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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 of My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. While exploring the Old Man Watershed, I want to discover the history of water development in this area. My first conversation had been learning about the creation story of the Old Man River and why our watersheds matter to the Blackfoot people.
(00:51):
My name is Chief Bird from the Bird Spirit, the old man river began of time, started from a puddle, then it started going into a trench and a deep hole in the ground, and it slowly filled up. And from there, it kept filling up, and it slowly formed into a little stream from the little stream, more water. And the creator Napi, the story of Napi. So more water and fluids or liquids were poured in and collected, and it slowly overflowed from this deep hole in the ground. And then with the snow and ice, it slowly gathered, collected, and started flowing east. It did not flow west because of the direction of the sun coming up from the east. And so in our language, we would say flowing towards the east and slowly got bigger and wider and deeper. Then the fish came through and started using that as their home.
(02:16):
Then the four-leggeds came after that, and then all the other birds and animals that use water, and that's just about every animal. And then the water life, the otter and the beaver started using the water. And so this all kind of came through an orderly fashion, but it started from a puddle of water that slowly went into a trench, and then it overflowed. And thus the Oldman river started and was created by Napi, and that's why we call it the Old Man. That water flow. We hold the waters, the rivers, in this case, the old man of ceremony waters connected to ceremony. We have the Beaver bundle, the very first sacred bundle to the Blackwood people. And that started from water. The actual origin of Beaver bundle was a different water stream, but at the same time, the beavers that were in the old men also represented that bundle.
(03:31):
And so more bundles from the Beaver Bundle ceremony started from that. And then we have the sacred otter. And so all these animals, the water beings, and incidentally, the Beaver Bundle we call it, and those are very old ceremony. Also, the songs originated from the water and the beaver. Those were not manmade songs put together. They were all spiritual in the beginning of time when the Beaver came out of the water transformed into a man, and then a man told the people, this is what you'll do. So we've been doing the Beaver Bundle opening ceremonies within the Blackfoot territory. Since then, you take the Waterbird, the chief spirit of the water, birds is the loon. And so the loon also plays an important role. So you could see how the water connects the water animals, the waterbirds, and then the four-leggeds, the bison, the deer, the moose, all those animals that need the water to survive with no water. None of these animal beings, water beings would have survived. So the essence of the water was important to the animals. And the water beings then transformed into our ceremonies, which we still practice today. And from those ceremonies, many of the Blackwood language words were born and arrived from that. Even the names of the animals arrived, and that is part of our language system now. And so you could see the abundance of connections interrelated to the Blackfoot world and culture. It's not just water, it's more than just water.
(05:45):
Next, I would learn about settler development and one controversial project that people gave a damn about.
(05:56):
So as I understand this little thing here used to be basically it was a dock designed for people who are floating down the river. They could take this diversion canal and then use this as a dock to get out. So it's like a convenient exit point, but now it's no longer, it's just been essentially left to crumble. I'm Tyler Stewart, a curator for the Gault Museum and Archives. If there's three pillars of the Southern Alberta economy or the economic development of the area, which started in the late 18 hundreds, it would definitely be mining the railroad and irrigation. And I feel like water is something we often take for granted and just expect it to be there. But I feel like a lot of people don't understand how much the watersheds have been kind of manipulated, changed, rerouted, managed, I guess is the way that people in government like to say it, the management of the watershed.
(07:05):
But really it's that people, particularly settler culture, has really manipulated or changed the way our watershed has flown, the way it has not flown because of DAMing and reservoirs, those types of things because of irrigation canals. So definitely a lot has changed in it's been about 150 years since that kind of management of the watershed has really taken place. I think another interesting thing about how all this started. So the history of irrigation in southern Alberta is connected to settler colonialism and particularly the Mormon church. So Joseph Card, who is the namesake of Cardston, the town of Cardston, an hour or so south of Lethbridge here, the Mormon church had a deal with the Galt. So Alexander Galt and Elliot Galt, his son, who known as some of the founders of Lethbridge, but we're exploiting the coal resources of the area and using their positions in government to get access, early access to the economic kind of prosperity of the area.
