rssThe first time the low, relentless roar from the power plants’ draglines and 40-ton coal trucks registered in my awareness was the fall of 2005. I had spent the afternoon stringing chicken wire around some big aspens along Strawberry Creek on our family’s land near Warburg, 80 kilometres southwest of Edmonton. My intent: to protect the picturesque old trees from a pair of beavers stockpiling winter food for their two kits. Later, the air was perfectly still when I went down to the creek, at dusk, to watch the shadowy creatures on the far bank whittling bark off alder and willow. And there, muscular and insistent, muffling the sound of the beavers’ gnawing and felling, was the unmistakable whine of machinery, working its way into every fold of the landscape.
Genesee’s two massive coal-fired power plants are 12 km north of our land, close to the North Saskatchewan River. The front edge of the neighbouring coal mine is just 8 km distant, and getting closer.
When the second of the two 450 MW power plants came on-stream in 2005, the thirst for coal doubled. Now there are 3,600 train cars of coal a day helping satisfy the appetite of Edmonton’s electrical grid. Why had I never fully considered the consequences? Soon the strip-mine will chew its way to our property’s northern barbwire boundary. Then there will be expropriation agents and papers, and our cherished parcel of aspen parkland – with its oxbows and white-throated thrushes and spongy muskeg – will be stripped and heaped as “overburden,” and harvested of its own thick seam of coal.
For me, as for many Albertans, the cumulative impact of this latest oil boom is only now lurching into focus, the rousing parade of economic numbers, buoyant immigration figures and housing starts slowly turning sour as familiar places become unrecognizable. Soon, one can’t help thinking, the archetypal Alberta land-scapes of bald prairie and foothills and rolling fields with patches of parkland bush will exist only in carefully cropped, soft-focus postcards. Meanwhile, one immediate consequence of the boom is the steady loss of Alberta’s agricultural land to residential and industrial development, particularly in the fertile Edmonton-Calgary corridor. The issue isn’t merely the obvious one of advancing cul-de-sacs of vinyl-clad townhouses, either. The sprawl of Alberta’s cities is just part of the story. Cities send out a wave that ripples ahead as they expand, transforming large, commutable distances with gravel pits, golf courses and racetracks, trans portation infrastructure, the inevitable power-generation projects and the quiet creep of industrial parks and acreage development (a.k.a., “country-residential”). En masse, such ripples divide once-whole farming tracts into small, inefficient pieces and provide a snapshot of our society’s values, dangerously out of balance and unsustainable.
Bill Partridge, a senior property management executive in Calgary, conservationist and former urban planner, has a unique vantage point on Alberta’s situation, and his assessment is blunt: “We are slowly killing ourselves by diminishing the capacity of the earth to support us. We practice pop stewardship – like the occasional green space allotment or insertion of lofty principles in municipal plans – when what we need is real, long-term-oriented stewardship policies integrated into the fabric of our society. We are due for a significant paradigm shift, and it has to happen at the political level.”
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On her organic farm operation in Delisle, Saskatchewan, Nettie Wiebe [no relationship to the author] offers quieter yet no-less-penetrating insights. A theology professor and former United Farmer’s Association president, she traces the roots of Alberta’s urban sprawl to western Canada’s unshakeable “tomorrow country” mythology. “The social attitude toward land in the West is that there is always more.” But at stake, she notes, is our long-term food security. It’s an ill-advised position to be in when a growing North American trend is “buying local” and climate change and declining fossil fuel supplies threaten the inexpensive importing of food. Experts predict that by the end of the century, for example, California – which produces 75 per cent of North America’s vegetables – will be completely arid. As for this country’s food exports: When the grain trade is removed from calculations, Canada is a net importer of agricultural products. Alberta, for one, imports 85 per cent of its vegetables.
Yet despite the warnings, government seems slow to grasp the consequences of such shortsightedness. With the present rate of urban and industry development, for example, Calgary will border Kananaskis and Edmonton will envelop the City of Leduc by 2050, according to Calgary’s Brad Stelfox, an expert in ecological modelling. In fact, by 2105, predicts Stelfox, the land between Edmonton and Calgary will be one continuous ribbon of industry and residential – the result, he says, of government’s lack of vision and sense of stewardship. “Alberta has been doing everything, everywhere, all the time, with no overarching plan. But this needs to change,” he warns. Decisions have to be made about where cattle should best be raised and wood fibres and hydrocarbons harvested, using a zoning approach based on resource assessment.
