Arcadia in Peril

This little book—short enough to be read at a single sitting, small enough to fit into one’s jacket pocket—has big ambitions. It is really three essays in one: a manifesto announcing an ecologically based view of Western Canadian history, a lament for a lost community and advice on how to resist the forces of “hyper-development,” the rapid urbanization of once cosy rural mountain communities. Tying these parts together is an argument about the importance of a sense of place and identity when we confront threats to the communities we love.

Robert William Sandford is an ecological historian and an expert in regional water issues who teaches at the University of Lethbridge and lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. He is a regional patriot and, as he says of himself, he has spent “the better part of a lifetime articulating and sharing the nature, history, and culture of the Canadian Rockies.” Yet the book is suffused with a sense of frustration and deep regret, bordering at times on anger. The profound love of place that he discovered among people in the “mountain West,” a sense that he says goes deeper than mere commercial or ecological concerns, has had no clear voice. “I sometimes feel as though I have witnessed in a single lifetime the destruction of many of the elements of place and community that gave meaning and value to living in the mountain communities upon which I have … depended for my livelihood.” The question his book raises is this: is a clearly articulated understanding of why you love a place enough to stop the urban sprawl that threatens to engulf it?

Sandford begins on a positive note by claiming that the central achievement of those who settled the mountain West has not been conquering nature but preserving it. “It is not what we constructed out of the landscape that most deeply and enduringly defines us as a people,”Sandford writes.“It is…what we saved.” He is referring to the creation in 1990 of the almost 23,000-square-kilometre Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site from a string of much older national parks (Banff, Yoho, Jasper and Kootenay) and three British Columbia provincial parks (Mount Assiniboine, Humber and Mount Robson). The site includes many important historical, archaeological and geological areas, and has a resident population of over 20,000 who derive their livelihood from its attractions.

Despite some memorable observations—he calls the mountains “water towers of the entire West,” and points out that discoveries in the Burgess Shale site, with its many well-preserved fossils from prehistoric times, has enabled paleo-biologists to pinpoint, on a long evolutionary scale, the emergence of sighted creatures—his assertion that “no other country in the world has been able to achieve what we have done by this remarkable restoration” slips into hyperbole. The Adirondack National Forest in upstate New York, created well over a century ago, is just as large, and was a product of the same wave of 19th-century eco-thinking, inspired by people such as Sierra Club founder John Muir, that gave rise to Banff National Park.

Sandford’s enthusiasm about the preservation of water sources for the West is curiously untempered by any reference to the climate change that is melting the glaciers that feed the rivers that water the prairies. The challenges of global warming are so daunting that protected natural habitats, even ones as large as the Rocky Mountain site, can scarcely mitigate the damage wrought elsewhere. In Alberta’s ecological balance sheet, it may well be that what the mountains give, the Alberta tar sands—with their massive output of greenhouse gases—take away.

But Sandford’s eye is fixed on a single goal. Calling on authors as diverse as philosopher Wendell Barry, memoirist T.E. Lawrence, novelist Wallace Stegner and science fiction writer Michael Crichton (author inter alia of the dino-thriller Jurassic Park), he argues that a sense of belonging to a specific place is the key to preserving one’s identity and, ultimately, one’s culture. Yet in our complex and mobile world, most people’s understanding of who they are, although it may be anchored in a physical home, tends to evolve into a more richly complex, layered sense of identity. Sandford’s grasp of identity is more mystical, more archaic, more utopian. “The most enduring communities,” he writes, “are those in which the identity of the self and the character of the community became indistinguishable from the nature of the land and the fabric of life that supports the uniqueness of this place.”

Yet Sandford must know, from the evidence of his own experience, that enduring communities are the stuff of myth, not of real human history, where the only constant is change. The prime exhibit is his own home town, which he never names, not even in his brief author bio. It is an odd decision that seriously weakens his case: I had to Google Sandford to discover that he lives in Canmore, and the anonymous town whose travails he outlines sounds exactly like Canmore. When Sandford moved there about 30 years ago, Canmore had only recently abandoned the coal mining that was the town’s primary industry, and it was presumably faced with the bleak prospect of either becoming a ghost town or finding some other means of livelihood. The town chose, as many others have, to parlay its prime location—in this case in the foothills of the Rockies—into a four-season tourist destination. Over time, the population has mushroomed from about 3,000 when Sandford arrived to its current 12,000 permanent residents, with an additional 5,000 or so part-time residents—the “weekenders” of Sandford’s title.

