Environmental impact assessments--at the federal level

Last week I used this space to draw attention to the changes to environmental assessment that we are seeing in Saskatchewan. Things are worse on the federal level, where the big projects go for approval, the stuff that can really do a lot of damage: pipeline, mines, and offshore drilling.

Here is an article published in the Globe & Mail on March 31 this year. It appears that the Tories slipped these changes into parliament, as a way of getting around a Supreme court ruling. From the G & M article:

"The decision to rework environmental assessment requirements follows a Supreme Court ruling in January, where the top court decided that the federal government violated the law by conducting only a partial review of the Red Chris copper and gold mine, located in Northern British Columbia, and not an in-depth study of all the possible environmental impacts of the project.

Under the changes in the budget, Mr. Prentice [Environment minister] will have the ability to limit the scope of assessments at his discretion, legal changes that will allow him to sidestep the Supreme Court ruling, which had been sought by the Ecojustice group."

A month later, on April 21, The Green Budget Coalition--a gathering of Canadian environmental groups, including Bird Studies Canada, Canadian Environmental Law Association, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Centre for Integral Economics, David Suzuki Foundation, Ducks Unlimited Canada, Ecojustice Canada, Environmental Defence, Équiterre, Friends of the Earth Canada, and many others--denounced the Harper government's efforts to weaken Canada's environmental protection laws. Here is a copy of their news release.

Let your MP know what you think of these changes. It is exactly this kind of pandering to industry that leads to both environmental catastrophe as we are seeing in the Gulf of Mexico and to the slow erosion of biodiversity in wild places.

The environmental assessment process is flawed to be sure, but to weaken it further will just make it that much easier for industry and commercial development to run roughshod over the last remnants of wildness we have in Canada.

Here is what you can do to voice your opposition to this dismantling of Canada's environmental protection laws: go to this web page created by Nature Canada and a coalition of concerned groups. From there you can send an email to the Prime Minister, Opposition leaders, Ministers of Finance and the Environment and their Parliamentary Secretaries, the Environment and Finance critics of all parties, and members of the Finance and Environment committees of the House of Commons.

Environmental impact assessments

While our screens and newspapers bring us the latest news from the Gulf of Mexico showing us the mess that can come from oil extraction, we find ourselves asking about environmental guidelines and impact assessment processes. If the risks with a given development--in this case, offshore oil drilling--are high, how does the project get past the Environmental Impact Assessment? How is it that we allow this kind of oil development or the tar sands in Alberta?

The sad truth is that our official environmental assessment processes are not up to the task and, even as the oil gushes forth from this Deepwater leak, the regulations are under seige from industry and being watered down even further by their allies in government.

A biologist friend who recently found himself participating in a study that was part of the Environmental Impact Assessment for a development in native grassland told me off the record that he was ashamed to say that his report and study was "bad science." The terms and parameters of the study were kept to the minimum that is required under legislation, which meant that the data was not very meaningful as a way of determining the long-term affects of the development on species at risk. Why do it then, if he knew it was a sham? His answer was that if he didn't do the work, someone else would do an even shabbier job.

At the Prairie Conservation and Endangered Species Conference in Winnipeg, I heard Brad Stelfox say from the podium that he thinks the current EIA process is "disgusting." He too called it bad science and said that typically, the studies just look "over the shoulder" to compare the effect of any proposed project to yesterday. Change over such a short time frame increment will always seem minor, but if longer studies were done, the full impact of the development would be revealed.

But if biologists and conservationists don't like the EIA process, the oil and gas industry likes it even less. To a pipeline or oil company, the EIA process is a lot of unneccessary cost and paperwork slowing them down. You can see their logic. Our projects are almost never turned down or stopped and are seldom even re-routed to any significant degree, so why make us go through all of these regulatory hoops and pay for all of these studies? Sure, we have to look like we are considering environmental impacts, but can't we speed up the process of faking it?

In Saskatchewan, the Brad Wall government has been listening. They have promised to "streamline" the existing EIA processes and introduced some legislative changes, claiming to be following a new and better, "results-based regulatory system." This might sound good, but the only place I have seen anyone praise the new regulations was in a copy of "Pipeline News," an industry tabloid put out in Estevan. Check out page 2 of the January edition.

A couple of issues later, on page A5 the paper ran an editorial titled "Some rules are for the birds," written by the editor, Mr. Zinchuk. In it he ridicules the requirements for low noise levels in a bird sanctuary where the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline is slated to run and then reminisces about the good ol' days when you could get a project up and running real fast. Near the end he complains about construction guidelines here on the prairie:

"there is a regulation limiting construction during the summer – the prime time
to be doing this sort of work. This is the regulation I came across, from a source would [sic] prefer not being named, but must work under these guidelines. 'No construction activities will occur within the migratory bird nesting period between May 1 and July 31 until such time as a bird breeding survey by a qualified avian biologist has occurred with recommendations for mitigating strategies that have been approved by Environment Canada.'

