| Jeffrey Emmett drives around the Castle Wilderness, north of Waterton Lakes National Park, in his diesel- and vegetable-oil-fuelled Toyota, pointing out evidence of a rapidly deteriorating landscape. It doesn’t take long for the executive director of the Castle Crown Wilderness Coalition to get upset about what he sees.
There are invasive weeds growing in ditches, people random-camping right next to streams and off-road vehicles have brazenly driven through fences around areas that the Alberta government is trying to reclaim. Meanwhile, Shell has applied to drill more sour-gas wells in the area, oil and gas and forestry roads, used by an increasing number of off-road vehicles, continue to carve up important animal habitat and the Castle Mountain ski resort is hoping to proceed with a major expansion.
The Castle Crown Wilderness Coalition, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Alberta Wilderness Association have been fighting to protect the area for years, but instead of protection, Emmett says the area is being increasingly degraded because of the government’s multi-use land policy along the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies, which allows a variety of land uses in one area.
AN IMPORTANT WILDLIFE HABITAT
What environmental groups call the Castle Wilderness consists of 1,004 square kilometres of land sandwiched between Crowsnest Pass, Pincher Creek and Waterton Lakes National Park, and bordering British Columbia and Montana. The southwestern part of what is now called the Castle Wilderness was once part of Waterton Lakes National Park between 1914 and 1921, and then became a wildlife refuge until 1954 when it lost all protected-area status. Emmett acknowledges that some parts of the Castle, especially the most northerly section, are nowhere close to being pristine wilderness and haven’t been for years.
But, he says, "We have a lot here now that’s worth protecting…. Some areas are quite pristine and other areas can come back and be restored."
Despite intense development in some parts of the area, the Castle Wilderness is still recognized as having the second highest level of biodiversity in the province (after Waterton). It provides an important habitat for grizzlies, wolverines, cougars and wolves, and is home to 120 rare plant species. Land in the area provides a crucial linkage between wildlife populations in Montana, British Columbia and Alberta.
In 1993, the Natural Resource Conservation Board recommended that 739 square kilometres of the Castle should be protected as a wildland park. It found at the time that the effects of wide-scale development had led to a deterioration of the regional ecosystem. The recommendation was made in conjunction with the approval of a major expansion of the West Castle (now Castle Mountain) ski resort. The expansion didn’t happen at the time, but there’s been incremental development at the ski hill since then and its current owners want to go ahead with a major expansion this year.
The province rescinded the 1993 decision "in reaction to public concern" about the creation of the wildland park in the Castle, says Michel Proulx, a spokesperson for Alberta Sustainable Resource and Development. This year, the provincial government approved a new proposal for an expansion of the West Castle ski resort without doing a new environmental impact assessment. Castle Crown Wilderness Coalition took the issue to court and, in July, Justice C.L. Kenny ordered Alberta Environment to reconsider whether or not an environmental impact assessment was necessary. Alberta Environment is appealing the Court of Queen’s Bench decision.
The entire Castle area was also one of the areas nominated by the public for protection in the government’s Special Areas 2000 program, under which the provincial government created a network of new parks in the province. However, only a tiny portion of the Castle, 94.16 hectares, was protected within a new West Castle Wetlands Ecological Reserve because a local advisory committee recommended that the majority of the area should remain multi-use. Environmentalists say Shell Canada also exerted a lot of pressure behind the scenes because it owns extensive mineral rights in the area.
"Whatever the committee recommended that’s what the government did," explains Cheryl Robb, spokesperson for Alberta Community Development.
Now, a little more than a decade later, the local municipal district of Pincher Creek also has serious concerns about what’s going on in the area.
GRIZZLIES ENDANGERED
Pincher Creek MD Reeve Brian Hammond says there’s a lot of support for an expanded ski hill in the community and people in the district are still supportive of multi-use planning for the area versus protected status. But he says people are starting to be concerned about the environmental management of the area.
