What We Heard: Key Drivers Affecting Alberta's Land-use

Neil MacAlpine summarizes what the Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network (ALuKN) has heard about land-use issues in the conferences it has attended in the last year. This presentation highlights land-use issues that ALuKN sees as important for Alberta.
Urban agriculture is not a fad. It is the low cost way for new farmers to enter the industry and market local food directly to the customers with the highest disposable income, Alberta's new urbanites. ALuKN has an online urban agriculture course at "Growing Insights".
Who is in charge of Alberta lakes? Municipalities with their area structure plans or the Province of Alberta? Lake management societies and Watershed Planning Advisory Committees want to know.
Hydraulic fracturing is seen as an environmental concern for many. But this is actually a decades long practice in Alberta's oil and natural gas fields. The scale of fracturing operations has increased with horizontal drilling. So what is the problem?
Rural subdivision development (acreages) is a sore point between urban and rural municipalities. In Southern Alberta, a freeze on water licences puts Calgary and irrigation districts in the drivers seat for any development. And Bragg Creek is a poster child for rural development issues (in a flood plain, forest fire risk and alluvial aquifer pollution). Compounding that is property rights to subdivide agricultural land and "Right to Farm". They are in conflict.
Foothills Research Institute has championed research that brings natural disturbance (primarily fire) back into our land management principles. We need to look at floods in Alberta's river valleys and native prairie range management from the perspective of "What would Mother Nature do?"

Alberta used to be big and wide open. It is now small and busy.