Read Andrew’s article in The Tyee article here.

That’s the consensus after successive archaelogical digs in the 1970s by Bea Loveseth and Barney Reeves and, in the 1980s, by Margaret Kennedy.

For 8,000 years, indigenous miners extracted blocks of chert from the surrounding limestone and chipped it into tradable chunks.

Chert is a glass-like mineral that can be shaped in any direction and was prized for the making of knives and points.

A TransAlta high-tension power line cuts across the site. There is no historical marker but the pits, back-filled with limestone, are clearly visible. Bits of discarded chert are easily spotted, but please leave them in place.

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If you would like to support our work protecting the Crowsnest Watershed, please donate by Interac eTransfer to: funding@crowsnestheadwaters.ca

Link to Deanne Watt’s ArcGIS Storymap

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If you would like to support our work protecting the Crowsnest Watershed, please donate by Interac eTransfer to: funding@crowsnestheadwaters.ca

Why Conservation Makes Me Mad and Motivated

Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.

Setbacks in conservation and environmental protection are legion. It feels like the economic and political weight of the world is arrayed against me in rigged deals, unequal footings, and unfair processes. Population pressures, consumer demands, and economic growth seem insatiable and irresistible. Conservation successes are few, infrequent, and ephemeral. But failure is not an option.

One of the contradictions of our lives is we see ourselves as living on the land but not the land living in us. As such, the linkages are broken, severed even, and do not serve to inform our conscious lives about these essential connections.

We have forgotten that within the land is power and life, origins and futures, foundations and walls, humility and promise, and myth and story. When we lose that sacred bond to place we become untethered through ignorance, greed, and even malice. When we break the land, pollute it, corrupt it, shifting it to just another commodity to be used up and discarded, we are doing the same thing to ourselves. What some term progress can eat away at a landscape as leprosy does to a nose.

There is a tendency to default to “taking the world as it is.” This was recently articulated by our Prime Minister in response to world affairs. Carrying this forward to the relentless economic development impacting the natural world, the conclusion would seem to be to give up hope on biodiversity, on ecosystem strength and resilience, on combating climate change, pollution, and land degradation. Perhaps in the minds (and actions) of politicians and corporate giants these might be considered only aspirational goals.

However, aspirations lead to awareness, it leads to concerns, concerns are a link to action, and action takes us into the realm of the possible. Then, instead of blind acceptance we view the world, not as it is, but as it should and could be.

When I see the unwarranted delays or reversals in environmental protection I formulate a question. I ask this of politicians and economists, corporate executives, and the apologists and cheerleaders of unbridled economic growth— have they ever calculated the number of species and their habitats that must be condemned to extirpation, degradation, irrelevance, and death to produce one more vote, one more stock dividend, and one more rich person in a land made poor because of a single-minded pursuit of wealth?

Where in the balance sheets of the Sirens of economics are recorded the costs of being rich—the frequency and intensity of floods, drought, wildfires, air quality alerts, heat domes, and the other wicked weather linked economic development? Or the losses of biodiversity, water and air quality declines, soil loss, and reduced landscape resilience to changes brought on by getting rich.

Most governments spend more on subsidies that destroy biodiversity than they do on financing conservation. If much of that money was redirected from supporting fossil fuel extraction, destructive mining, harmful agriculture and logging, the perversity of making our world less habitable through public tax dollars would decline and conservation efforts would be better funded.

It is human nature to reject evidence that doesn’t support our opinions. Although we are all entitled to our opinions, it doesn’t mean we get to make up our own facts. However, the strategy employed by those unmoved by facts, the uncomfortable truths, follows a time-tested pattern. Disparage the science, attack the scientists, make outrageous statements, including the invoking of conspiracy theory, and manipulate and use only the information that seems to support your side.

Science serves everyone, but only if we choose to listen. Facts don’t cease to exist because we won’t accept them, or worse still, ignore them. Science doesn’t give you the answer you want, it provides the result the evidence indicates.

Muting science to make the compromises orchestrated by governments, businesses, and ourselves is a testament to something—let’s make a deal where everyone is a bit unhappy. A standard level of unhappiness by all seems to signal success in negotiation. In the give and take between the environment and economics there is a lot more give expected from the environment and much more take anticipated from the economic side.

