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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 Old Man watershed, I want to learn about riparian areas and why they matter.
(00:36):
I'm Norine Ambrose. I'm the executive director with Cows and Fish. Basically, we help people understand these things called riparian areas. These areas near water, streamside, wetlands, lake shores and riverbanks and floodplains are all riparian. That extra water creates a different kind of habitat because you have different soil and more moisture. So we help people understand them, how to care for them. We share the stewardship things that people are doing that are great and awesome with other people who can learn from those examples, whether it's on a lake shore, somebody who owns a cabin or it's a rancher along a stream. It's like what kind of grazing management works well here? All of those kinds of things are what we do. So we do a lot of education and outreach as well as repairing health monitoring with landowners and community groups and partners, helping people understand these places and sort of some of the options and alternatives for management.
(01:30):
What exactly is a riparian zone?
(01:32):
Yeah, a repairing area basically means a place near water. It comes from both Greek and Latin. That's what it means near water. So it's the floodplain and the stream bank next to a stream or a river that has extra water and different soils because of that extra water. So it's influenced by flooding frequently or periodically. So you get moist soils. And then of course, because there's more water in different soils, the plants that grow there are different than the rest of the landscape. So the upland, the drier landscape, if it's a lake or wetland, same concept. Wet soils more often, which means different plants grow there and plants that to keep their roots or their feet wet grow there. So things that are in the water like cattails and bull rushes, but also things like willows and cottonwood trees like that extra water and lots of other kinds of plants tell you that you're in a riparian area.
(02:22):
And so I guess percentage-wise, is it quite a small percentage right, of the actual overall land mass?
(02:29):
Yeah, so in southern Alberta especially, it's about 2% of the landscape is riparian. So it's really tiny part of the grasslands and the prairies and sort of the boreal forest in Alberta and the parkland, that transition between prairie and forest, it's probably 5% is riparian. So it's still a pretty small amount because we are not counting the actual water body itself. Obviously in a stream river that doesn't make up a lot of the area, but it's a tiny part of the landscape, but an extremely important because it is the interface between land and water. A lot is happening not only for water quality and quantity, but also for wildlife and recreation and human values of all kinds. So it's a tiny place, but very important.
(03:14):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Maybe tell me a bit more about that. So what sort of things are going on in the riparian area that are important for water?
(03:22):
From a water quality perspective? Riparianaries are filters. So if it's runoff from the landscape in the nearby area, those plants get in the way basically and slow and trap material, whether that's soil or potentially pollutants or chemicals, it can be nutrients that on the land are great as nutrients, but we don't want in our water. So they help slow those things down and hold onto them and use them up. They also from flood waters, which spill out of the channel of a river or stream, capture that some of that nutrients and that energy that might be in the channel as well. And they resist erosion. So they're kind of like this place of amelioration. So they reduce the impact of that flood water by stealing or holding onto some of the energy. It's kind of like friction. How do you create friction? Plants are get in the way basically and take out some of that energy that water would have to erode and wash away and make the channel wider, for instance.
(04:18):
So that's the water quality and kind of physical piece. And then there's of course all the biological stuff that happens by making cleaner water and just providing spaces. There's lots of wildlife. So in Albert, like I said, 2% in the southern part of the province is riparian, but 80% of the wildlife rely on that area for all or part of their life cycle because it's that interface zone. There's a lot of different things happening than just in the aquatic or just in the terrestrial dryer land because there's just more stuff going on that there's a narrow interface. So pretty important for wildlife, fish rely on it. You might think, well fish live in the water, but what happens in the water is influenced by what happens on the land and the overhanging deep binding roots that provide the cover for fish or that help clean the water for fish or keep it cooler.
(05:05):
Those all come from the terrestrial riparian component. There's lots of fish and wildlife relationship and then forage. So whether it's for wildlife, for food or livestock, they're pretty important places and they're very moist, so they're very productive. They produce a lot more primary productivity, a lot more plant mass. And then of course we love them as people. They're places to recreate. They're culturally, they're beautiful to look at all of those good reasons to have them and appreciate them for resiliency, they do that buffering of water, energy and volume and timing. They're important in droughts, they're important in floods. They're important as climate gets more extreme.
(05:45):
Yeah. Actually, that was going to be my next question is how are riparian areas connected to change in climate? Like you mentioned droughts or floods, maybe tell me a bit more about the importance of that.
