Can you Imagine?

August 18, 2025

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• Wildlands
• WLA Archive

 

By Lorne Fitch

Read the PDF version here.

 

There is a place in the universe called Alberta. I’m biased since my roots are there, and I can’t imagine anywhere more perfect. This place has a unique blend of grassland, parkland, foothills, mountains, and boreal — all with their own special characteristics and attractions. Others may disagree with this assessment, and they should, based on their own places, but to me, Alberta has elements of paradise.

This paradise isn’t without a growing number of warts, blemishes, and scars, mostly self-inflicted by its residents and visitors.

If Alberta were a car, or more likely, a big, diesel 4×4 truck, we’ve been red-lining it for some time, running it past the point of safety and reason. We should know that doing so will cause things to break. Some already have. The speed of economic aspirations does not mesh with the ecological world and biodiversity loses.

Ironically, we have the tools to help us slow down, pay attention, and proceed with caution. There are also ways and means to fix some of the broken parts and avoid things too sensitive, too important to break. Having the tools is one thing; using them is yet another. Hence, some of my frustration.

My father was born before Alberta became a province. He grew up farming with horses and then with steam power. Neither would have been considered fast-paced. Much to my consternation, when he drove, it was slowly and methodically. When I drove, his feet pressed down, forming dents in the car’s floorboards, or so it seemed, wordlessly wishing I would slow down. Sometimes, well, often, his concerns weren’t wordless. We were worlds apart in our sense of speed, the pace required to reach a destination.

In the same way my father drove, former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed counselled a go-slow approach to petroleum development, especially the tar sands. All of his successors chose instead a laissez-faire approach, allowing industry to set the pace of development. This led to runaway growth, massive cost-overruns, less royalty revenue for the province per barrel produced, and a huge bull’s-eye for the global environmental movement to target. That attitude of “go fast and break things” has become part of all resource development aspirations.

As Sid Marty wrote, in Oldman’s River, “They were blind to the mountains. All they saw was their ambition’s scenery.” When all you can see are the dollar signs in a landscape, the rest goes blank. The speed of development has changed the scenery, sometimes irrevocably, and with costs known, most yet to be calculated. It’s like we took our wild heritage to a pawnshop, thinking we could redeem it someday.

Although I take pride in Alberta, there are things we should be ashamed of. There are legitimate concerns about how our natural resources are being developed, skewed land-use planning, and the lack of regulatory oversight. Asking penetrating questions about who benefits and what the costs are, nets derision, ridicule, and name-calling, up to and including from the premier’s office.

Lots of imagination went into the economic development that has given us the good life. Imagination seems lacking, though, on where the path now leads as we exploit our natural resources at the current pace. It’s more in the order of a perceptual blindness. Mahatma Gandhi wisely said, “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.”

It would be good to remember that corporations work towards their own interests and those of their shareholders. They are unlikely to accept less — they always want more, because growth is viewed as a religion. In so doing, Albertans get less with greater liabilities as corporations gain more of the share. While governments should be the adjudicators of the share and the speed at which the share is taken, instead, they act as the sales staff, facilitating industry goals.

As engines have limits, so do we, and the same goes for landscapes. An economic juggernaut does not care about limits, since once reached, investment can flee elsewhere. Concepts like moderation, restraint, and efficient use are anathema to economic goals.

My father saw speed as unnecessary risk. So too did Lougheed, regarding it as a failure to properly assess the implications of narrowly focused economic decisions and to choose better alternatives that provided benefits over longer periods. Slowing down could have helped us to avoid risk, including the now-recognized toxic legacy of the tar sands.

The current economic vision clouds our sight, especially when another piece of Alberta’s landscape breaks, another species nudges closer to extirpation, and water quality becomes more suspect. Some things we can fix, although the expense makes us reluctant to do so. Mostly, we should ensure that those who broke things are responsible for the full costs of repair.

Other things cannot be fixed, especially within reasonable periods and sometimes beyond our sense of time.

We can’t remedy the pollutants that spew from abandoned and even “reclaimed” coal mines. Native prairie grasslands, evolved over millennia, cannot be resurrected after cultivation. Climate-changing emissions, from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, will be with us for centuries, even if we come to our senses and start a dramatic cessation today.

Industrial-strength, clear-cut logging changes the headwaters sponges that collect, store, and slowly release water. After logging, it is estimated the return to a pre-logging hydrologic response is over a century. That’s a long time for native trout, and caribou too, to wait for their habitat to return. It’s a long time for us downstream water drinkers to wait, too.

What if the speed of development were regulated by the ability and rate of restoration instead of quick profit? As a former motorcyclist, I learned to look far ahead for signs of danger. Because, when something unpredictable happens, you have to react to it; if you’re reacting at speed, you’re reacting too late. And so your focus should be on the signs that indicate reducing speed would be a good idea.

If we moved more slowly and thoughtfully in resource development, it would aid in recalling the elements of paradise that were, are, and could be Alberta. That is directly proportional to and is a necessary part of successful, ecologically-based long-term planning. Unfortunately, the pell-mell of today’s development rush enhances the intensity of forgetting, erasing some of that paradise before it.

Can we imagine a universe where the pace of development doesn’t ruin a paradise?

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—Dispatches From the Conservation World and Travels Up the Creek—A Biologist’s Search For a Paddle.