Editor:
How many more buildings and people can fit into our narrow, ecologically-sensitive mountain valley before causing serious environmental damage?
Specifically, how much more development can occur at Three Sisters before we risk killing the goose that laid the golden egg, our montane mountain environment that, among other things, currently sustains a rich diversity of wildlife, some that usually become locally extinct as human settlements grow too large (wolves, lynx, grizzly bears, wolverines)?
In scientific terms, what is our carrying capacity? That is, what is the number of people our local ecosystem can support without significant negative impacts occurring? At the Town’s Sustainability Screening Hearing on March 14 regarding the massive Three Sisters Project, I was hoping to get an answer to this but did not. But for true sustainability, such an answer is important.
A simple test for sustainability is this: does the proposal improve the well-being of people in our community, socially and economically, while at the same reducing the risk to our environment?
I believe the Three Sisters project does not. It greatly increases environmental risk and in fact has potential to decrease overall well-being in our community too (for example, it would add roughly 11,000 more cars to our streets; see tinyurl.com/bnp39ma for details). Viewed through the sustainability lens, the Three Sisters proposal currently looks pretty awful (council disagreed and voted in favour of it).
The proposed project is the largest single resort-residential project ever in the Canadian Rockies, and could on a daily basis add roughly between 10,000 and 20,000 people (residents and visitors combined) to the Canmore area. Placing so much development in a fragile ecosystem such as ours has never been done. Therefore, it can only be viewed as a very risky experiment.
So, how can environmental risk be reduced to a more acceptable level?
I believe further reducing the size and footprint of the proposed development would go far in this respect. Specifically, by keeping development well back (600 metres) from the steep mountain walls below Wind Ridge at Site 7, hence allowing wildlife the best chance to move through, and by retaining the unfinished golf course as a buffer, as originally planned, would help reduce some of the serious risks associated with trying to cram too many buildings and too many people onto ecologically sensitive lands.
Jacob Herrero,
Canmore
