Alberta is home to two of Canada’s imperilled caribou populations, the southern mountain and boreal woodland herds. Both are threatened with extinction.

Under the federal Species at Risk Act, the boreal woodland caribou recovery strategy requires provinces to develop range plans by 2017, outlining paths to recovery. Because caribou need large, intact areas, degraded habitat must be restored so industrial and natural disturbances affect no more than 35 per cent of each range.

The challenge to recover caribou is not Alberta’s alone; it is a national undertaking. Boreal caribou are threatened in every province except Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Federal assessments show high levels of oil, gas and forestry activity mean no boreal herd in Alberta is likely to survive without significant changes in habitat management. In 2011, the range of the Little Smoky herd was assessed as being 95 per cent disturbed by industrial activity, and oil, gas and forestry have since caused further damage.

In many ways, the Little Smoky herd symbolizes what is wrong with our approach to land management. While humans are one of about 10 to 30 million species, many of which require vast areas to survive, we set targets for protecting 12 per cent of our land base for wildlife while taking over the other 88 per cent. Politicians in Alberta have spoken of “balancing” economic and ecological values, but seeing less than five per cent of the Little Smoky range left undisturbed highlights the faulty scales.

Alberta recently released its draft range plan for the Little Smoky boreal and A la Peche southern mountain herds, allowing continued forestry and petroleum approvals in both ranges. It also proposes ongoing predator control — in the Little Smoky range, hunters killed 841 wolves between 2005 and 2012 — and a “rearing facility,” a 100-square-kilometre permanent enclosure to fence in female caribou and “export” yearlings. The public can comment on the plan until August 5.

To be fair, the draft plan, based on a mediator’s recommendations, includes progressive elements such as restoring old seismic lines, and the province has committed to significant protected areas for some northern caribou populations. And Alberta’s current government is paying the price for previous governments’ years of inaction to address caribou habitat needs.

READ MORE: Will Alberta's Last-Ditch Effort to Save the Caribou Be Enough?

But the plan’s troubling components could set a terrible national precedent.

It outlines a vision for a “working landscape,” where “caribou and careful development co-exist.” Yet no evidence exists that working forests work for caribou. Caribou don’t adapt to human presence like squirrels or raccoons. They’re intensely shy creatures that avoid humans and human-created disturbances.

Band-aid solutions like predator control and enclosures don’t pertain to Alberta alone; they represent a growing national trend of allowing industrial activities to continue, merely softening negative effects rather than ensuring adequate habitat is maintained for species’ survival. Mitigation might lessen the bite of impacts or stave off extinction, but it will not advance recovery. That can only occur by restoring healthy, functioning ecosystems.

Governments that employ predator control rarely, if ever, pursue sufficient habitat protection measures to justify its use. By allowing habitat disturbance to worsen over the next five years, Alberta will likely prolong its reliance on killing predators.

Both predator control and permanent enclosures impair functional ecosystems, of which predator-prey dynamics are a linchpin. Caribou are integrally shaped by interactions with their habitat and the predators they try to avoid. Experiments like caribou enclosures muddy the recovery landscape. Captive breeding initiatives are usually cast as good news but often detour from addressing primary problems.

The mediator recommended examining the potential for similar enclosure projects in other caribou ranges. This must not happen. Wildlife “zoos” must not become the new norm. We should be blunt about what permanent enclosures represent: our epic failure to manage landscapes so they can continue to support wildlife.

As the mediator recommends, governments must work not only with industry to change management practices but also with conservation organizations and Indigenous communities, many of which rely on caribou — or did before herds disappeared — for sustenance. Provincial governments must uphold their responsibility to recover caribou by ensuring healthy ecosystems are maintained and restored. Half measures that keep caribou alive through human interventions while further degrading their homes won’t suffice.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Science Projects Manager Rachel Plotkin.

Image: Alberta woodland caribou. Photo: R. Arssenault via SAGE

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Industrial activity has profoundly affected the Blueberry River First Nations in northern B.C. A recent Atlas of Cumulative Landscape Disturbance, by the First Nations, the David Suzuki Foundation and Ecotrust, found 73 per cent of the area inside its traditional territory is within 250 metres of an industrial disturbance and 85 per cent is within 500 metres.

