IN PRAISETHE
OF PROTEST
PRAISE
Richard Collier’s arrest, Feb 1, 2012. For blocking logging, protesters were banned from all public land in Alberta, including hospitals.
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IAN URQUHART
PROTESTER
By SID MARTY
Saving the Castle forest from destruction
O
N JANUARY 24, 2012, THE STOP CASTLE
Logging protest had been underway for 13
days in temperatures down to −35 degrees
and a wind-chill reaching −45. Alberta Forest
Service (AFS) had served official notice that
we were trespassers on our own public lands
and ordered us gone. I felt the frost biting
through the orthopaedic brace on my worn-out
knee, and pulled my parka hood up over my tingling ears.
We paced up and down the frozen skin of Highway 774,
shivering, waving placards reading “They Get the Pines, We
Get the Fines” at passing cars bound for the Castle Mountain
resort. Most drivers honked in support. Polls showed 80 per
cent of the locals felt watershed protection trumps logging
and even recreation in the Castle.
The news media kept showing up, hoping we would get
arrested on camera, and Premier Alison Redford was deluged
with emails in support of us. Our delegates were meeting
with her that day in Lethbridge, pleading for a reprieve.
Surely the department of Sustainable Resource Development
would not approve clear-cutting this vital watershed, when
it was so obviously at odds with public sentiment. But SRD’s
Alberta Forest Service cared little for sentiment, ignoring
even Alberta Fish and Wildlife’s priorities in the Castle.
Ironically, the cutblock was part of Alberta’s Grizzly Bear
Core Conservation Area. An SRD biologist was conducting
an ongoing survey of bear dens in the cutblock, so how could
the department justify logging her study area? I’m told that
when challenged on this, a forest officer responded, “No
problem. The feller buncher operators are trained to identify
bear dens so as to avoid them.” I must be crazy, because this
notion of managing a threatened species via feller buncher
dude did not comfort me. No, AFS was determined that
Spray Lake Sawmills would log half of the 52 km2 licence in
these woods in the next three years, some 4,737 truckloads.
Whatever was not useable as lumber—40 per cent—would go
to garden mulch and fence posts.
Three greybeards and a lady of a certain age—four
“obstructors” as AFS styled us—huddled around a hot camp
stove in a battered outfitter tent, sipping cups of cowboy
coffee. As it happened, Gordon Petersen, Tim Grier, Diana
Calder and I were the only bodies on hand when Spray Lake
employees arrived to begin the logging operation that the
protest action had delayed. We tumbled out and trudged
through the snow to confront a bulldozer and a feller
buncher operator for a moment of protest Zen while a forest
officer, camera deployed, circled us demanding to know, “Are
you going to leave the area? You guys are trespassing here.”
We stared back at the operators, and I felt the hair rise on
my neck, thinking, “Shit, this is it, the crux, the moment
that had to happen.” A diesel engine roared as the operator
in the bubble of the Caterpillar feller buncher deployed a set
of giant metal jaws on a long hydraulic arm, opening and
shutting them with a noise like a gigantic sprung bear trap.
I thought, “This here’s Alberta, where men are men and trees
are nervous.” We eyed him and his machine with trepidation.
He seemed sane and calm; that was reassuring (we probably
looked crazy as hell to him). His iron steed would be a serious
contender in a boxing match. Nearby, the bulldozer also
WE MARCHED FORWARD. THE FOREST
OFFICER TRUNCHED ALONG IN OUR WAKE
LIKE AN IRRITATED BEAR. THEN CAME
THE INEVITABLE ARRESTS.
rumbled defiance, predicting doom to trees and tree huggers.
Such machines cost a fortune, and at one point the operator
worried out loud they might be vandalized. “Don’t worry,”
Petersen assured him, “We’ll keep an eye on them for you.”
It was clear to us that day that if the logging began, all
appeals would be moot. We guys hesitated, but Calder, a
local businesswoman, made the call. She shouldered her sign,
turned and waded down through the deep snow to stand right
in front of the startled operator in his plexiglas cockpit. Tim
and I exchanged looks: Diana had just made up our minds for
us. So we marched forward to join her, watched by Petersen.
As our media guy, he could not afford to be arrested. The
forest officer trunched along in our wake like an irritated bear.
Spray Lake, not wishing to martyr us, shut down the deafening
machines and by noon the officers and the operators had left
the area. But like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator,
their looks said, “We’ll be back.”
