Editor:
Last week, a World Wildlife Fund study revealed Earth has lost 52 per cent of its wildlife in the past 40 years.
That’s an alarming and depressing statistic that only serves to highlight the opportunity we still have in the Bow Valley to get things right. Providing enough space for wildlife to move around our developments is one of the best ways we can avoid such extinctions from happening here.
To that end, Three Sisters Mountain Village (TSMV) deserves recognition for voluntarily including a 70-metre (doubled) buffer to the cross-valley wildlife corridor in Phase III of their Stewart Creek development (approved last week). They also re-aligned this across-valley corridor so it now lines up better with the wildlife underpass beneath the Trans-Canada Highway.
We look forward to more community-minded work from TSMV as they begin to consider how they might develop lands to the east of Stewart Creek (the largest block of undeveloped private land left in the Bow Valley).
Agreeing to an along-valley wildlife corridor that isn’t too steep or too riddled with trails along the slopes of Wind Ridge will be important if the many investments this community has already made so wildlife can move without conflict between Banff National Park and Kananaskis Country are to pay off.
Nailing down the design and management of this final piece of Canmore’s wildlife corridor network must occur before any building to the east of Stewart Creek begins.
Karsten Heuer,
president, Yellowstone to Yukon
