Looking northwest, into the face of time

David McIntyre photo

David McIntyre

The view looks northwest across the Rock Creek valley toward the serrated edge of Alberta's Livingstone Range, a Crown of the Continent-featured landmark. This Oldman Watershed headwaters landscape has no meaningful protection. It remains under threat from potential strip-mining, clear-cut logging and overhead transmission lines. Any of these industrial activities, if realized, would forever scar the land's intrinsic beauty, degrade its ecological integrity and destroy its internationally acclaimed aesthetic virtue. It's this last value that's repeatedly taken the Livingstone Range to Hollywood movie stardom, and created the cachet for its appearance in a Remember to Breathe Alberta tourism video.

When my grandparents were born, the pictured landscape supported herds of buffalo.

When my parents were born, people living here saw their first automobile.

During more recent years, this landscape has emerged as Canada's supreme sailplane soaring site.

Just 14 years ago the same mountain range was discovered to be the flight path for the world's greatest concentration of migrating golden eagles. More than 5,000 of these majestic birds have soared through the pictured view during a single autumn migration.

Within the past few years, threatened pure-strain westslope cutthroat trout have been found here.

The showcased landscape is also a virtual Serengeti. It supports herds of deer, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk and moose. It's carpeted with rare rough fescue grasslands. It's home to endangered forests of limber and whitebark pine.

I've seen a wealth of wildlife—including cougars, wolves and grizzlies—within the featured view, which reveals a crossroads of land-managing jurisdictions. Here, on the eastern flanks of the Livingstone Range (public land), the MD of Pincher Creek meets the MD of Ranchland and the Municipality of Crowsnest Pass.

This landscape, today, is under more industrial threats than you can imagine. None would appear to offer any significant economic virtue, or benefit to society as a whole. Each and every one, if permitted, would degrade a geotourism product that Alberta markets internationally.

What's to become of Alberta's remaining heritage landscapes? What will my grandchildren—and yours—have as a meaningful remnant of today's drop-dead-gorgeous vistas?

What can you do to protect the last of the best of this province's heritage forests and rangelands? Some of you can buy—and preserve—vanishing viewscapes, or create conservation easements that offer protection. Most of you can support organizations and groups working to protect Alberta's remaining native grasslands and isolated pockets of headwaters integrity. 

Everyone can demand that the Gov. of Alberta save and safeguard this province's priceless heritage landscapes. Dial 310-0000 and ask the operator to connect you with Premier Prentice's office. You'll speak to a person who will record your request.

Premier Prentice said this: "If we're serious about becoming a global leader in energy, then we need to become a global leader in environmental performance. Under my leadership, we will establish Alberta as a world leader in the advancement of conservation and the protection of the environment."

Thank you, Premier Prentice. Today's the day to walk the talk.

The Livingstone Range, known to the Piikani as Piitstaistakis (Place of the Eagles), is public land that needs your help. It needs it today. Tomorrow may be too late.