It’s a vision of the future supported with equal fervour y Harvey Buckley, a straight-talking rancher from the Cochrane area and former president of Action for Agriculture, an Alberta land policy forum established in 1990. At age 75, Buckley became one of nine municipal councillors in Rocky View, a huge municipal district that surrounds Calgary on all but the city’s southwest flank – and onsequently bears the brunt of its expansion. And he, too, offers a withering assessment of Alberta’s approach to land use. “It’s hard getting people to think about collective responsibility and to care for our natural capital. These days, development comes first, full stop. But Alberta is 103 years old, and look what we’ve done to the place in that time. In another century, will there be anything left? We need a whole culture change.”
Driving south out of Edmonton on Highway 2 en route to Strawberry Creek, I can’t miss the post-agricultural face of Alberta. The comunity of Ellerslie on the city’s outskirts, until recently a landmark gateway with two grain elevators, has been erased by a highway cloverleaf, its last elevator backhoed into rubble with little protest in 1999. On the gently sloping lands to the east are now the tight phalanxes of new residential subdivisions – one of them, ironically, a Melcor development dubbed the Fields of Summerside.
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When asked about his company’s seeming preference for low-density urban expansion in a world touting sustainable development, Peter Daly, VP of Melcor Developments, points to the lack of political will. “We put forward plans for developments with higher densities all the time, but city council rejects them because their constituents, they say, have no appetite for them.” It’s country-residential, says Daly, that’s the primary culprit in the agricultural land consumption issue. “A quarter section of land [65 hectares] houses 700 people in new urban subdivisions; country-residential, in five-acre parcels, houses about 100.” Country-residential developer Bob Thiessen, however, contends that, unlike cities, which grow from the centre indiscriminately, small municipalities such as Leduc County have policies that help limit development to poor-quality agricultural land. “Leduc has land subdivision guidelines that say, ‘If the soil is Class 4 or 5 [lower grade] then we have no difficulty subdividing it.’ But if it is Class 3, I have to present a very good case to city council. In other words, it’s cities that are the real problem,” says Thiessen, because they have the political power to grow without constraint and to easily seize fringe land from neighbouring municipalities.
Back on Highway 2, I run the gauntlet of Nisku’s industrial park (the fabrication plants for the oil rigs and pipelines driving the hydrocarbon industry), continue past the International Airport and, at Leduc, turn west toward Calmar. On all sides: some of the best farmland in Alberta, layered with Class 1 soil infilled by ancient, glacial Lake Edmonton. Around here, eyebrows were raised in the 1950s when an airport was plunked smack in the middle of the lakebed. Today, the covering-over only continues, despite protests that the loss of Class 1 land is of national concern. Only five per cent of Canada is capable of producing food, and only 0.5 per cent of such land is Class 1 (characterized by ideal climate and soil quality), yet the loss of superior farmland is a countrywide phenomenon – from the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia to the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario to B.C.’s Okanagan and Fraser valleys. And it’s particularly significant in Alberta. In 1971, 1.5 per cent of Alberta’s Class 1 land was occupied by urban development; by 2001, the figure had jumped to 6.5 per cent, and has continued to increase since. Yet what Alberta does land-wise affects the entire country because, according to Stats Canada, three-quarters of Canada’s “dependable agricultural land” (Class 1 to 3 soils) is concentrated in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
It seems absurd that a society would liquidate such a precious commodity, one that supports the essence of human life – our food. The tenets of modern agricul-ture are a house of cards, says William Rees, UBC scholar and originator of the “ecological footprint” concept. “The whole Western world has succumbed to the idea that we can substitute hydrocarbon-based fertilizers for soil, leading to a short-term abundance of food and reducing the value of productive farmland. But with peak oil production soon upon us, that abundance will rapidly come to an end.” To experience the most recent results of such short-term thinking, one has only to drive through the County of Leduc, where planners are in the process of laying out a new industrial park west of Nisku along an idyllic and fertile stretch of Highway 19. If endorsed, the plan will see 3,560 hectares of mostly Class 1 farmland encrusted with a combination of business parks and heavy and light industry.
