No Herd Left Behind: Federal Caribou Recovery Strategy On "Collision Course with Industry," Leads to Caribou "Zoos"

This post is a part of DeSmog's investigative series: Cry Wolf.

Five years overdue in a legal sense and ten years after caribou were officially listed as 'threatened' according to the Species at Risk Act, the Canadian government has finally released its controversial Recovery Strategy for the Woodland Caribou. The report, originally released in draft form in August 2011, ignited severe public criticism for emphasizing 'predator control' options like a provincial-wide wolf cull in order to artificially support flagging caribou populations in Alberta. 

"Under strong pressure from the Canadian public, it appears the federal government has significantly improved the caribou strategy. There are much better goals of showing progress every 5 years towards a 65% undisturbed habitat target for even the most vulnerable herds. This is important for caribou in Alberta’s boreal forest, all except one of which are already in serious decline and expected to die out in the next several decades if nothing is done because of multiple pressures from oilsands, forestry and oil and gas development.

 

Instead of the draft strategy’s unacceptable preference for wolf kills, the good thing about this final strategy version is the most urgency is clearly given to landscape level planning and to habitat restoration.

Yes, it would be better if the plan’s target for populations to be self-sustaining was set at 80% probability rather than 60% probability. But given that so much of the Alberta population’s habitat is disturbed already, actually moving towards a 65% intact habitat would be significant – so for us the key issue is to call for swift implementation action, to get governments to set in motion on-the-ground actions to get us there."

"the caribou are one indicator of what's considered a failing of the environmental responsibility in the area. And I think that’s true. But I think the public on the other side has to be realistic.

 

Look, if we want to exploit this resource as a mine it's like any mine – we create an enormous hole in the ground and there’s not going to be any biodiversity there. Environmentally its doing nothing for the environment on that local scale but we as a public have to decide what is acceptable in terms of environmental things. And it might be that clean water flowing in the Athabasca is an absolute – it must be maintained. But in the same sense we can’t expect the oil sands mines to have caribou on them – they’re not going to.

 

So we have to decide in a much more realistic fashion where we want that conservation to take place and where we want exploitation of the resource to take place and that’s a public decision. The balance is somewhere in this mix and right now many people perceive the balance is shifting far too much towards the actual exploitation of the energy resource.

 

I don’t know what the right answer is but the public needs to realize you can't have this outstanding environment and an oil sands mine in the same region. So what should we demand as a public in this instance? I don’t think that dialogue has gone beyond the very trivial battle between caribou and oil sands for example. We’ve got to be much more sophisticated in those decisions it seems." 

"That's why they're looking to those very radical solutions like large fenced areas which would be a way of keeping predators and deer and moose out of caribou ranges without wolf control. It's a zoo, a huge zoo, a natural zoo. Very different from what people are currently thinking about. But this is something radical we may have to think about if we want to keep caribou where they are because other options might not work. I think we need to entertain these crazy sounding ideas to see if they hold water, not disregard them off hand," he told DeSmog.