Corb Lund: The Reluctant Activist

January 19, 2026

Corb Lund delivering a speech during our awards night. Photo © C. Hunter

By Lindsey Wallis, AWA Adventures for Wilderness Coordinator

Read the PDF version here.

This year’s Wilderness Defender continues the ongoing fight to keep Southern Alberta’s headwaters free of coal

Corb Lund has been making music on stages around the world for 30-some years. He cut his teeth with a metal band called The Smalls before returning to his western roots and making a name for himself at home and internationally with his band the Hurtin’ Albertans.

But for the last five years, he has been making a name for himself on a different stage. At Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) hearings, in news stories, and at benefit concerts, Lund has raised his voice to denounce coal mining in Southern Alberta. He never envisioned himself standing up against giant foreign corporations, fighting to protect the water running through the Southern Alberta landscape he calls home.

“I don’t view myself as [an advocate] or aspire to be one, I just didn’t want them to ruin the water that I drink,” Lund says wryly. “I hate it kind of. Everyone lies constantly about [coal mining]. I have way too much other work to be doing. I want to be playing music more. I’ve spent 40 percent of my time on this bull****.”

But when the call for help came from friends and neighbours, he stepped up. “I didn’t really think it through that deeply, I just thought it was a terrible idea and started talking about it,” Lund says. “My mom drinks the water, my animals drink the water, I drink the water from the Oldman.”

Something that has always been clear in his music is the sincere connection Lund has to these landscapes. His youth was deeply rooted in Southern Alberta and ranching life, and these themes have always seeped into his songs. From howling Chinook winds to brash young cowpokes, his music often evokes a way of life and the land it is lived on. “There Are No Roads Here” paints an evocative picture of the stark prairie landscape, while “Little Foothills Heaven” brings us sunny days on windswept ridges of the Eastern Slopes. “The Truth Comes Out,” written a decade ago, is as relevant as ever. A brooding piece of cowboy poetry, the song ruminates on the struggles and changes to ranching life, as does the heartbreaking narrative of “S Lazy H.”

In the family since the early 1900s, the family ranch was where Lund spent a lot of time as a kid. “My grandpa impressed upon me from a really early age the importance of land health and soil health and grass and water,” he says. “To me, it’s synonymous with living here. I don’t get the feeling that a lot of the politicians making the decisions about coal have a visceral connection to the places we’re talking about. They pretend, but they don’t.”

And that is why, as the Alberta government clandestinely rescinded the 1976 Coal Policy on a Friday afternoon in 2020, and coal development projects such as Cabin Ridge, Tent Mountain, and Grassy Mountain ramped up, Lund decided to jump into the fray. Though he doesn’t oppose resource extraction (“We humans have been using resources ever since we started using the hides from animals.”), he couldn’t abide the Cabin Ridge project and other projects proposed for Southern Alberta, which threatened the headwaters of the Oldman River and the lands of his neighbours. Lund says of Grassy Mountain, “This particular project is just a bad idea. You have to look at every project on its own merit, and this project, on the scale of pros and cons and risk and reward, it’s off the charts bad.”

Lund says that until the coal issue, he never spoke out about environmental issues because he doesn’t necessarily believe all art should speak to current events. But sometimes there comes a moment when we are forced to stand for something we believe in, and coal was that issue for Lund. “This was just in my backyard and affects me and my family and friends and a lot of people who I like, so it seemed important,” he says.

And so, his art began to reflect hot-button issues. “This is My Prairie” was originally written as a piece of fiction, but in 2021 Lund changed a few lyrics and re-recorded it with other big-name Alberta country stars to raise awareness for the anti-coal campaign. Its new version became an anthem for the anti-coal movement. The lyrics “they can drill and they can mine o’er my mouldering bones,” are both heart-wrenching and a call to action. At this point, the poisoned water and dead cattle he sings of may well be a portent of the future for many ranching families if our current government continues allowing coal development throughout the province.

Lund is using his musical talents and name recognition to spread the message and bring people together around the issue of coal. There was a protest concert with local landowners near the proposed Cabin Ridge mine site. Then there was Coal Chilla Couch Fest, a virtual fundraising concert in the midst of COVID-19, organized with the assistance of AWA and the Livingstone Landowners Group, which featured Lund alongside other well-known Alberta conservationists like Sid Marty, Kevin Van Tighem, and John Wort Hannam. Most recently, Lund joined a long list of Alberta musicians onstage in Fort Macleod who spoke and played to a packed house. In the audience, there were puffy down jackets, alongside cowboy hats, next to suit jackets. Someone in the crowd was sporting the Lonefighters Society insignia, a group reborn from the Peigan Nation that opposed the Oldman dam some 40 years ago.

And that is the magic that Lund has brought to the Alberta anti-coal movement.