Then came the inevitable arrests. On February 1, Inspector
McGeough and Corporal Gopp came out from Lethbridge
to enforce a court order barring us from the lease effective
at 8 a.m. They’d brought a peace offering of Tim Hortons
coffee and muffins for everyone, which they spread out on
the hood of their squad car. Things got even more Canadian
when McGeough complimented the protesters on their good
behaviour. Jim Palmer, a burly local artist clad in a fur hat
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FE AT U R E I N P R AI S E O F P R OTE ST
with ear flaps and quilted Carhartt coveralls straight out of a
Fargo episode, asked politely: “For those of us who decide to be
arrested, where do we line up?” In the end, Mike Judd, Reynold
Reimer, Jim Palmer and the late Richard Collier refused to
leave. The arrest itself, as Petersen remembers it, was like the
Monty Python movie Life of Brian. “’oo’s for the crucifixion?
Are you for the crucifixion? Right, please line up on the left.”
Judd and his crew went to Pincher Creek jail that day, were
locked up awhile for identification, and then were released.
No good deed goes unpunished, and as our reward for
trying to stop the destruction of the Castle Special Place, the
oxymoronic Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development
issued our group—Judd, Petersen, Calder, Grier, Marty and
persons unknown, including John Doe and his wife Jane
Doe—with an order to stay off all public land in this province
indefinitely. Public land, our lawyer later advised, includes
everything from provincial parks to government buildings.
The case went to court and eventually the government allowed
its absurd order to lapse, much to my relief. I was due for major
surgery, and hospitals are also public land in Alberta.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ISN’T COMMON IN
ALBERTA; WE’RE A CONFORMIST SOCIETY,
EASILY EMBARRASSED BY PROTESTERS
“MAKING A SCENE.”
O
NCE PART OF WATERTON LAKES
National Park, the Castle–Carbondale area
of the Oldman River watershed is the most
biologically and botanically diverse area
in Alberta. But the gradual ruining of this
ecological wonder does not trouble the forest
service, whose sole mandate as manager here
is to generate wood fibre and fight forest fires
that threaten that resource. Thanks to Alberta’s antediluvian
doctrine of “multiple use,” in which everyone can basically be
everywhere doing everything all the time, the area has been
multi-abused by seismic exploration, clear-cut logging, gas
well drilling and motorized recreation. Basically, industry
(including logging) slices and dices the land base with roads
and access trails on weekdays, then quads and dirt bikes
come in on the weekend to finish off the wounded.
This has produced fragmentation of habitat needed by
threatened species such as grizzly bears as well as endangered
populations of trout. The motorized set use the 1,283 km of
trails to penetrate nooks and crannies of the area, displacing
wildlife and hikers from their path. Runoff from logging
roads and quad trails produces sediment which destroys
endangered trout spawning areas downstream. The Hon. Ty
Lund, a former minister of the environment and AFS boss,
nicely summed up Alberta’s Earth Last attitude years ago,
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describing protected land as “sterilized.”
Conservationists, led primarily by the Castle-Crown
Wilderness Coalition, have volunteered huge amounts of time
and effort for 40-plus years to create a park in the Castle. Park
status would protect not only wildlife but the watershed that
supplies 30 per cent of the raw water needed downstream in
Lethbridge and far beyond. Several times the goal of protection
danced close, then slipped out of our grasp.
In 1993 the Natural Resources Conservation Board
recommended park-like protection for the area. An advisory
group was appointed; three members, favouring industry
and motorized recreation, met with minister Lund and the
recommendation was rescinded. Protecting mountains
to protect our water was just too avant-garde for our PC
politicians. I wonder if they had even read Alberta’s Policy for
Resource Management of the Eastern Slopes (1984), which
declares “…the highest priority in the overall management
of the Eastern Slopes is placed on watershed management.”
In 1998 the Castle was listed under Alberta’s Special
Places program. The appointed advisory committee favoured
forestry and opposed park status. Castle was designated a
FLUZ (Forest Land Use Zone), to manage motorized access.
Lack of law enforcement allowed quadders and dirt bikers to
create hundreds of additional illegal trails and entry points.
In 2005–06 Spray Lake Sawmills obtained logging rights
to the Castle forests, now part of the C5 Forest Management
Plan. A C5 citizen advisory committee pointed out that the
plan needed more rigorous environmental and cumulative
effects studies. Watershed management was supposed to
be the priority, yet our rivers continued to threaten us with
spring floods and showed decreasing summer flows year
after year. The plan did not adequately address water quality
issues or economic values other than wood fibre. Nonetheless
the plan was approved with few changes.
