them that will determine whether or not Alberta's threatend grizzly bear will survive in the Bow Valley and the rest of Alberta's dwindling wilderness.
And how we choose to think of them is nothing more than taking a quiet moment and "simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me." (David Foster Wallace)
Preventing captive bears from becoming a defining element of Canmore's evolving gestalt may be one of the last opportunities to save the town's wayward soul. Please, take a moment to think about it.
According to the Calgary Herald, the bears would be housed in a 1.7-hectare enclosure on the ranch, which would become a "world-renowned centre for teaching conservation." Ruth Labarge, a wildlife trainer involved in the project, said shows would allow people to see live bears and learn about bear safety. "These bears are spokespersons for their wild brothers. Their drives and focuses are not like a real bear.... Our bears are like small children that enjoy performing, and their health issues are non-existent."
Do we really need another "conservation" zoo to teach us about bears? I doubt it. The facade of "education = conservation" for too long has been used to justify projects whose primary aim it to provide decent returns for their "investors." How can displaying (albeit captive-bred) wild animals in a town that has destroyed more grizzly bear habitat than your average gas field teach anyone about conservation? Isn't this rather like bombing for peace?
Besides, it is not more knowledge of bears -- never mind the chance to watch them "perform" like enslaved whores -- that will encourage our conservation of them. No, it is not how much (more) we know of them but how we choose to think of them that will determine whether or not Alberta's threatend grizzly bear will survive in the Bow Valley and the rest of Alberta's dwindling wilderness.
And how we choose to think of them is nothing more than taking a quiet moment and "simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me." (David Foster Wallace)
Preventing captive bears from becoming a defining element of Canmore's evolving gestalt may be one of the last opportunities to save the town's wayward soul. Please, take a moment to think about it.
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