(05:56):
Yeah, often we only think about the water we see, which is surface water, whether it's in a streams channel or it's a lake or a wetland. We don't see the stuff underground. And that's a really important part of what riparianaries do is store water. So the water might be in the river channel or even the lake, but a lot of it also is underground, shallow underground. So seep sideways into the floodplain of a streamer river into that storage basin, which is like a giant sponge that holds that water for later. So you think about in the prairies especially, how on earth is there water flowing in December, January, February? Where does it come from? It comes, a lot of it comes from the stored water that during high water events went into the banks and into the floodplain and then comes back out when there's low water so that there's perennial flow or it extends the flow.
(06:44):
How do fish live the rest of the year that are in there or anything else aquatic. So that water storage is part of what makes them important for resiliency and drought and flood because they obviously need water to be stored to then come out later. And that flood effect also is that the flood plane is called the flood plane. It's meant to get flooded. It's the release valve for the energy, the horsepower that water has, but also the water, the nutrients. That's what builds deep rich soils that then grow more plants is by trapping over thousands of years material that washed off the hillsides or came from upstream. That's how we have these big wide flat valleys that are very productive, lush places.
(07:25):
And on the flood side of things, how does it relate to that?
(07:31):
So because they store water, and that really means they're storing water temporarily, it's not like they're built permanent situations. It's more like they give it a chance to go into the bank temporarily, so it can be withdrawn later. Sort of like your bank account idea, except that it actually pays off an interest and it does it all by itself if we give it the chance. And that flood means less flood damage in terms of physical impacts, as long as we aren't building in the flood plain or putting our houses there, that resiliency is about taking the peak off of extreme events, basically whether it's drought or flood, it's slowing the impact down and allowing obviously the system also to rebound more quickly. There's greater resilience. So if we keep them healthy, that is, if they're healthy and have that ability to do that, then they can rebound more quickly due to natural events like floods and droughts as well as human impacts of course. But the more resilient they are and ability to do those functions I talked about, that's what helps us be more resilient in the future is that ability to rebound. Because floods are natural, droughts are natural, but if we get more of them are more extreme, we need them to have the ability to rebound and respond.
(08:43):
And so you briefly mentioned just if they are healthy, that's how obviously things are healthy, then they work well. But yeah, how healthy are riparian areas in Alberta here?
(08:54):
We certainly haven't assessed or looked at all of them, but we have looked at a lot of riparian areas in Alberta and from our large scale scattered looking across the province, we looked at over 4,000 sites and roughly a quarter of the sites that we've looked at are healthy, half are kind of in the middle of the healthy with some problems, so depending on some at the higher air, lower end of that, and then the other quarter are unhealthy. So there's a lot of room for improvement. The unhealthy sites often have a lot of land use, a lot of things happening at them. The healthy sites often also are used, but managed well then there's good stewardship happening at them. Sometimes there's sites with no human activities or very little as well. It's really about making sound choices for management and thoughtful management or land use decisions that you can have healthy or unhealthy with the exact same general kind of land use. It's all about how you manage your use or the choices you make. So yeah, that helps us understand that there's opportunity for health in many kinds of land uses. Clearly if we, there's some land uses that are not going to be compatible with a riparian area, you can't actually turn it into something else and it still be healthy. There are some kinds of land uses on the other hand that can happen there like recreation or grazing. If they're managed thoughtfully, you can still have a healthy repairing area.
(10:14):
And so what would be an example of something you couldn't put in a repairing area that wouldn't be healthy?
(10:19):
Yeah, I mean if you turned it into a parking lot or a house, and we certainly see that that's kind of the trade-off of saying, well, even in park systems, where do we put our trails? We always put our trails beside the water because who doesn't want to walk beside the water? You don't want to walk a long ways away from the water, you walk beside the water, but those trails then wash away in big floods sometimes or get damaged, but they take away the function. So pavement or shale pathways aren't filtering and trapping anything. They're not providing habitat. There's no infiltration of water on top of the trail, maybe beside the trail. So those are mowing our lawns and whether it's in a park or a green space of some other kind of golf course, or if we turn it into a parking lot, it clearly can't do those functions I talked about.