In other words, in much of the territory, which once supported healthy moose and caribou populations, it’s difficult if not impossible to walk half a kilometre before hitting a road, seismic line or other industrial infrastructure. Local caribou populations are threatened with extinction mainly because of habitat disturbance caused by industrial activity and ensuing changes to predator-prey dynamics.

Scientific literature suggests that a natural functioning landscape with species including large predators requires a maximum density limit of 0.6 kilometres of linear disturbances — roads and seismic and transmission lines — per square kilometre. The report revealed Blueberry River has 2.88 kilometres of linear disturbance per square kilometre, totalling 110,300 kilometres — including 45,603 kilometres of seismic lines constructed over the past 10 years, nearly eight times the length of the Trans-Canada Highway from Vancouver to Halifax.

Foundation science projects manager Rachel Plotkin recently toured the area with Chief Marvin Yahey and lands manager Norma Pyle. They showed her clearcuts in caribou calving grounds, hunting camps dissected by pipelines and giant oil-processing plants where elders once picked blueberries.

“Development has extinguished our traditional way of life on wide areas of our land,” Yahey said, noting most of the damage has occurred over the past 30 years.

Plotkin said travelling across the landscape was surreal. “From far back, it looked like a forest ecosystem, though dotted with farmers’ fields,” she said. “But no matter which road we drove down, we saw signs of the extraordinarily high levels of industrial activity — a pumpjack peeking from amid the trees, a sign on the road warning of a high-pressure pipeline hidden below, a sour gas flare above the treeline, a forestry clearcut, a processing plant or a pipeline riser.”

As a last resort, Blueberry River First Nations brought a civil claim against the B.C. government in 2015, asserting that cumulative industrial impacts in their territory have displaced and prevented people from carrying on traditional activities assured to them by the Crown under Treaty 8.

The B.C. government responded to the report by saying it’s working on a cumulative effects framework. “We recognize the importance of assessing, monitoring and managing the cumulative effects of resource development,” B.C. Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation Minister John Rustad wrote in a statement to the Dawson Creek Mirror. “Several attempts have been made to get Blueberry River First Nations involved in Northeast cumulative effects (management) programs.”

This response is lacking on several levels. To start, it attempts to address an immediate ecological crisis by proposing that the community engage in ongoing, sometimes years-long processes. As Chief Yahey told the Mirror, “Despite raising these concerns directly with the premier and with provincial ministers, there has been no meaningful response to this critical threat. Instead, the province continues to approve major industrial undertakings in our territory, including major fracking operations and the Site C dam, willfully ignoring that each new approval brings our unique culture closer to extinction.”

For the ministry in charge of reconciliation to respond defensively rather than open doors to better co-operation with Blueberry River is troubling. Although the government says it recognizes the importance of managing cumulative effects, the report’s map of industrial activity reveals that if government has a sustainable management regime, it’s broken.

The people of Blueberry River recently shared with government their Land Stewardship Framework, which outlines a path to sustainable land management, protection and restoration. What they need from government now is immediate action to protect critical areas and to be included in decision-making. Process without interim measures can be a trap — a talk-and-frack situation.

No one should have to put up with such high levels of destructive industrial activity, especially when they aren’t given a say in decisions. When governments have committed to reconciliation with First Nations they need to change their decision-making regimes and recognize that First Nations have the right and responsibility to make decisions about how their traditional territories are managed, now and into the future.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Science Projects Manager Rachel Plotkin.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: Fracking site on Treaty 8 territory/Vancouver Observer

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When the Alberta government released its draft plan to save the province’s dwindling caribou populations from local extinction earlier this month, it was heralded as a major step forward — but big questions remain.

The biggest one: after years of failing to intervene in the caribou crisis, will the new plan be enough to bring them back from the brink of extinction?

“It was great news for northwest populations where big protected areas are needed and there’s still time there to ensure caribou recovery,” conservation specialist Carolyn Campbell from the Alberta Wilderness Association told DeSmog Canada.

But when it comes to the Little Smoky range, it’s still not enough, Campbell said.

“The problem is the underlying causes of predation are still allowed to worsen in the next five years by restarting logging and by implying energy infrastructure can still go ahead,” she said. “We can’t support the plan continuing to destroy habitat.”

Woodland caribou are a threatened species both provincially and federally. According to provincial estimates, caribou are disappearing at a rate of about eight per cent per year due to habitat loss from energy and forestry development, which in turn increases wolves’ reach into caribou habitat.

