The Elk Valley, Canada

The Elk Valley (EV), an important Canadian coal-producing region since the late-1890s, faces an uncertain future as new “green steel” technologies seem destined to undermine global markets for metallurgical coal. The environmental legacy of decades of mountaintop strip mining includes dangerous levels of selenium in the transboundary Elk-Kootenay River System that will take billions of dollars to remediate while the corporate behemoths that control the EV’s four operating mines explore ways to offload environmental liabilities. The Ktunaxa Nation, excluded from any input into whether and how coal mining should proceed in their traditional territories by Canada’s colonial policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has asserted their legal and moral rights in the twenty-first century, thereby projecting a future for the EV that is both ecologically sustainable and politically decolonized. This chapter sketches the history of coal mining, working-class mobilization, and tourism in the EV as a prelude to arguing that a watershed-scale co-governance framework is the only path to support pluralistic decision-making and diverse stakeholder values like watershed security, ecological intactness, and sustainable development. It also advocates for the establishment of an environmental trust modeled on the existing Columbia Basin Trust, and the development of an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in Canada’s Flathead Valley that would create one of North America’s most valuable conservation complexes, bordered by Waterton National Park to the east and Glacier National Park to the south.