A Citizen’s Guide to Ecology and Law in Alberta - Dr. Judy Stewart

The members of the Board of Directors are appointed by the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary and the President of the University of Calgary. [...] The “environment” is defined in Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act (EPEA)20 to mean “the components of the earth and includes air, land and water; all layers of the atmosphere; all organic and inorganic matter and living organisms; and the interacting natural systems that include the components of the environment.”21 This definition reflects a basic understanding of ecosystems. [...] The EPEA, the Water Act, the Public Lands Act, the Agricultural Operations Practices Act, the Forests Act, the Wildlife Act, the Parks Act, the Mines and Minerals Act, the Oil and Gas Conservation Act, and the Wilderness Areas, Ecological Reserves, Natural Areas and Heritage 18 See Elinor Ostrom, 1990. [...] So-called integrated resource management is just now emerging in the form of regional land use plans to partially bridge the chasm between ecology and environmental law.34 In the early-2000s, through the introduction of the LUF and the ALSA, the Province decided that human activities on the landscape were best regulated at the regional scale. [...] consisting of two interacting subsystems: the biological (epidemiological ecosystem) and the social (social and economic conditions of life of the society) subsystems where the biological subsystem plays the role of the governed object and the social acts as the internal regulator of these interactions.