Oldman Watershed Council reflects on past 20 years of stewardship

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Taber Times

By Heather Cameron
Taber Times
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

During the Oldman Watershed Council’s recent 2024 Annual General Meeting, Founding Director and Vice-Chair Andy Hurly provided some reflection on the past 20 years of the Oldman Watershed Council.

“I think it’s very important these days to think about our perception of water,” said Hurly. “We all learn in grade school that seven per cent of the earth surface is covered with water. It doesn’t seem like a whole lot of water until I saw this figure. It’s actually not as much as I originally thought. It turns out that 97 per cent of that is salt water and only about two and a half percent is fresh water, and in fact, only about 0.5 per cent of that is readily accessible water. We don’t have nearly as much water as I originally perceived.”

Hurly explained that his perception of water changes depending on what he is doing.

“I realize just how much water I use in a day, and it’s a lot more than I thought,” said Hurly. “What I usually do becomes normal in my mind, and I’m surprised when I’ve changed things. People in Calgary’s perspective on water has changed radically. Very recently, we’ve been asked to cut back by about 25 per cent, and that is a hardship because everyone’s used to using water in a certain way. There are millions of people in the world who would be thrilled to have access to 50 per cent of the water that the average Calgarian or Lethbridgian uses, but what’s normal for us, we don’t want to change, and of course, we’re in our third year of a drought. Despite the fact we’ve had a little bit of rain lately, we are still in the drought, and that has huge effect on our everyday day lives. That changes our perspective on water and how we value water.”

“We have recognized the value of water in this province for a long time,” Hurly stated.

“Back in the 70’s, the government brought in plans our legislation and policy to protect water, particularly in the eastern slopes, recognizing that that’s where most of our water comes from,” said Hurly. “In 2023, Minister of the Environment Lorne Taylor brought in the Water for Life strategy and fantastic goals for the, for the Water for Life strategy. One of the best things that I think the government has done is implement the Oldman River Based Water Quality Initiative and the Olman, River Basin Advisory Committee. Many people on both of those committees came together to form the Watershed Public Advisory Committees, one of 11 in the province. That’s what the Old Man Watershed Council is here in our basin.”

The Oldman Watershed Council, Hurly stated, has had a clear vision, a healthy resilient watershed where people, wildlife and habitat thrive since very early in their development.

“The Oldman Watershed Council’s a collaborative forum for all voices working for watershed health through education, action, and stewardship,” said Hurly. “The real theme here is that this is a shared watershed. It belongs to all of us or all of us. All of us belong to our watershed, and we’re going to work together collaboratively.”

The Oldman Watershed Council’s success, Hurly said, is largely due to the people, the people that we have: the executive directors through the years, and the staff through the years, lots of volunteers doing an incredible amount of work, a board of directors who provide strategic direction to the people who do an incredible amount of work. The Oldman Watershed Council, Hurly explained, represents various stakeholders, and other groups including First Nations in the watershed. 

“We don’t agree on absolutely everything, but we interact well when we listen to each other respectfully and where possible, we form consensus before we make decisions and take action,” said Hurly. “The other thing that I think is particularly effective with the Oldman Watershed Council is that we are nonpolitical. We don’t endorse any political party and we have a very distinct policy that says that while we advocate for the Watershed, we don’t lobby for or against particular developments or projects or issues, and I think that gives us an objectivity and an independence, that has earned us the trust of various groups and individuals within the province.”

Hurly also spoke about the programs offered by the Oldman Watershed Council, which include education literacy, children’s programs, monitoring and reporting, planning and policy engagement, convening and collaborating, initiation, working together with others to accomplish goals, gotten cattle away from rivers, held weed pulls and cleanups, collected a lot of garbage, and have had many projects including biocontrol releases and bioengineering projects.

Hurly then touched upon three big projects done by the Oldman Watershed Council, beginning with the State of the Watershed Report in 2000.

“This is a very necessary thing for a Watershed Council to look at how before we decide the things that we need to do,” said Hurly. “We look at the health of things, water quality and quantity, and that gives us some information about things we might do.”

The second project Hurly touched upon was the Oldman Watershed Council’s Integrated Watershed Management Plan.

“Now that we know what our watershed looks like, how are we going to address some of the issues there?” said Hurly. “Essentially, what we wanted to do was engage and empower residents of the watershed. We brought together 34 people from all sorts of stakeholder organizations and tackled this problem. The first thing we really took on was to deal with our headwaters, and that was our Headwater Action Plan done in 2013 and 2014, and we went out to the communities and asked people what their concerns were. Everybody here lives downstream from our headwaters and relies on our headwaters, so we consulted really broadly. We engaged with First Nations, we developed a partnership advisory network with stakeholders from anyone who wanted to be involved, we had a whole bunch of meetings, we drafted a plan, and then we took that plan back to the communities to make sure that they were comfortable with the plan. I think the evidence that we put together a good plan is that we had endorsement and approval from basically all the communities that we dealt with. I think we’ve done that really successfully. What are we going to do in the future? I think to some degree, we can simply say, “Let’s keep on doing the good things that we’ve been doing in the past for our shared watershed. In terms of citizens the way we operate as a WPAC is a form of shared governance that as citizens become informed, they participate in discussions and decision making, and I think that’s a wonderful process because it gives us all a sense of ownership.”

Hurly stated that the Old Man Water Council is really in the business of vision and planning. 

“We sometimes in our society don’t do enough of this, and that leads us to a situation where if we don’t plan where we want to be, then other forces are going to move us around, and we may end up in places that we don’t want,” said Hurly. 

Hurly then provided a graphic from a recent CBC article that looks at the various volumes of water in the province.

“It’s no surprise that oil and gas is responsible for most of that water consumption, and here in the arid south, it’s not surprising that irrigation is the users of the water,” said Hurly. “If we look at the river flow in the Oldman river past Lethbridge, about 90 per cent of that comes from our headwaters, which represent only about 20 per cent of our watershed. I think one of the good things about drought is it makes us change our perspective on how valuable our headwaters are. It is in our best interest for our shared watershed to take good care and make sure that we have the best water quantity and water quality coming out of there that we can manage.”

Hurly concluded his presentation with some ideas he invited everyone in the watershed to think about for a while.

“The first is that water does not come from rivers,” said Hurly. “It comes from the land, we’re all familiar with that idea. That’s the whole idea of a watershed in the first place, and if we’re going to take care of our watershed, we need to be careful about what we’re doing on the land. The activities we have to do, we need to do carefully, so that we have good water quality and quantity. A river is more than the delivery system for water. Rivers are amazing aquatic ecosystems that do all sorts of stuff for us. Aside from just delivering water to leverage, they assimilate waste along the way in a healthy ecosystem that makes that job a lot easier. If the river is performing well, it doesn’t take as much effort to bring that water up to potable standards. That river is supporting a surrounding riparian area. Riparian areas are fantastically important to both humans, our activities, and to wildlife. The third is that perhaps we should think that water’s more than a resource to be exploited. We live in a very dynamic economy.”

“We reap the benefits of living in a dynamic economy, but sometimes we pick important things and see them as only commodity.”

“Really, there’s more to them than that.”