Horejsi is a wildlife scientist from Springbank, Alta.
The winds of change have been blowing stronger in North America since that day in November 2008 when Barack Obama became president of the United States. As the new world leader visits Canada, it should spur us to contemplate where Albertans and Canadians are and not only where we might go, but where we can go….
Great damage has been done to democracy and our environment by those who tore down the pillars of public accountability in order to facilitate corporate and industrial domination of the political, regulatory and conservation world.
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There have been no bailouts for the environment, yet the cost will exceed manyfold the price tag of bailouts now in the news; an estimated $317 billion annually worldwide just to maintain biological diversity and evolutionary potential.
No heads rolled in Canada among elected or senior government management. Biological diversity and our public and natural landscapes have been dismembered as part of the race to private sector enrichment. But like overextended and unearned financial credit, destruction of and disdain for the living processes that support life on earth under the guise of economic growth is an illusion that can be hidden only so long.
Mired in intellectual obscurity, a long series of Alberta Conservative governments and their corporate bedmates have denied Albertans the principled, scientifically sound and legally and democratically accountable regulatory structure that would mark us as a progressive civilization.
We learn, for example, after several decades of bitter conflict, that the public and independent scientists were right; grizzly bears are endangered, and their numbers but a fraction of what the public was led to believe. And still we see hostility to endangered species legislation.
We are suffering, at great cost, as vast areas of Alberta’s forests are deliberately being denuded in a hopeless and wasteful effort to control a largely natural process of regeneration – pine beetle expansion – even as scientists warn of the doubling of “background” forest mortality for trees of all ages in western North America as a result of climate change. And still there are no environmental impact assessments or legislated forest plans.
An appallingly inept land use framework is being proposed for the province. Astonishingly, it has never been subjected to the scientific rigour of an environmental impact assessment, nor has it ever seen the light of democratic process, the foundation of which is public hearings. It will further entrench, should it ever be implemented, priority access upon those industrial, agricultural and motorized interests that have historically dominated public lands for their own private use, the very people and organizations that have led us to the environmental, social and economic abyss.
Albertans continue to suffer from rampant expansion of industrialization of public lands. This expansion is the work of “regulators” like the Energy Resources Conservation Board that sneer at scientific evidence and principles and make a mockery of the legitimate visions and democratic dissent of citizens and public interest groups; 99.9 percent of permits are summarily issued, reeled off like sheets from a roll of toilet paper.
We daily see denial at senior government levels of environmental destruction, economic mismanagement and democratic failure that resembles the contempt and arrogance of Holocaust denial. Disdain and ridicule for the science of global climate disruption inflame carbon emissions from the country’s most concentrated source, hence the label “dirty” oil from the tar sands.
Contrast this attitude with the words of president Obama: “the science is beyond dispute and facts are clear”…. “Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high; the consequences too serious.” In the face of this tidal wave of evidence and mounting atmospheric disruption, Albertans are crippled by more tax and regulatory breaks designed to expand these environmentally destructive, grossly expensive, and according to bishop Luc Bouchard, morally unacceptable tar sands activities. In an act of desperation that exposes a pathological distrust of Albertans, Ed Stelmach and the Conservative government have gone so far as to legislate a muzzle on access to information regarding royalties agreements and calculations.
Each and every one of these decisions bears heavily on not just our natural heritage like fish and wildlife and publicly owned resources, including habitat, but on our collective and individual ability to take back control of our government and of our lives.
Where lurk the solutions to these chronic problems? Dare the citizens of Alberta have the audacity of hope? Well, of course, we dare. And for many years, many Albertans – I would even argue that most of them – have held the audacity of hope that intellect and science will rise to the top in public Alberta.
Public lands and legally entrenched regulatory processes, strong on public oversight, ought to be, and must be, the foundation of the new Alberta, the new North America. Public lands provide us with the least socially and environmentally expensive, most politically and legally accessible and most effective means of securing a reservoir for water and biological diversity, a reserve that might help us buffer the avalanche of global climate disruption impacts cascading down on us.
We can, and no doubt will, do battle over the role of private lands, and we will and must fight over the engineering and financial boondoggles that will be proposed to provide us with the ever promised but never materialized nirvana – technological escape from global climate disruption.
As has far too long been the case, these technological white knights remain as elusive as ghosts, the rarely attainable “birds in the forest.”
We do, however, have a bird in hand, one that can best kick start our climb out of The Great Darkness. That bird in hand is physically intact, ecologically functional, legally protected public land.
In times of crisis, the people of a land must force their way back into public debate and take control of democratic process and regulatory direction away from those who drove us into this crisis. Fellow citizens, with brighter light from the south shining our way, there will never be a better time than now.