(11:06):
And so the more that we do that on the rest of the landscape too, not just repairing, of course, the more runoff there is, the more flood risk, the more flashiness, the less habitat, all of those things, of course are cumulative. So maybe we do need popular access points to be like that. They're going to be unhealthy, but then we should be doing that purposefully or kind of understanding the trade, maybe not the trade off what we're giving up. That site cannot function if it's a beach, unless it was naturally a beach maybe, but in a site where we're designing it to do something other for us, but we don't want the whole site, the whole stream, the whole river, the whole lake to look like that because we're taking it away. Its ability to do those functions, which we also rely upon.
(11:48):
And you did say that also you can still have use on those areas, but as long as it's managed properly, then it can still be healthy, right?
(11:56):
Yeah. We see amazing examples. Cows and fish of course started with livestock produced with ranchers in the southwest about really great strategies for grazing management that were really great stewards of the land, careful timing, appropriate distribution, looking at the right stocking rate, so not too many cows for too long in simple terms, and really looking at thoughtful management of that and that can totally work and have a healthy repairing area. And recreational properties, whether they're on public land or private land, same kind of things is it's more about volume and intensity of impact. You can imagine that anywhere in the landscape, the more people or the more things we're doing, the more footprints, the more traffic prints, the lack of vegetation starts to be the norm instead of the opposite. Less plants, less wildlife, less clean water. It can't be filtered that results from those. So definitely thoughtful use and management can result in healthy repairing areas
(13:01):
Because like you said, it's such a large percentage of animals rely on those areas. And I assume it would be the same for cattle too.
(13:07):
Yeah, cattle definitely like to linger in riparian areas for a few reasons. One is there's gravity, they're at the bottom of the hill usually, right? They're the lowest point besides the water themselves. So it's work to climb up sometimes if there's a lot of hill terrain, but they also need water. So one of the practices that a lot of producers do is provide offsite watering systems, pumping water into a trough of some kind so the cattle don't have to drink from the water body, and they can also move the water around. In that case, the trough can be placed in different locations that will reduce the impacts. And of course there's forage riparian areas because they are moisture produce more forage, so more for the cows to eat basically, and wildlife for that matter. So there's more forage, there's more water, and there's also shade and shelter usually in a riparian area. If there is tree or shrub cover, that's shelter to get out of bad weather to get shade. Especially with the heat we have in southern Alberta, that's often one place that there is that protection as well. So lots of reasons to linger there if you're a cow, which is why it takes really thoughtful management to sort of not let the cows make all those decisions and encourage them to spend time elsewhere.
(14:19):
Yeah, because I assume maybe would they be damaging that area by just walking on it?
(14:23):
Yeah, so I mean just walking through it isn't really the issue. It's more about the frequency and root repetition and volume. Just like if it was lots and lots of people, a site gets more trampled, obviously from a cattle perspective or any other livestock, they will eat the vegetation. Some of the vegetation, they'll eat willows, they'll eat grasses obviously, and other broadleaf plants. So if they're there a lot, then they're can eat there a lot. On the other hand, if they're spending more of their time of pasture, then they're spreading that use around as opposed to just targeting their favourite areas or where they linger. Kind of like your easy chair, stick in your easy chair and all your good stuff is right in hand. Your pops in one hand and your remote controls in the other. You don't have to go anywhere, everything's right here. So you kind of got to take that option away from them.
(15:11):
And you said you obviously work with organizations and people to educate and work with them, and so I assume you're working with ranchers to let them know about this. What does that look like?
(15:22):
Yeah, we do a lot of presentations, workshops on repairing areas, repairing, grazing, how these places work or what does health look like. So kind of help people tune their eyes to know what to look for. We do a lot of grazing schools and courses for livestock producers with partners. They're always delivered in partnership with a bunch of other people who help put them on to talk about what does healthy look like, what are grazing, some of the grazing strategies you might use, as well as other kinds of things like soils and wildlife and how does a watering system work or how do electric fencers work best or whatever that might be. So we do lots of those kinds of things, tours, demonstration sites. We work a lot with individual landowners to try things out sometimes and then learn from them and share that in our presentations or take people there on tours so that you can actually touch, feel, see sometimes they don't. What you try first doesn't work perfectly or it has to continue to be tweaked or adjusted.
(16:24):
Yeah. So it sounds like you're also getting some of that information from the ranchers on how things are working or even how the health of the riparian area is some of that used.
(16:32):
Yeah, I mean we absolutely don't own our own cows. At cows and fish. We rely on learning from ranchers who are making these things work and have made them work sometimes by trial and error that we learn along with them. Or sometimes they learned it a long time ago and knew it before we met them. So it's sharing those profile stories that profiling good work, which means somebody else already knows how to do this and it's a great story to share.