Such compromises epitomize our everyday world thinking but rarely does the evidence shore up the result. For example, not imposing a realistic carbon emissions target that actually slows climate change, putting faith in an unproven carbon capture technology, while ramping up oil production, and pushing any reconciliation with the evidence far into the future, may well ensure we don’t have a future. The contention that accelerated economic growth can be aligned with environmental protection is a pernicious myth.

Disconnection—the tendency of ignoring the evidence to connect the dots to the erosion of earth’s systems— allows ecological abuse to continue, regulatory blindless to persist, lies to compound the damage, and the surrender of us all to greed, corruption, inequities, and fantasies.

Some of us wonder where and when change will occur. Shifts in attitudes and behaviours with awareness of options can help. But often the sense is that individual actions are cancelled out by government and business to inaction or contradictory actions. It seems that the motivation to change, to act, only comes when we are teetering on the edge of an abyss. Then all the previous alarmist calls become real and compelling at about the same time there is a realisation our options are limited or precluded.

If we viewed climate change and everything associated with it—fire, flood, drought, wicked weather, death, famine, and extinctions—like a world-wide plague (which in all respects it is), or an asteroid on an impending collision course with earth (with past precedent), we might have a sense of urgency about the need to change, shift, and adapt in time.

Some won’t recognize the urgency because in their minds the evidence isn’t compelling, or there is the ever present illusion we will dodge all of this with yet unknown, untested technology. To some, explanations of the nuances, intricacies, and outcomes of scientific research can often sound made up, unbelievable, and even stupid—not airtight like biblical references, an economic development prospectus, or a government news release.

Others will simply party on because if we are going out with a bang, so be it. For many of us the status quo is hard to avoid—it seems so comfortable and safe. We’re in a rut, but it’s carpeted and well furnished. It’s easier to watch Netflix than a documentary on biodiversity loss.

Essentials like air, water, soil, and biodiversity are a common good. They need to be commonly protected. If they are not, then the suffering includes all of us, everywhere. The rich might think they have lifeboats, but those will be rendered useless if there’s no water or safe harbour. The concept of wealth needs a reboot, to remind us what is essential to our survival.

In matters of the environment it is not enough to be aware. It is not enough to be concerned or anxious. It is not enough to be angry. Feeling helpless, powerless, or resentful, and that failure is inevitable is self-defeating. We must resist the urge to acquiesce, to surrender, to give up. Now is not the time to sit on our hands, or passively wring them—it’s time to raise a hand.

Passively accepting ecological losses is to assent to the system responsible for the destruction, and to become part of it. Resist when government and corporations try to convince you otherwise. If those who destroy ecosystems feel no consequences for their actions, nothing will change.

Resistance and change happen in dialogue, in conversations. These are facilitated, and delivered through the art of words conveying feelings. Issues are complex. People hear fragments and from those fragments it’s difficult to grasp the bigger picture. Shared understanding needs to be built with an ecological education.

This can only happen with trusted relationships in neutral settings where there is a sharing of ideas and concepts with lots of listening. This should be occurring at all levels of government, but isn’t.

Each generation must commit to protect wild places, processes, and things, and not give way. This will require a fundamental shift in our thinking and approach to Earth’s gifts. We spend our lives in pursuit of what we want and in denial of what we need. An essential move is to a better accounting of the essentials of life that cannot be bought but are easily destroyed.

Wind and water eventually wear away stone. Persistence is the handmaiden of resistance and the ultimate solution for conservation.

Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a former Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.

Read David’s take at this link.

A big thank you to Andrew Nikiforuk for passing this on to me.

Wendell Berry - Poet and Prophet

Please listen to this 40 minute interview here. You will not be sorry you did.

On Friday, July 3rd….you know….”Convenient Friday”, with the weekend ahead and the Calgary Stampede beginning the same day, we once again have wonderful distractions for people to be directing their attention. How could one not when we’ve been starving for warmer temps with sunshine days and Alberta’s biggest annual attraction?

