Editorial

Trees, please

We can’t brag about our fall colours to anybody from eastern Canada, but they’re still pretty nice. The hills around Slave Lake are particularly pretty in the latter part of September.
The view from Marten Mountain, for example, is dazzling on a clear late September day. And the hills south of town can look spectacular when you’re heading down Main St.
Closer in, the ‘cemetery hill’ just south of town across the highway has been beautiful lately with the mixture of yellows and dark greens. Thanks to development, there isn’t as much of it as there used to be, and this raises a concern.
Do we want to give up our beautiful views to development?
Some of it is inevitable, we know. But some of it is not, or should not be.
If we like that hill the way it is, we should let somebody know, or we may wake up one fine day to find it’s been turned into a dirt slope with a parking lot at the top. Even now, the only thing keeping it from becoming a series of chewed-up ATV trails are the trees that grow on it.
Dirt slopes no doubt serve their purpose, but they are ugly. Even when the weeds grow up and cover them they are still ugly.
So let’s ask ourselves: do we want to give up one of the great natural assets of Slave Lake?
Perhaps it’s human nature to take such things for granted. ‘It’s always been there so it always will be.’
Wrong!
Let’s not assume the powers that be have written anything in stone about preserving this elegant backdrop to our community. Let’s make sure – if it’s not too late – that the beautiful hillsides south of town remain that way.
It’s a legacy we should not be letting slip away through ignorance or lack of vigilance.

Poets and scientists
Some scientists are like visionary poets. They see the big picture in black and white terms and prescribe what to them seem obvious and even fairly simple solutions to problems.
Caribou at risk? Stay out of the forest!
Global warming? Quit burning fossil fuels!
See? So simple. So obvious.
It’s not rocket science after all. In fact that’s exactly what Dr. David Schindler, the University of Alberta water expert, said in his address in Slave Lake last week at the Alberta Lake Management Society workshop. (See story on Page 3) “It isn’t rocket science. Leave the lake alone. The lake will fix itself.”
He might as well be John Lennon, saying ‘all you need is love’ to solve war, poverty, etcetera, etcetera.
Leave the lake alone? Let’s see, that would require shutting down all the farms, stopping all shoreline activity, a moratorium on fishing, and while we’re at it, no more logging in the watershed. For starters. How do you think that would go over?
Unfortunately or fortunately, humans are part of nature too. Leaving lakes alone, like leaving forests alone, is simply not on the agenda. The reality of trying to implement Schindler’s prescriptions is that the politics involved would be brutally complicated.
Still, there’s a role for the prophet. He or she gets people talking about the issue, at least. And although we’ll never agree with such simplistic solutions, at least we can agree improvement is possible and desirable. Then we can get on with figuring out what can be done to reduce the amount of nutrients (such as fertilizer) going into our lakes and messing them up.