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Michael is on a quest to get his environmental footprint as low as humanly possible. So he built his own off-grid Tiny House. But downsizing and minimizing weren’t enough. He had to take more drastic measures, altering his lifestyle in some extreme ways, all in the name of saving the planet. But when it comes to his goal, he still feels in over his head. He doesn’t know if all the downsizing, minimizing, reducing, reusing, recycling, and sacrificing make a difference. It’s time to bring in the experts.
Join Michael as he sits down with scientists, policymakers, industry leaders, and environmental experts to figure out how to effectively reduce his footprint in all aspects of life. From food and fast fashion to cars and caskets, he gets into what the worst culprits really are and how we can all make more informed choices when it comes to the impact we have on the planet.
If you have feedback or would like to be a guest on In Over My Head, please email: info@inovermyhead.com
(00:00):
Well, I'm in over my head, no one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I’m in over my head, what do I really need? Tryin’ to save the planet, oh, will someone please save me? Tryin’ to save the planet, oh, will someone please save me?
(00:27):
Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. While exploring the Oldman watershed, I want to learn about land management and fish. My first conversation was with two experts who are all about conservation.
(00:40):
Walk along the screen here.
(00:45):
Oh, nice. I forgot that. You could get right up some water over here. Spot.
(00:50):
Great. Yeah, right that
(00:51):
There's some fish right below There they are. Tiny baby fish.
(00:57):
Hi, I'm Am Philip Meisner. I'm a conservation specialist here at Alberta Wilderness Association.
(01:02):
Hi, I'm Devon Earl. I'm a conservation specialist at Alberta Wilderness Association. So Alberta Wilderness Association has been around for many decades, started in the sixties and we've been focused on creating a protected areas network to look after our lands, our waters, and our biodiversity for all Albertans and for future generations to enjoy. So we're about advocacy and we're about action and educating people about what's going on in their environment and how they can help steward it properly and also help our elected officials or our governments make appropriate decisions about land use and how to maintain these environments both for the inherent value of nature, but also for what nature does for us, and acknowledging that we rely upon these ecosystems just as much as the animals that we love so much as Albertans like our grizzly bears and our caribou and things like that.
(01:59):
Well, I guess we can get into kind of the main concern I have that I'm looking into with this season is water and climate change. So how does climate change affect our watersheds?
(02:09):
Climate change is going to have a diverse array of impacts on water and how we relate to water. There's issues of water security. A lot of the evidence shows that climate change is just going to make things less predictable. So bouncing between those sort of severe extremes. So droughts one year, maybe floods the next year or maybe multiple years of both, either way less stable or consistent than what we've been used to. Water issues or water security might not be as front of mind for us just because we've had access to so much of it over the past. And I think it's just going to make us question what water is used for, how much water we use as things go forward. There's concerns with melting glaciers and lack of water in streams. We as an organization at AWA when it comes to water, we talk a lot about sort of the need for aquatic ecosystems and riparian ecosystems. So along the riverbeds, they need a certain amount of water left in stream, so that's called either an instream or an environmental flow. And so those are important just to maintain sort of the health of the ecosystem.
(03:20):
So with the different species and the water flow. So I guess, yeah, if we are having more floods or more droughts, I assume that would affect those species, right?
(03:31):
Of course. Yeah. Either of those is going to have an impact. With floods, there's the issue of sort erosion and sedimentation, and so adding anything to the stream is going to have an impact on the things that live inside of it. And then on the other end of things, the drought and the water temperature issue, fish and other aquatic species and vertebrates, bugs, et cetera, even plants, they've all evolved over time to sort of tolerate a certain range. And so if there's not enough water and it gets too hot or if water evaporates and there's less water in the streams, that also concentrates sort of other chemicals like agricultural chemicals that are there and the fish just have to swim around in that environment and they don't really have any other place to go.
(04:18):
There is a big interaction also between climate change and between different land uses that we have within watersheds. So for example, forestry is a major activity that goes on in the eastern slopes and in the Old Man River basin as well. And a lot of the time when there's intensive logging, there's sort of a destabilization of soil and you can get a lot of runoff of sediment into streams, which also impacts fish. But when you have climate change on top of that, for example, as Philip was saying, we expect just less stable, less predictable conditions. So we might get a lot of rainfall or not enough. So when we have a situation after there has been logging and then we get really high rainfall, that could make the situation in the watershed a lot worse in terms of how much of that sediment is running off or eroding and ending up in waterways, which causes a problem for fish and fish habitat.