On Friday, yesterday, (I’ve needed a day to recover from the shock) Elections Alberta rejected Corb Lund’s “Water Not Coal” petition saying the verification process found duplicate signatures and incomplete information, failing to meet the requirements for a citizen initiative petition.

Needless to say, we are not prepared to take this sitting down or at face value.

This is not the first time we’ve witnessed this trickery by a UCP government when it comes to decisions around coal mining and the protection of the Eastern Slopes. You will recall the cancellation of the 1976 Coal Development Policy for Alberta which was revealed by a media release on the Friday afternoon before the May long weekend in 2020. They make it a point to be clever at this.

Similarly, they recently did it again declaring that the deadline for this petition to be a referendum item on the October ballot had been missed. Suddenly after Corb had delivered 207,000 signatures on June 10th, the day that Elections Alberta designated as the deadline, that deadline had been missed because it mysteriously had been changed to June 1st. Who knew? Who was supposed to know? NOBODY.

Allow me to throw some numbers at you and I’ll use round numbers to keep it simple, erring on the short side.

Corb delivered some 207,000 signatures that had been scrutinized by his team, to Elections Alberta in Edmonton. 207,000 was somehow changed to 196,000 as reported by the CBC and I think it’s fair to suggest that the CBC did not pull that number from thin air.

The required number of signatures necessary to uphold the petition for referendum, based on the electoral list for Alberta is 177,000. Elections Alberta has “verified” 172,000 arriving at a shortfall of 5000. Hmmm. Based on the government’s number of 196,000 received that implies approximately 11,000 that were scrapped. However, based on Corb’s delivery of 207,000, that’s 35,000 signatures that were disqualified.

Seriously??? Let me say clearly right here and now that Corb’s team absolutely would not have allowed this to happen given that the team is made up of so many professionals who realize the necessity of integrity and the importance of credibility.

So the numbers beg the question:

How did 207,000 suddenly become 196,000 and how can Elections Alberta and the Alberta Government be content with what is seemingly a 35,000 signature discrepancy? I can offer one reason straight away. “Elections Alberta says the number of verified signatures dropped after applying a random statistical sampling method….” (CBC - July 3, 2026).

You mean to tell me that we’re supposed to accept the random sampling provided by computerization with something as significant as this? Am I outraged? You bet I am. Are you? I’m sorry but this implemented methodology with such a political hot potato is incredulous.

The Alberta government and Elections Alberta really need to be taken to task on this and right now while it’s fresh off their desk. I’d say write to your MLA but if you have one that suffers deaf ear syndrome, what’s the point? That said, something definitely needs to be done and our polite and abiding conventions don’t seem to be getting us there.

With that said I leave it to you and your connections, your groups, your individual brilliance to make noise and demand an explanation to what I see as a travesty of our democratic process.

And, you can see CBC’s coverage of this travesty here.

I’m passing this on for the Water Not Coal group and it has important information regarding follow up by Elections Alberta. If you signed the Water Not Coal petition please read this and be prepared. This message needs to reach 207,000 individuals who signed so please pass this on to others.

Thanks!!

Hello!

Thanks to your hard work, grit, and determination, Water Not Coal’s message was received loud and clear on June 10 when we delivered over 200,000 signatures. What happens next is yet to be determined (more on that soon!), but in the meantime, our signatures are being validated and we need your help in the next stage of the process.

Elections Alberta will call and email a random sample of petition signatories to verify their information. It is vitally important to the success of the petition that everyone who is contacted by Elections Alberta is prepared to answer their questions.

Please help us and share this information in your communities!

Elections Alberta will verify your name and residential address (not your PO box!), and ask if you signed the petition; were an eligible elector at the time of signing; and what form of ID was shown to the canvasser. (The full details can be found HERE.)

Here’s What You Need to Do:

1. If your driver’s license lists just a PO box, look up your physical address (the address that you provided when you signed the petition) and be ready to provide those details if/when you are contacted.

2. Save Elections Alberta’s phone number 877-672-1365 to your contacts/address book so you know their call isn’t just another telemarketer.

