Grizzly bears on trial in the Castle

‘Rhetorical’ smokescreen ensures bruins’ decline

When Franz Kafka wrote both The Trial and The Castle he set out to explore in part the dangers inherent in government bureaucracies that operate outside the rule of law. In The Trial (originally called The Process ) Joseph K. is arrested for an unspecified crime by two unidentified agents working for an unidentified authority. After a long nightmarish quest to find out what the charges are and how to clear his name K. ultimately resigns himself to the unresolvable absurdity of his situation. He is eventually executed for a crime of which he knows nothing.

The protagonist in The Castle is also called K and he lives in an equally absurd society in which an unknown number of aging white men rule over a village their authority unknown from an impenetrable castle on a hill. K is a newcomer to the village and he finds it strange that the villagers not only allow the anonymous despots in the castle to rule their lives they actually support them even though the villagers have no idea who they are or why the rules are the way they are. Like K. in The Trial The Castle ’s K attempts to figure out what’s going on all to no avail.

I’m sure Mike Judd who is trying to use an unresponsive and inscrutable bureaucracy to protect Alberta’s grizzly bears can relate to both protagonists K. I know I do.

Kafka of course used his literary impulses to condemn the abuses of power perpetrated by authoritarian regimes but the critique applies equally well to Alberta’s twisted democracy at least as it relates to environmental management and protection. Like the bureaucracies in Kafka’s novels the regulatory framework in Alberta is so absurdly enigmatic that it would be comical if it weren’t so dangerously problematic.

The ongoing battle over industrial resource extraction (clear-cut forestry sour gas) and rampant off-highway vehicle use in Alberta’s Castle wilderness in the province’s far south is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The Castle is a very special place boasting the highest diversity of plants and animals in all of Alberta including several threatened and endangered species and its peaks and valleys and red-rock ridges leave visitors forever changed by the beauty. I should know: I lead university field courses in the area.

Spurred by overwhelming public support the Castle Special Management Area was “protected” as part of the Alberta government’s Special Places Program. Eight years later after more public outcry the grizzly bear population was listed by Alberta as an endangered species under the Wildlife Act because their numbers are small shrinking and at risk of disappearing altogether.

The government then developed a grizzly bear recovery plan to “restore and ensure the long-term viability of a self-sustaining grizzly bear population” across “current provincial distribution and occupancy levels.” As part of this plan the government designated the Castle as “core grizzly bear habitat.” Because a high density of roads has been well documented to be a death knell for grizzly bears the recovery plan followed the scientifically justified norms used in other jurisdictions and stipulated that the density of roads and trails used by trucks ATVs and dirt bikes should be less than 0.6 kilometres/square kilometre in all core grizzly bear habitat. Such a move is well known to be the most important strategy in recovering grizzly bear populations and has been used very successfully right across the border in Montana.

A 2011 study by Global Forest Watch found that the Castle already bears the scars of more than 1200 kilometres of roads and trails available for motorized and off-road use — a density of 1.3 kilometres/square kilometre twice the level prescribed in the grizzly bear recovery plan. The government’s response was right out of Kafka’s playbook. Rather than putting a moratorium on road building and other development in the Castle the Alberta government simply approved more clear-cut logging — which Spray Lakes Sawmills is set to begin next month — and another Shell sour gas well for the Castle’s designated core grizzly bear area.

Interested to know whether the government had done an assessment to understand the impacts additional development might have on the local and regional grizzly bear population I contacted Alberta Sustainable Resources Development spokesperson Dave Ealey. He assured me that it had been done prior to the approval of the forest management (for example logging) plan. When I asked to see it he conceded that “It’s safe to say that the analysis is a combination of experience observations and feedback with stakeholders rather than a single product.” Reading between the lines the obvious translation is that it wasn’t done at least not in the open-and-transparent manner consistent with best democratic practice.

Clearly our government doesn’t care much about understanding how logging will impact grizzly bears in the Castle. What it does care about is squeezing every last drop of oil and joule of gas from the ground the consequences be damned. This became clear when Ealey added: “Grizzly bears are not the only access management considerations of our natural resource management responsibilities.” It turns out that the government is not required to implement the recovery plan it approved. Ealey said the plan only provides “guidelines” and that instead the government is focusing on “technology transfer of what’s been learned about grizzly bears in recent years into adaptive management approaches that fit within a working landscape.”

Ah yes the working landscape. For those of you not fluent in such Orwellian bureaucratese this means providing industry with maps and computer models and asking them to do the best they can to minimize impacts on grizzly bears even as they ignore the recovery plan and introduce the very threats the recovery plan was developed to redress. It’s simply “business as usual” disguised as “we’re doing our best” the kind of paternalistic politics that you’d expect from the insidious bureaucracies that haunted Kafka’s imagination.

This is where Judd comes in. Like me he is fed up with the “discretionary” nature of environmental management in Alberta. When the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) approved Shell’s latest application for yet another sour gas well in the Castle — despite the fact it appears to contravene the grizzly bear recovery plan by adding to the degradation of grizzly bear habitat in the Castle — Judd like K challenged the absurdity in the courts. Judd is a dogsledding guide who lives near the well site and he is well acquainted with his ursine neighbours. He has a grizzly bear den on his property and he’s got photographic evidence of several grizzlies using the area this spring.

Predictably Alberta Court of Appeal Justice Carole Conrad denied Judd’s right to appeal and reconfirmed the ERCB’s original decision. “At the end of the day after balancing all of the factors” she wrote in her decision “the ERCB concluded that loss of the grizzly bear habitat due to the exploratory well would not be significant.” The claim is ridiculous. While one exploratory well and the ancillary development that will accompany it — roads and pumping stations and if it’s successful additional wells and pipelines — would likely have a minor effect on grizzly bears when it’s layered on top of the other 1200 kilometres of roads and trails and the other 50 wells and 200 kilometres of pipelines and the Spray Lake’s logging plans it’s just another nail in the grizzly bears’ coffin.

Earlier this month Judd and his supporters held a wake at Shell’s newest well site. Unlike K. Judd and others trying to challenge Alberta’s inane bureaucracy will not be executed for their courage. But that is small consolation for the grizzly bears who will continue to die while bureaucrats and politicians hide behind a rhetorical smokescreen that all but guarantees the continued decline of our grizzly bears in the Castle and the rest of western Alberta.

Jeff Gailus’s The Grizzly Manifesto has been shortlisted for the 2010 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. His upcoming book about the tarsands Little Black Lies will be published later this year.

GRIZZLY FACTS

• There are an estimated 51 grizzlies in the Castle area. In 2010 five of these bears were killed and another one was relocated. That’s about 12 per cent of the population (not including unreported mortality) which is addtional to five removed (one dead four relocated) in 2009.

• Because grizzly bears are so slow at reproducing (the second-slowest reproducing land mammal in North America second only to the mighty musk ox) the recommended human-caused mortality threshold for threatened populations undergoing recovery is from three to four per cent.