Friday, April 09, 2004
By John Holt, E/The Environmental Magazine

The widely held notion that Canada is taking excellent care of its wild, pristine lands — far better than the gluttonous citizens in the United States — is nothing more than a misperception approaching myth. Americans, or Yanks as they are often called up north, are frequently verbally assailed by Canadians with the misplaced and perhaps na?ve notion that all U.S. citizens are swine when it comes to caring for and preserving quality country.

Canadians, in contrast, are valiant, conscientious souls who have no blood on their hands. This stance is at best spurious and possibly created to hide the fact that the western provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon are being plundered at an astonishing rate.

While I was having a couple of drinks in a bar called The Pit in Dawson City, Yukon, last summer, a Canadian came up to me and asked where I was from. When I told him he said, "You damn Yanks don't give a damn about your own land. You log it and stripmine it all to hell. Then you come up here to enjoy our country." Over the years I've heard many comments along those lines.

True, there are individuals in Canada who have devoted their lives to preserving the land and there are, as most of us know all too well, greedy people tearing apart the last remaining shreds of unspoiled country in the United States. But fair is fair, and the bottom line is that Canadians should take stock of their own environmental situation before gleefully casting aspersions America's way.

Forty years of being an inveterate road bum, traveling back roads on a skinny budget, fishing malarial bogs, inadvertently canoeing class V whitewater, hiking nonexistent trails bound for nowhere, and unavoidably staying on top of environmental issues in Canada has provided me an ongoing opportunity to see disturbing change in a land of incredible splendor and abundance — one peopled with some truly remarkable, generous, and creative individuals. But in the last five years, these destructive shifts in direction have been seismic, both metaphorically and literally.

Land Under Siege

The notion that Canada is the great white sustainable north is not wholly without merit. On the Environmental Sustainability Index, developed by Columbia and Yale Universities, Canada is ranked fourth and the United States 45th. Canada allows industrial hemp production, while the United States prohibits it, and is also a signatory to the U.S.-shunned Kyoto Treaty on global warming.

But when it comes to allowing extractive industries to run rampant, Canada may be king. From Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia to Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta to the vast Tintina Trench region in the southern Yukon and over east to Yellowknife on Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, the landscape is under siege. The extraction industries are running the show, tearing, blasting, sucking, and cutting every diamond, gold nugget, drop of oil, chunk of coal, and stick of timber they can access. If it's of value, these industries intend to have it.

What's going down in western Canada puts the devastation being visited on states like Montana, Wyoming, and West Virginia look mild by comparison. What are obviously horrendous clearcuts or devastating open-pit coalmines in the U.S. West are everyday situations in Canada too. Both countries are mining their natural resources at an alarming rate.

Canadian provincial campgrounds are filled to the brim with late-model pickups tricked out with all the options and pulling expensive fifth wheelers and pricey speedboats, ATVs, and jet skis. The Cypress Hills section along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, the setting for Wallace Stegner's book Wolf Willow, are now so overrun as to resemble a scene from National Lampoon's Vacation. Housing developments in cities such as Calgary and Edmonton stretch for miles with thousands of quarter-million-dollar homes.

All of this comes not only from the jobs provided by these corporations but also from royalties paid by the industry based on the amount of a given mineral extracted from a province. In Alberta, this figure exceeds $6 billion annually just for coal. The money is flowing in direct proportion to the abundance of the oil coming from countless wells hammered into the Canadian countryside. The old phrase "a chicken in every pot" has been updated in the northland to "an oil pumpjack in every yard."

Killing a Good Town

A good example — and there are many — is Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. This used to be a rather sedate town of a few thousand sometimes-impoverished souls who enjoyed life on the bluffs above the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River. The residents could take part in all of the outdoor activities one would expect in an area that rests in the foothills along the east slope of the Canadian Rockies, surrounded by dense, mature pine forest with countless rivers and streams pouring out onto the prairie. Lakes of the purest water abound, as do grizzlies, moose, eagles, deer, wolves, various species of trout, grayling, and mountain lions.
For years, timber generated decent incomes for many, as did motels, restaurants, and service stations that supplied occasional tourists with basic needs. Most everyone knew everybody else and crime rates were low.