(16:58):
Do you remember any of those stories? Any kind of success stories that come to mind?
(17:02):
Yeah, I mean there are many, and everyone is certainly different, but I would say one of the really great ones that we've been involved in recently and for a couple decades actually is just changing the timing. There's a situation where the site had had pretty long-term overuse in the riparian area and had lost a lot of its willows and cottonwood trees. And so it got a few years of rust, they fenced it out and then they started grazing it again. But looking really carefully, watching timing, looking at kind of how many head were in there for how long, and just making sure that was in balance with the recovery. And it's amazing to see a site that didn't have a lot growing and now it's just lots of thick vegetation. It's still grazed. It's not that it's not grazed, it's just really well managed.
(17:54):
Nice. Yeah. So how long, cause you're talking about years then if a site was unhealthy to make it healthy again?
(18:02):
In that site, probably 10 to 15 years, but going from unhealthy to healthy, but that's really not that long when you look at ecological time and it got that way perhaps in a hundred to 150 years. It's not like it changed overnight to where we first were introduced to it. So we can't change things overnight. But we've also seen sites where in a year or two you go, how is this even the same site? It's crazy that it can change it fast. And part of that actually is a flood aspect. If something floods really quickly after a change is made, there's lots of sediment and seed source and it can almost reset the clock. So it can start over really quickly. And because these are wet places compared to say the rest of the landscape stuff grows quicker there too, so it can rebound more quickly.
(18:49):
Was there anything else you wanted to touch on the cows side of cows and fish? Anything that you think is applicable to talk about in this conversation?
(18:57):
I think one of the things about the cows side of cows and fish is really, cows isn't just about cows and fish. It can be quads and fish, it can be urban dog walkers and fish. We do work with people in all kinds of places because riparian areas are in all kinds of places and land uses. And it's really about matching our land use choices and management to the ecosystem. So the land or the cow or the quad or the dog and their owner to the fish or the ecosystem or the environment in the water. It's really trying to meld those things together and recognize that no matter what kind of land use we do, we can probably all do better. And we can also all understand if we understand how our management or land use affects the landscape's ability to function, then we can tweak it and adjust it.
(19:46):
If we don't know we're having any effect or impact, how do we change it? If we think everything is great or we're having no impact, how or why would we adjust? So I think that's one of the things that we do is try and help, whether it's an urban or rural or an agricultural or recreational setting, is just to get people to look at the landscape differently. They don't have to have a cow or they don't even have to have a fish. It's really about understanding our relationship to the land and how it functions in its ability to be healthy.
(20:20):
And is part of that in your education and awareness is part of that spending time there and learning about the place has that ever come up?
(20:28):
One of the most powerful things that we do is hands-on repairing health assessment field days. And we've done social third-party evaluations of our program to make sure we're having an impact. And one of the most impactful things where people say they learn new information and they also are going to make management change based on what they learned is a hands-on field day because it changes how people see the world around them. It's really about kind of changing the lens by which you look at things You don't know that all green is the same, it's just green, it must be good. Well, actually those green things are weeds that might not be good. Or I thought that nice mowed lawn next to my lake was good because I'm keeping it neat and tidy and clean and that actually is not contributing positively to the lake. That's actually increasing the nutrients that get in the lake, removing habitat. But not everybody knows those things. So getting out and touching and feeling and seeing is really important.
(21:24):
So, Norine, it's called cows and fish, but I'm thinking about beavers. How are beavers involved with this?
(21:30):
Yeah, well, beavers obviously live in water and that affects and influences riparian areas because they dam water bodies, they actually create more flooding to build themselves deeper ponds and pools that they're safe in. And that actually expands or widens the riparian area so it makes them bigger. And so beavers, dams are kind of like a whole series of little speed bumps. So when there's a flood event, an extra either snowmelt or runoff from a big storm, that water gets trapped in pools successively. So it kind of slows down the flood impacts and ameliorates so reduces that impact at the downstream end. So takes the peak off of the floods. And then in droughts, there's a lot of landowners who will say to us, man, am I glad I got beavers? I have water because they've trapped it. At some point in the past when there was snow melt or a runoff from rain events, there's actually water present and they hold more water.
