Alberta's Special Places Program: A Triumph of Politics over Science

by Wendy Francis, Conservation Director
Calgary/Banff Chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society

1 Introduction

In 1989, World Wildlife Fund Canada and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) conceived an ambitious campaign called Endangered Spaces. Its goal is to protect at least 12 percent of Canada in a wild state by the year 2000. The campaign has been incredibly successful in generating commitments to its goals. Every province, each territory and the federal government has said, in writing, that it will achieve the Endangered Spaces goal of completing a network of representative protected areas by the year 2000. The Honourable Brian Evans, who then was Alberta's Environment Minister, signified Alberta's commitment to the Endangered Spaces goal in 1992, the last jurisdiction to make the pledge.

This paper will review Alberta's progress toward fulfilling its commitment to complete a network of protected areas. It concludes that, at present, political imperatives and policy limitations mean Alberta is making little meaningful progress toward that goal.

2 Ecological and Philosophical Rationales for Protected Areas

The need for rational networks of protected areas, representative of varied ecological regions and capable of sustaining ecological processes, is widely recognized. Natural habitat, undisturbed by human activities, rapidly is disappearing in southern Canada. Only small, scattered remnants of a once wild continent remain. Some wide-ranging large mammals, particularly grizzly bears, wolves, and migratory species such as caribou, need large, relatively intact landscapes in which to wander, move between winter and summer habitats, feed, mate and raise young. If humans can manage the land to ensure the continued survival of these largest of mammals, the remaining abundant elements of biodiversity also will be preserved. The science of conservation biology holds that populations of wild animals must remain interconnected across landscapes if they are to survive over the long term. Core protected areas form a critical foundation of a land use management approach that will ensure the persistence of wildlife populations.

Industry proponents suggest setting aside small core protected areas (i.e., a few hundred square kilometres) inside larger buffer zones may protect biodiversity adequately. However, it may be many decades before we know whether these techniques will allow industrial development to co-exist with healthy wildlife populations. The only evidence we have to date is that industrial development causes habitat loss, alienation, and fragmentation that contributes to risks to wildlife populations. Therefore, the precautionary principle mandates that in the face of uncertainty, adequate areas be set aside to maintain at least minimum viable populations of wildlife. These areas can serve as ecological bench marks against which the success of more intensive land use management efforts can be measured.

In addition to the ecological rationales for protected areas, there are social and ethical justifications for prohibiting human impacts on some portion of the landscape. The notion of sustainable development requires a balancing of economic and environmental considerations. This idea is commonly, but mistakenly, used to support the argument that protection must be balanced against use within landscapes. However, that approach will not result in a true balance. Many places on the landscape are committed exclusively to human uses, for example, urban areas and landscapes under cultivation. To achieve a balance across the province requires that some landscapes be dedicated completely to the wild.

3 How Much to Protect?

The amount of land necessary to meet the goals of protection is a matter of some debate, even among biologists. World Wildlife Fund's goal of approximately 12% has been treated as a rigid maximum in jurisdictions like British Columbia. In Alberta, existing circumstances mean protecting 12% of the land base simply will not be adequate.

Alberta is blessed with magnificent mountain landscapes that have been protected in Waterton Lakes, Banff, and Jasper National Parks. In addition, Wood Buffalo, Canada's largest national park, protects some of the unique wetland environments and boreal forests of northeastern Alberta. However, these four protected areas alone constitute 9.5% of Alberta's surface. A rigid goal of 12% would leave only 2.5% available for adequately protecting Alberta's other four natural regions and 16 subregions.

Approximately 1.4% of provincial lands are represented in provincial parks, natural areas, ecological reserves and wilderness areas. In order to capture what remains of highly fragmented natural regions such as the grasslands and parkland, and provide at least one large wilderness (i.e., greater than 4,000 square kilometres) in natural regions such as the foothills and the boreal forest, approximately 5% of Alberta provincial lands, or an additional approximately 3.6%, needs to be protected to meet the basic goals of core protected areas. This does not include land that will need to receive special management as buffer zones and connecting corridors. However, it is fallacious to measure progress numerically. The job will be done only when there are enough protected areas of sufficient size, surrounded by buffers and connected across landscapes, to ensure the goals of representing landscape diversity, maintaining ecological integrity, preserving wildlife populations, providing recreational opportunities, protecting biodiversity "hot spots," and preserving unique or endangered features or species are met.

