ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

Albertans act together to keep their water safe and the Rockies beautiful

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Country and western singing superstar Corb Lund

THE POPULAR RESISTANCE PAID OFF. Big Coal will not be free to rip the tops off mountains in Alberta, make drinking water toxic and threaten whole ecosystems.

A federal-provincial review panel gave a resounding thumbs down to the Grassy Mountain coal project June 17. The Kenney government says it will respect the decision.

Democracy in spite of itself

The Kenney government had been the biggest booster—and enabler—of the project. They claim the thumbs down from the panel is proof that the system of checks and balances works.

What they don’t say is that it only worked because of the citizens of Alberta—not the government.

Let’s be clear. A functioning system would have rejected a project like the Grassy Moutain coal project from the get go.

The Benga Mining Limited grand plan was to rip the tops off 15 square kilometres of mountains in the foothills of the Rockies near the Crowsnest Pass in southwest Alberta, in the middle of a watershed that supplies clean water to more than a million Canadians, in order to construct and operate a massive open-pit coal mine with disastrous environmental impact and dodgy economic benefits.

Business loved it. They were about the only ones.

General uprising

Albertans from every economic, social and political community—including Alberta’s favourite son country superstar Corb Lund—pushed back in a loose, spontaneous and determined coalition to defend water quality and the beauty of the Rockies’ eastern slopes.

This exercise of raw democracy, in the form of active engagement by tens of thousands of Albertans, proved to be the most important factor in the demise of the Benga Mining assault.

Not one scientist from the Kenney government spoke about water security or the hazards of selenium during the hearing.

On the other hand, the Livingstone Landowners Group, hired six prominent scientists to model the impacts of proposed projects on water security in an arid county.

The comprehensive study found even limited coking coal mining would create intractable problems with water quality and quantity, including toxic selenium contamination.

The panel relied solely on evidence presented by citizen activists: such as the Timberwolf Conservation Society, the Municipal District of Ranchland, the Livingstone Landowners Group, the Alberta Wilderness Association, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, private landowners, local naturalists, eastern slope ranchers and federal scientists.

‘Wrong century’

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This giant public wave of protest was probably the largest and longest demonstration for water security and the environment in the history of Alberta. It forced the Kenney government to backtrack on its many backroom deals with Aussie coal miners.

Given these forces, the joint review panel agreed with the citizen activist who told them Grassy Mountain was “the wrong project, in the wrong place, in the wrong century.”

The panel concluded: the mine would result “in significant adverse environmental effects on surface water quality, westslope cutthroat trout and their habitat, whitebark pine, rough fescue grasslands, and vegetation species and community biodiversity.”

The only way the “system worked” was because citizen activists seized the opportunity to make it work.

Not done yet

Nor has the power of democracy finished fighting the desperately wrong idea of planting coal mines in the Rockies, noted Ian Urquhart, conservation director for the Alberta Wilderness Association.

“The Grassy Mountain decision, combined with federal ... decision to subject all proposed metallurgical coal mines to federal impact assessments, delivers a one-two punch to these financially struggling companies,” said Urquhart.

“It may well knock them both out.”

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