Under the federal Species At Risk Act, the province must preserve 65 per cent of critical caribou habitat by October 2017.

“We inherited a bit of a policy logjam on this,” Environment Minister Shannon Phillips told the Calgary Herald. “Certainly, there were a number of jobs at risk both in the energy and the forestry sector, and we have a looming federal deadline for us to file our range plans for this particular species at risk. It made for a number of tough choices.”

Biggest Caribou Announcement in Decades

“This is the biggest caribou conservation announcement — in a real concrete way based on habitat — that’s come out of Alberta arguably for the last 30 or 40 years,” Mark Hebblewhite, associate professor of ungulate habitat biology at the University of Montana, told DeSmog Canada.

In 2011, after a lawsuit launched by the Alberta Wilderness Association forced both the Alberta and Canadian governments to address the problem, Alberta proposed a province-wide wolf cull, to the dismay of the general public and the scientific community.

For Hebblewhite, the current proposed plan is exciting because for the first time it puts emphasis on habitat protection and reclamation especially, but not exclusively, in those areas least impacted by industrial development.

“This plan really recognizes the important role of habitat in recovering caribou and that you can’t kill wolves forever and continue to not protect habitat,” he said.

Plan Goes Soft on Oil and Gas Industry

In addition to the protection of 18,000 square kilometres of caribou habitat in the northern part of the province, the plan addresses Alberta’s most at-risk caribou populations: the Little Smoky and A la Peche herds.

For those herds, which are located in prime forestry and oil and gas resource areas, the province proposed strict restrictions on timber harvest and recommends oil and gas limit their activity in those zones.

The proposal, Hebblewhite admits, could have been harder on the oil and gas industry.

“It’s a little softer on oil and gas than I think ultimately may be required to recover habitat,” Hebblewhite said.

That arrangement may mean any benefits for caribou coming at the expense of forestry might be outdone by oil and gas drilling in those ranges, Hebblewhite said.

Since 2012, when the federal draft caribou recovery strategy was released, 667 new wells were drilled in core critical caribou habitat in the Little Smoky range alone. A total of 96 per cent of that caribou range is within 500 metres of human development, Hebblewhite said.

“It’s the most heavily destroyed caribou habitat in the country.”

Campbell agrees the recovery strategy trends in the right direction by encouraging the energy industry to limit its impact in caribou ranges and it also rolls back the “perverse requirement” for leaseholders to develop their resource within five years of purchase — whether or not it makes economic sense.

“But,” Campbell said, “we don’t have limits on land disturbance.”

Reclamation Strategy Gets Industry On Side

Hebblewhite emphasized an important aspect of the current strategy is that it doesn’t pit industry against caribou recovery aims. Reclamation plans are being used as an opportunity to put oil and gas workers back on the job.

“There’s a huge investment in the restoration of seismic lines that wolves and other predators zoom up and down on and renders all these caribou vulnerable to predation,” he said.

That kind of innovative and inclusive thinking has brought industry on board with the plan, he said.

“It’s another strength of this plan, that it’s not being sniped and groused on by forestry and oil and gas.”

The province engaged a mediator who consulted with Aboriginal, environmental and industry groups.

Continued Habitat Destruction Means ‘Caribou Zoos’

Campbell said although the general sentiment is that oil and gas activity has ground to a halt in Alberta, there is still plenty of activity in natural gas plays like Fox Creek within the Little Smoky caribou range.

“It’s booming with activity. There are many big companies operating in there like Shell, CNRL and Encana that know very well they’re operating in endangered caribou habitat.”

Campbell said without specific and strict land disturbance limits, there is no way to guarantee caribou will get the habitat protections they need.

“With no limits set we are concerned that when this issue falls out of the public eye, conversations between companies and the regulator will lead to more disturbance.”

That leads to a prolonged reliance on the wolf kill, Campbell said.

And it has also led to the introduction of “caribou zoos” to fence in caribou, which Campbell calls “a step backwards.”

“Caribou and species at risk generally are valuable because of what they say about the habitat that they’re in,” she said.

“They’re not just little bizarre ornaments on the landscape that we should be keeping alive by all sorts of methods that don’t respect the ecology they need to thrive.”

However, for Stan Boutin, the University of Calgary conservation biologist that introduced the idea of caribou pens, it is going to take every sort of strategy possible to save the caribou herds most at risk of disappearing.