That’s ridiculous, but it makes sense when you realize that one of those major pipeline projects I worked on a decade ago, they rerouted the line around an owl’s nest and some protected grass, to a cost that was well into six figures. Now, they don’t even work at all until they figure the nests no longer have chicks in them."

Mr. Zinchuk does his best to make the regulations seem onerous, but the truth is, the pipeline or drilling facilities end up going where they want them to go most of the time, and on rare occasions when they have to move to avoid a nest site, the margins are always minimal and no one really finds out what the long term impacts are on the grassland or species at risk. The oil and gas industry is in general wreaking havoc on grassland and grassland birds by cutting up habitat with hundreds of roads, introducing invasive species that degrade the prairies, installing vertical structures that nesting birds avoid, creating ponds that incubate deadly West Nile virus-bearing mosquitoes, and bringing in noisy machines that mask the sounds of grouse and chase birds from the landscape. And all of this is being done under the current EIA system , with its supposedly stringent guidelines.

In my next posting I will talk about Stephen Harper's assault on the EIA process.

Unintended consequences of a bounty (and good news and a nasty rumour)

Photo by Rick Price

This disturbing image is from a news story about the Saskatchewan coyote bounty spilling over the border into Alberta. Saskatchewan “hunters” were going into wild places like the Cypress Hills in Alberta to shoot coyotes. After cutting off their paws to turn in for the $20 bounty, they dumped the carcasses in front of a farm near Elkwater. Read the story here.


There is some good news on the coyote bounty, though. After hearing from Nature Saskatchewan and other groups, including the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, the provincial government has introduced a new initiative to compensate farmers for damage caused by predators. This new program will pay farmers 100 per cent of the market value of livestock killed by coyotes or other predator animals. It will also pay farmers up to 80% of market value for any animal that is injured by a predator enough to require veterinary attention.

At the same time, however, I keep hearing rumours that Saskatchewan Agriculture has approved the use of the infamous 1080 poison to kill livestock predators.
It's bad enough that farmers are being encouraged to use strychnine to kill Richardson’s ground squirrels (RGS, commonly known as “gophers”). The Saskatchewan Government extended the Gopher Control Rebate Program for 2010. It provides a 50% rebate to producers and Rural Municipalities for the cost of gopher control products. The federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency has also approved the provincial government's application to extend the emergency registration of strychnine to July 31, 2010. (source: Nature Saskatchewan). Like the coyote bounty, poisoning gophers has significant unintended consequences.

At the Prairie Conservation and Endangered Species Conference in Winnipeg a few weeks ago, one of the most startling posters presenting recent research came from Alberta's Gilbert Proulx, Director of Science, Alpha Wildlife Research and Management. Here is a quote from the poster's abstract: "Although it is known that the use of indiscriminate poisons poses potential threats to wildlife, since 2008, southwest Saskatchewan farmers have used large quantities of 0.4% strychnine (acute poison available as freshly mixed and ready-to-use baits ) and chlorophacinone (anticoagulant causing fatal hemorrhages) to control ground squirrel populations. In the last 2 years, I have gathered field evidence that both strychnine and chlorophacinone efficiently controlled ground squirrels but also killed a diversity of songbirds, small mammals (mice and voles), and predators including raptors, canids, American badger (Taxidea taxus),and long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata)."

Among the non-target species found dead around the strychnine bait stations on Proulx's study sites were Horned Lark, Chestnut-collared Longspur (new to the threatened species list), Western Meadowlark, and Vesper Sparrow.

High populations of Richardson's ground squirrels (as the Sask. Agriculture website itself tentatively admits) result from bad grazing practices. Ranchers who find ways to treat their grass well don't have problems with RGS. Don't get me started on the decline of predators--including the threatened Ferruginous Hawk, which feeds its young nothing but ground squirrels, and badgers. Coyotes too, of course, eat a lot of ground squirrels, so the circle of unintended consequences goes round and round chasing its own tail.

after the burn

The prairie is greening up in the aftermath of the controlled burning we did earlier in April (see "Fire on the Prairie")This prairie crocus (anenome patens/pulsatilla patens)is standing among dozens of its kind all over the black-becoming-green surface of our upper pastures. Here is another image showing several blossoms amid bunches of grass (perhaps stipa?)now emerging.




In a few weeks, and given the right moisture, only the standing skelatons of wolf willow and other woody plants killed by the burn will show where the flames passed.

The native grass on the edge of Saskatoon's Tipperary Creek burned in an unplanned fire earlier this week on the property of Wanuskewin Heritage Park. (See CBC website story here.)No buildings were damaged, but one bridge was scorched in the coulee. However, the fire department says that "the fire caused 'significant damage' to the surrounding grassland." Can't blame the fire department spokesman for expressing what many others in this part of the world would agree with. Non-indigenous people here harbour a deep-seated animosity to the wildness in a prairie fire. That fire is probably the best thing that has happened to that grassland in decades.

