Month: February 2023

Coal was the final straw.

I grew up in a fishing and hunting family. We spent golden days in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, from the Oldman north to the tributaries of the North Saskatchewan. Rolling, pine-clad hills, quiet trout streams, chance sightings of deer and bears — it was paradise for a kid.  In the fall Dad took us hunting pheasants on the farms of relatives east of Strathmore. In between times, impatient, I sought out the wildest places I could find and became a birder.

That was many years, and many governments, ago.  Mostly conservative governments: some good, mostly bad.  Certainly Peter Lougheed’s government was one of the good ones.  It gave us an Environmental Conservation Authority, strong environmental laws, Kananaskis Country and a Coal Policy.  Especially in the early years, Lougheed’s vision of environmentally-responsible development seemed to offer Alberta a future where nature and commerce might flourish together.

But it didn’t last.  The ECA got disbanded, regulatory agencies were de-fanged and greed took over.  It seemed like each election resulted in the “progressive” part of Progressive Conservative fading more, until it vanished altogether and we got a new creature: a “United Conservative Party.”  The centre shifted and “progressive” came to define opposition parties, not government.

What did that look like on the land?  It looked like paradise lost. 

There’s a uniquely profound sorrow that comes of having one’s identity shredded. I chose a career in biology because I’d grown to love everything natural about Alberta.  But the creeks, far valleys, shrubby corners and coulees that grew to define me were under siege from a careless capitalism that, as Oscar Wilde said, knew the price of everything but the value of nothing. By the time I retired, life had become a constant battle against what philosophers call solastalgia – the profound homesickness one gets when home is no longer there.

Native trout are gone from many of those childhood streams. Once-peaceful foothills valleys are tracked up by motor vehicles and filled with noise all summer long. Once-green woodlands are mangy with clearcuts. Prairie grassland is upside down and silent. Even the barn swallows are gone.

It happened incrementally, the consequence of inattention: Albertans’ casual assumption that home would always be there, no matter how much the governments we elected commodified it and it off in bits.

But love doesn’t offer one the option of giving up, even when one’s heart is breaking. When an angry province surprised itself by electing an NDP government in 2015, I was one of many who felt hope rekindle. Here was a government, like the original Lougheed one, that actually believed in the public interest. After three decades of promises but no action, the new government actually established new parks in the Castle River region.  Then they went on to planning for the public lands in the rest of the Oldman drainage. Recently retired, I volunteered on advisory groups working on both those initiatives. It seemed impossible, but we again had a government committed to stewardship of our best places and values.

Many of my fondest memories of wild Alberta reside in the green foothills west of Rocky Mountain House, and it’s there that the NDP government proposed to establish a Bighorn Country similar to the Kananaskis.  But that, apparently, was one conservation hill too far for the angry few who had grown accustomed to laissez-faire mis-management of public lands. In the 2019 election campaign, UCP politicians like Jason Nixon drew on that anger, magnifying it with lies, and rode it into power.

And so, in the 2019 election the NDP were swept aside and replaced by the UCP.  This was no progressive conservative party.  It wasn’t even truly conservative.  It was a reactionary party of hard-core commodifiers.  Everything was for sale.  Nothing was sacred. The public interest would be determined in the marketplace, not by policy.  

Those motivated by love of place and care for wild nature felt crushing despair as the last rules were shredded, parks put up for sale, resource protection staff isolated, and public concern sneeringly dismissed as “NDP talking points.” We’d tasted hope, and had it swept away.

And then came coal.

Since 1993 when Gail and I moved our family to Waterton, I had worked with dozens of good, decent people who loved the land in much the same way as we do.  Ranchers, farmers, Blackfoot and Stoney people, business owners, artists…they came together in various combinations to manage carnivore conflicts, restore trout streams, steer industrial development away from sensitive habitats and just generally try and keep good places good.

In 2020 we all woke up to the news that the UCP government had secretly cancelled Peter Lougheed’s Coal Policy and handed out massive leases to foreign coal companies. The entire headwaters region of Alberta — almost every inch of that childhood paradise that gave shape and meaning to mine and so many other Alberta lives — was being offered up cheap for strip mines.

That betrayal was the last straw, not just for me but for all those good people with whom I’d been so honoured to work over the years.

The worst kind of anger is motivated by hate and selfishness.  But there is a good kind of anger – that motivated by love. And it was love of Alberta that united so many people to fight the sellout of our headwaters to coal companies.  Few things have inspired me so much as seeing Albertans of every type come together to force a rogue government to step back from their plans to pillage our headwaters. The massive resistance to coal strip mining renewed my hope that we might finally be uniting into what Wallace Stegner dreamed of: “a society to match its scenery.”

Alberta has arrived at a crossroads.  It seems like everything good about this place is under threat.  Yet it also seems like we could be awakening to ourselves as a people who will fight for what we love.  Coal, in that regard, was a good thing; it woke us all up. But there is still a risk that we’ll get distracted and look away from the things we matter most.

So I ruined a perfectly good retirement and went into politics.  

I had to: it would be a betrayal of my very identity not to defend the good places, wildlife, people and enduring values of my home place. The UCP has taken us to the brink, but at least where the coal fiasco is concerned, Albertans have pulled back.  Now we need to restore what we can of our lost nature, and ourselves. We need to put our good anger to work – making the best of what remains, and what could yet be.

