Louisa Wilcox at NRDC and her Environmental allies are petitioning 87 Lumber Retailers in Southwest Alberta, Canada to stop selling SPRAY LAKES SAWMILLS WOOD until the Regional Government comes up with a sustainable Forestry plan for what is known as the CASTLE AREA, located adjacent to Waterton Park..............Alberta delared Grizzlies as "Threatened" a year ago but has turned right around and allowed extensive clear-cutting in the Bears core habitat to continue.........Not something that is going to get the Bears off the "Threatened List"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Borders and Bears: Shared Threats, Shared Futures

Today I was again reminded of the fact that grizzly bears don't carry passports, and what happens when bears in the US make the innocent mistake of crossing the border into Canada.

Simply put, many grizzlies die because of the heavy industrialization, caused by logging, road-building, oil and gas development and off road vehicle use, near Waterton/Glacier parks in Alberta. Grizzly bears, one of the most sensitive indicator species of the ecosystems where they hang on, deserve better.

The Castle area north of Waterton Park, now slated for more logging, does not need to be a bear sacrifice zone -- it needs to be a sanctuary.  It has long warranted designation as a Wildland Park.

My colleagues in Alberta, including Sierra Club Canada, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and Alberta Wilderness Association, NRDC announced a market campaign against clear-cut logging in the Castle, a key refuge for grizzly bears in an increasingly fragmented landscape.

Eighty-seven lumber retailers in southwest Alberta have received letters asking them to decline selling Spray Lakes Sawmills wood until the Castle area is off the chopping block and habitat protections in the Crownest Forest have been improved. Conservationists are asking, once again, for this special landscape to be preserved rather than degraded.

Just last year, NRDC and Canadian colleagues issued a report A Grizzly Challenge: Ensuring a Future for Alberta's Threatened Grizzlies that resulted in an announcement, four days later, by the Alberta government that grizzly bears would be listed as threatened under the Alberta Wildlife Act, due to excessive human-caused mortalities and habitat loss.

Today, the province is allowing more critical habitat for the threatened bear to be destroyed, making a mockery of the Alberta Wildlife Act and undermining grizzly recovery efforts south of the border in the US. 

The purchasers of Alberta wood products now have the choice of voting with their wallets about whether they support the path of a government that never saw a timber sale it didn't like. Grizzlies, without votes or passports, have us to depend on as they emerge from their dens after a long winter's sleep. Will we rise to the occasion and give them room, or further hem them into smaller and smaller corners?

Time will tell whether grizzlies in southwest Alberta will remain a habitat sink for US bears, or whether we will work together to achieve a shared vision for recovery of bear populations that we and Canada are jointly responsible for.In the meantime, keep an eye out for Spray Lakes Sawmills wood and, for the Great Bear's sake, don't buy it.