“I was keen to see this, this incorporation of this caribou rearing facility — or a pen, or zoo or whatever you want to call it — into the recovery strategy,” Boutin told DeSmog Canada.

“People are so eager to get back to a natural system that they think anything that’s artificial is not right to do,” Boutin said. “Those herds, particularly Little Smoky and A la Peche are never going to go back to being natural for many, many, many years.”

Boutin added the scientific and conservation communities seem to be able to stomach some amount of predator control but balk at a fence designed to achieve the same end.

“Apart from predator control, it’s the only other option. Everything else will do nothing in the short term to save the Little Smoky and A la Peche herds.”

“Let’s not forget that this is a compromise strategy for everyone,” Boutin said. “Everyone had to pay the piper.”

He congratulated the Notley government for working so hard behind the scenes to bring it together.

Climate Change Threatens Caribou Habitat

He added that regardless of the efforts made to save these critically endangered herds, climate change may so drastically alter their range in southern Alberta that it becomes no longer suitable for the species.

“That’s another hidden twist in all of this,” he said. “There’s a very real possibility that the changing climate for the southern distribution of caribou in Alberta has created a situation where we have deer now being a full-fledged part of the system, which means higher numbers of wolves, which in turn means caribou can‘t coexist there.”

The Little Smoky herd is an example of a population that is on the “trailing edge of their climate envelope,” Boutin said.

That could mean caribou in that region need permanent human intervention to survive in that region, he said.

Boutin said these shifting climate envelopes are going to become a more common conservation phenomena in coming years.

“We as a society have not grappled with how we are going to deal with those populations that are in that really tough circumstance where the only way you keep them is by very strong artificial management all the way through.”

Photo by John E Marriott Photography

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Companies in Alberta’s oilsands are scrambling to find a way to reclaim tens of thousands of kilometres of seismic lines cut into the boreal forest before regulations that mandate the recovery of endangered caribou habitat are implemented in late 2017.

But while crews experiment with planting black spruce in piles of dirt during minus-25 degree weather in a bid to repair the forest, the Alberta government continues to lease massive segments of the region for further exploration and still hasn’t mandated reclamation of seismic lines.  

The controversy over caribou habitat and wolf culls in Alberta has stewed for years, but the issue of seismic lines has been largely overlooked. It’s these linear corridors cut through the forest (used to set off explosive charges to locate oil and gas deposits) that encourage predators like wolves to infiltrate what remains of fragmented caribou habitat.

“I don’t think a lot of people thought these seismic lines were a big deal,” said Scott Nielsen, an Alberta Biodiversity Conservation Chair and University of Alberta professor. “But … there are these cascading effects that you can’t anticipate.”

In a century of oil and gas development, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of these wolf freeways have been cut through Alberta’s forest. In one section of the Lower Athabasca region alone, south of Fort McMurray and extending out to Cold Lake, there are 53,000 kilometres of seismic lines.

“We still face the legacy of a tremendous amount of linear disturbances from the initial phases of exploration in the oilsands,” Nielsen said. “So it’s become a major conservation concern — or crisis — really.”

In 2012, the federal government released a recovery strategy for endangered caribou that demands that 65 per cent of their ranges be “undisturbed.” Right now, some Alberta caribou herds have as little as five per cent of their ranges left undisturbed.

“Trying to recover things after they’ve happened is a heck of a lot harder than preventing habitat disturbance in the first place,” Nielsen said.

Restoration Costs Estimated $10,000 Per Kilometre

Some industry players are already voluntarily putting their minds to finding a way to piece the fragmented forest back together — even though restoration costs roughly $10,000 per kilometre.

“With caribou being listed [as endangered] and these areas being defined as critical habitat — that’s why there’s a bit of a mad rush to deal with the legacy of disturbances that we have,” Nielsen said.

Companies Push Ahead with Restoration Despite Lack of Government Requirement

Devon Energy, an oilsands company involved in seismic line restoration since 2011, is trying to make it harder for wolves to move around in caribou ranges.

“Seismic lines, not just seismic lines but roads and trails out in northern Alberta, make it easier for wolves to travel and hunt more efficiently,” Amit Saxena, senior lands and biodiversity manger with Devon, told DeSmog Canada. “They are increasing the spatial overlap between wolves and caribou, more than pre-disturbance levels.”

