Joe McWilliams
One good thing about the Lesser Slave Lake watershed is that it doesn’t depend on glaciers. Those things continue to shrink, up there in the mountains. If the trend continues, they’ll dwindle to nothing in a few decades.
What that means is rivers that rise in the mountains won’t have that reliable source in the warm, dry months. That has big implications for agriculture in some drier parts of this continent. They won’t be able to continue as they have been. To say nothing of similar situations on the dry side of the Andes Mountains in South America.
And let’s not even get started on what happens if the Ganges and the Indus start drying up in the summer.
But good old Lesser Slave Lake is fed by water in muskegs and lakes and springs, released slowly and constantly. Of course, the supply is not guaranteed. Nothing is. But as long as historical precipitation patterns persist, there will be enough water throughout the year. Lesser Slave will continue to do its bit to top up the Athabasca as well, even if it becomes little more than a trickle coming down from the glacier-less Rockies at some point in the future.
It is very handy, when you think about it, to have a nice big reservoir in the neighbourhood. It can be drawn on when needed, as long as we don’t take too much. Then in wetter years, it fills back up.
There are industrial demands on the water, but they are manageable, or so the authorities tell us. They also tell us not to worry about municipal waste fouling the big lake. Some people do worry about it, and predict a dismal scenario of blue-green algae bloom, during periods of hot weather. That ‘heat dome’ thing that happened in 2021 was quite the novelty, but too much of a good thing pretty soon becomes a bad thing. Heat like that will promote algae growth, and when the dreaded bloom happens, you can’t drink the lake water. What’ll we do then?
Fish don’t like warm water either. They’re not used to it. Just the other day, a biologist was talking about the 2021 heat wave probably being responsible for a fish kill in the lower McLeod River. Some fish just can’t handle those warmer water temperatures, and go belly up.
So . . . what does the future look like for the Lesser Slave Lake area, or indeed all of northern Alberta?
We’ll probably be better off in the long run than some of those drier parts of the province and continent.
But we need to look after what we have. And ‘we’ means individuals, companies, municipalities, provincial and federal governments. A healthy watershed is vital to pretty much every scenario you can imagine, however many decades you want to look into the future.
There are a lot of things we can’t control. But we can all do our bit to keep the water clean, to not aggravate erosion and not get into any extravagant, unsustainable use of water that is difficult or impossible to dial down when the going gets tough.
When the Dust Bowl hit the Prairies in the 1930s a lot of people pulled up stakes and came west and north, because the drought didn’t hit up here. Nor has it since to any great extent.
If things dry up elsewhere, people are going to come looking again, and we need to be ready for that as well.