Editor’s Note | We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

“Why has it taken so long to realize that there are greenbacks in going green?”

by Paul Marck

The green movement’s shift from marginal to mainstream has transformed it from a novel curiosity to a major business opportunity.

Green issues used to be the exclusive domain of latter-day hippies, embraced by the unbathed back-to-the-land cartel, abetted by the Gravity-Pope-garbed tree-huggers and wispy-bearded pinkos, as Albertans of a certain persuasion might say.

In the early days of the green movement, the towering foreheads of the political and corporate landscape were sneeringly dismissive of anything more than recycling copy paper and newspapers.

About 20 years ago, there was this growing notion that people could become green at home by embracing practices like garden composting, collecting rainwater, chucking herbicides and pesticides and installing energy-efficient furnaces and appliances.

All the while, though, we continued to cap and abandon old oilwells. Our land reclamation efforts amounted to throwing grass seed onto a scarred landscape, we allowed settling ponds for contaminated water to get wider and deeper and we merrily let runoff sluice tonnes of field chemicals and manure into our rivers and watersheds.

Over the last decade, with the very public discussion of the Kyoto Protocol, that awareness of the importance of green issues started to grow. It has become clear to more than just that tiny subset of people with a fondness for spelt wheat and hemp clothing that Western society not only could but needed to make substantial, wholesale changes to the ways we deal with effluent, emissions and growing mountains of waste emanating from our industrial resource projects. Kyoto may be long dead, but thankfully its legacy has a sustainable future.

People once talked about the “Green Revolution.” In reality, it has been a long, slow evolution.

Now, as government and industry respond to growing public concerns over harmful and wasteful practices, we have come to another realization: There’s money to be made from investing in environmental stewardship. My only question is this: Why has it taken so long to realize that there are greenbacks in going green?

Earlier this past spring, I sat across the table from the president of a company that expanded operations into Alberta in the demolition, salvage and environmental remediation business . He spoke about the endless business opportunities he saw in the new regulatory environment in which the oil sands, power generation and other industrial projects will have to work, one that will require a phalanx of new professional services to achieve these green goals.

You will read more about those opportunities in this, Alberta Venture’s annual Green issue.

The Green issue also celebrates the recipients of the coveted Emerald Awards. Congratulations are in order to all of the recipients.

This issue also contains our special report on aboriginal business. We profile five aboriginal business leaders and their diverse range of businesses across the province. For Mel Benson, William Big Bull, Dale Monaghan, Marie Delorme and Nicole Robertson, theirs are remarkable stories of achievement. Also, a story by new Alberta Venture managing editor Max Fawcett examines aboriginal hiring developments in Alberta.

Those are the main courses we’re dishing up in our August edition. For dessert, and one of the most fascinating stories I have read in some time, turn to our Curb Appeal feature at the back of the magazine. There is a haunting photo of the old community hall in Chancellor. In an Alberta Venture web exclusive, 101-year-old Alberta pioneer Charlie Toogood tells writer Geoff Morgan about his early life in Chancellor, and his family’s trip across the Atlantic in the Lusitania from Britain in 1912, just before the Titanic sank.

Charlie’s life is the stuff of legend, and we are pleased to capture his story in our online edition.

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