(05:21):
It also causes a problem for people who want to use that water for whatever purposes and creates a bigger problem for water treatment as well. So I wanted to talk about the Hidden Creek Valley within the Old Man River watershed. So Hidden Creek is a tributary of the Old Man River and in 2012 there was logging that occurred in Hidden Creek, which is important habitat for some endangered fish species including bull trout and West Slope cutthroat trout. And this logging happened despite concerns raised by environmental organizations like the AWA, but also recommendations from Alberta Fish and Wildlife itself that logging should be deferred in that area because of the fish habitat there. This logging proceeded anyway, and then in 2013 there was really heavy rainfall event and after that there was quite a bit of erosion and sedimentation that you could actually see not upstream of the logging but downstream of the logging only. And so it was just really a good example of this bad situation that we see where there's an interaction between climate change and between logging and seeing how those impacts compound to form problems for habitat in our eastern slopes.
(06:48):
Thinking back to the 2013 floods, which were harmful for a lot of communities in Southern Alberta, in the wake of that there's discussions and there's projects now underway for flood mitigation. So thinking of new reservoirs or reservoir expansions and in these situations it involves sort of damming or blocking watersheds in some capacity and that has impacts the fragmentation of fish habitat is a huge issue. And so it sort of is like a cascading problem where if we have sort of the logging issues that Devon has explained, which then makes the flooding even worse, and then we go and we try to control the environmental situation by damming things up or creating new reservoirs and expanding this under the idea that we can just control the systems rather than letting them be and maybe controlling how we interact with the environment, just it leads to a whole cascading mess.
(07:49):
So forestry, DAMing floods, was there anything else that on the concern side that you think is important to address within our watersheds around climate and our interaction with the watershed
(08:03):
Around our interaction with the watershed a little bit less related to climate, but there are a lot of concerns that we have with just cumulative effects of different activities that are happening on the landscape, whether it's oil and gas development, coal mining, off-highway vehicles or road development and just how all those activities interact to cause issues in a watershed and how those things are managed. So that's something that's really important in our eastern slopes because we've had sort of a hodgepodge of all these different things happening at once and not really a big effort to look at managing them all together in such a way that isn't harming our ecosystem. And so land use planning is a really important thing that we need to be utilizing and moving forward on in order to manage the cumulative impacts of all of these things. So that land use planning piece is just vitally important for cumulative effects and there's still quite a bit of land use planning that needs to occur throughout the province, but also in the Old Man River basin.
(09:19):
And I guess that's a good point with the land management side of things. Yeah, I was thinking about the other day about even conservation and balancing conservation efforts with just sustainable development, right? Yeah. Maybe let's talk a bit more about that land, the importance of land management in order to have a healthy watershed. I dunno if you want to speak to that Devon.
(09:40):
Yeah, sure. I actually, I just wanted to talk a little bit about your point about maybe balancing say the economy and the environment because I think it's viewed that way quite often, which isn't wrong necessarily, but I think there's another way of looking at it, which is that we also rely on a healthy environment just as much as any other organism does. I think we really as a species have tried to separate ourselves from nature by creating these cities that many of us live in and just going out to nature on our vacations maybe and experiencing it that way. But we are really also part of nature and we rely on things like this stable source of water, which is indicative of a healthy environment and we rely on that water being relatively clean so that we can treat it and then we can drink it or we can use it for whatever we need it for.
(10:34):
So I think really sustainability, protecting the environment and the economy, we really need to start looking at those altogether because the reality of the situation is if we completely degrade our environment, our economy is going to go down with it. So rather than viewing it as, oh, we have to sacrifice certain elements of the environment in order to prop up our economy, we really need to find solutions where we're looking at that altogether and integrating that together and creating a society where we're living in harmony with nature and we're creating systems that work with nature and that steward nature properly rather than looking at it as sort of the two butting heads.
(11:22):
Were there other concerns you had around the work you're doing and what's going on?
(11:29):
Yeah, I wanted to bring up coal mining as an issue in the eastern slopes and in the Old Man River basin as well. You may know that in 2020 when the Alberta government rescinded what was called the 1976 coal policy, it opened up a lot of lands that had previously been protected to new coal mining exploration and development. There was a lot of concern about these new proposed coal mines and where they were going to get the water from and where that would come from. As well as of course that coal mining has a huge impact on polluting waterways with selenium and other contaminants that are really harmful to fish and also are harmful to people. And in sort of an environmental win, Albertans came together and raised their voices out against coal mining on the eastern slopes and we saw that coal policy be reinstated.