In 2007, during the Castle Special Place Citizens’ Initiative,
citizens volunteered countless hours over 18 months on a
proposal to protect 99 per cent of the Castle as a Wildland
Park. The result? No change of course from the Ministry of
Sustainable Resource Development.
In 2012 word spread that Spray Lake would not only log the
area, but do so near two beloved places, Beaver Mines Lake
and Castle Falls. It seemed like a stick in the eye from AFS,
a message saying, “We don’t care what you think, and get the
hell out of our way.”
On January 11 some of my neighbours set up a protest
camp at the start point of the designated cutblock. SRD
ordered them to remove it. This stirred up more defiance,
and on the 22nd, 150 defenders of the Castle rallied and
made plans for a protest action at the site.
Acts of civil disobedience are not common in Alberta; we’ve
been a conformist, deferential society for the most part, easily
embarrassed by protesters “making a scene.” Also, post-Wiebo
Ludwig, activists are wary of a government inclined to slap
the libel of “eco-terrorist” on any citizen that dares put “earth
first.” For a naturalist, this business-as-screw-you-all attitude
incurs not just feelings of impotence and anger, but a great
“Solastalgia” is caused by environmental change and a sense of powerlessness. Civil disobedience offers relief from the condition.
SID MARTY
sadness. The forces of dullness and blight have had their way
with the sublime Castle backcountry, precluding anyone with
eardrums and a love of wilderness from going for a walk in
our publicly owned commons.
We even have a name for this condition. It’s called
“solastalgia,” a term coined by the Australian philosopher
Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It’s a form of psychic or existential
distress caused by changes in one’s local environment that
are “exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of
control over the unfolding change process.” I’ve found that
a dose of civil disobedience offers relief from this affliction.
BUT OUR PROTEST ENDED IN ARRESTS. We had lost the
battle, or so we thought.
That summer, SRD’s favoured clients would go on churning
up old logging roads, gas well access roads and seismic lines
with quads and dirt bikes, filling the air with gasoline fumes
and engine noise. They drove the conservation officers in
BC nuts with their illegal forays over Middle Kootenay Pass,
which they are banned from using, into the Flathead Valley.
A local group, the Crowsnest Quad Squad, tries hard to set
responsible standards for use and acts as a good steward,
packing out garbage left by others and maintaining bridges
and trails. But their efforts are undermined by those whose
attitude seems to be “Let’s go down to the Castle and trash
it.” Random camping is another privilege sometimes abused,
with folks parking giant RVs on public land for months at
a time, free of charge. Some have even built themselves
insulated add-ons, woodsheds, an outhouse—even a yurt
(near the Castle Mountain ski resort).
In 2012, however, the government startled us by suspending
logging pending completion of the South Saskatchewan Land
Use Framework document. In 2014, under this framework, the
bare rock above treeline was to become a provincial wildland
park—great for rock climbers but of no use to bears and fish.
Then came the thunderbolt moment in 2015, when it
seemed our dream had come true. The new NDP government
announced that the whole area, some 1,040 km2, was to be
protected in two parts as a provincial park and provincial
wildland park. The clear-cutters were out; no new industry
would be allowed in. Existing industry and cattle grazers
would continue as before.
Our chorus of praise soon faded when it was announced
that motorized recreation would be allowed to continue in the
area—a dangerous precedent, since quadding isn’t allowed in
our other provincial parks and most wildland parks.
IN 2015 A PRAXIS SURVEY SHOWED THAT, given a
clear choice, 86 per cent of Albertans prefer non-motorized
recreation in wilderness areas. For years, due to official
mismanagement, the motorized minority has been allowed
to set the agenda for recreation in our forest reserves. Why
on earth in this era of climate change, diminishing water
resources, devastated and disappeared species and soaring
healthcare costs should this invasive form of recreation
overrule the will of the majority on our public lands?
Ultimately, the fight for the Castle watershed has scored
only a partial victory for conservation. It is clear that if the
people of this province want wilderness for the soul and
responsible management of our watersheds, they may have
to turn out at protest actions not by the dozens but by the
thousands. In Alberta we have only to gaze westward to see
our mountains rising up to greet us. They have always called
out to the best in us; now they challenge us to match their
grandeur with some newer and grander ideas. #
Sid Marty writes on natural history and western life and culture.
He has published five books of non-fiction and three of poetry.
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