As a rural Albertan with a family ranching background and ‘horse-cred,’ so to speak, and who is vocally apolitical, Lund has been instrumental in bringing a broad cross-section of people together, to sing in unison from the same song sheet to oppose coal mining in Southern Alberta. “The more people that don’t want it, the better the chances are,” he says. “When [the government’s] own supporters give them grief, it resonates more. It’s important to have a wide group of people yelling at them, not just people who they view as ‘the other side’.” In his estimation, the people who really pushed the government to finally reverse course on the removal of the 1976 Coal Policy were the conservative voters — farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen who didn’t want the water flowing from the Eastern Slopes compromised.

Speaking of being apolitical, it’s not just that Lund doesn’t want to get involved, but that he finds politics and most politicians odious — to put it nicely. “I don’t like politics at all,” he says. “The worst thing is it’s really shaken my opinion of government. And I don’t just mean this government, I mean government, period. The incompetence and blatant dishonesty that I’ve run into over and over is really shocking. And they’re all liars. They just lie.”

While there is a lot to be disillusioned about, Lund sees glimmers of hope from many of the people he has met over the last five years. “It’s been heartening to see that people care about this stuff,” he says. “I appreciate the gesture of the award, but I’m doing this part-time, and I’m mostly just a mouthpiece, because I have a platform. There are a lot of people who have been trying to keep the water clean for their whole careers and they toil away in the dark mostly, and those people are really impressive.”

Corb’s Wilderness Defender award. Photo © C. Hunter

Through talking to people from across the spectrum, Lund has learned a lot about coal over the course of the last five years. He has been particularly impressed by some of the technical experts who were able to drill down to the crux of the issues and who allowed him and others to refine their anti-coal messages. “I didn’t know s*** about coal when I started this, and I didn’t even talk about it for a couple of months because I don’t feel comfortable speaking about issues unless I really understand them,” he says. “It’s great to have people in the streets screaming “No coal, no coal” — we need that, but it’s really useful to talk to someone who’s been a coal engineer and can tell you the parts that are actually bad and actually not so bad.”

One major issue that has been brought forward, making the coal pill even harder to swallow, is the fact that the coal at Grassy may not even be usable. One expert who spoke at a Fort Macleod coal town hall was Cornelis Kolijn, who knows the coal at Grassy intimately from his work with mining company Teck Resources, and was unflinching in his description of the coal there as “s*** coal.”

As we talk about Kolijn and his assessment, Lund gets fired up. Exasperated, he says, “If the coal is sub-par, what are we doing this for? It was already a bad idea, but when the coal isn’t even useful for metallurgical purposes, what the f*** are we doing? This is nothing but a big hustle. Our water hangs in the balance so some hustlers from Australia can make some quick money.”

As our conversation continues, Lund’s mood swings back and forth, from pessimism to optimism that coal can be a unifying issue for Albertans to get behind.

“It’s been kind of a rollercoaster over the last five years,” Lund says. “Sometimes I thought we had them on the run — we delayed them, certainly. But other times it feels inevitable and it kind of feels like we’re not living in a democracy. The tactic the other side is using is to drag it out. And people have ten other things — a job, and hockey practice, and they’re exhausted, while [the coal companies] are just grinding away in the background.”

For Lund, the best outcome in terms of the coal strategy is to create an educated public that makes coal a non-starter in Alberta. “It’s beyond party lines,” he says. “It should just be that the public sentiment is such that any politician knows you just don’t mess with coal in Alberta — that’s a third rail and will just get you kicked out of the room. It just has to become part of the cultural fabric, that’s the ideal goal.”

While many folks have tried to pull him into other issues, Lund maintains that he needs to keep his focus narrow. “I’m not a very good blanket advocate for anyone. That’s why I only talk about coal, because as soon as you start opening your mouth about other issues, you start losing people, and I’m just trying to fix one thing.” By keeping his focus only on coal, he hopes to connect with people across multiple lines. Lund thinks that this is a winnable issue because people across the political spectrum dislike the idea of coal, especially as it threatens our water. “The pointier and narrower the issue, the better chance you have of piercing the veil into success. That’s the basis I’ve been operating on so far,” he says.

Lund believes there should be no new mines or expansions of mines in the Eastern Slopes and is concerned that other mines would be emboldened to submit applications if Northback Holdings Corporation has a successful application to mine at Grassy Mountain. (Currently Northback only has an exploration permit.) “Grassy is the canary in the coal mine, the bellwether. If it goes then all is lost. It’s the foot in the door,” Lund says.

Near the end of our conversation, the topic shifts to Ian Tyson, another salt-of-the-earth cowboy who did his part to stand up for an issue that mattered to him during the Oldman dam protests of the late 1980s. Lund toured with Tyson and they became good friends, with Lund penning his album El Viejo to pay homage to this legend of the Alberta music industry after his passing. Tyson was known to be a bit of a curmudgeon, which amused Lund. He lets out a short laugh as he reminisces. “He actually told me not to bother with the coal thing because you’re never going to win. He might be right. But I mean, you got to try.”

And I suppose that is the best that we can all strive for — to try. To each find our corner, our issue that speaks to us, and stand up for what matters to us in our own backyards. Because otherwise, when the water is poison and the calves are all dead, what will we tell our grandchildren that we did?