geology climate land disaster denial
unreceived wisdom
language | of geography by stephanie white
R eading about the Akamina Parkway on page 60, the engineering project that controls creek beds when they fill with too much water, ‘fingers’ and ‘dykes’ come to mind. All this work was done to protect a road, and that road is meant to deliver tourists to views that can be photographed. Leeb points out the shift in Parks Canada’s focus on protection and conservation of vast tracts of land, to tourism. Perhaps the vast tracts of land aren’t working hard enough to make money for the government. Surely they can be mined, logged or dammed, but in the meantime we can mine the tourist dollar. And then it rains, there are floods, there are avalanches if rain comes between snowfalls, skiers and snowmobilers are lost, houses ripped off their foundations, and if it isn’t raining, the forest is burning. Decades of misguided forest fire mitigation means that the woods are full of tinder, or dead pine beetle stock (no longer controlled by very cold winters), so when they go, they go with vengeance. Mine, sayeth the lord, or in this case, the climate. Controlled slash burning was once a form of fire mitigation – yes, all that burning dumped tons of things into the atmosphere and the air was full of smoke, but now with forest fires the size of small provinces burning all over BC, northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, tons of CO 2 and particulate are still being dumped into the atmosphere, whole mountainsides are lost, not to clear-cutting, but to fire. The loss of habitat is gone in both scenarios. The parks were supposed to be immune to all of this; increasingly they are invaded by interference of the human kind, whether it be forest companies or campers who don’t put out their fires properly – easily done, the landscape is marketed as an image, able to be carelessly entered, virtually read without the knowledge of what that landscape actually consists of, how it was made, how it works. It is a marvellous thing, IMG_10452. 1 Michael Leeb wrote a poem ( On Site review 29: geology ) about the Frank Slide of 1903 where the side of a mountain sheared away and tumbled over a little town and the railway tracks. A natural disaster, just bad luck. Turtle Mountain, hanging over Frank, was called by indigenous people ‘the shaking mountain’. Would this not give a town builder pause? or the CPR engineers? Evidently not, what did the natives
know, allegedly living in their late nineteenth-century stone age? — quite a lot as it turns out. The eastern slopes of the Rockies are made up of the western edge of an inland sea, sedimentitious slates, sandstones, lifted up to long ridges by eastern-advancing plate tectonics. Like the snow conditions that produce avalanches – layers of snow, ice, snow, ice until it is so heavy that upper snow layers slide off buried ice layers, so too the mountains. So too Turtle Mountain, especially with a couple of decades of heavy coal trains rumbling by at its base: good-bye Frank. The engineers, geologists and civic entrepreneurs weren’t listening. The Akamina Parkway, the site of the flood mitigation engineering, is like the town of Frank. The creeks are shouting that there are problems ahead, but no one is listening; all of a sudden the fans of steel I-beams look pathetically frail. 2 The inability to listen is both ignorance and arrogance. The belief that living in a modern western society protects us from violence, from disaster, from death is a fallacy: our money is useless. The 2013 Calgary floods wiped out one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in a very wealthy city. The Elbow floods regularly, every five or so years, but this was an exceptional year, a weather system that slid up the eastern slopes from Colorado and parked itself over the headwaters of the Elbow River, somewhere in the Kananaskis Range 100km away. The Elbow joins the Bow which proceeds east to the South Saskatchewan River. East, 100km down the Bow from Calgary, is the Blackfoot Reserve of the Siksika Nation. It too flooded, it regularly floods, the housing is so flimsy that it is uninhabitable even between floods. The Blackfoot once were nomadic, ranging from the North Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone River, from the mid-Rockies to the Sand Hills. Treaty Seven, 1877, gave them a reserve on the Bow River. Where does the idea come from that to settle, to embed settlements in fixed geographies, to be permanent, is what we need? Is there not a logic in watching the waters rise and so moving to higher ground, rather than staying in an environmental and behavioural sink, vulnerable and trapped? Or in listening to the mountain above you groan and creak and deciding to move out of its way, rather than shouting at it to shut up?
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