The town, originally founded 150 years ago because of the fur trade and the natural highway provided by the Saskatchewan River, is now a riot of oil rigs, logging trucks, related workers, and the destructiveness that comes from too much money deposited in a local economy way too quickly. Residents are now moving towards surliness, depression, and anger caused by these rapid changes to their lifestyle.

A recent trip up that way this spring revealed streets, even residential side streets, overrun with trucks of all sizes running helter-skelter to the oil-and-gas biz shuffle. Gas stations are constantly busy filling the tanks of industry vehicles.

Beleaguered locals put on game but grim faces in the wake of this onslaught. A woman at a local bakery said, "I don't even remember what my town used to be. None of us knows anyone the way we used to. This place is frantic, like Calgary."

Rocky Mountain House has more than tripled in population, and that doesn't include the countless oil and gas roustabouts, drilling maintenance crews, surveyors, and the like.

What is happening to longtime residents of Rocky Mountain House and countless other towns scattered about the forests, mountains, and prairies of western Canada is to be expected wherever extractive industry moves in and shoves locals out of the way.

What was once home is now a corporate compound replete with out-of-control drinking, drugs, prostitution, and the ubiquitous grifters plying a variety of hustles and cons — the ever-present tagalongs to this avaricious carnival. The townspeople don't know what's happening to them or their land. All that most of them see is the quick money fix that blinds them to the negative and long-term changes to this way of life.

"In terms of world greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. is responsible for 25 percent and Canada 2 percent," said Jim Fulton of the Vancouver, Canada–based David Suzuki Foundation. "But Canadians are the largest per capita users in the world. We use more energy on a daily basis than the entire continent of Africa.

"The impact from gas and oil exploration, especially in the boreal forest of Alberta, is catastrophic," said Fulton. "Exploratory roads are laid out in a grid pattern that runs for hundreds of miles east-and-west and north-and-south. The combined impact of seismic exploration, then bringing in heavy equipment and constructing storage facilities, is enormous.

Then these roads are used by people on ATVs. This affects wildlife including migratory birds, bears, and wolves. The terror experienced by caribou, deer, and moose from ATVs cannot be overstated. If these animals are forced to flee even short distances, they frequently overheat or lose pregnancies. Often they die. In some areas moose populations have vanished, leaving indigenous populations without sustenance.

"The oil reserves in our tar sands are the largest in the world, larger than those of Saudi Arabia," said Fulton. "And the North American oil and automotive industries are doing anything but encouraging fuel-efficient vehicles and conservation. Members of the oil industry are criminals of the first order."

The continual boom-and-bust cycle of the West is at play in Canada. Ten, maybe 20 years of feast, then complete collapse and all of the new homes and expensive toys go back to the banks while the oil, coal, and timber companies are long gone, searching for the next valley to plunder. It's an old, ugly story that's been played out in Butte, Montana; Deadwood, South Dakota; and in ghost towns with names like Garnet, Pony, and Como. Now the routine is playing in Canada.

Millions of acres of land in these western provinces are being surveyed, mapped, and then exploited by these extractive industries. And production figures in oil and gas, coal, and other minerals along with timber are climbing rapidly and, in many cases, equal or exceed production totals in the United States. Forest trunk roads that used to wind serenely through dense pine woods and alongside unspoiled rivers in the Rocky Mountain foothills are now bustling, muddy or dusty corridors conveying a steady stream of enormous trucks hauling huge machinery.

Incoming!

A couple years ago, a friend and I were traveling north from Rocky Mountain House on Forest trunk 743. We were working on a book about the northern high plains called Coyote Nowhere. The late-June weather was warm but rainy and the dirt roads were now a muddy and treacherous quagmire.

Even if there had been no other traffic the drive would have been a sporting proposition. We'd been warned by a forest employee the night before in a campground along the Pembina River to watch out for the steady stream of oil and coal rigs moving up and down these roads.

