A recently released video shows a dirt biker riding the crest of the Livingstone Range.
I wonder this: What would allow anyone to believe the showcased activity showed any virtue, value, or benefit to society?
I watched the video to its conclusion, but found it so disturbing I had to force myself to sit through it. The process took two sittings.
If "this" is legal, moral and ethical, what isn't?
I think the thing that's most amazing is that a person can post something of this nature, not face serious charges and, instead, be admired and lauded by a cast of active, vocal supporters.
Unseen in the posted video, but present in the real world, is a vast network of trenches that ATV riders and dirt bikers have carved up the sides of southwestern AB's mountains in order to high-mark and/or reach an ever-growing number of summits. Some of these trenches are waist-deep. They form prodigious erosional channels.
It's my belief, based on earlier assessments of the costs associated with landscape restoration, that, today, society would need to invest more than one-billion dollars to restore the "wreckreationally" ravaged landscapes of the upper Oldman Watershed. We might look at this as the added price required to cover the true costs associated with the past twenty years, a time when management practices failed to meet public need in a catastrophic and wholesale way. Within this picture, I suggest that the cost of a dirt bike, or ATV, pales in comparison to the watershed and floral destruction it can create in a single afternoon.
Ironically, I was writing about prehistoric vision quest sites on the Livingstone Range when I was exposed to the video featuring the dirt-biker on the crest of the range, the rider riding within the same—vision quest—viewscape I was describing.
What's crystal clear is that we, as a society, don't speak the same language when it comes to values, but, strangely and incongruously, here in AB we have embraced—history reveals this—everyone's right to his/her chosen recreational pursuit, even if it is a direct affront to someone else's spirituality, even if it degrades society's heritage landscapes and cripples the land's ability to deliver its intrinsic wealth of natural capital.
The South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP) is likely to be released within the near future. When last seen, the plan, while claiming to deliver protection to the Livingstone Range, offered, via a lack of meaningful management, a virtual embrace of dirt-biking along the crest of the range. This activity would appear to be the pinnacle of high adventure and good-old-boy, Alberta-style fun … achieved at the expense of society as a whole.
If the released SSRP mirrors the draft, the GoA should post the dirt-biker video as its image-defining poster child.
The Livingstone Range: it's a magical place where dirt bikers, ATV enthusiasts, vision-questers and eagle-watchers meet and hold hands in a muddy, tire-chewed portrait of picture-perfect, land-use harmony … Alberta style.
Thanks, everyone, for such great interest in this posting - and also to David McIntyre, our star blogger, who always discovers something interesting to teach and share about our beautiful watershed.
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