Oh, Canada! Does the great white north deserve its green reputation?

E: The Environmental Magazine, Jan-Feb, 2004 by John Holt

The widely held notion that Canada is taking excellent care of its wild, pristine lands far better than the gluttonous citizens in the United States is nothing more than a misperception approaching myth. Americans, or Yanks as they are often called up north, are frequently verbally assailed by Canadians with the misplaced and perhaps naive notion that all U.S. citizens are swine when it comes to caring for and preserving quality country. Canadians, in contrast, are valiant, conscientious souls who have no blood on their hands. This stance is at best spurious and possibly created to hide the fact that the western provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon are being plundered at an astonishing rate.

While having a couple of drinks in a bar called The Pit in Dawson City, Yukon last summer a Canadian came up to me and asked where I was from. When I told him he said, "You damn Yanks don't give a damn about your own land. You log it and stripmine it all to hell. Then you come up here to enjoy our country" Over the years I've heard many comments along those lines.

True, there are individuals in Canada who have devoted their lives to preserving the land and there are, as most of us know all too well, greedy bastards tearing apart the last remaining shreds of unspoiled country in the U.S. But fair is fair, and the bottom line is that Canadians should take stock of their own environmental situation before gleefully casting aspersions America's way.

Forty years of being an inveterate road bum, traveling back roads on a skinny budget, fishing malarial bogs, inadvertently canoeing class V whitewater, hiking non-existent trails bound for nowhere and unavoidably staying on top of environmental issues in Canada has provided an ongoing opportunity to see disturbing change in a land of incredible splendor and abundance--one peopled with some truly remarkable, generous and creative individuals. In the last five years these destructive shifts in direction have been seismic, both metaphorically and literally.

Land Under Siege

The notion that Canada is the great white sustainable north is not wholly without merit. On the Environmental Sustainability Index, developed by Columbia and Yale Universities, Canada is ranked fourth and the U.S. 45th. Canada allows industrial hemp production, while the U.S. prohibits it, and Canada is a signatory to the U.S.-shunned Kyoto Treaty on global warming.

But when it comes to allowing extractive industries to run rampant, Canada may be king. From Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia to Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta to the vast Tintina Trench region in the southern Yukon and over east to Yellowknife on Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, the landscape is under siege. The extraction industries are running the show, tearing, blasting, sucking and cutting every diamond, gold nugget, drop of oil, chunk of coal and stick of timber they can access. If it's of value, these industries intend to have it. What's going down in western Canada puts the devastation being visited on states like Montana, Wyoming and West Virginia look mild by comparison. What are obviously horrendous clearcuts or devastating open-pit coalmines in the U.S. West are everyday situations in Canada, too. Both countries are mining their natural resources at an alarming rate.

Canadian provincial campgrounds are filled to the brim with late-model pickups tricked out with all the options and pulling expensive fifth wheelers and pricey speedboats, ATVs and jet skis. The Cypress Hills section along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, the setting for Wallace Stegner's book Wolf Willow, are now so overrun as to resemble a scene from National Lampoon's Vacation. Housing developments in cities such as Calgary and Edmonton stretch for miles with thousands of quarter-million-dollar homes.

All of this comes not only from the jobs provided by these corporations but also from royalties paid by the industry based on the amount of a given mineral extracted from a province. In Alberta, this figure exceeds $6 billion annually just for coal. The money is flowing in direct proportion to the abundance of the oil coming from countless wells hammered into the Canadian countryside. The old phrase "a chicken in every pot" has been updated in the northland to "an oil pumpjack in every yard."

Killing a Good Town

A good example--and there are many--is Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. This used to be a rather sedate town of a few thousand souls who enjoyed rife on the bluffs above the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River. The residents could take part in all of the outdoor activities one would expect in an area that rests in the foothills along the east slope of the Canadian Rockies and is surrounded by dense, mature pine forest with countless rivers and streams pouring out onto the prairie. Lakes of the purest water abound, as do grizzlies, moose, eagles, deer, wolves, various species of trout, grayling and mountain lions. For years, timber generated decent incomes for many, as did motels, restaurants and service stations that supplied occasional tourists with basic needs. Most everyone knew everybody else and crime rates were low.