"They don't stop or even move over for anyone. People are killed all of the time. Trucks, cars, campers: all of them sometimes crushed flat like empty beer cans. That's an extremely dangerous drive you're about to undertake." He wished us luck and then headed off down the road to check on another campsite.

At the time I considered his warning a bit extreme, but I was to find out differently. The next morning as we drove north, a steady stream of enormous rigs roared past us, the tires on these machines taller than our GMC Suburban. The noise of the engines was deafening as they belched thick black clouds of diesel exhaust. While climbing a sticky hill, a semi pulling drilling equipment moved well over to our side of the road, just missing us by inches and drenching the Suburban's windshield in a thick wash of slop. We barely made it to the top of the rise, driving blind, and barely managed to skid over into a slight turnoff.

Getting out to collect ourselves and settle frayed nerves, I looked around. On both sides vast open-pit coal mines stretched deep into the ancient pine forest. Tall metal stacks that rose above the trees were crowned by flickering flames of natural gas being burned off at several pumping stations. Oil company signs said "No Trespassing" at the entrance to every side road. In the pits, large machinery was scooping up and hauling away coal. Dynamite blasting roared in the distance. Far in the west the lofty crest of the Rockies flickered snow white between swirling openings in the cloud cover.

Fifteen years ago when I traveled this road on my way to the then-remote mountain town of Grand Cache (now overrun with the same madness as in Rocky Mountain House), I felt like I was in the middle of a primeval forest, that a grizzly or moose could appear from the edge of the trees at any moment. Now the atmosphere was more like a scene of some vast industrial park.

The rivers were running muddy along the road, and the only wildlife I saw was an occasional raven gliding high above what remained of the forest. This vision of desecration continued for 60 miles before we turned off onto another road, but that one soon led past a mammoth coal mine where mountains on the eastern edge of Jasper Park in the Gregg River drainage were being carved down to nothing. The air was filled with the noise of heavy machinery and was choking with waves of black dust swirling in miniature tornados as the wind whipped down from the remaining mountains. More than 800 miles north from my home, I felt like I was in Detroit.

A Fragile Balance

Half of Canada is covered by temperate forest (like that found in the Northwestern United States), temperate rainforest or boreal forest (similar to that found in Siberia). The boreal forest is a 600-mile-wide band of timberland stretching from approximately 300 miles north of the U.S. border to the treeline in the Arctic and spanning the breadth of the country.

Approximately 300 million acres of the country's forest are managed for timber production. This is an area more than one-and-a-half times the size of several Midwestern states. Two-thirds of Canada's estimated 300,000 wildlife species live in the forest.

The temperate and boreal forests along with the arctic tundra of these four provinces are extremely fragile. I spoke with a biologist at the Tombstone Campground Interpretive Center located on the Yukon's Dempster Highway. She pointed out that as few as 20 people walking the same line to a distant peak and back again would disturb the vegetation and soils of this boreal environment to the extent that it would take several decades to return to its natural state.

Less than two dozen people treading lightly, not thousands of pieces of machinery the size of houses, thousands more workers, and thousands of tons of explosives, all ripping and digging away at some of the last wilderness left on the planet.

These figures give an idea of the magnitude of these extractive processes in Canada: The total timber harvest in the country is near 8 billion board feet per year, up from 2.9 billion in 1950. (In the United States this figure is around 4 billion board feet per year, down from 6 billion in the 1980s.)

Canada's forests cover an area nearly three times the size of Europe. This represents 10 percent of the world's forest cover, but only 5.5 percent of this is under some form of legal protection or constraint related to logging. This is some of the most productive forest in terms of biomass in the world. Grizzly bears, cougars, owls, woodland caribou, and elk live there. Approximately 10.8 million acres of logged forestlands in Canada (an area more than twice the size of Wales) remain denuded. If present trends continue, all of Canada's suitable forest will be harvested within 30 to 35 years.

