My youngest son, Silas, grew up fishing the blue-ribbon trout streams of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.
The first time he set a fly on the narrow, crystal clear waters of the Livingstone River – a couple of hours south-west of Calgary – he knew that he had found his place. We both did.
It was a fabulous feeling to fall in love with a landscape not because I was necessarily drawn to it – though I had been since the early 1990s – but because my fourteen-year-old son was enamoured by it.
Many Albertans enjoy a special relationship with the Eastern Slopes; a range of mountains and foothills that run from the Alberta/Montana border, along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains and Foothills, north to Jasper National Park, the Wilmore Wilderness and the Kakwa Wildland.
This is where our water comes from; it’s where many of Alberta’s most iconic species – from grizzly bears to bull trout – live, and it is where we retreat with our friends and families to hunt, fish, hike, camp and paddle.
The Eastern Slopes are part of our province’s narrative. They are part of the story we tell about who we are and what we stand for.
That relationship and that narrative, however, are at risk because of the Alberta government’s reckless, ill-conceived plans to allow new open pit and mountain top removal coal mines in these watersheds along Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.
Take Action: Tell the Alberta Government to Stop Coal Mines in the Eastern Slopes
It doesn’t matter to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and Minister of Energy and Mines Brian Jean that 90% of Albertans oppose new coal mines; what matters is the procession of coal company lobbyists, including many former provincial government employees, who keep knocking at their doors to demand access to coal used for making steel in India, China and South East Asia.
In a string of haphazard decisions starting in 2020, the Alberta government has alternatively opened the Eastern Slopes for further coal exploration, reinstated the 1976 coal policy, and then, in January of 2025, reopening the Eastern Slopes for exploration and mining.
As hard as it is to believe, there is still a strong market for coal in China, Asia and elsewhere in the world. While western countries appetite for steel making coal is expected to flatten in 2025 after a record high level of consumption between 2020 and 2025, India and China’s use is forecast to continue to grow.
Unfortunately, market forces alone are not going to keep coal companies out of the Eastern Slopes of Alberta.
While alternatives to coal fired blast furnaces – including electric arc furnaces and hydrogen powered steel making – are beginning to gain traction, these technical solutions are still years from being adopted at the scale needed to sideline coal.
That means it is up to you and me to stop this. We’ll have to do it the old fashioned way: advocacy.
Take Action: Tell the Alberta Government to Stop Coal Mines in the Eastern Slopes
As Environmental Defence’s lead for the Alberta Energy Transition, it’s impossible to ignore the impact that coal has on our climate, our communities and our economy. In this special series of blog reports on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes coal industry, including how it has become deeply and profoundly corrupt, and its impact on our ability to see clear-eyed to the future of the energy transition, we’ll explore these challenges and seek out opportunities to take action.
My motivation remains simple. My son is now a young adult, and like him there are many young people in Alberta who dream about casting a dry fly on the undulating back of the Livingstone, the Oldman, the Castle, and Highwood, and the Crowsnest Rivers. My son didn’t know this country before the threat of coal mining; now it’s my goal that he gets to know the Eastern Slopes after this threat has been banished.
That’s what gets me and hundreds, even thousands of other passionate defenders of the Eastern Slopes, up in the morning. It’s why I hope you will join Environmental Defence in taking a stand against coal mining, and for wildlife, wild water, and the wild places we love.
Stay tuned for future blogs that look at the connection between coal mining and climate change, and how when water and wilderness are lost, they’re gone forever.
