Conservation as a Way of Life
June 1, 2019
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Wild Lands Advocate article by: Nissa Petterson, AWA Conservation Specialist
Moving to Calgary to go to university was a dramatic change for me; I was leaving my family’s acreage in the much slower-moving cowpoke town of Innisfail, where everyone knew everyone, to a massive city of over a million people where I knew practically no one. At home, the view out my front window featured a mature aspen forest with a small meandering creek; from my basement suite in Calgary that forest became a car-packed street. Cars and asphalt for aspens and creeks. It was a difficult transition for me to leave my little piece of nature for a major metropolitan centre. To be honest, I may have been in denial for a good portion of it. I had to find ways to get back to where I felt I belonged. I used the excuse of landing a lucrative bartending job at a local hotel near Innisfail, just so I could leave the city every weekend and go home. I sometimes wonder if I didn’t spend more money on gas driving back and forth than I earned from working that job. A normal weekend at home for me was jam-packed; I would study throughout the day, and then bartend until the early hours of the next day. And if, by some lucky chance, I was not drowning in homework, I could spend the day with my parents helping around the acreage or make a quick daytrip out fishing in the West Country. However exhausting that cycle might have been at times, it was still worth it to me. Going home every weekend had a regenerative power; I could recharge from a week in the city by sharing a space with nature along with people who I loved.
As time went on, life changed, and the nature retreat that was my family’s acreage became nothing more than a memory. But life gave me some good fortune and I was introduced to a group of friends that shared my passion for nature. It was through these amazing friendships that I was able to, and continue to, fill my need to experience wilderness.
Most of our gatherings are centred around some kind of outdoor adventure. This past year, we’ve spent time hunting whitetail deer and mule deer, in addition to mallard ducks and geese with an outfitter. The bird hunt turned out to be somewhat of a surreal experience for me. We used layout blinds in the middle of cropland, and between the waves of birds and action, there were moments of complete calmness. As I stared up at the winter sky through the tall grasses shielding my blind, I felt entirely present.
The last few weeks of this year’s bone-chilling winter were spent huddled around a hole in Sylvan Lake in what you could call the Taj Mahal of fishing huts. I caught my first walleye on one of those ice fishing trips; he was small (15 inches), but feisty. He eagerly grabbed my line that had only a flasher without any bait; I have never had that happen before and it was an awesome experience.
We even try to incorporate nature when we vacation together. In April of 2018, we travelled to Florida, where we spent days trying to spot gators, catching and frying up bass, and swimming with gentle sea cows otherwise known as manatees.
Nowadays, this is often how I choose to experience nature; these wilderness adventures I share with my friends allow me to escape the craziness of life. However, I would argue that the value of these outdoor excursions extends far beyond the superficial action of casting a lure or pulling a trigger. For me, Alberta’s wilderness is a vehicle or channel for delivering more profound moments. Being in the outdoors brings me a sense of familiarity and belonging. It allows me to reconnect with a version of myself that I identify most strongly with. Sharing this time in the outdoors with friends has given me the capacity to fill a void that came from leaving my family’s acreage and a chance to rebuild community, however small it might be.
For me, a sense of accomplishment is an important by product of my hunting and fishing experiences; seeing the time and effort you have invested into developing a skill being rewarded by coming up with game is tremendously rewarding. It is a similar feeling to growing a beautiful and healthy vegetable garden. All of that back-killing work tilling the ground, and the endless weeding and watering seems a lot less grueling when you have your first taste of a fresh salad reaped entirely from your own garden. The sensation of harvesting from Mother Nature for sustenance is one beyond comparison. It is entirely grounding. It reminds me that things like food come to our tables with a lot more ease than they used to. In comparison to generations before us, we rarely have to work for our food; there is little skill or time requirements tied to the food we eat. Today, a lot of that responsibility falls upon our surrounding rural communities that have to find methods to meet those demands.
All of these aspects of hunting and fishing in Alberta’s wilderness have provided me with more than just food on my table. These outdoor pursuits have positive impacts on my physical and mental health, in addition to giving me a higher sense of social awareness. This overall positive state for my well-being is the reason why I pursue these opportunities. I engage with Alberta’s wilder spaces in this capacity because it is a fulfilling part of my chosen lifestyle, as it is for many people in Alberta.
