Life in the prairies is beautiful, but it takes a lot of hard work to help it flourish.
In a vast open landscape with high winds and little water, settlers who came here had their work cut out for them when they started farming in Alberta.
The first few years of cultivation in the early 1900s were a metaphorical goldmine.
Farmers experienced extremely high crop yields and high morale, leading to a boom of settlers moving to get in on the harvest gold rush.
Unfortunately for them, the good times didn’t last long.
Drought combined with unsustainable farming practices led to the renowned “Dust Bowl” of the 1920s and 30s.
The practice of regularly burning fields and leaving them bare every other year resulted in barren and over-plowed farmland, leaving no plants to anchor dirt to the earth. So, soil blew off fields, creating massive dust storms. More dust meant less bounty.
It was an awful time for those living here; many left entirely.
Over time, farming practices improved, the rains came back, and the Dust Bowl ended.
But today, as droughts and heat increase from our changing climate, the likelihood of “Dust Bowl 2.0” increases.
Preventative Measures
Alberta’s government actively planted “shelter beds,” lines of trees along the edges of properties, for many years to help slow winds in the prairies. But the government stopped funding this work a decade ago.
On Indigenous reserve land, the government never implemented shelter beds, leaving those lands even more bare than the rest of the province.
Now, the Siksika Nation is stepping in to change that.
In partnership with Project Forest, they plan to take “shelter beds” to the next level.
The Nation will be planting rows of native and hybridized trees adapted to the harsh conditions of the prairies.
“Siksika has tried to grow trees before and sometimes not super successfully because it’s a very challenging climate,” Mike Toffan, executive director of Project Forest, told CBC.
“We’re going to use [trees] like caragana and okanese poplar, which can grow really well in low moisture, high-temperature situations.”
In the next year, they’ll be planting over 130,000 trees; in the next five, they have plans to plant over a million of these hardy trees.
But it’s not just trees they’ll bring back.
Rewilding the Land
“There are plants that used to grow here for medicinal use that are no longer here; we have to go out to get them. There was a time when everything we needed was here,” said Eldon Weasel Child, a Blackfoot knowledge keeper.
The project hopes to create microsites for plants like Colorado blue spruce, saskatoon berries, raspberries, and other edible and medicinal indigenous herbals within the shelter beds.
The diverse shelter beds will help “rewild” the lands, returning species that haven’t flourished in the area since settlers arrived.
“It’s hard to imagine all the ways that planting one million trees over the next five years is going to transform the land, environment and people’s lives,” said Project Forest.
“It’s our most ambitious project to date, but great things are achieved by taking the first step.”
It will take a lot of teamwork and effort to make a project of this scale happen.
But it will happen, and it’s not only bringing more beautiful plant life to the prairies, it’s restoring hope.
Through collective actions, we can restore the prairie back to the abundant, diverse and resilient habitat it once was and prevent Dust Bowl 2.0!