(22:26):
And some really great research in Alberta that looked at even in decades of dry times, places with beavers that are even in wetland lake habitats. There's more water if you've had beavers for decades before, because they do that over long, long periods of time, trapping of water and storing it. So even if the beavers go missing, there's still more water for years because the canals they dig, the dams they built, they are there and they've been holding and recharging our groundwater. So really, really important for water storage in addition to water quality because they actually improve water quality too by slowing and slowing water means slow the sediment, the little particles that are floating in the water can't hold onto water quality contaminants or nutrients and they're trapped. And so that means their quality, quality water is better as well. Cows and fish has actually been kind of including beavers in our work for most of 30 years. And it's a really important part of climate and watershed resiliency because ecosystem engineers that beavers are, they're a keystone species that used to be much more abundant and we're probably in almost every main and small water body across the continent when there was water. But their populations are much reduced compared to hundreds of years ago. And that means our streams and our rivers and therefore our riparian areas are very different than they would've been in the past.
(23:50):
And I guess with that, obviously you can maybe do a bit more management with livestock, with fevers, I assume it's just that if the riparian area is healthy, they'll probably be more likely to show up there, right?
(24:00):
Yeah, they obviously need habitat that they can survive in, but they also sometimes need help in hand. And a lot of our past choices with beaver were blow up the dam, get rid of the beaver because they're flooding the roads or they're plugging the culverts. And so how do you deal with those actual conflict things, which we do have to deal with? So there's a bunch of work we've been doing with the Miistakis Institute and working with Beavers collaborative to sort of share some of those techniques of how do you build beaver-proof culverts? How do you build a pond leveler that keeps the beaver? It isn't about, hopefully, it's not always about getting rid of the beaver. It's like what are the other techniques that we can use that are really cost-effective? And especially for municipalities and people who manage roads and infrastructure, there's some amazing Alberta research that shows that it's way cheaper to use those techniques than the conventional approach of rip out the dam, blow up the dam, shoot the beaver, trap the beaver, or remove the beaver and put them somewhere else. It's much more cost effective to work with what we know about how beavers do things and address those conflicts. So a lot of the work we're doing is miss penalties, but also landowners and individual landowners are starting to just say, Hey, we could do this differently. I mean, some already have obviously been doing things really innovatively in the past, but it's kind of a new way of thinking about beavers that beyond them being a pest or problem only
(25:31):
My next conversation would have me learning about why lakes are important to watersheds.
(25:35):
Hey, I'm Bradley Peter. I am a biologist and the executive director at the Alberta Lake Management Society. Lakes are often described as sentinels of change because I think they're these collection points on a landscape. We think about a lake possibly as having these really distinct boundaries. But really a lake is connected via tributaries to rivers, to glaciers to other lakes in a watershed. And any activities that happen in that watershed, that area of land that drains into a lake can often be picked up in the lake itself. So lakes become these really kind of focal points on the landscape for environmental change. Obviously, they're important sources of biodiversity, recreationally important fisheries, you can look at almost all the lakes in Alberta. We've got intense development right around the edge of the lake. So culturally, socially, lakes are important features. And of course, indigenous communities use lakes for harvesting medicine, harvesting food, even drinking water sources.
(26:42):
So lakes are ecologically, socially recreationally like these really important features on the landscape that are difficult to assess because of all those complicating factors like all these cumulative effects. It's difficult to assess a lake's health in the context of all that. And so that's kind of the work that we try to do. The general work that we do is really what I would call ambient monitoring, like long-term ecological health. But when you look at a lake, you really have to consider so many factors. Think about physical factors or morphological features. How deep is a lake, how gradual is the slope of the lake bed? That really has important implications for how quickly a lake can evaporate. For example, looking at water quality, so nutrients, water clarity, looking at temperature and thermal stratification, looking at regional impacts like climate, weather, looking at human footprint in a watershed. So the amount of development, agriculture industry, you really have to consider all of these parameters when you're trying to understand how healthy is this lake? Where should this lake be naturally or where would this lake be naturally? Can we manage the impacts and what is actually having an impact on the water quality? There's all these factors and there are some studies that have really tried to look at these multi-scale drivers of water quality in Alberta's lakes.
(28:13):
Is there a difference between, let's say a glacier lake in a mountain versus a manmade lake? Is there a difference in what you might look for in an assessment or what makes a lake healthy?