From the Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church just outside Nisku, where the evolving Highway 19 Area Structure Plan was presented to the public at an open house in June 2007, one can count the spires and domes of three other churches. I try to imagine what the lush fields forked with wooded creeks that surround them will look like with welding shops and metal cranes sidling up to cemeteries where a century of homesteaders are buried. Local farmland is not only important for food production – in terms of environmental, health, security, community infrastructure and economic value. It is also a cultural artifact, a collective creation that carries the indelible traces of the past. The piles of rocks along the fence lines, the weathered wooden barns, the sloughs left unplowed – these speak of human history.
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In other countries, vigorous preservation groups squelch efforts to demolish or develop important, historic rural buildings and landscapes – societies such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Barn Again! program of the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation. But in Canada, rural heritage still has a low profile. Though Alberta communities such as Grande Prairie, Lethbridge and Edmonton are taking inventory of the rural heritage within their city boundaries, few buildings have thus far been protected. The city of Edmonton’s Ellerslie Area Structure Plan from July 2007, for example, states, “Given the plan area’s long agricultural history, it is unlikely that the lands are of an historical or cultural value.” Furthermore, the lands are rated as Class 1 and zoned “Agricultural,” yet “agriculture” is not mentioned as having a place in the future of the area. The Plan’s Development Objectives and Principles lists only ”industrial, business, commercial and residential development.” Alberta is slowly awakening to its rural heritage, however. The Southeast Area Structure Plan includes, for the first time, an assessment of rural heritage resources. As a result, near the Fields of Summerside development, officials are now inking a deal to save the Treichel barn, a large wooden dairy and horse barn from the 1930s. Edmonton heritage planner David Holdsworth calls the innovative deal a litmus test for other buildings the city is cataloguing. “The developer is giving the city the barn and the land (around four or five housing lots). In turn, the city will sell the package to the buyer with the best renovation and most sympathetic use plans,” says Holdsworth.
Ward Councillor Dave Thiele has been instrumental in saving the Treichel barn, convincing developers (density bonuses helped), city departments and fellow councillors that protecting Alberta’s heritage – even a small part of it – is important. “But it’s not easy for property owners like the Treichel family to go against the money offered by developers,” he notes. “In most cases, their land is their biggest investment, their retirement savings. So there needs to be a system that pays for the difference between the value of a property as farmland and its value for residential use.”
Heading west out of Leduc toward Calmar, past weathered wooden granaries and lines of trees that once acted as shelterbelts, I’m reminded of all the old farmsteads that have disappeared along this route in the past decade. But in Tofield, retirement-aged Bernie Von Tettenbaum is facing not only the loss of his family’s land but his entire community. In January 2007, Sherritt International Corporation announced plans for its Dodds-Roundhill Coal Gasification Project, which would see 312 square km – “80 per cent of it very good agricultural land and 10 per cent of it pasture” – strip-mined. Plans for a similar plant in the mid-1970s were thwarted by such groups as the Roundhill Dodds Agricultural Protection Association, which Von Tettenbaum currently chairs. But this new proposal is being spun as a public good, one that will curb greenhouse gas emissions at the new tar-sand plants planned for eastern Edmonton by powering them with what Sherritt calls, “the clean coal technology of coal gasification.” The final decision on the plant will come in mid-2009.
Von Tettenbaum’s own mixed farming operation takes in 13 quarters of land. His two sons worked it alongside him for 25 and 16 years respectively, but both quit recently. There’s not enough money in agriculture. Even though crop prices increased in 2007, the cost of fuel and fertilizer has wiped out any gains, says Von Tettenbaum. Nevertheless, he is determined to hold on to the farm. “We’re faced with not only losing our land but our history, our sense of community. There is no way a company can compensate for that monetarily – land is not a simple commodity. It’s the basis of who we are.”