His account of the transformation of a mining community into a brash and sprawling modern town is cast, perhaps unintentionally, as a classic Arcadian myth. When the town was small, the people were in touch with nature and each other, their very identities intrinsically embedded in the life of the community and its history. There were no traffic lights, no rush hours, no malls or parking problems, no exclusive life-style suburbs, no tourists. Then came along the interlopers lured from the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of this world by the natural beauties and amenities of the town, bringing with them inappropriate, insensitive urban ways. In collusion with the Devil incarnate—the real estate developer—local politicians aided and abetted the trend, and turned a piece of Paradise into a parking lot, a place the original inhabitants no longer recognize as home. Suburban tracts occupied by fractional owners or part-time residents often stand virtually empty for most of the year, preventing, Sandford argues, the emergence of a new community in place of the old. In this I agree with Sandford: some of the new forms of ownership are detrimental to an established community, quite apart from their tendency to drive up real estate prices and property taxes. I am less sure about his claim that “when a mountain town approaches 40 percent part-time residency, the sense of community begins to implode.” According to current figures, Canmore is approaching 30 percent.

The problems Sandford outlines are real enough, and common to almost every community that has opted for growth over stagnation. It is hard to see how a town like Canmore could have gone any other way, although Sandford argues that it could have proceeded more slowly, adopting policies to encourage a more organic growth of the town’s potential. But because he does not name the town, it is hard for him to specify, or for his readers to imagine, what those policies might have been.

That is a pity, because Canmore is typical. I live near Collingwood, Ontario, which has undergone a similar transformation: from a shipbuilding town where the giant Great Lake freighters were once built to a town whose prosperity is based on a highly developed four-season tourist industry, combined with a massive influx of retirees and weekenders, mostly from the Greater Toronto Area. I was a weekender once, too, and I am now a full- time resident, but in making the transition, I did not notice any radical transformation in how I felt about the place, or how neighbours whose families have been here since the early 19th century felt about me. Of course, my attachment to the place can never be as deep and complex as theirs: to use Sandford’s language, my identity is not inextricably intertwined with the area. But when it comes to resisting bad development, I don’t think that matters as much as other factors, such as one’s more immediate, here-and-now experience of a place, concrete ideas about the differences between good and bad development, an understanding of how developers operate and a knowledge of the legal and political tools available to ordinary citizens who decide to become involved in the planning process. Newer arrivals can be more savvy in this regard than long-time residents who, as Sandford admits, are often slow to perceive a threat to their community. They may also have ties of family and friendship to others in the community who directly benefit from hyperdevelopment.

This is where Sandford’s book ultimately fails to deliver on its promise. The reason why so many bad real estate developments get built is not because people are not articulate enough about their love of where they live, but because the system of land-use planning—the foundation of every development scheme—is so complex that inspired amateurs who might make a difference rarely understand how it works. Moreover, in most jurisdictions, the deck is stacked against ad hoc citizens’ groups who oppose hyper-development. All three levels of government—municipal, county and provincial—tend by their very nature to be pro-development, and arguments that a given development will ruin the character of the community or degrade the environment are notoriously hard to prove before the tribunals, like the Ontario Municipal Board, which often end up adjudicating disputes among citizens, municipalities and developers who have learned to cloak themselves in green.

Moreover, such disputes typically end up as long-winded arguments about highly technical matters like sewage disposal or infrastructure shortfalls or environmental assessments, and few citizens’ groups, if any, can match the legal and technical and public relations expertise that developers routinely deploy to get their way. Developers are also generally richer, more sophisticated and better connected than the municipalities they seek concessions from, and they can overwhelm under-staffed municipal planning offices with carefully crafted technical studies, frequently offering to pay for infrastructure improvements, the cost of which would otherwise make a local council balk at granting approval. Ultimately, they can threaten to take any dispute to a higher tribunal—a move that cash-poor councils try to avoid.

An even more disturbing trend—certainly in British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario, to name just three jurisdictions—is for developers to hit their most vocal opponents with huge defamation suits or costs applications, causing them great anguish and expense, and scaring off other potential opposition. Such legal actions, dubbed “Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation”— or SLAPP suits for short—have been curtailed via legislation in many states in the U.S., but so far no attempt by any provincial legislature to limit them has yet succeeded in Canada.

The battleground on which future development struggles will be fought—struggles to protect the places, natural and human, that we love from destructive development—is an immensely complex one, and the weaponry required to oppose bad development is sophisticated and expensive. It requires the articulation of a coherent vision, intelligent battle plans and realistic aims. It requires the creation of alliances among citizens’ groups with the ability to mount powerful public relations campaigns, to lobby politicians and to build war chests to fund the inevitable battles. A powerful sense of place—however well articulated—is no more, and no less, than a point of departure. It is one of many reasons for joining battle, but it is not enough, in itself, to win the wars.