Is Conservation Doomed?

Someone will pay for this red ink of polluted water, damaged landscapes, loss of essential ecological services, and native biodiversity.

Open for Business — Only

Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.

In a world of climate-related disasters, mounting pollution, biodiversity loss, and loss of critical ecological functions it’s easy to become disheartened and despondent, even for the toughest of us. Alberta isn’t immune from the changes and in some ways is the poster child for causing these risks, not just provincially but beyond our borders. Are attempts to conserve Alberta’s natural heritage effective, or are these efforts doomed?

There is a growing realization that resource extraction industries are a combination of unregulated, badly regulated, or self-regulated. Land use planning is incomplete, ignored, or driven by industry. More and more, government is complicit with, an enabler and cheerleader for, or a financial supporter of industry in spite of broad public perception of its role in environmental protection, planning, and conservation. Evidence-based decision making is trumped regularly by the corporate ideological pursuits of shadowy, insider lobbyists.

Maybe we need to thoughtfully examine if Albertans are headed to being desperate survivors besieged by heartless, soulless or, at least, careless zombies, which are shredding the place. How much are we subject to the pirates of politics and commerce?

There is certainly evidence we are living in an era where reality is suspended. Facts are optional, suspect, and experts are treated as pariahs. Foreign companies have a firm grip on our natural resources and a short leash on the current crop of UCP politicians (and government “regulators”). Both have been shown to be less than scrupulous in their behavior towards the public good for the severely normal Albertan.

On a pathway to understanding is the question—who are the people making the decisions that seem to run so counter to public resources governance and policy? I once worked for a senior government bureaucrat who, as a character described by author Paul St. Pierre, in Smith And Other Events, had a smile like January moonlight shining on a coffin handle. I’m no psychologist, but I believe the man was either a psychopath or a sociopath who lacked empathy and conscience. His view of resource management was singularly and coldly focused on profit for corporate bodies. He wasn’t alone.

Kevin Dutton wrote The Wisdom of Psychopaths, which argues that psychopaths are really effective at certain jobs precisely because their emotions and empathy are blunted relative to the rest of us. I’m not suggesting that all politicians and corporate types are psychopaths, but a certain percentage are and as Ian Walker, in Psychopaths in Suits points out, they can set the tone in government and business. According to Kevin Dutton there are ten careers with the highest proportion of those who score high on psychopathic traits. First on the list are CEOs of business.

These people are given to fits of sanctimony, considering themselves righteous in their endeavours, where profit is seen as an ethical behaviour, no matter what the cost. They voice one set of principles for public consumption while following other, darker ones. They do what they want, consistent with a seemingly rational front, so an underinformed public remain ignorant of their intent. But they seem completely devoid of empathy, understanding, or connection with the natural world.

Other economic ideologues scoff at the idea of environmental protection as “unnecessary non-use.” It’s one thing for some government departments to be aligned with business interests, but when even “environment” departments are, it is a litmus test of agency capture. In Alberta we are bereft of any government agency that even minimally speaks up for environmental conservation.

The pathway to power and profit is paved in incestuous lobbying, deceit through misinformation and misdirection, suspected malfeasance, an aversion to truth, kowtowing to corporate influence, and a rapacious, unrestrained raid on the province’s natural resources wealth. It must take some effort to extinguish the ethical instinct.

There is a business philosophy of increasing profits by downloading costs to others, selling the fiction this is a public benefit. All the while undercutting regulations and oversight, lobbying for reduced standards and self-regulation, and demonizing any attempts to shine a light on these actions.

Politically there is a pandering to business interests over perceived economic advantages of rents, royalties, taxes, and illusionary job prospects. While some of that might be true, the application of full-cost accounting tends to show the perceived benefits on the plus side of the ledger are sometimes written in disappearing ink. The other side of the ledger is awash in red ink.

The red ink shows up in increased drought and floods, declining river flows, coupled with searing heat domes, all a function of human-caused climate change. Changes from an increasing footprint of logging in the headwaters to hydrologic response exacerbate the impacts.

Rivers with less water cannot deal with increasing industrial, agricultural, and domestic pollutants discharged into them. Many of the pollutants are from legacy economic endeavours. Despite the repeated history of failures to treat these toxic elements, new endeavours like coal mining are treated favourably by the provincial government. Mining, logging, petroleum extraction, and motorized recreation add to the sediment burden of watersheds and drive already at risk native trout species to the brink.

Caribou and grizzly bears, icons and indicators of landscape integrity are also at risk. Most grassland species are imperilled from an increasing footprint of cultivation, roads, petroleum development, solar farms, and urban expansion.

Someone will pay for this red ink of polluted water, damaged landscapes, loss of essential ecological services, and native biodiversity. Most assuredly it will not be business interests based on past experience.

Politicians who allow this to happen and are enablers will be long gone and accept no responsibility. The glib sales job leading to acceptance of economic benefits while sacrificing landscape integrity will haunt future generations. That legacy already haunts us.

As we stare into the new normal (or the abnormal) of a world beset by human-induced climate change, the reaction from the titans of commerce and politics is to ignore that reality. One can only puzzle how they think they (and their children) are immune from the changes occurring and that doing more of the same will not add to our shared dilemma.

It is also confusing how many can be such fervent science deniers, when their lives are supported by, enriched by, protected by, and made easier by the products of science. As they tap out their rabid dismissal of climate change, of ecosystem collapses, or of biodiversity losses on their smart phones, the irony escapes them. Their explanations of conspiracies, alternate data interpretation, and dubious anecdotal “evidence” sound like an undiscovered sequel to Alice in Wonderland.

While the interests of commerce and politics deserve a substantial amount of blame, none of us are entitled to a “get-out-of-jail-free-card.” To some degree we are all complicit, in rampant consumerism, investments in damaging endeavours, population expansion, and generally the tendency to reach far beyond our needs for our wants.

Some have speculated on a dystopian postapocalyptic future becoming real. It’s tempting to think there’s something to the scenario and that we are entering that reality. To some, tuning out is the default, hoping not to hear of an impending apocalypse. Others lash out, trying to point a finger at someone, anyone who might be responsible for the plight of the province. And then, there are those who have bought into the narrative that nothing’s wrong, and the world is unfolding as it should.

What kind of province do we want? The one defined by foreign corporations driven by returns to distant stockholders but not Albertans? A province governed by politicians indistinguishable from their corporate friends? A place where the CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator makes an arbitrary decision to cancel a hearing over a coal mine at the request of the company? Where the minister of Environment and Protected Areas sentences caribou to extirpation in a land use plan to benefit timber and petroleum interests? The list goes on.

Increasingly, environmental oversight, measuring, and monitoring has to be undertaken by individual Albertans, plus landowner, Indigenous, conservation, and environmental groups because of the vacuum created by government and industry inaction and intransigence.

Wake up Alberta. We are governed and influenced by pirates, some psychopathic, others ideologically driven, who do not care about us, except to the extent we can slave away delivering the raw materials for someone else’s wealth generation. They are accelerating the loss of Alberta’s biodiversity riches, essential ecological services, and a wealth of landscape integrity.

Conservation of our environmental attributes is doomed if we let it be. If we don’t educate ourselves, engage with others in awareness, and consider the implications of decisions made about our resource legacy, doom follows.

Mark Twain famously said, “A newspaper is not just for reporting the news, it’s to get people mad enough to do something about it.” It’s time many more of us got mad enough to do something about the state of affairs provincially—affairs that are leading us inexorably to an environmental cliff edge.

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Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a past 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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