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The Bow River, one of the most iconic and well known Canadian waterways, flows from high up in the Canadian Rockies, through Banff National Park, meanders down through Calgary and flows out on to the open prairie. It is the water source for both the City of Calgary and much of the surrounding farmland; the Bow watershed is the most densely populated in Alberta. So it’s particularly worrying that those in the Bow River Basin, not to mention the river itself, have been hit — to use an appropriately environmental metaphor — by a perfect storm of massive population growth, liberal water licensing, climate change, and a free market on the water itself.
These issues were explored by a recent episode of The Current on the CBC, but they’ve been visible by Alberta’s citizens for a while. As they tell it, the massive growth (both economically and in terms of population) Southern Alberta has experienced over the last few decades has led to larger and larger development projects, including mega malls, race tracks, and massive entertainment complexes, all of which require equally large water licenses. And until 2006, water licenses were more or less available for all, leading to situations like that of 2001, when there was more water allocated than was actually available. Thus, when the licensing was stopped in 2006, most environmentalists hailed the move as simultaneously commendable and too little, too late.
The water licensing restrictions also created Canada’s first free market for water. The people who held existing licenses started selling them to the new developers, and water — that indispensable resource— was given a price. The result, many argue, is that farmers and Albertans are priced out of the water market by casinos and shopping centers. If that wasn’t bad enough, this summer may be the driest on record- the second to make this mark in the last decade. So far, it has forced 9 counties to declare states of emergency and countless farmers to give up their crops.
Though tourists in Banff might see the river as a singular force of nature, the history of the Bow has been intensely influenced by the actions, regulations, and attitudes we can attribute to a combination of government, industry, and individual citizens. In a book by Christopher Armstrong, Matthew Evenden, and H.V. Nelles, set to release in November 2009, the history of the Bow is painted in similar strokes — not so much a geological history as a social one, illuminating the ways in which humans, both inadvertently and consciously, have interacted with nature to make the Bow. As they put it,
“Rivers have a history. They change under human intervention; they change on their own. However much a river has been used and abused, it is still very much a river, doing river things, which humans ignore or underestimate at their peril…The history of humanity along the river is so bound up with the history of the river as to make the two inseparable”.
If there’s something for us to learn about the Bow, it’s something we’ve had to learn many times: learn from how we made that history and do a better job of making the future.
For more information on the river and it’s story, check out the piece on The Current by the CBC, this report on the state of the river by ecojustice, this website on Alberta’s watersheds, the work done by the Bow River Basin Council, this article from the Globe and Mail on the drought on the Prairies, or the comments of some who have travelled the length of the Bow.
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