The punchline is that they said no.

Maybe by now the rejection of proposals to preserve bitumen belt forests sounds like no big deal – just the latest government rebuff of “halt-the-oil-sands” demands. But the latest turn of the cycle of request and refusal was no storm in a teacup.

The recommendation came from a blue-chip coalition of industry leaders, government agencies, environmental groups and aboriginal communities that comprise the Cumulative Environmental Management Association. CEMA spent half a decade and millions of dollars commissioning studies and making plans.

From its Fort McMurray head office, the association didn’t ask for a halt to oil sands project construction or a development moratorium. Why would they? They represent most of the oil companies operating in the area.

The tightly focused recommendation asked for a freeze until 2011 on sales of mineral rights that industry has not yet scooped up in oil sands areas still pristine enough to rate consideration as candidates for wilderness preservation. The idea was to allow time for a land use plan to be agreed upon and implemented. This, they claim, was first rejected and then ignored by the provincial government – to the detriment of the environment and investment strategies for industry.

Through the collaborative efforts of its working groups, the association’s mandate is to produce reports and management frameworks based on science. Subcommittees meet several times a week and include various combinations of CEMA’s 44 members including several federal and provincial government departments, around 30 oil companies, as well as aboriginal, environmental and community organizations.

CEMA began as a government initiative, funded by industry and public money. It was designed to have clout by including participants from all major groups with significant interests in the northeastern quarter of Alberta. Members assumed recommendations would be taken seriously. Until the forest preservation effort, the association’s history showed that confidence was right.

“In the past we have put in about seven different recommendations and we’ve gotten fairly prompt responses from the government on these recommendations. Most of them have been accepted in totality,” says CEMA executive director Glen Semenchuk. Association members were stunned when their recommendation of a temporary freeze on disposing of unsold mineral rights was denied.

CEMA owes its birth to the late-1990s acceleration of industrialization in the Wood Buffalo region that transformed its economy and ecology. The formerly sparsely populated, thickly forested 68,454 square kilometers of northeastern Alberta were increasingly taken over by mega-enterprise, reshaping the landscape.

Environmental concerns spawned an Alberta government initiative known as the Regional Sustainable Development Strategy. The approach went beyond conventional regulatory processes that concentrate on single projects, one at a time and only as they affect their own locations. The RSDS addressed cumulative effects of area development. The provincial strategy indentified 72 issues to be studied and gave them priority rankings.

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