(08:19):
They had a deal with the Mormon church essentially to build a lot of the irrigation canals that started coming up in the very late 18 hundreds and more so in the early 19 hundreds. So I think that story of settling Southern Alberta is really a lot about the management of the resources and in particular the watershed management, because as we know, it's a very dry place. We're in a semi-arid desert, and so the European settlers moving from out east or from places in Europe where they didn't really have so much that type of climate that we do have here in southern Alberta. The first expeditions out west, I think it was paler, one of the first explorers, basically said Southern Alberta is not good for, I mean, he wouldn't have called it Southern Alberta at the time, but it was part of the Northwest Territories.
(09:09):
But it was like, that area is not good for settlement or for agriculture. We should go around it, keep going to B.C., keep going west, kind of thing. But of course, that was part of the settler colonial project to settle as much as the land as possible. And so yeah, the Mormon church in particular was definitely involved in bringing lots of settlers here to build projects like the irrigation canals, which in exchange for that work, they were paid half in cash and half in land. So through the development of irrigation canals in southern Alberta, that was also a settler colonial project to occupy and settle the land. So they're all kind of intertwined things in a lot of ways.
(09:52):
Were there any sort of challenges as they were developing this area for irrigation? For
(09:58):
Sure, challenges, just in that it's easy to think of how a construction project happens today with big machinery versus in 1904 or some of the earlier canals that were built in the late 1880s, 1890s, which were kind of hand-dug ditches and took a very long time to build. So that was the solution was not having a lot of that big machinery. You just get a lot of people to dig and work for a long time. So I'd say that's probably one of the main kind of challenges was just construction doesn't unfold in a year. It takes multiple years to build some of these irrigation canals. And a lot of them did take a decade to reach their completion. And it's not like they all were built at once. What we see as the irrigation districts in and around Lethbridge, so there's multiple different irrigation districts.
(10:58):
Some of them weren't finished or built until later on. It wasn't until the forties when the St. Mary's River, the St Mary's Reservoir kind of was built. And so full irrigation canal systems didn't reach places like Medicine Hat until later into the forties. So as different kind of phases of those projects happened, they reached different areas. And also there was other economic factors happening too. A lot of the, so the first period of irrigation development expansion was the small scale stuff, which would've been the late 18 hundreds, like individuals building irrigation canals for their own use and for community use. So Cardston was one of the first communities to build their own irrigation kind of system. And then the very late 18 hundreds into around 1915, basically up until World War, it was the bigger projects that were financed by groups like the Galts, like the Alberta Coal and Navigation Company, these types of conglomerates that were starting to form to not just do irrigation, but they were also, like I said before, connected to mining, connected to railways.
(12:15):
So those companies had each of those three different things happening, usually simultaneously to help exploit the natural resources, but also then ship them off to markets, those kind of things. So kind of complex connected systems there. But then you had something like World War I happening where it's like, well, basically irrigation construction and all those projects stopped for a while, and then after the war, people needed jobs again. There was a lot of depression happening in the twenties and thirties. So there was make-work projects, build other phases of things. And then again, in World War ii, irrigation expansion kind of came to a halt almost. And then the big scale projects again kind started happening in the late forties and fifties where you start seeing those big dams like St. Mary's Reservoir, the Gardener Dam, and Saskatchewan and all of those kinds of big projects.
(13:09):
Yeah. Was there anything else interesting about the history in that 18 hundreds to World War ii, to the sixties? Anything else you want to maybe touch on around that?
(13:18):
Something we take for granted today, and living in Lethbridge is not a constant discussion, but a frequent discussion is like, we need a third bridge here in Lethbridge. That kind of debate and thinking about when this area was settled and when people were moving around in the mid to late 18 hundreds, bridges weren't just everywhere to cross rivers. It was either you found a shallow Ford crossing or you move stuff across the river using either horses or boats or rafts or something like that. So when folks like Nicholas Sharon first showed up in the area and was starting small-scale mining, Nicholas Sharon was also one of the first people who ran a ferry to cross what we call now the Old Man River. So originally close to Fort Whoop Up, he was running a ferry that was just two flat bottom boats to get people back and forth across the river, and then later moved his operations just west of the Galt Museum across the river.
(14:21):
So that's where Nicholas Sharon's mind was established. I think it was around 1882, but he was also running a ferry there. So he was kind of like the main ferryman getting people across the Old Man River if they were going west, heading, heading further west from what we call Lethbridge now, what was known as Coal Banks then. And so that slow progress of taking it for granted these days where it's like, I want to go to the west side while you hop in your car or your bike or whatever crossed the river on a bridge. There's two bridges, whereas in the late 18 hundreds, it was a slow travel getting across either through a ferry. And then when bridges started to be constructed in the very early 19 hundreds, which were often washed away when there was a flood, here's a great new bridge. It's so much easier to get across the river. And then in the next springs of flood season, oh, well, there goes the bridge and it takes two years to build a new one. And what we think of a bridge today compared to what a bridge in reality was in 1902, very much a different structure.