(28:23):
So we do know that, for example, reservoirs when we look at the algae or phytoplankton communities in reservoirs, that they actually appear quite naturalized compared to natural lake systems. So it does appear that these reservoirs, these dam systems really quickly naturalize into what looks like a normal lake community. But certainly things like when you compare alpine lakes to Prairie lakes, elevation is a factor that you can look at in terms of determining water quality. What's really important though, I would say, is the local geology. So when we compare, say Alberta's lakes to lakes out in Ontario on the shield, we would have very different expectations. The reason we have such great agriculture in Alberta is we have really productive soils, and that basically leads to really productive lakes. So we have really green, nice agriculture. We're probably going to have really green lakes, and that would change of course, in an alpine system where you don't have that nutrient-rich geology. So the setting of a lake in the landscape, is that one of those local factors that's really important for determining water quality?
(29:35):
So when we're looking at lakes and climate, what sort of things should we be considering?
(29:41):
So Southern Alberta right now is experiencing a pretty significant drought, and that's really hard on the reservoirs that exist in that region that are used for irrigation. So for example, our team went down to Nuwell Reservoir, which is just east of the old man watershed in Southern Alberta. And we were unable to even launch a boat to collect the water quality samples because the reservoir was down meters of depth. And so I mean, that's a direct impact of the climate situation on our, not only the water quality, but our ability to even assess the water quality. So climate has various impacts specifically around that precipitation, evaporation regime. But think about lakes in the wintertime. We live in this northern climate where lakes are ice-covered for the majority of the year. Imagine if we shorten that period of ice cover. What you're effectively doing is increasing the growing season in that open water season, which has really strong implications for the amount of algae and phytoplankton that we might expect in those lakes.
(30:53):
So in systems where they're supposed to be ice-covered, maybe you're getting less snow cover on a lake, and that's allowing more light penetration into a lake that's increasing what can grow under the ice in a lake. We have lakes that have permanent phytoplankton blooms all winter long toxic blooms all winter long. So there's a lot of impacts that climate can have on a lake system. So one of the main reasons people get involved in our programs is over concerns around cyanobacteria or what's also known as blue-green algae. One of the most serious possible side effects is the production of what we call cyanotoxins. In Alberta, the most common toxin is called microcyst, and it's a liver toxin produced by some of these bacteria, and we can find it in almost every lake in the province. But there are some lakes that in the wintertime produce these toxins that exceed public health guidelines like January, February, March. So we're trying to understand why those lakes, why are they producing these toxins? There's also good research from Alberta that shows that increased temperatures can actually select for cyanobacteria that are toxin producers. So looking at the toxicity of these bacteria over time might actually be a direct impact of climate.
(32:14):
And so what sort of effects would that toxicity have? Is that more on the wildlife or if people were using the lake?
(32:20):
Yeah, so humans generally, I would say western culture tend not to drink from lakes, raw water at least, but certainly indigenous communities have relied on lakes as food and drinking water sources. The toxin micro system tends to accumulate in and impact mammal livers. So imagine livestock dogs swimming in a lake, people who are drinking the water. It tends not to harm fish, but the toxins can actually accumulate in fish livers. So anyone who's consuming fish organ meat might be at risk.
(32:57):
If we are having more evaporation or more of the toxins, or if these things are related to a changing climate, how would we adapt? How would we be able to use our lakes for the things you've been talking about, if perhaps things are changing because of the climate?
(33:13):
Yeah, I mean, certainly it can change our relationship to lakes or our reliance on lakes. Certainly, it's posing questions for water security in southern Alberta with those reservoirs. And I think it highlights the idea that we need to minimize the stressors that we're putting on the lakes, or as best we can minimize our impact on lakes, because these climate effects will really, in most cases, act as like a multiplier. Maybe we can't control the local climate so much right now today, but certainly we could control the invasive species or try to control invasive species entering at the lakes or try to control the amount of nutrient runoff that we're having on a watershed scale into a lake. And so I think everything we can do to minimize the stressors we're putting into that system, knowing that this multiplier is coming, is happening, is what we can do to try and plan for or adapt to the risk of climate having negative impacts on our lakes.
(34:19):
Is there anything else that you think is relevant to talk about in managing our lakes, from our side of things?
