Editor:
I started my career working with scientists to classify the landscapes and inventory wildlife in the mountain National Parks.
I learned to see how landforms work, how vegetation evolves over time, and where wildlife – from amphibians and birds through shrews and voles to the larger carnivores and ungulates – prefer to live. It was wonderful to learn land so intimately, but there’s a downside: I see wounds that others don’t.
In the early 1980s, when Canmore was still a recovering coal town, I lived in Tepee Town. The Three Sisters lands, Benchlands and Cougar Creek were all undeveloped.
Canmore still fit inside nature. Increasingly, however, nature’s been having trouble fitting in at all. The fate of Bear 148 is only one example of how human use now controls the fates of our wild neighbours.
We tend to assume that because things are here today, they’ll always be here. As a child I thought the burrowing owls and curlews on the outskirts of Calgary would always be there. They’re gone, even their prairie is gone; it’s all city now.
During my wildlife inventory days in Jasper, I came to see caribou as defining that park’s very nature. They’re mostly gone; Jasper has a hollow in its heart.
Animals don’t just happen; they need habitat and space. Some habitats – like riparian areas, deciduous woods, native grasslands, south-facing benches – are vitally important. And wildlife doesn’t need the stress of constant encounters with things that make them uneasy. Like us. Especially like our dogs. They rely on predictable patterns of weather, seasonality, the presence of other species, the availability of food.
Animals do not need “wildlife corridors.” The concept of a wildlife corridor has an ecological basis – corridors of intact vegetation with low human use help wary or nervous animals get around fragmented landscapes, albeit with a lot of stress – but it’s mostly a planner’s conceit: something that lets us pretend we’re providing for nature while we fill the landscape with buildings.
Animals don’t need wildlife corridors; what they need is intact habitat. Lots of it.
Most people in the Bow valley like living among wild animals. We’re proud that there are grizzly bears here, that elk sometimes walk down the street and coyotes sing in the night. But none of those things are assured once nature starts to run out of space.
That’s why I oppose the latest Three Sisters Mountain Village concept.
It’s no village; it’s a development play, for profit. There’s nothing wrong with profit, of course. But buying land on speculation comes with risk; big profits aren’t guaranteed.
So I don’t feel that anyone owes anything to land developers wanting to profit from urban sprawl at the expense of nature. On the other hand, we all owe something to nature, considering how much it enriches our daily lives (and helps developers market the subdivisions with which they keep replacing it.)
We should be talking about people corridors, not wildlife corridors. Wildlife shouldn’t be forced into stress-filled forays from one patch of cover to the next. Because at some point, the grizzly bears, wolves, moose and other animals just won’t be here. Wolves are already mostly absent.
In this century, nature is under siege from climate change, habitat fragmentation and the massive footprint of a human population that insists on all material prosperity instead of asking what we can do without. But if Canmore wants to be a community where people and nature coexist, we need to be different.
Every remaining square meter of stream floodplain, aspen forest, grassland, wetland and Douglas fir forest in this valley needs to be left wild.
We’ve taken more than our fair share and certainly don’t need more high-end weekend retreats that sit mostly empty in cul-de-sacs echoing with emptiness and reeking of wasted wealth. Developers should confine their ambitions to places where there are no elk, bear or marten tracks, no birdsong and no game trails.
If we don’t rein Three Sisters in, that’s what the whole place could become.
Kevin Van Tighem,
Canmore