(15:26):
Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe they had more of a connection to the river, possibly. It was much more present and intimate. I feel like when you're driving across the bridge, you see the river, but you don't really get close to it. Right. Do you feel like there maybe would've been a difference then they were maybe closer to the river more, had more interaction with it?
(15:41):
Definitely. Well, when this community of Coal Banks was first established, it wasn't like it was today where the community exists up above the river valley. The community was in the river Valley. So in the late 18 hundreds, lots of houses were built down there, and there was Blackfoot, folks were camping down there still. And even there was housing in the Lethbridge River Valley into the 1960s. The 1960s was when the last of the structures kind of finally left. And again, this was because of frequent, not frequent, but occasional flooding where homes would get destroyed or washed away. So I feel like, yeah, in the early 19 hundreds, the community of coal banks, which in the early 19 hundreds it was renamed to Lethbridge, that connection to the River Valley would've been more immediate, like proximate speaking, but also a better appreciation for its as a life source for the community, a literal life source for the community. Whereas I feel like, like you said, a lot of folks today living in Lethbridge, you're driving from the south side to the west side, you're going over the bridge and you're seeing the river, but you're not kind of as immersed in it. It's not as present or immediately tangible in a certain way that it would've been when this community was first founded living down in that river valley and experiencing the river in a more immediate way.
(17:16):
Yeah. I guess we could talk a little bit more about the dams. Yeah. Maybe tell me about some of the history of the development of that. So you said it was about in the sixties that was starting
(17:23):
Kind of like post World War II is when these, and this is across what we would call the South Saskatchewan River Basin. So we know the Old Man River eventually flows into the South Saskatchewan River, goes all the way to Lake Winnipeg, eventually goes to Nelson River, into Hudson Bay. So we're part of one of the biggest watershed systems in North America. And thinking about how all that is managed now is vastly different than how those waterways and how the watershed flowed in the 18 hundreds, 19 hundreds. So these projects didn't just pop up overnight. They've like the Old Man River Dam, which is more or less just a little northeast of Pinch Creek for those who kind of want to geographically situate that in their minds. That was more than a 10 year project.
(18:22):
I would learn about the development of the dam from someone who was involved with the flow regime planning of this project.
(18:27):
I'm Stuart Rood. I'm a professor of environmental science at the University of Lethbridge. This was a precedent-setting project, not just for Alberta, but for Canada and even worldwide. It had been anticipated back in the 1920s when the diversion weir, the Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District, Weir was implemented on the pecan reserve, and that diverts water for a fairly major irrigation system north of the Old Man River, hence the name. Now, the problem with a weir is that it diverts water offstream, but it doesn't allow for storage and trapping of the spring flow. And so a storage reservoir, again, had been anticipated from the onset. The location of it was uncertain at the time, and there were studies through the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, with the drought of the 1980s, which was as severe as the drought of the 1930s. The decision was finally made by Premier Peter Lawed to go ahead.
(19:28):
There was controversy relative to the location, but it needed to be upstream from the diversion weir. So this might have been on the Pecan Reserve, it might have been upstream, or it might have been up in the Rocky Mountain areas in a zone called the Gap. The decisions were partly engineering, but they were also influenced by the social, cultural and political factors. The site that was chosen was called the Three Rivers site because there were three rivers that were in fact, entering this reservoir and stored the old man, the Castle, and the Crowsnest. And it's interesting that when the site was proposed, three Rivers seemed like a positive in that here we can have one dam and collect water from three Rivers. But of course, with the reversal relative to the valuation, it was subsequently called the Old Man River Dam. Perhaps to slightly reduce the perception of impact.
(20:27):
I haven't read all of the reports, but from my studying of the topic, that site was not necessarily the best site from an environmental perspective, but again, it was the best site, or not necessarily the best site, but it had a lot of positive aspects from an economic perspective. Of course, the Pikani First Nation didn't necessarily agree with that, and there was a lot of back and forth about whether the dam would actually be located more closer to Brockett, and it would've been co-managed or potentially primarily run by Pikani First Nation. Eventually, the selection of the site at that three River site north of Pincher Creek was made without consultation. So when it was first announced, a lot of people were taken off guard, both folks from Pikani and all of the farmers and ranchers in that area, because if you look on a map, that Old Man Reservoir is pretty huge.