(12:27):
And right now we have a sort of ban on new coal mining exploration and development in the eastern slopes, which is a positive step in the right direction. But we do still need that ban on coal mining in the eastern slopes to become permanent because right now it could be removed by the minister. We want to see that permanently legislated because coal mining just has such a big impact on water quantity and on water quality, and there's just too many pressures on the landscape. We don't want to be coal mining in our headwaters and just creating this huge impact that's often irreversible.
(13:08):
Absolutely. Yeah, no, definitely. Do you have anything to add to that, Philip?
(13:11):
The awareness piece is a huge part of piece of the puzzle for us. I mean, if there's enough public involvement, public outrage, public organization around a particular issue, the government feels under pressure. There may be just even backstepping from industry who knows. But that's a huge piece of why the AWA takes the advocacy stance, the educational component is a huge piece of it. With the Eastern slopes, it's sometimes a little easier because it's a huge area for recreation for people in the province. And then yeah, we sometimes struggle getting as much momentum elsewhere, but getting the public involved and interested and concerned is one of the strongest tools we have
(13:55):
In forest management. There's no really meaningful opportunity for public or for stakeholders to really get involved and affect management plans. So there are some requirements by the provincial government that industry forestry companies have to consult the public and they have to do indigenous consultation as well, but it's rarely if ever meaningful participation. So what happens a lot of the time is that the most important decisions about where to log or how much to log have already been, those decisions have already been made by the time there's any contact between the company and the public. And what can happen in a lot of cases is that environmental organizations can put a lot of effort into making really detailed submissions to forestry companies about their plans and about what they think about them and what they think should change and then barely get any response back from the company and not see any actual changes in the management plan at the end of the day.
(14:59):
So it's a really big problem with public participation and also with transparency because there's a lot of different levels of plans. So in force management, there's sort of these big management plans, and then there's a series of smaller plans and different reporting and stewardship reporting that goes on that is not necessarily available to the public and certainly not available to the public in a timely manner. So it's really hard for people to even know where companies are planning to log until they're about to log. That was an issue in the Hidden Creek example. But we see that in a lot of other examples throughout the eastern slopes where we'll become aware of sort of imminent logging plans in areas of critical habitat for endangered trout or caribou or things like that. And you kind of think, well, how did we not know about this and how did it get to this stage already when we can see how much habitat it's going to destroy for a species that is sort of on the brink of extrication?
(16:06):
So it's really shocking to see those proposals being put forward and often going forward despite environmental organizations raising red flags about them or scientists saying that that's not the place that we should be logging. So that's a really big issue when it comes to watersheds just because clear-cutting just has such a big impact on water quality and water quantity as we've talked about before, that piece about public participation and about transparency is something that really needs to be changed in forest management, and we really need to modernize the way that we do forest management to move away from looking at the forest just as timber and looking at them as full ecosystems that contribute to all these other values like water, which we really need to protect.
(16:56):
Were there any other kind of concerns you had, things you wanted to bring up around our watershed? Anything you're thinking of, Phillip?
(17:04):
Yeah, I think we've brought them up a few times, but I think I should just maybe focus a bit of attention on our fish In the Old man watershed, there's critical habitat for both West Slope cutthroat trout and Bull trout, which are both listed as threatened under Canada Species at Risk Act. So they're both within the Old man watershed as a whole, as well as there's Lake Sturgeon, which can be these massive fish that are super prehistoric looking, really impressive, and they're not listed under Canada's Species at Risk Act, but they have been assessed by COSIWC, which just assessed sort of population statuses in the country, but they've been assessed by COSIWIC as endangered. The watershed itself is home to these three at-risk species of fish. And so anything we do in the watershed or to the watershed has impacts on them. Under the Fisheries Act and the Species at Risk Act, which is managed by Fisheries and Oceans Canada or DFO, we shouldn't be destroying or at least doing projects or work that's going to harm the critical habitat for these.
(18:10):
At-risk species, their habitat has been fragmented by linear disturbance. Industrial development, we've sort of pushed them to the margins and they've got a few safe havens closer to the eastern slopes, usually now for both of the trout. But if we know that critical habitat for these fish species exist, we shouldn't be putting a project in to a given area that's going to harm known critical habitat. But a lot of the times we do because the DFO takes the route where they permit harm, but they allow offsetting elsewhere. So as long as the company sort of establishes new habitat somewhere else or improvements elsewhere, oftentimes they'll be permitted to go into an area that we know is critical habitat and potentially damage it. And so it just seems to go sort of against the idea of conservation under the Species at Risk Act to do so.