This lifestyle, however, is not without its challenges. Being able to have these opportunities, and ensure they are possible well into the future, requires thoughtful management on behalf of current generations. If we want to continue to harvest animals from Alberta’s wilderness and allow this to be a lifestyle for future generations, sustainability has to be a priority.
We have organizations and frameworks in place like Alberta Conservation Association and Alberta Fish and Game Association that aid in monitoring wildlife populations, enforcement, and regulating how much hunting and fishing can occur season to season. However, a large piece of the puzzle for maintaining a sustainable wilderness for Alberta appears to be missing: land management. To date, we have seemingly overlooked the reality that land-use decisions and industrial and commercial management are equally contributors to the harvesting potential.
To quote a segment from an essay of Professor Lorne Fitch, Two Fish, One Fish, No Fish – Alberta’s Fish Crisis, “If the changes in the Beaverlodge River and the loss of fish [Arctic Grayling] provide a lesson, it is that fisheries management — maintaining fish — often has little to do with how we manage fish, in terms of seasons, bag limits and harvest size. What dictates fish persistence or not is the integrity of the watershed and the elements that produce fish habitat.”
Since beginning my work at AWA, I have shifted dramatically in the way I understand and think about conservation within Alberta. Coming from an ecology background, I always thought about conservation in the sense of population dynamics; the growth or retraction of a species is dictated by processes such as birth and death rates, immigration, and emigration of individuals with respect to their environment. Understanding this dynamic system and how it relates to a minimum viable population size is having the capacity to predict the likelihood of extinction or extirpation, and while environmental conditions are a part of this type of analysis, the emphasis on how strongly people can influence these conditions was never really there. Generally, we influence the carrying capacity of an ecosystem as much, if not more, than any natural process, and yet we don’t fully acknowledge it.
In order to preserve lifestyle choices and be able to continue to engage with Alberta’s nature in this capacity, we as communities need to think more critically about how land-use decisions are a fundamental part of wildlife management and how they affect this ecological bottom-line. While current management strategies or species-specific conservation initiatives have positive impacts, we have to properly acknowledge and address how influential our activities are on these natural systems, both directly and indirectly.
A glaring examples of where Alberta has failed to integrate this approach to conservation are the current predicaments of woodland caribou. The Narraway and Redrock-Prairie Creek herds, both of which are southern mountain woodland caribou herds, have experienced a significant amount of habitat alterations and loss due to land-use activities such as logging and petroleum exploration. Alberta’s Athabasca rainbow trout find themselves in a similar situation; this species of fish is an obligate resident of clear, cold flowing waters. Their future darkens when their aquatic habitats endure water withdrawals from resource development such as fracking; it darkens further from the increased sedimentation and water temperatures produced by removing riparian or nearby forests through logging. Rather than identifying these sensitive areas and the effects of industrial activities occurring within them, we have skirted around the issue by resorting to stop-gap solutions such as angling closures, wolf culling, and pen rearing of caribou. Methods such as these absolutely have a place in the “conservation toolbox” and can be successful in slowing the decline of these species, but these should be among the last tools we reach for, not the first. Unfortunately, we have resorted to these methods as our primary conservation solutions rather than acknowledging our impacts on the land and changing our land-use practices accordingly.
In my opinion, these trends are doubly concerning. They affect our ability to continue to hunt and fish for generations to come. But they also damage the quality of life that comes with having access to the vital ecological services and goods provided by Alberta’s wilderness. Given the current intensity and frequency with which we are developing and converting our wild spaces, the prospect that Alberta’s wilderness will be able to continue to supply our communities with clean water and air depreciates considerably. It is short-sighted to think that, given these current land-use practices, Alberta’s wilderness will be able to sustain wildlife populations, let alone us. Conservation in Alberta is not just about protecting our native species or natural features, it is about protecting our quality of life. If we strive to take care of our landscapes, we can continue to reap the benefits of healthy and biodiverse natural spaces that are resilient to change.
When I think about those days hunting and fishing with my friends, I feel happiness, but now more so than ever, I feel privileged because today I have a better understanding of what is at stake if we do not act. I understand that we are at risk of losing our home – and the time to save it is now.