3. Add PetitionValidation@elections.ab.ca to your email contacts to help ensure their emails don’t go to your spam folder.

4. For the next 10 days, be on the lookout for a call or email from Elections Alberta!

5. If you are contacted, respond to the call or email as soon as possible. If they leave you a voicemail, call them back at 1-877-672-1365 right away. If they contact you by email, reply to the email and confirm the information requested.

6. Spread the word! Share this email with friends, coworkers, and anyone else who might have signed the petition. We need to make sure everyone is aware of this crucial part of the process, so they know what to expect (and don’t think the call is a telemarketer!)

Once our petition has been verified, the government will respond, and Water Not Coal will be ready for whatever comes after that. Our petition compels the government to either create legislation prohibiting new coal development in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, or put the question on the ballot of an upcoming referendum — and we will do everything we can to protect the Eastern Slopes.

THANK YOU for your help and support. We hope you’ve had a chance to get some hard-earned and much deserved rest over the past week or so, and also, take time to reflect on the impressive accomplishment that we just achieved as a team.

Water Not Coal wouldn’t have come this far without the incredible support of Albertans like you. What began as a petition campaign has become a province‑wide movement—thanks to volunteers like you and to Albertans who know our mountains and our water are worth protecting.

Keep up the great work—we will do the same.

With gratitude,

Team Water Not Coal

A bison horn carrying water from the source of the Oldman River was delivered to a joint Piikani-Kainai Blackfoot prayer ceremony June 20 by a team of Buffalo Rivers. The sacred water was carried by foot and canoe over several weeks.

This was the fourth such ceremony this year, all dedicated to recovery of the Crowsnest/Oldman river system from coal-mine selenium poisoning.

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Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.

G’Day Dani,

Crikey, that was a bloody ripper of a strategy, to have a secret drop dead date for the Water Not Coal petition one from Corb Lund. It was classic bait and switch, just like we coal companies play the suckers with on jobs, huge revenues, and environmental excellence.

Promising Albertans they could have some participatory democracy in the form of a referendum on blowing up the Eastern Slopes for coal. And then jerking the rug out from under them, with some made-up time limit. That was brilliant! More than 200,000 Albertans who signed the petition might be wondering about your ethics, honesty, and trustworthiness. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back.

We’ve been secretly funding ad campaigns, partisan experts, local coal citizen groups, messages from coal workers, lobbyists, and even a vote at a municipal level (that some have tried to paint as rigged). The “Myth Busting” website uses ingenious double speak to disguise the truth. You know we’ve been mouthing the words about protecting water and letting people know we have the most stringent environmental regulations anywhere.

But we appreciate the work done by your ministers to ensure we can elevate allowable selenium levels to the point it is economical to mine. It’s also great that you’ve secretly changed the rules for your regulator, the Alberta Energy Regulator, to keep a lot of loud-mouthed ranchers and environmentalists from participating in decision-making processes like hearings on coal mines. That will save us a lot of money and speed up mine approvals.

Australian coal companies thank you for ensuring Alberta doesn’t go coal free, like most Albertans want. Good on ya! She’ll be apples now for our mine applications and approvals. Maybe we’ll even drop our frivolous lawsuits. The barbie’s on whenever you and your ministers come south to Australia again. You’re our saviour and hero!

With gratitude to our Alberta toadies, from your Ozzie coal friends.

Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a former Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.

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Hi all.

It seems that the table turned on Saturday. Now that we’ve spent the past several months working hard to comply with what the premier said were the rules and criteria for her to take the WNC petition to referendum along with the other 9 or 10 issues on the ballot, it’s as though we have been redacted. If you haven’t seen it on social media or elsewhere, here’s what Corb Lund and the team just delivered today.

“Thousands of Albertans spent weeks collecting signatures in snow, sleet, rain, and occasional sunshine; and thanks to that grit and determination, we delivered more than 200,000 signatures to Elections Alberta last week to protect the water we drink.

You folks did an amazing job and I’ll be proud for the rest of my life to have fought that battle with you. Massive thank you to our thousands of intrepid canvassers. You guys really delivered and should be very proud of your work.