4 History of the Special Places Process

For decades, Albertans have expressed strong support for increasing the province's network of protected areas. Following the government's 1992 commitment to the Endangered Spaces
campaign, it released a discussion document and struck an Advisory Committee to hold hearings into and receive public comment on the draft policy. The Committee's report reflects a shared public sense of urgency to move forward with protection while the opportunity still exists. It proposed a spectrum of "special places" in which specific activities would be either permitted or prohibited.

The Advisory Committee's recommendations received significant praise from environmental groups. However, some in government did not like the direction the policy was headed and, consequently, a further round of public consultation was mandated. A fear campaign commenced in which different users such as snowmobilers, recreational vehicle users, and the energy industry were told the program would eliminate them from large areas of provincial land. The resulting letter-writing campaigns saw thousands of letters from user groups opposed to the policy reach the Minister's desk.

In March 1995, the current Special Places policy was released. It was substantially diluted from the 1992 draft, and the 1993 Advisory Committee recommendations.

5 Key Issues in the Special Places Policy

5.1 The Program's Goals

Fundamentally, Special Places is not a protected areas policy. Rather, its goals are fourfold. It seeks "to balance the goal of preservation, with the parallel goals of outdoor recreation, heritage appreciation, and tourism/economic development." The policy document uses places where industrial development has been allowed to occur within parks, such as Dinosaur Provincial Park, as examples of "special places" where all four goals can be met.

5.2 Existing Dispositions

This fundamental inconsistency is heightened by the policy's commitment that "the government will honour all commitments to tenure holders utilizing the existing renewal processes." In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the pace of industrial dispositions in Alberta escalated rapidly. During the same decades, little progress was made to set aside protected areas. As a result, with over 90% of Alberta layered with Forest Management Agreements, timber quotas, mining permits and licenses, and oil and gas leases, the possibility of new forestry operations, oil and gas exploration and development, mining exploration and development, and associated roads and infrastructure exists in virtually every Special Places candidate site.

The consequences of this dilemma were highlighted last week when the Department of Energy posted for sale mineral leases in the Rumsey South Natural Area, one of the newest Special Places established to protect a small remnant of the highly endangered parkland natural region. During the recent Alberta election campaign, Premier Klein insisted that Special Places are virtually off limits to development. However, Special Places, as currently constituted, is not creating a network of protected areas.

5.3 Amount of Land to be Protected Determined by Politics, Not Science

Consistent with World Wildlife Fund's methodology, Alberta chose a "gap analysis" approach to determine how much land will be protected through Special Places. Designed to ensure that each of Alberta's 20 subregions are represented in the protected areas network, gap analysis is a useful tool for measuring progress towards the protected areas agenda. It sets numerical targets for the land base to be represented in Special Places in each subregion.

However, Alberta's gap analysis explicitly states:

As with any numerical system, great care should be used in applying it to natural systems. This is to be used as a dynamic tool for sorting and prioritizing and should not be used as an absolute and inviolable reference point. The targets are based on the assumption that lands specified for meeting those targets will have a prime function in ecosystem protection and will not be subject to significant recreation and tourism use. The requirements of large carnivores and migratory birds and mammals are not adequately addressed by these targets.

The Special Places targets provide only a coarse filter to the issue of biodiversity preservation, protecting perhaps only 75 to 80% of species. Further, the more that protected lands are not serving a prime function in ecosystem protection or are subject to recreation, tourism or other pressures, the more inadequate the gaps are to do a sufficient job of protecting biodiversity and meeting other protected areas goals. Government representatives to the process acknowledge that, at best, assuming all targets can be met in sites having adequate protection, Special Places will protect a maximum of 80% of Alberta's biodiversity. However, the government is not prepared to expand the land base being considered for protection beyond the 1.4% identified as the "gaps."