(19:03):
We're seeing this currently with an example in the watershed, there's a tributary called Rock Creek, which is in the tributary to the Crowsnest river, which then flows into the Old Man. So down in the crow's nest pass and it's critical habitat for West Slope cutthroat trout, and there's just a new sort of a pipeline going through there that's causing a lot of harm to the watershed, a lot of dust, a lot of sediment that gets in the water has impacts on fish, again, fragmenting their habitat. And so it's just another example of one of these specific impacts having contributing to this idea of cumulative effects. You have this pipeline, its impact on fish, but then you have maybe coal mining or off-road vehicles or irrigation further down it's the fish are a concern we have, but it's just one of the issues facing the watershed.
(19:58):
These fish that are at risk, these species, what happens if they died? What sort of effect would that have?
(20:04):
I can't say exactly what the impact of sort of removing west slope cutthroat trout out of the ecosystem is, but it would have cascading effects for sure. But the concern there, then it becomes like if there's no more trout there, there's no more critical habitat and there's less barriers on future development because then proponents don't even have to worry about the fish being there. That becomes my sort of immediate fear, like my visceral like, oh no, if they're not there, it's often used as an argument if a say a population of fish seems like it's unrecoverable, we try to push back. That's an economic determination. It's whether it's financially feasible or not to go in there and save them. But we see it used sometimes as an excuse like why bother if they're already in such a bad state? Why go in there? But these ecosystems and species deserve to exist just as much as we do.
(20:56):
Next, I will learn more about why the health of our fish matter to our watershed.
(21:01):
Hi, I'm Lorne Fitch. I'm a professional biologist and our retired provincial fish and wildlife biologist. I retired from my provincial job in 2006, and then I continued to work for an organization that I helped co-found called Cows and Fish. I spent about another 11 years working part-time for them, and now I'm working on a variety of advocacy issues.
(21:27):
What sort of concerns do you have around the health of our waters here in southern Alberta?
(21:32):
Well, I think starting as a fisheries biologist, I tend to look at the world through not necessarily the lens of water, but the lens of fish. I don't want to suggest this as a sort of a doctor do little thing, but fish tell us things. Their abundance, their distribution, their health or their absence provides us in many respects a report card on how we manage watersheds. And the reality is, for most native species, particularly those up and down the eastern slopes, which are our headwaters, we get a failing grade on our report card. When you look at the native species, and I include species like bull trout, west slope, cutthroat trout, Athabasca, rainbow trout, arctic grayling, and to green mountain white fish, many of those species are either threatened or endangered, and the ones that aren't threatened or endangered are probably close to the mark.
(22:42):
And so that's an indictment that we have not learned yet how to manage our watersheds. And the reason I say that fish are an indicator is that they're the gold seal of water quality. And so all of us in Alberta are downstream water drinkers, and so we should be concerned about the quality of the water and fish are telling us that quality and to a degree the quantity is declining. Climate change is of course one of the drivers behind the ability or the failure of fish to survive because they live in a very limited temperature tolerance range, the trout even more so than some of the cool water species like pike or walleye or perch. But with our land uses, we are actually exacerbating the effects of climate change. If you did a Google flight over the eastern slopes of Alberta, you would notice that the prevailing human footprint is logging.
(23:50):
And so this is a huge land use disturbance that creates a variety of issues. One being it changes the hydrology, in fact, how water runs off, how fast it runs off, whether there's any to run off during the year. And of course water quantity then becomes one of the drivers for fish. I learned very early that fish need water to live and need a certain amount of water to live, and the variability in that water has been changed with the pattern of land uses, particularly logging and logging is just one of those things, but it's also about every land use has a road we have to get in to do things, and those roads and trails tend to change hydrologic as well because they capture water. Instead of allowing water to flow freely over the landscape being absorbed and stored in shallow groundwater, it actually speeds up the way that runoff happens, exacerbating the amount of energy that water has and creating then flood conditions.
