Dennis Hryciuk, Journal Staff Writer,
Edmonton, The Edmonton Journal, February 18, 1999
For Helene walsh, the chinchaga is a winding river that carries her canoe past great horned owls, moose and beavers through rolling foothills.
"It's always turning. It's beautiful, with forests on both sides," says the environmentalist who has twice visited this remote area of northwestern Alberta.
For forest company executive Barb Deters, the Chinchaga is a vast timber area that will turn trees into paper and create hundreds of new jobs.
"The value added is huge. It's the best possible economic use of wood," says Deters, vice-president of Grande Alberta Paper Ltd., which wants to log the area for a proposed paper mill.
And therein lies a major conflict over what could become one of the largest Special Places in Alberta.
A coalition of environmental groups that includes the World Wildlife Fund has proposed creating a 5,500 sq. km wildland park - roughly half the size of Jasper National Park.
The region, which shows up on Alberta highway maps a a huge green area with no villages and no access roads, is home to woodland caribou and old growth forests.
But the Alberta government has also made sure that it has become a place for logging and interests that could oppose wilderness protection, says Edmonton environmentalist Sam Gunsch. Besides the proposed GAP forest management area, the province's forest service has issued smaller timber permits in recent years in a region long suggested as a Special Place, he says.
"Now there are industry players lobbying in the background," says Gunsch, a spokes person for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
Yet GAP itself has not been approved and therefore no commitments to the company have been made, Gunsch says.
Deters disagrees, saying land has been set aside as a reserve forest management area for the project.
Conservationists such as Walsh want the area protected because it is one of the last relatively unspoiled regions left in the province.
"It could be a place for Albertans and people everywhere to experience foothills wilderness for now and forever, " Walsh writes in a submission from her group, Albertans for a Wild Chinchaga.
The 70 member group believes the region should serve as an industry-free "benchmark" against which industries outside the protected area could measure their environmental impacts.
A proposed candidate area for protection from the Special Places provincial coordinating committee is totally inadequate because its 910 sq. km. area would fail to protect caribou habitat, Walsh says.
"We don't want these Tiny areas that can be swept away by fires," says the resident of Fairview, a town about three hours south of the nearest access to the Chinchaga.
But GAP has proposed a much smaller Special Place - a 70 sq. km. area - roughly the size of Edmonton.
The company wants to practice selective logging in parts of the protected area in ways that would mimic fires, Deter says.
All of that would provide 285 jobs in an area with limited employment opportunities, the GAP executive says. The $900-million project would include a paper mill far to the south near Grande Prairie to be built by 2004.
Many in the environmental community doubt the GAP project will ever go ahead since little has happened since it wa first proposed in 1992. But Deter says the company still wants the project to proceed after completing an environmental impact study, expected to take about nine months. Gap's chair is Jim Hole, one of the main investors in the Edmonton Oilers and a part-owner of Lockerbie and Hole, an Edmonton construction firm.
GAP's views on logging clash with its own industry group, which says member companies will not cut in Special Places.
The Alberta Forest Products Association says firms will stay out of protected areas under the provincial program.
GAP is not a member of the association. Deters has no comment on that matter, but notes that forestry isn't the only industry to intrude into the Chinchaga.
Photographs show extensive oil and gas seismic cutlines and roads throughout the area.
"There's the pristine Halverson Ridge," she says sarcastically, pointing to a road through the ridge.
But Walsh says designation as a Special Place would mean that oil and gas activity would be phased out of the Chinchaga, as agreed to by the Canadian association of Petroleum Producers. And creating a protected area would keep out logging, which would only add more roads.
GAP, she says, should be given land in less sensitive areas. Other industries such as tourism could be built by preserving areas such as Halverson Ridge, Walsh adds.
Tom Baldwin, who chairs the local Special Places Chinchaga committee, says the GAP proposal will be a factor to be considered.
Because the company's views are so far from those of conservationists, it will be a challenge to come up with a recommendation on size of the area, Baldwin says.
The committee plans to issue its recommendations next month.
For Walsh, however, the remote Chinchaga is one of Alberta's last hopes for preserving wilderness.
"If we can't do it here, we might as well give up on biodiversity. We can't do that."