Danielle Smith gave us her word back in February:
“Whether it’s the independence petition or the coal petition, if they get the requisite number of signatures, our intention would be to put those on the ballot at the same time.” [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/corb-lund-citizen-petition-coal-9.7101200]

On Saturday she broke that promise, and is doing everything she can to keep Water Not Coal from being on the referendum ballot in October.

I think it’s disgusting to put out a challenge to Albertans, watch them break their backs and devote thousands of hours to achieve their goal, then pull the rug out from under us. It is despicable and dishonest, and I’m not going to stand by and let her get away with this without a very big fight.

The fact is, Smith can put Water Not Coal on the ballot herself via ‘Order in Council,’ just like she said she would in February, just like she did with all 10 other questions that are currently on the ballot.

She can do it, but she’s choosing not to. She’s treating Water Not Coal differently, because she thinks she can.

But we’re fighting back. Our mountains and water are too important to trust to politicians who have clearly forgotten who they work for. (Hint: They work for us, for Albertans, not an Australian billionaire, or profit-driven coal companies.)

We’re ramping up for a battle.

Here are 3 things you can do to help today:

1. Re-Commit to the Rockies and clean water. We’re building a team for this next phase and want your help. If you want to be part of our growing ground team of volunteers, let us know.

https://next.waternotcoal.ca

2. Get loud. Post to social media and have your say in the comments section. Tell her to keep her word, and demand Water Not Coal’s question be added verbatim, just as it appears on the petition sheets, to the October 19 ballot. Tag your friends, and tag your MLA.

3. Consider helping us out financially. Times are tight, but if you can help fund the fight back campaign, please consider make a donation to Water Not Coal. Even $50 helps. We have been very responsible in allocating the donations we receive to achieve maximum success and will continue to do so, you have our word. Your support at this critical time could mean the difference between getting on the ballot and getting lost in the legislative calendar.

https://secure.waternotcoal.ca

Thanks again for everyone’s support. I had no illusions this would be over quickly but I didn’t expect the Premier to behave so dishonourably, this quickly. We are not letting go of this after all our work.”

Sincerely,

Corb Lund and the Water Not Coal Team

At our last ceremony held at Bill English’s residence on the Oldman River, and as we were gathered at the water’s edge visiting and waiting for Elder Morris Little Wolf to begin, we were suddenly greeted by the whoop’s and war cries of the Buffalo Runners who had arrived and were looking at us from the cliff above. I tell you…..that was moving!

With water taken from the very upper headwaters of the Oldman and contained in a buffalo horn, the Buffalo Runners have been moving downstream from there in relay sequence. Some are on foot along the river, handing off to a paddler who carries the horn in a kayak continuing downstream for another hand off to runners again.

This is clearly an exercise in dedication, stamina, and fortitude representing the significance and importance of the precious resource of our water and the land, these basic elements of life which we are graced to have shared with us by the Piikani Nation and Blackfoot Confederacy.

Moving on to this coming Saturday, June 20th at 10:00 AM, in harmony with the summer solstice of the following day, the final prayer ceremony of the season will take place in Lethbridge at Fort Whoop-Up on the bank of the Oldman River. The buffalo horn will arrive there carried by the runners.

Following the ceremony everyone is invited and encouraged to move up into town for a gathering at the Trianon Gallery which is currently featuring an exhibition celebrating Water. This is a beautiful compliment to these ongoing ceremonies and well worth seeing.

The gallery is located at 104 - 5th St. S., on the corner facing Galt Gardens park and opposite Park Place Mall. The gallery is upstairs above the TARO Noodle House. The entry is the dark door to the left of the restaurant entrance. See photos below:

We hope that you are able to attend. Happy Solstice and Happy Summer!!

A grader had already ripped up a linear section of the native grassland on the Antelope Creek Ranch when Bob, the Ranch Manager, corralled the operator and asked what he was doing. “Building a new lease road to a proposed well site,” was the answer. When asked for the letter of authorization, the operator shrugged and replied, “I don’t know anything about the paper work. I just get paid for building roads.”