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To the west of Calgary is undulating ranchland, while to the north and east, farms are given over to cereal crops. Tim Creelman, Calgary’s coordinator of intermunicipal and regional planning, strives to put the loss of local farmland into perspective. The city, he explains, targets its growth into open agricultural land because the strategy offers a broader range of development opportunities. Lands already fragmented by country-residential are harder to work with. “We annex for long-term growth,” says Creelman, “so some of the land could continue with agricultural production for years. In the north and east parts of the city, for example, we have land annexed in 1989 that is still farmed.” Nevertheless, urban density, he says, is the most efficient use of land. When asked about the possibility of not expanding at all, he laughs. “You mean put a stop sign out on the highway? You can’t stop people from coming. No, our job is to manage growth. It will happen whether we like it or not.”
For Calgary conservationist Bill Partridge, it’s exactly that kind of growth-driven ideology that leads to sprawl. “The central question for Calgary should be, ‘Why are we continuing to embrace the 1950s and 1960s principles of continuous, low-density urban growth?’ Calgary is a living laboratory for this doctrine, and the city has out-stripped its ability to support itself. Its fire chief recently said they need 20 new firehalls, alone!”
One Alberta community that has stood out in its commitment to confront sprawl is Okotoks (population 15,000). In 1998, the town did something no other jurisdiction in North America has done: put a lid on population growth. Quickly ballooning as a bedroom community of Calgary, Okotoks had recognized the environmental limitations of its water source, the Sheep River watershed, and also wanted to maintain its small-town quality of life. So city councillors capped the municipal population at 30,000 and established a firm urban boundary. But the decision, says municipal manager Rick Quail, led to a dramatic increase in country-residential in the municipalities around Okotoks, a vivid illustration of how no one decision can be made in isolation; one jurisdiction’s principled stance can become another’s opportunity to expand its property tax base. Consequently, Okotoks is now working with surrounding municipalities to identify and collectively deal with country-residential fragmentation. Indeed, a growing number of regional planning bodies are now being formed. The Calgary Regional Partnership, for example, brings together 18 municipalities and one First Nation. And though decisions are non-binding at this point, the group has plans to develop governance criteria that will give it teeth as soon as next year.
Most of Alberta’s municipalities, however, lack the tools necessary to manage growth, says Cochrane rancher Harvey Buckley. His district of Rocky View, for one, is “inundated with acreages”; in the past 20 years, an estimated 28,000 hectares have been converted to urban and country-residential development. “The weak farm economy contributes to urban sprawl, but it is mostly due to lack of planning. Our planning process and municipal legislation is pretty Mickey Mouse. The province needs to revise the Muncipal Government Act (MGA) and require municipalities to conserve farmland.” Moreover, he says, municipal councils are dominated by developers and inexperienced representatives. “In Alberta we have government by developers. Look at Rocky View. We have nine councillors, and three of them are developers. I am the only active farmer.”
Still, even if the MGA is not addressed, Buckley is heartened by the fact that the provincial government is tackling the issue through its Provincial Land-use Framework Initiative. The aim is to better manage land-use tensions between urban development, agriculture, forestry, First Nations and the oil and gas industries, and to hopefully enshrine regional planning around watersheds. Governments, says Buckley, are one of the few entities that can mediate competitive private interests, “because self-interest dictates that we will not change behaviour unless we are compelled to.” And Canadians seem willing to have constraints put in place. A 2006 James Hoggan & Associates poll found Canadians rank sustainability as a top national priority, with 49 per cent saying “lack of government leadership” is a major factor in the lack thereof. (Perhaps surprisingly, it also found that 53 per cent of residents were not familiar with “sustainability” and that 70 per cent could not define the term.)