Solastalgia will have to wait; I’m running for office in hopes of being part of a government that builds forward from the last, desperate hope we’ve all found — for love of our home place, one another, and all our relations.

Perhaps it’s just natural that a lifelong loner should have an affinity to hermit thrushes. We share a common habitat, after all — that of solitude. But that’s too facile an explanation; my love for these birds is more nuanced than that. Whatever the case, when I arrived in the timberline forest near the head of a subalpine basin the other day and stopped to listen again to the wistful beauty of a hermit thrush singing somewhere back in the dim, it evoked a host of memories and associations.

For those who aren’t loners, it might seem that loneliness would be a stranger to those of us who prefer our own company. Not really. In the late 1970s I landed what seemed the perfect job for one who likes himself better when hanging out with wild things in wild places than with others of his own species. That work — conducting inventories of wildlife populations — took me into the remote corners of Canada’s Jasper National Park where I worked alone, often for days on end. More often than not, when I climbed out of my tent or stepped out of a patrol cabin into the pre-dawn shadows to begin another day of field work, there would be a hermit thrush singing somewhere in the cool secret places beneath the trees. And late in the evening, as mystery spilled down from the peaks to darken the world, again there would be a hermit thrush, intoning its wistful benedictions into a stillness we shared.

The slow, ethereal flutings back in the woods seemed to speak of their own kind of loneliness, of nostalgic loss and poignant rememberings. I’m sure those birds sang for themselves but it was a language I felt I almost understood as I simultaneously savoured my solitude and ached with loneliness. Strange days.

Years earlier, when I was religiously memorizing the first bird book I ever bought — the first edition of Birds of Alberta, by Salt and Wilk — I had been taken by the authors’ description of the hermit thrush’s song: “Oh, heavenly heavenly…ah, holy holy…” I had yet to see my first thrush, but I was haunted never-the-less. Maybe it was those lyrics that first made me equate a shy, brown bird with the parable of human exile from Eden.

Years later, when I was discovering the timberline trails of the Canadian Rockies, I sometimes backpacked with a book to read while resting. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was a particularly favoured companion; when the larches turned gold or the meadows were brilliant with blooming glacier lilies it was easy to imagine that I was in Middle Earth. In fact, I was — because the tragedy of Middle Earth was the loss of magic from the world of men – but I was discovering places where it lingers on. Jackson Browne sang of an earth wounded by “men who tried to forge her beauty into power” and that, to me, was the metaphor that linked the Christian story of the Fall to Tolkien’s fantasy novel: the deep human flaw that makes us all lonely strangers in a world of relations to whom we no longer relate. Magic dies when one ceases to look at the living world with wonder and love, striving to hear its music and to understand how best to relate to the beings with whom we share our existence, and instead simply focus on their utility and how we might possess and use them.

What good is a hermit thrush? Wrong question.

In the story of the Fall, humans eat fruit from the tree of knowledge reserved only for God. But it’s not the knowledge that banishes Homo sapiens from Eden; it’s our reason for wanting that knowledge and the fact that it turns everything else into a mere object of analysis. We objectify the world to gain power over it and, in so doing, isolate ourselves from wonder, humility, and relationship. We make loners of ourselves, and wind up alone, on the wrong side of the gate that locked behind us when we stepped through it. To understand the parable of the Fall, the first thing is to know that it didn’t happen once upon a time; it happens every time we look at the world merely as a bundle of resources, rather than a living source of wonder and inspiration.

In Tolkien’s trilogy the elves are the ones who love song and mystery, and live in a world infused by magic. “A Elbereth Gilthoniel!” they sing in celebration of a time when all was magic. 

But at the end, they sail away into the West, taking their magic with them and leaving the world to men. It’s the same story, really.

But the magic never really left; we simply turned away from it. It lives on in an Eden from which we never departed, except in our spirits. It lives in newborn creeks that bubble out of flower-strewn meadows and tumble through forests of larch and fir; it lives among the peaks, especially when they are wrapped in storm clouds or caught in the last rays of the sun; it is in the woods, the fens, the wind, and the wild things. There’s a dark magic in the eyes of a grizzly bear when it stands to study a startled hiker, and a bright magic in the way warblers flicker through the willows. Mayflies dance in magic sunbeams. When life emerges out of winter’s icy stillness, that’s magic. When trees crack with the cold and ravens hunch themselves against the hard winter wind, that’s magic too. It’s everywhere; it’s just hard to see it through the eyes of exiles.

I wonder if hermit thrushes remember the elves, or know them still. I suspect that they are actually birds of Eden, and that the half-light in which they prefer to sing is that place that lies between the lonely, lost world of humankind and the magic from which we turned away. Perhaps, if Tolkien’s elves sailed away into the West and left only the memory of magic behind, they also left a humble brown bird to keep that memory alive in sweet, forlorn laments that make mountain shadows sacred.

If we believe that magic has truly left this world, than a hermit thrush’s achingly sweet, spiraling song might be heard as the music that arises from memories of memories of mystery.  But I think it is more than that; it is proof, in itself that magic never left our world at all; we simply looked away.  Back in the sweet, subalpine shadows of forests, those small brown birds lament our loss of wonder even while they invite us back into its embrace. 

I’ve come to the certain belief that there is no time better spent than that spent listening to the hermit thrushes who sing to us from the edge of Eden, reminding us to remember what most of us don’t even realize we’ve forgotten: “A Elbereth Gilthoniel: Heavenly… heavenly… holy…. humbly… home.”