"I think society has to make a very difficult decision about the integrity of wilderness areas as we go into the future," he says.
Grizzlies, an iconic symbol of wilderness, aren’t faring well in the Castle. In a recently released report commissioned by the Castle Crown Wilderness Coalition, biologist Brian Horejsi states that southwest Alberta, including the Castle Wilderness, no longer has a viable grizzly population, and the area is a "mortality sink" for grizzlies travelling between Alberta and Montana and British Columbia because of its high level of development and high road densities. Horejsi found that there are more roads within the northern half of the Castle Wilderness (public land) than within the adjacent privately owned land.
A FREE-FOR-ALL SCENARIO
What’s happening in the Castle isn’t unique along the Eastern Slopes. Municipalities in the region have joined environmental groups in criticizing the government for lack of proper management. In June, the recently established Southern East Slopes Task Force, comprised of the MDs of Pincher Creek, Ranchland, Bighorn and Clearwater County, sent a scathing report to Alberta’s Sustainable Resource Development.
The report describes a chaotic, free-for-all scenario where an increasing number of recreational users are causing wide-scale damage.
"Sensitive lands, previously inaccessible, are being scarred, damaged or permanently altered" due to inappropriate off-highway vehicle use, it says. Meanwhile, wildlife are "distressed, displaced and driven off public lands." The report also says hundreds of people are random-camping on certain weekends at unofficial campgrounds that have no washroom facilities, and the drinking water for "hundreds of thousands of Alberta citizens" is being threatened as a result. Land along the Eastern Slopes contains the headwaters for southern Alberta watersheds.
The task force recognizes that in some cases the multi-use policy itself is the problem.It also says that, despite the increasing usage and damage of public lands, the four municipalities have "observed a decrease in provincial budgets and manpower requirements to manage the issues."
Sustainable Resource and Development spokesman Dave Ealey says there are a total of 12 forest officers in charge of monitoring activities and enforcing legislation in the southwestern part of the province, from the U.S. border to the Bighorn area north of Calgary.
Ealey says the government is addressing concerns about recreational use along the Eastern Slopes by creating new access management plans for various forest zones.
However, the task force’s report says that the MDs have major concerns about the government’s lack of financial commitment to implement the plans they’ve developed.
"The group feels the situation out here is serious and needs attention and investment," says Brian Irmen, task-force spokesperson and CAO of Clearwater County. "There is no doubt the number of visitors in some areas is so intense that some restrictions may need to be put in place. We can’t have a quad trail every 10 feet."
STUCK WITH AN OUTDATED POLICY
Barry Worbets, a senior fellow at the Calgary-based think tank Canada West Foundation, says current land-use management is clearly outdated. Worbets says two-thirds of Albertans recently surveyed by the Canada West Foundation stated that their second-highest priority after health care was the environment, but government policy is lagging behind that sentiment.
Worbets says along the Eastern Slopes, "recreation, tourism and wilderness are the most dominant land use that have to prevail." And the top priority in land-use planning along the Eastern Slopes should be to protect the headwaters of major watersheds.
"We need to get some real purpose, definition and vision about what the landscape should look like in 100 years," he says. "This is an important issue for Albertans and they want improvement."
Meanwhile, Ealey says there are currently no plans to update the Eastern Slopes policy from the 1970s on which all management of the area is based.
He adds that multi-use doesn’t mean every use in every area. He says the government does designate certain areas as prime protection or critical wildlife zones and in those areas the activity allowed is much more limited.
However, oil and gas activity isn’t always limited. Shell Canada has announced plans to drill four sour-gas wells in the Carbondale area of the Castle, in what’s been designated as a critical wildlife zone. The company currently has wells in prime protection zones, but it is promising not to do any more exploration or drilling in major protection areas and says it will eventually phase out wells in the area.
Meanwhile, Emmett of the Castle Crown Wilderness Association says keeping the company from drilling further wells throughout the Castle area will be just one of the many battles ahead for his organization as it struggles to save the Castle. |
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