Landfills are the top environmental issue in Alberta, says St. Albert’s latest provincial environment minister, and compost is the best way to shrink them.
Newly minted provincial cabinet minister Maya Gilchrist, 10, made the announcement at a press conference at her Lacombe Park home Wednesday. Gilchrist was one of 12 Alberta elementary students to win Alberta Environment’s annual Minister for the Day contest.
The contest asked students to answer a series of questions about biodiversity, said Gilchrist, a Grade 5 student at Ă©cole Father Jan.
Winners got to tour the provincial Legislature Thursday, where they met Environment Minister Diana McQueen and debated a bill proposing that all Alberta students have waste-free lunches.
Gilchrist said she enjoys watching animals in their natural habitat, and recently found a nest of duck eggs in her neighbourhood. She also recycles, composts, and participates in neighbourhood cleanups.
A healthy environment is very important for Alberta, Gilchrist said. “If we didn’t have trees and plants and things, we wouldn’t be able to breathe.” Animals, such as the rabbits and merlins in her neighbourhood, are also important players in local food webs, which can be disrupted if they go extinct.
Landfills and solid waste production were the biggest environmental concerns in Alberta, she said. “Landfills take up lots of space,” she said, and most of the stuff in them is compostable material. If all Albertans composted their food scraps instead of junking them, we could do much to shrink the size of our landfills.
As environment minister for the day, Gilchrist said she would push the province to encourage reforestation, with an emphasis on planting fast-growing trees, harvestable trees to lessen the need to chop down old growth forests.
The contest was part of Canada’s Environment Week.
St. Albert will get the warmth it deserves this summer after its recent long, cold winter, says an Environment Canada climatologist.
Environment Canada published its latest three-month forecast on May 31 for June, July and August. The forecast predicts above average temperatures for most of northern Alberta and the Edmonton region, as well as below normal amounts of precipitation.
People in the Prairies certainly deserve a warm summer after their long winter and late thaw, said David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada. “The situation really turned around in May,” he says, where Edmonton was about two to three degrees warmer than usual. “There were even a couple of days where it got above 30.”
Government models suggest that Edmonton will likely be about a degree warmer on average over the next few months, Phillips said. “It may be somewhat like last year,” he says, as Edmonton is right on the “warmer/same as last year” line on the forecast map.
Models aren’t yet advanced enough to accurately predict precipitation, he continued, but it looks like Edmonton might be near normal rain-wise this summer, with northern Alberta a little below normal. “That immediately tells me there might be forest fire issues,” he said, which could affect air quality.
This year’s slow thaw spared Alberta from the floods that have soaked Saskatchewan, he continued. “You almost got maple syrup weather: warm days and cool nights.” It also built up moisture reserves, leaving farms well positioned to weather droughts.
Forecasts can be found at weather.gc.ca/saisons.