The best thing that happened to me as I walked the land looking at the fire was the time to try out a new lens for my camera. All the photos for this post were taken through a Canon 100-400 (f4.5 to 5.6)zoom telephoto lens. I took some very smudgy shots of kestrels and Krider's red-tailed hawks in flight, some poorly lit and distant images of the first eastern phoebes singing by the cabins, bufflehead on the ponds, and the season's first turkey vultures.

Here are some bird photos that worked a little better--first a mourning dove I flushed from trailside:




Then a dark-eyed junco by our cabin:



And, finally, the song sparrow, back for the summer:

Odds and Ends--some things worth a look

this horned lark patiently waiting for climate change was photographed by Val Thomas who watches over things in the Weyburn area

I was interviewed recently by David Regan of the "Animals in Canada" blog. Here is a link to his posting on our discussion.

Here are a few things about birds or about grassland that caught my eye recently:

The 2010 State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change, released by the American Secretary of the Interior. Click here to go to the news release which has links to the full report. The report, put together by a consortium of bird conservation organizations, concludes that while forest birds show low level of vulnerability to climate change, grassland birds show an intermediate level of vulnerability. Here is the page with scores of vulnerability for grassland birds.

From my good friend Chris Reed, who right now is at Grassland National Park working with Greater Sage Grouse, I heard about this BBC report: "Songbirds in the US are getting smaller, and climate change is suspected as the cause."

And an item from the "Leave it Wild" folks in PEW Environment Group about the move afoot to designate 50,000 acres of public land within South Dakota's Buffalo Gap National Grassland as a wilderness area.

And, finally, here is an online version of a survey of grassland birds in Montana's Bureau of Landa Management lands. People who read my book or the wonderful "Prairie Ice" blog will perhaps recognize one of the authors--biologist and bird photographer, John Carlson. If you haven't peeked at Prairie Ice, now's a good time. John has posted some terrific photos of Sharp-tailed grouse on the lek this spring--not to mention some lovely images of sage grouse on the lek and snow geese slip-sliding in the sky in earlier posts.

American Serengeti: on TV Earth Day

courtesy of National Geographic Society website

"To the west, and as far as the eye can see, tall grass billows in the wind. Two centuries ago, Lewis and Clark were the first European-Americans to discover this land. This is prairie. It once blanketed much of the heartland of North America. Today on Americas Great Plains, few reminders of this pristine landscape survive. Now, things are changing. Through establishing and maintaining a wildlife reserve on Montanas prairies, several organizations work to restore an American Eden. Join us on this exciting journey as we capture the grand rebirth of The American Serengeti."

Ok, we will forgive them the usual misapprehension about Lewis and Clark being the first Europeans to discover the northern plains (17-year old Henry Kelsey was there in 1690 looking over the plains of what is now east-central Saskatchewan, and by 1792 Peter Fidler had wandered all over the prairie in what would become Alberta and Saskatchewan just north of where Lewis and Clark travelled, eventually setting up a fort, Chesterfield House, on the South Saskatchewan River in 1800, years before the two revered captains left Indiana to discover the west), but this should be a terrific show. It tells the story of the American Prairie Foundation's effort to create the largest wildlife reserve in the continental United States.

Should air some time on April 22, Earth Day, on the National Geographic Channel.

Here is a link with more info.

A Sprague's pipit succumbs to one of the underestimated perils of migration

photo by Tim O'Connell

Habitat loss may be responsible for most bird decline, but for direct and immediate kill, nothing compares to glass windows. This Sprague's pipit was trying to make its way north to some of the last habitat remaining on the northern plains and would have arrived here in the next few weeks to begin the breeding season. Instead, it ran into a window in Oklahoma.

Last week, on March 23, at the Noble Research Center on the campus of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Daniele Benson walked around the building to see if any birds had been killed by the large windows at the Center. She was helping out Dr. Tim O’Connell, on the faculty of the Dept. of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, who has been monitoring the building's bird kills for several months now and writing a blog about it, reporting on the casualties.

His blog posting for March 23 shows the image of the Sprague's pipit shown above and tells the story of Danielle finding it. In the intro to his blog, "Avian Window Kills," O'Connell says “it is estimated that as many as 1 billion birds die from striking windows every year in the United States. (For more information, see this report on Dr. Dan Klem’s work here.) This is more than die by cat predation, oil spills, acid rain, tower collisions, pesticides –you name it. In addition, the victims very often include fit, healthy individuals in the prime of life. These are not young birds, recently out of the nest and foolishly falling prey to a neighborhood cat.

Why the blog? We don’t talk about this issue nearly enough. Migrants face enough hazards without smacking into our windows while in the midst of a 3000-mile passage. Green certifications on new buildings and renovations need to consider bird-safe glass; designers need to understand situations of lighting and sight line that make a particular design especially deadly. We begin by acknowledging the problem.”