(21:30):
It definitely changed the landscape in terms of what was there before got flooded because of the reservoir. When that decision was made, there was a lot of protest. This led to the founding of an organization called Friends of Old Man River. So they were kind of the primary folks, aside from Piani First Nation that were kind of fighting the government of Alberta in court in terms of saying, why is this site being selected? Is this even a good idea? What is this going to do to the landscape? And that was almost 40 years ago. Now...
(22:09):
I'm Cliff Wallace. I'm a director with the Alberta Wilderness Association. That's a volunteer position, and I'm the past president of the Friends of the Old Man River. So Friends of the Old Man was a group that kind of formed out of the Alberta Fish and Game Association Southern District out of Lethbridge, as well as the Alberta Wilderness Association because it was issue specific, there was a problem. The Environment Conservation Authority and Environment Council of Alberta had recommended against building a dam. We knew that it wasn't economic, and we knew of the problems that it would create for fisheries and the riparian habitats and that. And so we just started down the road, what can we do to stop this project? And we looked through one law after another. We started with some cultural sites under the archeological, the Historical Resources Act, because there's a lot of First Nation sites in that area, and we thought there might be something there, but there wasn't.
(23:07):
But we eventually kind of meandered around and got to this thing called an ERP guidelines or a federal environmental assessment requirement that the Minister of Environment was supposed to do, and it hadn't been done. So we went to court and that takes money. Fortunately, we had lawyers who were working some pro bono, but there's still fees and other things you got to cover, and there's a lot of work to do. So we needed to organize some fundraising efforts, one of them being this Old man concert. And so some of our supporters were very well connected to the musicians side of things, Ian Tyson, for example, and Gordon Lightfoot. And so they started putting this idea together. We're going to hold a concert on the banks of the old men, and I didn't realize what that meant, of course, never done anything of that scale before. But they were confident and we had great talent, and David Suzuki was lined up, and we actually went to the government and said, we want the highways campsite at Maycroft. We've invited the premier and the guy gave us permission. Okay, we're on.
(24:26):
And it was raining all around us that day, and when everybody got over their muddy roads and everything to the campsite, the sun came out. It was sunshine, this hole of sunshine on the concert site. And we had brought in two B trains as our stage porta-potties all the way from Strathmore and just had, there was an estimate of 10 to 12,000 people there. They were lined up for miles up highway, what is now Highway 22. And it was just a glorious time. We weren't there actually to raise a lot of money. The first thought is, we just want to break even. But the crowd was great, the entertainment was great, and David Suzuki drew the biggest round of applause, which was kind of strange because the reports were all these people just came for a free concert, but they were clearly committed to the environment.
(25:23):
When we did the cleanup after, there wasn't even a single cigarette buck to pick up. There was some quarters and things like money, which had dropped out of the bags. We didn't realize we had these green garbage bags, and I had a little Suzuki Jeep, and it was stuffed full of green garbage bags with dollar bills, which we had dollar bills back then and quarters and $5 bills and $20 bills, and there was over $20,000, which we took to the Hong Kong bank in Calgary the following day, going down eighth Avenue, carrying these green garbage bags. And it was three o'clock in the morning. You're taking the Biffy back and everything else taking it out. But just the vibe and the commitment of the people said, we're on the right track here.
(26:11):
Cheryl Bradley was there, and she shared some memories with me.
(26:15):
I was almost brought to tears seeing all the people who had come from all over Alberta to celebrate the Old Man River. And I have images of rows and rows and rows of people up the hillside. They brought lawn chairs that were sitting on the grass. The stage was at the edge of the river valley, and then the audience just flocked up the hillside. And I remember clowns, there were clowns on stilts, tossing balls. There were all sorts of no damn way. But there was not, none of it was negative. None of it was dissing anybody. It was just all more, we really value our rivers.
(27:09):
Here you are from the hilltop, there's the stage and there's the people, and there's the cars going all the way up and back. And here's a good shot of the audience. There's the Joe Roche and other Chiefs sort of blessing the event, Gordon Lightfoot, Murray McLaughlin's, David there, David Suzuki, Mary McLaughlin, everybody wanting autographs. I think he was going to brush his teeth with Sprite. Sid Marty, Sid had poems and there's the clown, very colorful. It was great. And the no damn way, Martha, Martha and Cliff, this was the former president of Fish and Game. Don Hayden was there.
