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| View west to the peaks of Jasper National Park. All of this scene, as far as the mountains, could become an open-pit coal mine. |
I used to hike up through resin-scented forests south of Hinton to hunt bighorn sheep among the mountaintops.
I remember climbing out of predawn mist one day onto the open slopes of Prospect Mountain and seeing the world turn gold as the rising sun burned off the valley fog. Below lay a tapestry of green pine forest, golden shrub meadows where elk fed quietly, talus slopes, and bogs. A thin grey ribbon marked the road from Cadomin to the Cardinal River Divide.
As I had often before, I studied this wild Alberta landscape with the same aching pleasure I feel while watching the sleeping face of the wife I love. I felt rich beyond all hope.
Sitting by a streamside meadow to eat lunch, the intricacy of the vegetation struck me at close range. Wheatgrasses, pussytoes, louseworts and countless other native plants mingled in a dense, continuous mosaic of spruce forest, sedge meadow, alder thicket and aspen bluff.
Generations of weasels had hunted generations of mice amidst that living tapestry. Moose wandered from willow tangle to aspen bluff, wolves traveled the ridges, flocks of redpolls descended in enthusiastic chaos into the birches – sometimes the landscape seemed to teem with life. Other times it seemed lifeless, as still as the cold cliffs.
Picking my way along the sheep trails, I sometimes felt like an outsider. I wanted to be part of all this; I studied to belong, but in the evenings I went home. That worked against me. Still, I persevered.
One day I did get a sheep. Leaving the entrails for the ravens who watch over this country, I loaded the meat into my pack. Having been awake and working hard since before dawn, I decided to rest awhile. I fell asleep watching ravens circle above the ridge.
Later I woke, fought the pack onto my shoulders, stood up and there were grizzly tracks. I had slept, with a pack full of meat, beside his hours-old spoor. It was a reminder that in this sort of country, human beings are among the lesser creatures. Chastened, grateful for the reprieve, I headed home.
The road home cut through big strip mines where overfed bighorn sheep watched from the roadsides, complacent as cows and not much brighter. The coal companies really like those sheep feeding on the alfalfa they have planted on their slack heaps. See? Strip mining is green.
But there is no sense of history or place in those minescapes. The sheep are tame. There is no great bear. There is nothing to which a human being can ache to belong.
Now Cheviot Mines wants to strip coal from under the Mountain Park country, right to the edge of Jasper National Park. When they are finished, there will be a few hundred square kilometres more of alfalfa, rubble, bighorns, and little else. Investors will pocket their profits and move on.
That humans can still seriously contemplate violence on this scale is, I believe, deeply frightening. It implies a fundamental moral deadness: a vast dysfunction.
Some argue that Hinton needs the strip-mining jobs so that young families will not have to move to find work. Mine jobs pay well. Good people work there. What else are we going to do now that the frontier is gone?
Swan Hills got its toxic waste treatment plant and Pincher Creek its mud-encrusted Oldman River Dam because of those sorts of arguments. These are frightened arguments founded not on love of place or integrity of vision but on a collective inability to see beyond the near abyss. Just give me a few more good years until this mine runs out, the logic goes; someone will come up with something sustainable in the meantime.
And if they do not, what are we left with? Ravaged landscapes, no pride, no jobs.
Stripping the life from that Mountain Park country, I would argue, should be an act of desperation. Surely this is something a society that identifies itself with its land would consider only as a last resort: like burning the furniture to keep warm.
Lately I have wondered if this time I should just go stand in front of the bulldozers.
I will not, of course: we Albertans are a conservative bunch who tend to view that sort of thing as a radical act. Most of us, however, do not consider it radical for a transnational corporation to strip the life, history and meaning from an ancient healthy landscape, in order to export a dirty fuel to an overpopulated nation.
From: Coming West: A Natural History of Home by Kevin Van Tighem (1997)