Alberta’s conservation community is calling for strict limits on off-road vehicles on public lands and a total ban on their use in parks and protected areas in the Eastern Slopes of the Canadian Rockies to look after water and wildlife.
The move, which is supported by dozens of scientists and environmental groups, comes a few months after the NDP government announced the expansion of an existing wildland provincial park and the addition of a new provincial park in the Castle.
It shut out logging, mining and future oil and gas surface development, but it still allows for off-highway vehicle use on designated trails.
“We’re looking back to some of the original intent of the Eastern Slopes policy,” said Stephen Legault, program director for Alberta and the Northwest Territory with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. “Alberta designated certain parts of the Eastern Slopes as being too important to wreck — they were zoned as prime protection and critical wildlife (habitat).
“Those places are too important for watershed conservation and for wildlife to destroy with off-highway vehicles. Full stop.”
They are asking the provincial government to immediately ban off-road vehicles from protected areas on the Eastern Slopes, including the new Castle parks; permanently close and decommission trails in westslope cutthroat trout habitat; and reduce existing road and motorized trails in the areas by May.
Minister of Environment and Parks Shannon Phillips was not immediately available for comment. Neither were any off-road vehicle groups, but they have said in the past that they want to work with the environmental community to ensure they are not damaging any sensitive areas.
Scientists adding their voice to the issue said it’s too important to be ignored any longer.
“It’s our source water,” said Kevin Van Tighem, a conservationist, biologist and author. “Over 90 per cent of prairie water comes from the Foothills in the mountains. If it doesn’t soak in, it runs off and, if you fill it with slices and cuts and erosion, it’s going to run off very fast.
“We end up with worse floods and less summer water — both of which are bad for the people of Alberta.”
Water from the Rockies provides water not only for Alberta, but also for parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In southern Alberta, it comprises 30 per cent of the water in the Oldman River basin and features rivers, lakes, wetlands and groundwater systems.
Lorne Fitch, an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary who’s retired as a fisheries biologist, said it’s a critical resource.
“What we’ve seen progressively over, arguably, two decades is a tremendous escalation in the amount of road density in watersheds that are critical to what we now recognize as threatened trout species,” he said, noting there’s a direct link between the number of roads and trails to the amount of sediment in the water.
Fitch said that causes all sorts of issues for both fish health and water quality — both of which he said are deteriorating.
“It’s the perfect storm of failure to deal with access early, the proliferation of access far beyond what the critical thresholds are for any number of species,” he said. “It’s not just aquatic species, but terrestrial ones (such as elk and grizzly bears) as well.
“And now we’re at the point where everyone thinks that those roads and trails are an absolute necessity to have for their recreational opportunity and now the fight is going to be on over whether or not we consider watershed values in terms of water quality and threatened species to be more important than a person’s recreational opportunity with an off-highway vehicle.”
Several other scientists and groups such as the Alberta Wilderness Association, Bragg Creek Environmental Coalition and Livingstone Landowners Group have also signed the call for action.