(28:13):
It definitely made history. I mean, it was the pictures and it's a part of history that we didn't think would go anywhere. But that court case continued on after many different lower-level courts, which went one way for us. Then the other way for us or against us, we got to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that this is the law of the land and that the Alberta government had been obstructionist and they actually awarded double costs, which is very unusual. So it was a kind of slap on the wrist, the Alberta government in the way that they had handled things. But I think out of that, the federal government was actually waiting to create this new Environmental Assessment Act, and that Canadian Environmental Assessment Act was largely based on the outcome of the case. If that case hadn't gone our way, I think we'd be in a very different situation, and it still is. Parts of that act, if you wish, are still in the legislation today.
(29:20):
Oh, that's really interesting. And so what does that act all entail?
(29:24):
It means that certain projects must undergo a federal review. And so anytime there's an area of federal responsibility, that could be fisheries for sure, and that was one of the hooks in terms of the Old Man River, then there has to be an environmental assessment. We've seen now their involvement in things like the Grassy Mountain Coal Mine, there's indigenous issues in that case, there was also West Slope Cutthroat trout. Again, a fisheries issue. So anytime there's an area of federal responsibility or federal money involved in something, there has to be a federal review.
(29:59):
And that concert was kind of a part of that coming into being?
(30:03):
It was part of the history of getting that case done, because it wasn't simple. It wasn't just a one-stop shopping. We actually had to go through everything. And in various cases, we were also going after some of the people in government, and they had threatened us, me specifically with a slapsuit. And so we had to work through those issues as well. And I guess all I can say their satisfaction at the end of it, because those same people, it was the first time in the British law history that a government had been found to have committed on another DAM project Fraud misrepresentation, and awarded a construction company multimillions of dollars in damages because they had falsified documents and basically lied to landowners about various things. And those were the same people who were in charge of the Old Man River Dam. There's many fights.
(31:05):
And I mean, I guess what kept us going is we had assisted another group, the Canadian Wildlife Federation and Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation on the Rafferty Alameda Dam in southern Saskatchewan. And they caved before their court cases were over. They stopped their work, not sure why, but the people in the Canadian Wildlife Federation just said, Nope, our members down there, whatever it was, didn't want to continue. And they were far enough along that they would've probably prevented the Old Man Dam from ever being built because they were going down the same path to the Supreme Court that we were, they were a year ahead of us. And unfortunately, by the time the Supreme Court decision came out for us, the dam was half-built. So then we were dealing really, even though the panel that heard, because the ruling was you have to review this project.
(32:03):
And so a panel was struck, which included people from Alberta, but it was a federal panel, and they heard the arguments on both sides, and their first recommendation was to decommission the dam. And they had unfortunately, another series of recommendations, which was because in their mind they, they knew that wasn't going to be accepted by the federal government or the provincial government. And so they had a set of, I think, 23 recommendations about what to do if you were going to continue building. And I got involved in the Old Man Dam Environmental Advisory Committee and worked on that so that at least the water that was going to be stored and the way it was developed would be used for optimizing stream flow for fish and riparian habitat downstream. But it wasn't going to fix all the problems that were created by losing that habitat and the degradation of the streams upstream of the reservoir.
(32:57):
It's interesting because one of the MPs for Southern Alberta said, we want to build a dam on the Milk River. We want to build a dam on the South Saskatchewan River, but if the environmentalists make a peep, it won't happen. Well, it hasn't happened yet. The old man was kind of the nail in the coffin for a lot of uneconomic and crazy environmentally destructive projects. That court case was seminal, and it's now being taught in law schools, in environmental law courses as one of the landmark cases in Canada. And so those are the building blocks we like to say we stand on the shoulders of giants. There's always somebody before us that was big in pushing these things forward, but they weren't giants by themselves. They needed a lot of people helping them, writing letters, talking to people, giving money to nonprofit groups that are working on these issues.
(33:53):
Tyler told me about another group that protested the dam.