"Alberta is a very, very wealthy province compared to Montana, but that comes with its own baggage," said Alberta guitarist Amos Garrett, who is also a devoted conservationist. "The provincial government is making millions in oil taxes and that just comes in the mail. Maybe there's $10 million to $15 million coming in from sportsmen. That's paltry. So there are deaf ears in Edmonton [the provincial capital]. I don't think we have the programs that you do down there in the States. You do much more for the trout and upland birds than we do."

In British Columbia, ancient forests are vanishing at the rate of one acre every 70 seconds, or 418,000 acres per year. In the time it takes to watch a 30-minute sitcom on television, 26 acres of forest have been leveled. In the past decade an area eight times the size of Connecticut has been clearcut. Companies do not have to bid competitively to log public forests. Fees are typically set at one-fourth to one-third market value.

The majority of logging in British Columbia is in old-growth forest, and the Canadian government estimates that the province is overcutting its woods by 20 percent. Clearcutting makes up 80 percent of all logging.

In B.C., it is legal to log smaller salmon streams down to the banks, destroying aquatic life and leaving no protections against fine sediment and high temperatures that are lethal to salmon eggs and fry. There is no endangered species legislation to protect wildlife from logging, despite the fact that the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada now lists 387 species of plants and animals at risk of extinction (8 percent of these species are shared with the United States). This is an increase of 20 percent since 1992.

Big on Fossil Fuels

Coal production figures for Canada are similar. Alberta mines 27 million tons annually; British Columbia, 40 million tons. The Canadian oil and gas industry invested more than $20 billion in exploration and development in 2000, making it the single-largest capital investor in the nation. Oil production is not expected to peak for 10 years. B.C. government officials have asked leaders in Ottawa to lift a decades-old ban on offshore drilling along Canada's Pacific Coast. Geologists estimate that there could be up to 10 billion barrels of oil and 1.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the area.

"We risk enormous damage to British Columbia's environmental heritage, all for a short-term dollar," said David Hocking, communications director for the David Suzuki Foundation.

Much of the United States from one coast to the other has been devastated by coal mining. Canada's western provinces are experiencing a similar fate, and the pace of the industries is accelerating. Within perhaps as little as two decades the ecosystem damage inflicted upon the Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories will make what happened in the United States pale in comparison. At the present rate, most natural resources will be exhausted in Canada within 40 years.

Even if Canada was exploiting its natural resources at only one-half the rate of the United States — which it isn't — everything would be gone within a century.

Some of the reasons why the mineral extraction industries have engendered the ire of both U.S. and Canadian citizens are exemplified by comments from the Canadian Minister of Energy and Mines, Richard Neufeld, during his opening address for the 44th Canadian Conference on Coal two years ago in British Columbia.

"We have eliminated corporate capital tax, reduced corporate income tax by 3 percent to 13.5 percent," said Neufeld. "Over 90 percent of our coal is exported, mainly to steel-making countries. The philosophy behind our actions is simple: increase certainty. Streamline regulatory requirements and make B.C. a better place to do business. We've changed the Coal Act to accomplish this for coal exploration and mining. As a result, coal exploration and development can proceed with fewer encumbrances.

"We will make dramatic cuts to prescriptive regulations under the Health, Safety, and Reclamation Code to give companies more flexibility to focus on results, not process. We have amended the Mines Act, and we are developing related regulations to allow most exploration activities to take place without the need for permits," said Neufeld.

This "philosophy" sounds remarkably similar to that espoused by the current administration in Washington, D.C.

During a recent trip to the Yukon, I pulled over at a wayside that offered a spectacular view of the Klondike River valley and the seemingly endless sweep of mountains rolling north towards the Arctic Circle. The ragged, surreal peaks of the Tombstone Range ghosted in the distance.

Looking to my left I noticed a large display sign touting a gold mine that was hidden behind a near range of mountains. Pictures and words graphically showed the huge scope of the operation and extolled the mine as providing jobs and money for Yukon residents. Certainly, this is true, but what will the real cost to Canadians and all of us be when all is said, blasted, and done in the not-so-distant future?

John Holt is the author of Coyote Nowhere: In Search of America's Last Frontier (St. Martin's Press). His latest book is a novel called Hunted (Lyons Press) about strip mining in southeastern Montana.