(34:26):
When we think about lake management, oftentimes the tools that we have are not actually doing something within a lake, it's actually managing the watershed. And so you can kind of think of sources of nutrients, like phosphorus is one of those main drivers of cyanobacteria in Alberta. We think about sources of phosphorus. Phosphorus can come externally from the watershed, or it can come internally from phosphorus that's bound within the lake sediments. There's a process called phosphorus cycling in lakes where phosphorus comes out of the sediments, becomes bioavailable, the Sano bacteria use it and eat it and grow, and then they sink to the bottom, they decompose, they release that phosphorus. So there's this kind of internal cycle, but the other major sources, external sources of phosphorus. So imagine anything that increases the speed of water in transportation into a lake might increase the amount of phosphorus headed to that lake. Phosphorus is bound in sediments, phosphorus is found in human waste, animal waste. It's found in cosmetic fertilizers, fertilizers used for. And so there's a lot of policies and actions we can take in a watershed to really minimize the flow of phosphorus into a lake system. It's much harder to control the phosphorus that's already within a lake. So oftentimes it's kind of a long-term solution. It can be an expensive and difficult solution, but oftentimes watershed management is the only tool that we have in our tool belt.
(36:01):
Okay. And it's largely on the policy side, then?
(36:04):
Policy, but as well, I think there are also a lot of best management practices that don't even require difficult legislation or policy to implement. And there's a lot of efforts to educate shoreline, cottage owners on those issues, or summer villages, for example, often have a lot of control over what type of policies they can implement that would improve the health of a lake. So there are a lot of actions that we don't have to wait for a policy to come in place to implement. Imagine low impact development solutions, rain barrels, pervious surfaces on your property, minimizing the use or eliminating the use of cosmetic fertilizers, maintaining a naturalized riparian zone, not having a green lawn all the way down to a lake. There are local actions we can take to minimize the amount of phosphorus going into a water body in Alberta. There's kind of a weak lake management system. It's complicated and messy, but a lot of lake management falls onto what we call lake watershed stewardship groups. These are effectively volunteer societies, usually run by residents at a lake who are the strongest advocates for the health of a lake. And so if we can inform and equip those individuals to be informed advocates for their lake, I think that goes a long way into ensuring that we have healthy lakes into the future.
(37:36):
You guys obviously can't go to every lake all the time. You can't be monitoring things 24 7. So yeah, it makes sense. You would encourage community members who live or use that area to also to be monitoring it as well, right?
(37:49):
Yeah. Citizen science is a really growing field right now, and it tends to be extremely cost-effective. The other thing is, is that you gain the knowledge, the local knowledge from the people who really are the experts on those systems. We study really intensively about maybe up to 30 lakes each summer. So I really can't be the local expert interpreting and understanding that data. Surely we describe the data, we provide reports on the data, but it's often that local knowledge or even traditional knowledge that we rely on to understand what that means and how we can work with that information to maybe make some changes or maybe improve the health that lake. So working with people on the landscape, working with locals is a really interesting way to collect environmental data, but also to relate that into management options.
(38:47):
Do you have any sense on why lakes matter to people in Alberta? Why do they care about them and why should we be protecting them?
(38:54):
Yeah, there's various reasons. I think this kind of stewardship ethic is kind of a difficult concept to describe because it combines so many things. I mean, I think it's a bit maybe reductive to say, oh, people are worried about their property value lakes have this kind of intrinsic value. I think water in our culture has this kind of value. We're all drawn to it. Look at, we only have maybe 800 fish-bearing lakes in Alberta. Compare that to our population. Everyone wants a piece of that water. Everyone wants to have a property where they can see that water and enjoy it. People want water that they can feel safe about letting their grandkids swim in. These are really important cultural resources for us. They're important recreationally for fisheries. People live there, people swim. People drink, as I said in the south, really important for irrigation for the livelihood of farmers and for agriculture industry in the south.
(40:02):
So there's this whole package that comes together when we think about why is someone being a steward. And I would love to explore that a bit more and define that a bit more. We recently developed a program called the Lake Watershed Stewardship Community of Practice, where we're creating a forum for all of these people in Alberta to come together and learn from each other. Instead of us coming into a community and having this really kind of didactic approach to engaging with members of the public, we want them to feel like they're part of this bigger community working together to steward the health of the lakes. And so something that I really want to pursue and encourage and better understand in Alberta
(40:45):
Next time on the Old Man Watershed, I learn about land management and fish.
(40:51):
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, distribution, or loss, we can tell whether or not we've successfully managed that watershed.
(41:08):
In Over 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.
(41:17):
I'm trying to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
(41:27):
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.