(33:56):
In, I believe it was 1991 when there was a group of Pikani folks called the Lone Fighters, and Milton Born with a Tooth was kind of one of the leaders of that protest. They actually took direct action beyond protesting and attempted to divert water away from the construction of the dam, essentially using bulldozers to reroute the water, to have it flow as it would have otherwise flowed instead of being diverted and held. And this was around the same time you had other police indigenous confrontations like the Oka events in Quebec. Milton Born with a Tooth had actually gone to Oka to visit with the Mohawk people and say, how are you resisting these incursions by the government onto your land? And then he came back to Southern Alberta to find that the RCMP were on Pikani territory, basically trying to thwart these efforts to reroute the course of the river.
(35:00):
And essentially what happened was that Milton Born with a Tooth fired off a couple shots from a rifle in the air as like warning shots to say, get off our land. This is a confrontation. What are you doing here? And eventually was arrested, and in a multi-year court case, which was prosecuted, he was found guilty, and then they declared a new trial because the original judge had excluded a bunch of evidence or excluded any testimony about the cultural significance of the river to the Pikani people. So it's quite a complex situation, but you could see that Blackfoot folks were the ones taking real significant action to stand up to the construction of this dam. The friends of the Old Man River were kind of, they came at the protest around the Old Man River Dam from an environmental perspective, while the Piani First Nations came at the protest or resistance to this old man River Dam construction from a cultural perspective, they had shared interests, but from my understanding, they maybe didn't agree on the approach, so they weren't necessarily aligned all the time.
(36:23):
So while you had more direct action, like folks like Milton Born with a Tooth literally rerouting the river and having these direct confrontations with authorities, the friends of Old Man River were very much awareness-raising kind of focused. So this massive concert in Maycroft in 1989, it was a pretty significant event. And I think it interesting because similar things have happened here in just the past couple of years in Alberta where it's easy for people to say that Alberta is like, there's the rednecks and then there's the lefties or whatever. There's the rural folks who are all conservative ranchers, and then there's the lefty tree huggers when in fact, that's not really how it works. You have folks like Ian and Sylvia Tyson being the primary organizers along with the friends of the Old Man River of this massive benefit concert. So Ian and Sylvia Tyson, legendary country musicians in Alberta were the couple of the headline performers along with Gordon Lightfoot and Murray McLaughlin at the time, massive folk country kind of icons in Canadian music.
(37:32):
I think another cool little bit about that fundraising concert was David Suzuki was actually there as well. Kind of one of the big emotion-provoking speeches of the day, because David Suzuki is kind of an icon of environmentalism in Canada, but in 1989, he was a journalist and he had just been fired from the Globe and Mail just before this concert happened because his editors found him to be too left-leaning or too environmental leaning and not objective enough. So around that time period of the Old Man River Dam Construction in this concert, it's kind of a pivotal moment in the way environmentalism and the environmental movement was perceived, I think in a lot of ways where things kind starting to change in people's mindsets, in terms of what environmentalism means or why it's important to be thinking about a lot of these things, and back to the establishment of irrigation in the area.
(38:35):
Part of that whole story is as well, this idea of man conquering nature to a certain extent, we can build irrigation canals. People said this semi-arid desert was inhospitable for agriculture and inhospitable for settlement to build new communities, but look at us. We can control the river, we can push it this way, push it that way, send irrigation all across the province. We can build dams, we can harness the river and use it for the benefit of humankind in the settlement of the area. That was certainly part of the narrative of, look at this oasis. We've built in the desert and we're not the only place who's done that, right? Places like Arizona, Nevada, that was very much part of the nation-building narrative of we can control nature, we can live anywhere we want to. We can have green lawns in Las Vegas or in Lethbridge.
(39:29):
That's certainly part of how these systems kind of get established is that dominance over nature kind of concept. And I think it's becoming more and more clear in recent years with the massive changes we're seeing from climate change. That narrative is always has been problematic, but is beginning to not just crack, but crumble, and that if we don't start to make significant social and cultural changes in the way that the watershed is managed and drawn upon, that the lifestyle that is the kind of normal mainstream lifestyle of city dwellers in Southern Alberta is not going to be sustainable for that much longer.
(40:15):
Next time on the Old Man Watershed, I get a water treatment plant tour and learn about the city of Lethbridge's climate adaptation plan.
(40:24):
So the Climate Adaptation Strategy and action plan, what it aims to do is provide some guidance to the city of Lethbridge on how to better prepare for and respond to climate events, including extreme weather events.
(40:39):
In Ove My Heads, 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.
I'm Tryin' save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
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.