The actual sites chosen for consideration also are politically determined. Staff in the Department of Environmental Protection have done an excellent job of determining those nationally- and provincially-significant sites worthy of consideration. However, before those sites are referred to the process, an Interdepartmental Committee consisting of Deputy Ministers of the Departments of Energy, Community Development, Economic Development and Tourism, Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, and Environmental Protection, reviews the sites. They choose those sites and configurations having the least conflict with industrial dispositions. In the Foothills Natural Region, this process eliminated the significant Little Smoky caribou range from the process and substantially reduced the site in the provincially significant Chinchaga region of northwestern Alberta.

5.4 Primacy of Local Interests

The Special Places process contemplates three levels of decision- making. The public nominates sites in each of the natural regions. A Provincial Coordinating Committee (PCC) made up of representatives of 24 different interests, is charged with overseeing the process and recommending sites that will be referred to local committees. Local committees are responsible for reviewing boundaries and making recommendations about management principles.

Currently, five local committees are considering nine sites in two natural regions. In order to convince municipalities to accept the job of convening and managing the local committees, and to overcome local resistance to and suspicion about a process that might eliminate some uses from Crown lands, the Minister of Environmental Protection promised municipal governments virtually absolute control over the process at the local level. The result is that each local committee is taking a unique approach to the process of reviewing sites and its mandate. In some cases, local committees are proceeding in ways consistent with the overall intent and philosophy of the program. However, in others, the process has gone seriously off the rails.

For example, the Minister accepted the PCC's advice to establish a local committee for the Castle region, north of Waterton Lakes National Park, an area which constitutes approximately 50% of a narrow connection between regional U.S. and Canadian grizzly bear populations. The Castle has been proposed for protection for decades and recommended for protection by the Natural Resources Conservation Board, a government-appointed quasi-judicial body.

Convened by the Municipal District of Pincher Creek, the local committee considering the Castle site established terms of reference designed to minimize the likelihood of protection, that invoke a voting mechanism rather than requiring consensus, and which exclude many of the interests active in the region, including environmental groups and the energy and forestry industries. The Minister has endorsed this process, and has ignored the protests of conservationists that the process is unfair.

6 Status of Special Places Process

Currently, the Provincial Coordinating Committee is virtually deadlocked. The foothills natural region is the third largest in the province, and the most fragmented next to the grasslands and the parkland regions. It constitutes some of the best grizzly bear habitat in the province and also contains critical habitat for the threatened woodland caribou. Nine of the eleven best sites for protection in the foothills are covered with multiple layers of existing dispositions. Consequently, the environmental groups on the committee will not agree to refer those sites to local committees until the conflict between protection and honouring existing dispositions and the issue of procedural fairness within local committees are resolved.

A new chairperson, MLA David Coutts, is to assume responsibility for the process at the PCC's end of May meeting. Members of the PCC repeatedly have requested the assistance of a professional facilitator to help build consensus. However, to date, chairpersons having little in the way of facilitation skills have led the process.

In recent weeks, World Wildlife Fund awarded Alberta a D+ for its progress towards the protected areas agenda. Demonstrating his disdain for protected areas and his misreading of the public's concern about conservation, Minister of Environmental Protection, Ty Lund, responded that Albertans did not want to see their public lands "sterilized."

7 Conclusions

The possibility of much in the way of real, on-the-ground protection through the Special Places process seems slim, except in a handful of sites. CPAWS, one of the more moderate conservation groups in the province, is facing increasing pressure from its membership to denounce the Special Places process. So far, we remain committed to seeking improvements to the process, rather than abandoning it.

However, to achieve the changes that are needed if Special Places is to become a true protected areas strategy, decision-makers will need to be persuaded that this is in their best interests. This will require public awareness campaigns directed at government and industry opponents to protection. CPAWS has becoming increasingly public with its criticisms of the process. We would rather not return to the days of conflict, hearings and negative publicity for government and industry. We desperately need to move beyond the conflicts and seek consensus around the fundamental values that define a protected areas strategy. Creative solutions that allow us to move beyond a rigid "commitment to existing dispositions" must be part of this discussion.

We are challenged with solving the greatest test facing humanity - learning to co-exist with nature and stemming the tide of species extinctions. The fundamental question is whether we can make the visionary and selfless choices that will respect the needs and desires of other species and future generations, or whether economic and self-interested values will lead us to continue down the road of biological impoverishment.