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Meanwhile, Buckley points to the B.C. provincial government for examples of responsible land stewardship. The province established an agricultural land reserve in 1974 to halt the annual loss of 6,000 hectares of farmland, particularly in the Lower Mainland. Today, the reserve’s land base of 1.9 million hectares remains constant and, though not perfect, the policy has dramatically slowed the rate at which superior farmland is eroded by development. In the Fraser Valley Regional District, for instance, the size of protected agricultural areas has fallen only marginally since 1974, from 76,803 to 71,882 hectares. By contrast, though the Alberta government identified the problem of farmland loss in the late 1970s, during the last oil boom, it did not act pre-emptively. In the early 1980s, it brought in bills to establish an agricultural land commission and land preservation fund. But, wary of the B.C. approach (which froze development on prime agricultural lands), it merely proposed a variety of management strategies – all of which stalled. In 1994, those same regional planning commissions were then abolished, fragmenting any existing efforts and transferring responsibility for preserving agricultural lands to the municipalities, an approach some say only heightened competition over property taxes between the municipalities rather than working in the long-term interests of the province. Granted, other models for protecting farmland, including land covered by conservation easements held by land trusts, have been implemented (there are now some 15 land trusts in Alberta, including the Southern Alberta Land Trust Society), but all require funds to compensate farmers for what they could sell their lands for on the open market. And though new strategies are possible, such as the transfer of development rights, these all require strong political will.
Alberta is not unique in its dilemma, of course. The loss of farmland is a global phenomenon. Nepal, for instance, has been progressively paving its fertile Kathmandu Valley over the past 15 years. And in his 2005 book, Sprawl, urban planning professor Robert Bruegmann argues that the phenomenon is inherent to the human condition, at least since 14th-century China. At this point in history, however, most agree proactive action is needed. Can we move from being a money-centred society to one that invests in things that sustain life? Many are doubtful, and American political scientist Linton Caldwell offers one explanation as to why: “The cooperative task would require behaviour that humans find most difficult – collective self-discipline in a common effort.”
The sun is sinking as I turn onto Highway 622 and head west for the final 15 kilometres to our property. To the northwest: The smog from the Genesee power plant’s big stacks forms a yellow anvil on the horizon. To the south: Fields cleared by hand by two generations of families are dotted with ragged stands of parkland bush. In yield per hectare, this thin, grey, wood soil is marginal, good for grazing or mixed farming. But how can one appraise the true value of a place?
“People were gradually pushed out,” says lifelong area-resident Brenda Kyshyk of her community, displaced by the Genesee expropriation. “Now, for dozens and dozens of square miles, there are no people living here at all.” To see the future of this land, skirting the village of Telfordville, I have only to look across the North Saskatchewan to Keith and Sandy Porter’s century-old ranch, just outside Duffield. Since it was homesteaded in 1903 by Keith’s great-grandfather, five generations of Porters have lived and worked its 1,619 hectares. Yet the family will soon relocate some of its purebred Fleckvieh Simmental cattle to a new, smaller ranch near Stony Plain, where the land isn’t as suitable for livestock. “We slowly built up the soil at our present location through good management,” says Keith. “Our alfalfa and barley crops are second to none in the province. We even fenced off the creeks so cattle didn’t pollute the watershed.”
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But by 2009, the creeks, barns and original log homestead will be bulldozed. Even the Porters’ large calving barn, built just 20 years ago, will soon be a heap of splintered wood. “In the 1980s, I never thought the land would be taken away from us. I thought some other kind of technology would come along,” says Keith. The family fought hard for five years to keep it, but finally let the land go when faced with the huge expense and gamble of having its fate decided by the three-person Surface Rights Board. As Sandy Porter says quietly, “We’ve lived here all of our lives, and it’s pretty devastating to be forced to move and start over at retirement age. The people working in the executive offices of TransAlta in Calgary don’t have any idea what they’re doing to people’s lives.” The community used to be closely knit, but with the steady expropriations that is long gone. The plume of smoke from the power plant hangs like a pall over everything.
When I arrive back at Strawberry Creek, the sky is the rich, luminous blue of twilight. I walk down to the creek, recalling how Nettie Wiebe sees urban sprawl and the devaluation of farmland as an ethical issue: “The land is a reflection of our whole attitude, and what it’s showing us these days is a complete lack of accountability. We have such powerful means to intervene in the world, to reshape it, yet we have no real sense of the long-term effects of any of our interventions. All the same, I remain eternally hopeful.” Standing by the frozen beaver pond and listening to the low growl from the coal draglines, I can only hope such faith will be rewarded.
