What does your buying farmed salmon in your local supermarket or restaurant or you having some exotic fish dish at the top dining room in the city

What does your buying farmed salmon in your local supermarket or restaurant, or you having some exotic fish dish at the top dining room in the city, and the collapse of the fish stalks in the lower half of the food chain? The fish farm industry is a voracious consumer of wild fish ground in to fishmeal, and there is almost 44 billion pounds[1] of fish discarded in the process of catching that tuna, salmon, cod and swordfish.

Why should this concern you?

We have got to understand that the earth is a close environment system, and what we do in Alberta does affect what happens elsewhere in the world.

We also have to start you look at our water in the context it is provided to us by Mother Nature, or the Great Creator.

We cannot treat it as if it can clean itself of all things that humans throw in it.

Alberta’s waters flow in to two of this earth’s oceans.

So when you look at the water situation in your own back yard, think about the fact it has flowed through, across, or under someone else’s backyard, and unless we all get our backyards cleaned up, we will all suffer in someway, by the water that runs through, under, or across our own backyards.

Economics and ecology both have their roots from the Greek word ‘oikos,’ meaning living place.

Most people I know that earn their living from the earth they walk on will tell you that their pay-checks are directly related to how they take care of the environment around them. Unfortunately, this is a philosophy that is quickly disappearing through the lure of the all might dollar that the large multi-national agri-industries are waving in front of the family farmer.

In his book ‘Seven Generations’[2], Mike Nickerson uses the illustration of wine making and the ecology. He says that the limitation of toleration is shown by the fact that when the yeast eats enough of the sugars in the fruit juices used for wine making, alcohol is excreted as a by-product. When the level of alcohol reaches 14 percent, the yeast can no longer tolerate that environment cannot tolerate it and dies.

If you have tapped into the money flow from the oil and gas patch, you will probably not want to see anything change.

The fact is that Alberta could turn the nozzle down on the current economic growth and see virtually no change in the growth of the province's economy, and in fact see the growth become manageable, and the future of the environment improve.

As this article is probably being read by people that work on the land, you already know in the back of your minds that there is a bigger problem with the environment that people in the Klein Government want to talk about, can talk about, or need to talk about.

Whenever there is a comment made about the environment, those of as that talk about it are set to the side with names or labels that designed to take the attention from mainstream Alberta away from us.

As the two major centres of Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton expand at unsustainable rates, and the Oil Sands industry expands at a rate that is unsustainable both in environmental and human resources, it is time to take a look at the way the provincial government looks at our water.

Water in this province is looked at as a renewable resource that will always be there, and has the capacity to provide us with all that we need.

It does, but it is quickly becoming stretched passed its limits even now, and there are no reasonable plans to look in to the future and see what we need to do now, to fix the problems of the past and truly put forward thinking policies in place so our water is there for the springs seven generations down the road.

Our current governing party in Alberta can only see to the borders of the province, and the short-term benefits of the booming economy.


The Deserted Village, A Poem

A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintain'd its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life requir'd, but gave no more:
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.

Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-1774)

Even in 1770, In the Dedication of the poem, 'The Deserted Village,' to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith writes: "... it has been the fashion to consider luxury as one of the greatest national advantages; and all the wisdom of antiquity in that particular, as erroneous. Still, however. I must remain a professed ancient on that head, and continue to think those luxuries prejudicial to states, by which so many vices are introduced, and so many kingdoms have been undone."

Is Alberta destined to follow its craving for the luxuries that another oil and gas boom has to offer at the expense of our environment?

It would seem the provincial governments only reason to be, is to encourage and foster more and more growth in the energy sector, with no idea as to the costs we have and will incur in other areas of our lives and society, such as the environment and our water.

One solution to the above problem is to redeisgn democracy in Alberta.

This would involve not only how we elect our provinical governments, but where they work. It would involve rearranging the administration of provinical government as well as the laws, regulations, and the divisions of both the counties and electoral districts.

It would involve setting a province wide set of environmental, planning, and business development laws and regulations.

It would involve folding many regulatory agencies, boards, and departments into one focus. It would involve providing all Albertan’s with one point of contact, whether they are applying to build a hog processing plant, a pulp mill, oil or gas processing facility, drill a well, bury a pipeline, take arable farm land out of agricultural production and use it for an industial purpose, or build homes on it.

It will mean that the EUB, municpal planning boards, county planning boards, renewable resources development authorities would be folded into a new way of doing business.

What I am talking about here is divide the province up into a bioregional management boards, based on the watsheds. It means rearranging the county and municipal districts so their boundaries coincide with the boundaries of the watersheds, and not stradle them.

For too long industrial development organizations or companies have known they can play one county off against another to see who will relax their planning and land zoning by-laws the most. Sometimes a plant could be applying to two counties, yet their plans call for locations the plant on one side of a river or the other.

We forget in this province that when a pulp mill or oil refinery discharges its waste water, or takes its water from a rivier system, that the downstream communities and evnivorns are affected.

We forget that the water sources we can not see, can be affected for miles, if not hundreds of miles around us, either positively or negatively.

This new concept of how we govern ourselves would fold all stakeholders in the various watersheds, or bioregions. It means that the residents can elect their own people to sit on the boards, to deliberate and approve any and all development in the watershed.

This would mean oil and gas activity, logging, residential, industrial and recreational development, in accordance to the environmental, planning, and development laws and regulations.

In addition to the above, our provincial legislature would also change. It would have members sitting in it as MLA’s elected through a Proportional Representation, and they would also be expected to sit on the Bioregional Management Boards as a conduit to the provincial legislature, but not a voting member of the Bioregional Management Boards.

Our current legislature does not have any sort of mechanism for public participation in much of any policy development. In my new arrangement the Legislature would be radically changed, and so will the way it does business.

It’s job will be to create a province wide set of policies, laws, and regulations with regards to the environment.

This set of policies, laws, and regulations would be deliberated, discussed, and proposed through a new system of committees of the Legislature, and sit in public, with their proceedings open to public view via television, the internet, or attendance in person.

Our committees would be mandated to use as a large to net to grab the most up to date, and unpoliticized data, research and opinion as they can.

Their view of a situation that will be used to measure their success, will be how the first nations have looked at things. The first nations have in their tradition, as looking at what they do now, and its affect on the next seven generations.
[1] Swing, John Temple, “What Future for the Oceans?’ Foreign Affairs, Volume 82, No 2, September/October 2003
[2] published by Guideposts for a Sustainable Future, P.O. Box 374, Merrickville, Ontario K0G 1N0 @ $4.95