Personal Essay: Writing 60 letters to the Alberta government
December 8, 2025
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At one level, I have enjoyed sharpening my writing and research skills, especially the former. At another level, it has been deeply depressing.
Editorial Note: Former journalist Susan Scott takes up Alberta Wilderness Association’s 2025 What’s Your 60 challenge by writing 60 letters to the government. Here’s how it’s going so far.
Read the PDF version here.
Taking on the Alberta Wilderness Association’s What’s Your 60 challenge has been like entering an unending house of horrors.
I decided to write 60 letters to the provincial government about environmental matters. I knew things were bad, but it’s been an eye-opener discovering how bad things are.
Having worked at a Calgary newspaper until 2000, I was glad to have a self-imposed writing assignment. Between that time and the present, most of my work has been about marginalized women in Canada; therefore, turning to environmental matters was an interesting challenge.
Figuring that no minister would ever deign to read my letters, I did and do hope, that underlings might see them and rethink their beliefs. To this end, I wanted the missives to be accurate and, if possible, arresting. Consequently, one of my first ones asked the premier to explain why a coal mine is more aesthetically pleasing than a wind turbine. That was it.
Letter 12 asked the Energy Minister and the Minister of Environment whether they had ever tried to subtract $278,000 from $8,000,000,000. The smaller sum is the paltry amount Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. was fined when more than 400 migratory birds nested on an island in a toxic “pond” at the Horizon oil sands last year. The birds died as a result. CNRL’s reported net income for 2023 was $8.2 billion. The fine would have been as much of a problem to CNRL as a gnat on an elephant. In the case of the Forestry and Parks Minister’s terrible idea of creating hunting enclosures for elk, I wrote that cash cows are well established, but cash deer? The Alberta advantage, you say.
At one level, I have enjoyed sharpening my writing and research skills, especially the former. At another level, it has been deeply depressing. Why, for instance, cannot Brian Jean understand that we do not have and may never have the technology to keep selenium from seeping out of coal mines? Why would Premier Danielle Smith fly, at our expense, to speak to a fundraiser for Prager U, an unaccredited institution masquerading as a university whose website is rife with climate change deniers? Or, why does Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides think it is okay for school environmental materials to be funded by oil and gas?
Then there is the toothless Alberta Energy Regulator, which has an executive staff made up almost entirely of former oil and gas industry representatives. It would be a joke if the consequences weren’t so serious. There is no hint of impartiality and no attempt to disguise the bias. I suppose that’s honest, but have they no shame? Silly question.
I have managed to send emails to a variety of cabinet ministers including Nicolaides, Devin Dreeshen on his nutty idea of closing down bike lanes, and Agriculture Minister R.J. Sigurdson about selenium affecting farming and ranching in Southern Alberta. The bulk has gone to Danielle Smith, Brian Jean, Todd Loewen and Rebecca Schulz. The last I refer to in private as the minister of unbridled development. A few letters have had formulaic responses that I’m sure have gone to many others, and usually they miss the point of my letters.
Then I was able to rejig Letter 43 on Smith’s complete volte face on selenium into a letter to the editor of the Calgary Herald, which was subsequently published. Two for the price of one.
It is, however, puzzling why politicians aren’t worried about the kind of future that their grandchildren and children will inherit. To this end, I shall continue writing letters when the 60 are complete because I don’t want to think I sat idly by witnessing the pillage of Alberta. Idleness would make me complicit, I think.
So many creatures like wolverines and grizzlies are being set up as easy prey for hunters, and others like caribou and trout will be the victims of foreign-owned extraction operations. In the past settlers have done woeful things to Indigenous peoples and now Alberta’s First Peoples are chalking up another grievous harm — the loss of their natural resources and their hunting grounds in our race to deplete the earth and to sell our souls, not for 10 pieces of silver but for 10 lumps of coal or 10 drops of oil. For example, Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro recently said his people are no longer able to drink from the rivers and lakes downstream from the Alberta Tar Sands. This, I think, is completely shameful.
Have I learned a lot about the environment during this process? Yes. Has it been enjoyable? Sometimes. Would I do it again? Absolutely.
When my granddaughter was four years old, I found her prostrate on the sidewalk with her arms spread-eagled. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Hugging the earth because the earth loves me and I love the earth,” she said. I persuaded her that hugging trees would send her love via their roots deeper into the ground and would be more effective (not to mention cleaner) than the pavement.
Now six years old, she has a better handle than our government on what’s important and what to cherish. We should all want to leave a well-loved earth for whoever comes next, and to this end I quote Martin Luther King who urged marchers at the Lincoln Memorial to have “the fierce urgency of Now.” Or it may be too late.