Editor:
I am not in favour of lying to children. As a father, mentor, artist, educator and entertainer, I believe that honesty is the best policy. Over my 13 years working with national, provincial, and charitable agencies in the Bow Valley, I have interpreted and delivered educational messages on biodiversity conservation, sustainable lifestyles, climate change action, and the natural and human histories of our area.
We are lying to children.
As you can imagine, there is some difficulty involved in delivering messages about our changing world while maintaining the positive facade that people are mitigating and adapting to these pressing issues. Internally, I cannot ignore facts which I know to be true: biodiversity has plummeted globally and locally; our current North American rate of consumption is unsustainable; climate change effects can be seen locally in waters, glaciers, plants and animals. And yet, we continue to move in the same direction with seemingly no respect for the lessons learned by past generations.
Many of the young people with whom I interact provide impressive examples of technologies currently being used around the world which could easily apply to our landscape; innovations in water conservation, sustainable building, responsible and respectful recreation and tourism, and green energies.
Meanwhile, we are lying to children; convincing them that these things aren't possible here.
Remembering my own early childhood education around how CFCs and greenhouse gases were changing Earth's climate, I recall also hearing about solar-powered cars, water recycling, and the importance of preserving our planet's natural places, flora and fauna now. That was 30 years ago, around the same time that Three Sisters Mountain Village was first being proposed here in the Bow Valley.
Once again, this idea is being proposed, only now with untested mitigations and adaptations in an attempt to make it seem like TSMV has determined “how best to plan a development.” ASPs may align with MDPs, but it all sounds like lip service given that we all know the truth: this attempt is not good enough.
It was known 30 years ago that this was not the best we could do; that this is not a sustainable place for residential, commercial, or recreational development on this scale.
Recognizing, respectfully, the age gap between myself and the majority of councillors, investors, and other decision makers in our town, I can understand if their early education did not include the same lessons as my own, and therefore these issues may not have been at the forefront of their world view since early comprehension. However, we all must know by now that the world is crying out for extreme corrective action to our past missteps.
We have to stop lying to children. We have to show that we can change course; that we can learn, even beyond the years of in-school education.
If passed, this development may not be complete for 30 plus years. It will serve as an ongoing reminder to the next generation of humans that we thought this was the best we could do.
With everything we know about the world in 2021, with all of our human advancements, mitigations and adaptations, is this really the best that we can do? In the same vein, considering all that we know about what sustainable development can be, why are we willing to settle for any less?
Tyler McClaron,
Canmore