Saxena said while most companies are doing what they can to ensure new seismic lines come with a lighter footprint — by reducing their width and straightness — there is still a lot of work to do to inhibit wolf movement on the thousands of kilometres of legacy lines crisscrossing the province.

“Sometimes we actually put up wooden or snow fences at 500 metre intervals along the line, and sometimes we’ll do log rollback and brush clearing, making big piles,” he said. “That not only impacts wolf movement on the line but also human movement on the line so that limits the amount of ATVs and quads that go down those lines that will ultimately negatively impact the recovery of the line.”

Devon is working toward the federal government’s target of 65 per cent undisturbed habitat in caribou ranges and prioritizes line recovery based on their habitat value for caribou. The company is also working to offset disturbance in new ranges with conservation in others.

But Saxena pointed out that since there is “no carte blanche requirement” from the province for seismic line restoration, companies are trying to find ways to balance the restoration with other priorities.

“We have to be realistic about it also,” Saxena said. “Industry priorities do play a role in there.”

Tree planting along seismic lines in the ALGAR historic restoration project area. Image from COSIA.

COSIA Pilot Project Tests Caribou Habitat Reclamation Techniques

Kris Geekie, director of community consultation and regulatory affairs for Nexen, said his company is exploring new seismic line restoration techniques in caribou habitat through the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) as part of the Algar Historic Restoration Project.

“We’re looking at an area nobody is currently active in. There are no oilsands leases within that area and what we’re testing is how can we restore [seismic lines] faster, what are the appropriate treatments, and what are the tactical plans specifically for managing forest fragmentation from seismic lines,” Geekie said.  

Geekie said Nexen, along with other oilsands companies like Statoil, Shell and ConocoPhillips, are working on 390 kilometres of seismic lines throughout the Algar region.

“The pilot is specifically designed to find out if we can improve the sustainability [of caribou] in that area. Basically, the less linear disturbance in the area, and the less access for wolves, is one way we can improve the sustainability of caribou herds.”

Caribou Recovery Plan Still to Come: Province

Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD) is currently formulating the province’s caribou recovery plan, according to public affairs officer Duncan MacDonnell — although it’s too early to tell what role seismic line restoration will play in the plan.

“We must have caribou recovery plans ready to go by the end of 2017,” MacDonnell said. “It’s our responsibility to meet those plans according to the [federal] criteria.”

None of the provinces have filed their caribou recovery plans yet, he said, adding the variety of caribou ranges in Alberta alone has contributed to the delays in the draft plan’s release.

“How far [ESRD goes] in terms of restoration schedules or plans, we have no idea yet,” MacDonnell said.

He added ESRD is carrying out a wolf cull in the Little Smoky and A La Peche caribou ranges as an interim measure while the province prepares its recovery plans. Those plans are expected to include some restriction on new development in caribou ranges. 

Nexen seismic line replanting. Photo from Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship via Youtube.

Alberta Government Continues to Sell Energy Leases in Caribou Range

Yet the Alberta government’s recent sale of energy leases in caribou range has onlookers concerned not enough is being done to protect caribou habitat despite government promises.

Carolyn Campbell from the Alberta Wilderness Association said the government is “sending mixed messages” when it comes to caribou recovery.

In early March, the province came under fire for putting 21,000 hectares of energy leases in caribou habitat up for auction. Campbell said the day after her organization issued a news release on the auction, the government quietly announced the sale would be delayed.

Since then, several new small lease sales in that range have been announced.

“Alberta is being highly inconsistent right now,” Campbell said.

“The problem with new leasing is it creates new rights holders — energy companies — who have a time limit to prove up those leases and under weak rules that enables them to put down new well-sites, new roads, new pipeline infrastructure.”

Campbell said new energy lease sales continue while the government is perpetually delaying the release of range-specific recovery plans. She said Alberta initially committed to releasing the first plan, for the Little Smoky and A La Peche herds, in 2014.

“Time is running out for these caribou. It would be pretty inappropriate to try to run the clock out to 2017,” she said.

She added the current rules for habitat disruption are “unacceptably weak for an endangered species” even when paired with recent efforts to restore disturbed land.

“Even though some companies are getting interested in reclamation, the net effect with all the new leases and activity is ongoing degradation,” Campbell said.

“New lease sales should be totally deferred until there are strong range plans in effect.”  

Image Credit: Alex MacLean

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.