After Bob called me, I determined the company hadn’t even applied for the authorization, let alone been given the go ahead for construction. The Antelope Creek Ranch is a working ranch of about ten sections, set up initially to integrate and demonstrate ways of conserving native prairie and its biodiversity with livestock grazing and petroleum development. Building another road across the grassland, especially without permission, and adding to an already cumulative weight of development, did not fit with conservation objectives.

I ordered the company to cease and desist on road construction. I also pointed out that there would be no more petroleum development on the ranch, given their failure to adhere to the rules. The company wasn’t aware I didn’t have authority to do either.

You would have thought the energy security of the free world was at risk, given the company response. Since my role was biodiversity conservation, not energy development, I remained unmoved by the tirade. I suggested they first re-read the conservation plan for the ranch, of which they were a signatory, and then we might talk.

A meeting was arranged in their corporate headquarters in Calgary, an imposing downtown skyscraper. I was asked to wait, a standard intimidation technique. I browsed the oil patch magazines, thoughtfully arrayed on a table. One article caught my eye. I took the magazine into the boardroom, a cavernous affair with an immense oval table surrounded by leather chairs. Art, depicting oil derricks and other petroleum related works set against scenes of tranquil and wild landscapes, surrounded the room.

Every chair was filled but one, with grim-faced executives. It was to be the inquisition of the lone biologist. I began by quickly reiterating the goals and objectives of the ranch, especially the integration of petroleum activity with wildlife conservation. I then opened the magazine and asked if I could read them a corporate perspective on how one oil company was responding to those challenges.

I don’t remember precisely how the piece was worded but it included references to environmental sustainability, of the necessity to plan accordingly, and to commitments for reclamation and restoration. It talked about working cooperatively with local communities and groups, the corporate responsibilities to adhere to government policy and regulations, and to going the extra mile to be seen as engaged and good corporate citizens wherever they worked.

I asked them if they agreed with this corporate prospectus. All nodded. I then asked them whether they knew which company was referred to in the article. None did.

I pointed out the article referenced their company, their corporate objectives, their corporate commitments, and their corporate philosophy. The inquisition was turned on its head and there was much coughing, sputtering, and twisting in leather chairs. Their corporate actions on the Antelope Creek Ranch were 180˚ from where their stated philosophy was located.

This isn’t an anomaly, a one-off from one company, an excuse lower levels didn’t get the “memo.” No, this is corporate spin to cover what is in practice, a lie. Fine words, meant to soothe, to placate, and to disguise from true intents, are epidemic.

The Alberta Forests Products Association, the lobby group for the timber industry, says their environmental mandate is: “Healthy forests help maintain a healthy environment, and we make sure the forest industry does too. The health of trees, plants, animals, air, water and soils—today and in the future—drives what our industry does and how we do it.”

One of the companies active in the Eastern Slopes provided this response: “We agree that understanding cumulative disturbance across ownerships is important and West Fraser will continue to utilize best management practices, low risk watercourse crossings and temporary roads to minimize our footprint.”

Actions speak louder than words and in an assessment of logging practices in the upper Oldman watershed, the Alberta Wilderness Association documented a complete failure on the part of West Fraser to “maintain a healthy environment,” “use of best management practices,” and to employ “low risk water crossings.”

Riparian buffers were logged over, erosion protection at stream crossings was generally either missing, poorly installed, or not maintained. Subsequent monitoring showed excessive erosion and sediment delivery from logging roads to streams containing threatened cutthroat trout and bull trout.

The findings of 667 failures to adhere to even the minimal timber harvest operating ground rules, the Fisheries Act and the Species At Risk Act would suggest the reality on the ground is a complete swap for the rhetoric of sustainable logging practices and protection of other forest values like species at risk trout.

Given the evidence, what drives the logging industry isn’t the narrative of a healthy environment, but a profit-driven one, to the exclusion of most of the essential ecological checks and balances to logging activity.

The Coal Association of Canada says, “Canadian coal operates under the world’s strictest environmental regulations.” Given the evidence that every open-pit coal mine in Alberta has had, and many continue to have acute, chronic, and catastrophic failures that impact water quality and biodiversity, this might suggest either the regulations and standards are hardly strict, hardly enforceable, or hardly enforced.