(25:04):
And so all of these land uses tend to impact how big the floods are, what the frequency of floods are, that has some major impacts on downstream bridges and flooded basements. It also has impacts on the fish because they live now in a much more turbulent environment than they evolved with over at least the last 12,000 years. And so the footprint of our land uses has got to the point where it exceeds what many people would say is the limit, the ecological limit that we should be imposing on a landscape if we want all the virtues and values of that landscape to flow down to us, no pun intended. I think that there has to be a recognition that watershed health, and this is not just the aquatic portion, this is the upland portion, watershed health is inextricably linked to the river, and we can't artificially separate the uplands from the aquatic zone, which is what we do with our land use decisions. We can say, well, you can log over there or you can mine over there, or you can random camp here or drive your OHV there, just don't cross the stream. Well, this is about gravity and everything flows downhill. And so that's why fish are such a good indicator because everything we do in our watersheds inevitably flows by or through a fish and by their abundance or loss, we can tell whether or not we've successfully managed that watershed.
(26:50):
Lastly, I talk with one longtime angler who's made some keen observations over the years.
(26:56):
Let's take a look at some of these numbers here. These are different days, numbers of fish caught, numbers of cutthroat trout. Look at some of these 43 fish in a couple hours. 71 fish, 44, 23 40. They're unbelievably good cutthroat trout numbers, right? And this happened right up until bingo.
(27:24):
My name's Jim Rennie. I'm 73 years old. I'm a geologist by training. I'm a citizen scientist recording all kinds of neat stuff in our natural environment, specifically on streams and rivers and fish populations.
(27:44):
Maybe just take me back to when you started fishing. When was that?
(27:49):
Since I was about seven or eight years old, and I grew up in Montreal and I used to fish some of the little streams in the ions for brook trout and I'd fish some of the lakes for panfish perch and sunfish. I started doing stuff on my own, kind of like Tom Sawyer. I would take off, I was nine years old at the time, and I would take off with a willow pole and a piece of wine and a hook and a little can with some worms in it and wander off across the fields and through the woods down to a little stream that had brook trout in it. And while away the hours exploring and being a little kid, I was really interested in everything that was going on, and I would crawl on my hands and knees up to the edge of a little pool, and I'd look down into the pool and I'd see maybe some larvae crawling on the bottom and some little d minnows and some immature brook trout chasing the dace minnows around.
(29:01):
And it was a world of interesting stuff to get involved in, and it was all a great adventure. I'd go wandering all over the place all by myself, even though I was only nine years old. My mom took me down once to the creek, so I would know my way back to the farmhouse. And that was it. I was on my own after that and lots of adventures and doing stuff like that. And moved to Calgary in 1972 and started fishing some of the initially pretty close to Calgary. And I found, wow, we have just a tremendous number of quality fisheries in southwestern Alberta. And I started traveling all over the place and hiking in the mountains and going into all these streams and fishing, and eventually found a creek that shall remain nameless for various reasons. That was extremely, extremely good fishing for cutthroat trout.
(30:15):
And it was a stream that originally been largely destroyed by coal mining in about 1910, so more than a hundred years ago. And what was really interesting, and although that little valley had been totally demolished here, was a hundred years of growth and everything was looking really pristine. I mean, you really had to look hard to find any evidence of the old railway tracks in there and evidence of the mining. And I thought, wow, this is really something. This is, is it evolution or is it God's work? It's really amazing that it could come back in a hundred years time. So I've been back there many times. It's like a religious experience to go on, stand in the water and feel a push of the water, the creek, listen to the birds and seeing the insects on the water and the trope coming up and eating the insects.
(31:24):
And it's just a lovely, lovely example of nature recovering from catastrophe. Somewhere during the middle 1970s, a friend of mine talked to me and he said, you know, Jim, he said all these things that you're doing hiking around and going fishing and all that stuff, that's not going to last. It's going to be gone someday. And he was right. That day has come. So starting back then, I thought, well, I'm going to put together notebooks of my experiences and document the days spent on different streams and some of the interesting stuff like what's the water temperature and what's the weather doing? What did I see? What was the water conditions like? How many fish did I catch? What was the best fly I was using and that sort of stuff. And I had long ago, got into fly fishing. I started fly fishing when I was 10 years old and found that to be the most enjoyable way to do things, and the easiest way to release fish unharmed, because you could fish with a fly with a barbless hook.
(32:46):
And when you go to release the fish, you don't even have to touch the fish, you just reach down, you grab the fly, turn it upside down, the fish slips off the hook and away he goes. And it's a great feeling on a small stream to catch a really oversized, cutthroat trout and release it and watch 'em swim back into the pool. And some of these streams that I've been fishing for years, I'll go back to the same place over and over again. And it's amazing. You catch the same fish in the same place time after time. There's one particular fish, you'll laugh. I called this fish Walter. He was a great big cutthroat throat and dumber than a bag of hammers. And he was so easy to catch, and I caught him five times in the same year, and I caught him twice the following year.
