Winds of change are blowing on Alberta’s prairie
W.O. Mitchell’s child protagonist in the classic Canadian novel Who Has Seen the Wind ventures out into the prairie while pondering the nature of God.
He finds gophers, grasshoppers, meadowlarks, hawks and his first sense of the divinity in Creation: “For one moment no wind stirred. A butterfly went pelting past. God, Brian decided, must like the boy’s prairie.”
Prairie is part of how many of us know Alberta. We may not all seek God there, but we can always find that part of ourselves defined by prairie — the smell of pasture sage, the music of vesper sparrows and meadowlarks, the sudden flight of pronghorn antelope.
As a child in a much smaller Calgary, I used to ride my bike into those windy spaces in search of birds. I found burrowing owls and chestnut-collared longspurs on the prairie margin of Forest Lawn. Beside Beddington Creek, I watched a David and Goliath battle between western kingbirds and ferruginous hawks who had both made the unfortunate decision to nest in the same tree. Sometimes, I came home stinking of fecund prairie sloughs whose shallows I searched for grebe and avocet nests.
Today, those places are gone. Calgary’s sprawl overwhelmed them. Elsewhere, Alberta’s prairie grasslands continue to vanish under irrigation sprinklers, coal bed methane well sites, twinned highways, power lines and windmills.
Many of the birds I once found in abundance are now classified as threatened or endangered species. Who could have imagined that could happen here?
To its credit, the government of Alberta is finally paying attention to the dangers of unplanned growth. Under its land use framework, government planners have begun consulting Albertans on regional growth plans. The prairies and their vanishing wildlife fall under the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan — to be finalized this winter and come into effect in April.
Southern Alberta has already
Many of the birds I once found in abundance are now classified as threatened or endangered species. Who could have imagined that could happen here?
lost more than half its native grassland. That’s why our region accounts for more than three-quarters of Alberta’s species at risk. Their homes are disappearing. Fortunately, what remains is mostly public land, leased to cattle ranchers who take good care of it.
But it’s still at risk. Oil and gas companies slice new roads and pipelines across it rather than angle drilling from nearby roadsides. Irrigation farmers want to plow it up and plant potatoes and sugar beets. Vandals shred the soil with off-road vehicles. Erosion and weeds increasingly mar what remains.
A regional advisory committee recommended that the government protect most of our remaining prairie grassland as special conservation areas. Ranching would continue, but surface disturbance by heavy equipment and motor vehicles would be reined in.
But lobbying by special interest groups appears to have won out, because the draft South Saskatchewan Regional Plan contains not one single conservation area east of Highway 2 — where most of our species at risk are found.
Worse, it offers up a third of what remains for sale to irrigation farmers — something the regional advisory committee never even considered. Once plowed, prairie doesn’t recover.
Sage grouse and burrowing owls are almost extinct in Alberta. Their prospects are grim if they lose a third of what little habitat remains. Other species will surely follow if we can’t hang onto what’s left of their once-vast prairie landscape.
It would be tragic indeed if future young Albertans, having read one of our defining prairie novels, were to venture out in search of that part of the divine that expresses itself in our Alberta prairie ecosystems, and find only stubble and weeds.
But it’s going to happen, unless their parents tell the government that our vision of southern Alberta’s future includes protected native grasslands landscapes that sustain that unique piece of Creation we know as Alberta’s living prairie.