World Wildlife Fund has just warned of a 58 per cent decline in vertebrate wildlife since 1970. That's the year we bought our property north of Cochrane, then a village of 2000, where western toads and badgers were common and Bighill Creek had fishable trout. Forty-six years later, Cochrane is 25,000 and not a toad or badger in sight. Nor is the end of development in sight, in fact current proposals in and near Cochrane will double that population as fast as developers can act. Rocky View County, known for its rubber-stamping of development, is poised to approve the 7,600 acre Glenbow Ranch for 14,000 and the Urbanstar Glendale developments on another 600 acres just east of Cochrane, as well as Cochrane North for about 2,500 seeking the country lifestyle. The two developments along Highway 1A will hem in that roadway, already known as Alberta's wildlife slaughterhouse. Within Cochrane, Burnswest will invite in another 750 new ruralites. Unoccupied lands just west of the 1A to Highway 22 intersection have finally been released for development and Heritage Hills is cramming in even more people. Once Spray Lakes Sawmills is squeezed out, another large area will soon house even more. The new RVC developments are designed to be ecologically benign however, as they will be clustered, with green spaces left in between. Of course there has been no overall planning as to how these green spaces will accommodate displaced biodiversity or wildlife movement corridors between the Bow Valley and Bighill Creek to the north, two very rare natural corridors still existing within RVC. No plans exist for highway under or overpasses to accommodate wildlife - RVC would not want to burden developers unnecessarily. In time, the little Bow River with its receding glaciers will be a limiting factor. But first, it is conceivable that roadway and intersection congestion could just cement us into an immovable mass, blocking the westward flow of people and development. Long-term planning? In Alberta, that idea has always been treated as suspicious, if not as smacking of insurrection. In RVC we sometimes make a fuss over growth plans, plans to protect food-producing land, area structure plans, even once a plan for green spaces, but in the end they all prove quite ignorable, even disposable. Vivian Pharis