(33:43):
He was easy to identify because the top part of his tail had turned white from being frozen, being stuck under the ice. In the wintertime, he was very easy to identify. You could even see him swimming in the pool with this little white tip on his tail that was the same fish. It shows that cutthroat trout are really homebodies. They don't move around very much. They stay in more or less the same spot for their entire lifetimes. And so when things happen to a stream, say bad erosion or bad siltation, stuff like that, cutthroat trout don't really move around much. And so that if an area gets damaged, they don't come back. They just stay where they happen to be. And the little remnant populations are just remnant populations. They don't repopulate the streams. This is what I've been finding now, unfortunately, our cutthroat trout population has taken a real nose dive.
(34:53):
The documentation is there for anybody who wishes to see it. There's a couple of maps in the Alberta government West Slope Cutthroat Trout Recovery Plan, and it shows the historical range of cutthroat throat compared to the present-day range. And the present-day range is less than 5% of what the historical range was. So that's what has happened. And from what I've seen, there's some reasons why that has happened. Most of it has to do with poor land use and neglect increased, increased sedimentation in the streams, damage from cattle grazing, damage from logging, coal mining, thousands of people on ATVs, road building, all that stuff. And in the streams themselves, what I'm seeing over time is a big change in water conditions, quality of the water. And so what we see over time is sedimentation of pools, armouring of the bottom with this hard, hard setup of silt and in between all of the rocks. So scouring events don't happen anymore. Instead, the rivers start scouring away at their banks. And so streams get wider and wider and more shallow, and there's just no more places for fish to live. And the other thing that's been happening over the years is our climate change. The water's getting warmer and summertime, there just isn't any water anymore.
(36:54):
If I look back at my notes, very, very common for, let's take an example. Let's take the Castle River, what used to be just a beautiful river system, and it's been totally ruined. It used to be that the water would run fairly high in the main castle and the tributaries through most of the summer, through July, early part of August. And the river didn't drop in level until the middle of August, and it would get clear, and that would be the best time of the year for dry fly fishing. Well, now in the last, oh, since about 1998, there's been a big change and we don't get that prolonged flow of water in the summer months. Instead, what happens is what little snow melt we do get runs off really quickly. In less than a week in June, by the end of June, the water is low and clear.
(37:59):
And by about July 10th or so, there isn't even enough water left or float a canoe or a rubber raft down the Castle River. And that is not just the Castle River, it's happened to a lot of our rivers. There's just no water. And the Upper Old Man River above the Old Man Reservoir is essentially dry. There's no water right now. The water level and the Old man reservoir has dropped below the intake levels of the pipes that are feeding the towns of Cowley, Beaver Mines, and Castle Mountain Ski Hill. So there's no water for those communities. So I mean, this is serious stuff. And for me personally, it's really, really discouraging Going into beautiful trout streams and spending the day is, like I said, it's almost a religious experience and having that sort of torn away and it's gone, it's really tough. If I look back in my books, I've got, oh, there's like 10 different books there.
(39:24):
And typically each book would have two or maybe three years worth of notes in it while my last book has lasted nine years, because there just isn't that much opportunity anymore to go fishing. So I don't get out as much as I used to. And to be quite honest, I don't feel like going out and fishing a stream that has really low water and almost lethal temperatures being so warm and disturbing the fish and stressing them out under those conditions. And so I just haven't been going very often. So we're in the process of losing one of our really important trout species, cutthroat trout. We're there, people have been saying for years, well, we're headed for the cliff and we're going to lose them. And right now we've actually gone over the cliff.
(40:29):
Next time on the Old Man Watershed, I talk to business owners who rely on the old man for their livelihood.
(40:37):
So water is a very big topic in the brewing industry because in order to make one litre of beer from the seed in the ground, growing the plant to the finished product, we need about 14 litres of water to make one litre of beer. So that is significant.
(40:55):
In my Head's, the Old Man Watershed season was produced by Michael Bartz in partnership with Environment Lethbridge. Special thanks to all the guests who gave generously of their time and expertise.
(41:04):
I'm tryin' to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
(41:13):
This season was made possible with financial assistance from Land Stewardship Centre's Watershed Stewardship Grant, funded by Alberta Environment and Protected Areas. Opinions expressed in this season are those of In Over My Head.