FFWD REW

We’re all Oncelers now

Grizzlies moving into the land of Seuss

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Dr. Seuss

Remember Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax? In this 1971 classic published the very year the Alberta Tories came to power for the first time the well-meaning (if short-sighted) Onceler stumbles upon a landscape dominated by groves of beautiful Truffala trees. Delighted at his discovery he promptly begins to turn this imaginary ecosystem into a working landscape in which Truffalas are chopped down and turned into thneeds (something that all people need) “just as fast you please.”

The Lorax a boisterous little man who speaks for the trees (and the Humming-Fish Swomee-Swans and Brown Bar-ba-loots) watches as the Onceler’s technological industriousness turns more and more Truffala trees into more and more thneeds. In the process the accompanying industrialization befouls and besmirches the air water and land and the wildlife disappears. When the last tree is cut the people employed by the Onceler’s factories are forced to pack up and leave as well.

It’s unlikely that Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) ever visited Alberta but his cautionary tale of the perils of unsustainable (if well-meaning) economic development couldn’t be a more fitting analogy for what is happening here these days. While the tarsands is the most visible example of Alberta’s outdated Oncelerian economic philosophy the plight of Alberta’s besieged grizzly bear population is an equally tragic story.

As I detail in The Grizzly Manifesto our American neighbours have managed to dramatically increase threatened grizzly bear populations in parts of Montana Wyoming and Idaho over the past two decades. During the same period the Alberta government has mismanaged the Eastern Slopes to such a degree that our grizzly bear population is small and very likely declining. One recent estimate suggests that there is a 98.6 per cent risk that the population will decline by as much as 30 per cent in the next 36 years.

Why such a dramatic difference? The U.S. born of an inherent distrust of government maintains a much more robust set of environmental laws and policies — including the U.S. Endangered Species Act — that allow citizens to keep the Oncelers in check. Alberta on the other hand is more like the land of the Lorax — the laws and policies meant to protect our environment are weak or nonexistent and the Oncelers among us are turning our forests and rivers into empty shadows.

This point was driven home one day during one of my more forthright conversations with Dave Ealey a biologist and senior “issues manager” for Sustainable Resource Development (SRD). I asked Ealey why so little had been done to protect Alberta’s grizzly bears over the last 20 years even though evidence indicates they are in deep trouble. Surprisingly he told me that he thought Alberta has “done very well for bears” citing inadequate technology and lack of information for any potential shortfalls.

“Why hasn’t the government listed the grizzly bear as a threatened species yet?”

“We manage the landscape as if it’s a working landscape as opposed to a landscape where there’s nothing happening” said Ealey. “An important part of the value of this landscape is to the resource economy.”

I couldn’t help but think of the Onceler’s “Super-Axe-Hacker which whacked off four Truffula trees at one smacker…. Business is business! And business must grow!”

As The Lorax illustrates it is this dominance of short-term economic interests over ecological limits that is the biggest threat to most species at risk including grizzly bears and the health of our ecosystems. Effectively protecting them will require us to maintain human activities within the limits dictated by nature. We need to keep our Oncelers in check.

To do this we need a way to be able to hold our politicians accountable for their decisions between elections. We need strong environmental legislation that individual citizens can use to sue the government when it fails to comply with the spirit and the intent of the law which after all is the articulation of our collective values.

What I think we yearn for is a Canadian society based on polite and peaceful co-existence. Don’t we endure enough confrontation already? Do we really need to refer the protection of our environment to the courts?

The evidence in Canada suggests the answer is “Yes.” Even if there is another more collaborative more conciliatory way to protect nature it will be built on a foundation of clear transparent and enforceable laws and policies that hold citizens corporations and governments accountable for their actions. The rule of law is the foundation of Western democracy and grizzly bears deserve its protection as much as people do.

Remember that the next time you vote.

Jeff Gailus is the author of The Grizzly Manifesto published by Rocky Mountain Books. He will be reading at Pages bookstore on May 20 at 7:30 p.m. and at Communitea in Canmore on May 25.

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