Hitchens’s razor is a general rule for rejecting certain claims of knowledge. It states: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” No facts are in place that detail the various environmental regulations on a worldwide basis as an opportunity to test the assumption Canada’s (or Alberta’s) regulations are superior. Nor does it offer evidence that regulations are uniformly followed.

Since the Coal Association, as the lobby group for coal interests, constantly lobbies both provincial and federal governments on reducing the environmental regulatory “burden,” one has to take the statement on operating “under the world’s strictest environmental regulations” with more than a pinch of salt.

In the case of coal mining, the evidence of environmental failures is voluminous, unequivocal, and compelling. The impacts of legacy coal mines, in terms of a constant release of a chemical stew of contaminants into receiving waters, selenium especially, is not a credible endorsement for the industry or its claims of environmental excellence.

It is as if corporate speak is designed to paint a picture that is a lie, make it a big lie, and tell it frequently enough so it will be believed by some, especially politicians who continue to support unsustainable logging, mining, and petroleum extraction practices.

The truth is painful, unpalatable, and politically dangerous, at least in the short term. In contrast lying is profitable (at least to some) and allows the powerful to set the narrative. To the lazy and the uninformed these lies seem practical and easy, even beneficial. But as José N. Harris, an American author, reflected, “Lies only strengthen our defects. They don’t teach anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one’s character, one’s mind, one’s heart or one’s soul.” That works at a corporate level as well as at a personal one.

When many understand they are being lied to, they start to look under the surface and find the cracks in corporate speak. If the social license to operate is lost, credibility and trust fly. The regulatory one may be soon to follow. Then corporate aspirations diminish.

Children are taught that the ethical principle is to tell the truth at all times. Yet in politics and business it seems this is a common transgression. Some lies are made in apparent error, because of failures to investigate all the evidence. But lies by intention, when the truth is known and the facts are indisputable, should be considered the most serious of crimes.

When Jack Ward Thomas, an eminent wildlife biologist, took over the helm of the US Forest Service, he sent a short, but pointed memo out to all staff. It read, “Tell the truth and obey the law.” Imagine if this was to be the new corporate mantra.

Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a former Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.

Corb suspects government will exclude Australian Grassy Mountain in referendum question.

“I think this whole project is crooked. It doesn’t make any sense economically or environmentally”, Corb tells CTV.

View CTV’s Alberta Prime Time . . .

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CBC: “Musician and rancher Corb Lund says more than 200,000 Albertans signed his petition demanding the province prohibit all coal mining and exploration in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, including the Grassy Mountain and Blackstone projects.

“Lund arrived at Elections Alberta’s head office in Edmonton Wednesday afternoon in a pickup truck pulling a trailer with black plastic bins with blue lids full of signed petitions.”

Read full CBC News report . . .

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This coming Saturday, June 13th, at 10:00 AM we will be engaging once again with our Piikani brothers and sisters in the 3rd ceremony, the Buffalo Crossing Ceremony, at Bill English’s place on the Piikani reserve. Below are two directional maps, one oriented from Ft. Macleod, the other from Pincher Creek.

To spare any confusion at crossroads there will be blue arrows indicating direction. Taking note of the written distances on each leg of the route should be of help as well.

Once again, we’re hoping you can attend.

From Ft. Macleod:

Hwy 2 north to Hwy 785 heading towards Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. Continue past to Range Rd. 280 and follow blue arrow signs from there to arrive at the Buffalo Crossing Ceremony location.

From Pincher Creek:

Hwy 3 east to Hwy 785. Continue east then north on 785 to Township Rd. 82 and follow blue signs from there to ceremony location.

See you there!

It was a big risk, and he won it.

Musician Corb Lund stood up for Alberta against Australian greed and Danielle Smith complicity. He won. They lost.

Let’s see whether the Smith regime will have the moral integrity to obey its own law and put the coal issue to the legislature for a vote or to the people directly in a referendum alongside her separatism question.

Calgary Herald

CTV Lethbridge

CBC/The Canadian Press

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Read Kennedy Halvorson’s full article in Nature Alberta Magazine . . .

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