The places that stayed with me: Rod Ruff reflects on a summer spent on the land and with each other
Every summer, if I'm lucky, I get a handful of days that stay with me longer than the rest. This year there were more than a handful, and as I sat back into my desk this September, I found myself needing to write them down, if only to remember how much of what I love about this work happens outside of a virtual meeting room.
I spent an afternoon in the prairies catching wild bees with our friends at the Alberta Native Bee Council, learning just how many species are quietly doing the work of holding this landscape together, mostly unnoticed. I watched bison mate and roll in the dust as part of the Iinii Initiative, the Blackfoot-led effort to bring buffalo back to their traditional territory across southern Alberta and Montana. There is something that resets your sense of scale about standing near an animal that shaped this land and the people on it for thousands of years, and is only now being welcomed back home.
I walked through the cottonwoods near Blackfoot Crossing with local knowledge keepers and our friends at Tataga Inc., listening more than talking, which includes the wrens and the robins. I stood in a field while a farmer told me about a century of his family's work restoring and enhancing a wetland on their land, work he's now doing alongside the Oldman Watershed Council, Cows & Fish, and the Lethbridge North Irrigation District. Multi-generational stewardship, still going.
Rod Ruff (Alberta Ecotrust) and Megan Evans (Alberta Native Bee Council)
I also travelled to Prince Edward Island with Environment Funders Canada and toured the Macphail Woods Ecological Forestry Project, a community-led effort that has spent decades restoring the Acadian forest one woodlot at a time. It's a good reminder that this kind of work rarely moves fast, and rarely moves alone. It takes a community of people showing up for the same patch of ground, year after year.
Closer to home, I took my daughter on her first multi-night backcountry trek. I got to watch her figure out, the way you only can out there, what it feels like to be fully immersed in nature with the people you love. I cast far too few lines in the James River on my last break of the summer, which I'm choosing to blame on the season rather than my skill.
Environmental Impact Grantee, Blood Tribe Land Management, Kainai Iinnii Rematriation Project
All of this happened under another hazy sun of wildfire smoke. All of this happened while global uncertainty is creating real economic and sovereignty pressure here in Alberta. I don't say that to end on a heavy note; I say it because it's the truth of the backdrop we're all working against, and it's exactly why the moments above matter as much as they do.
None of it happens without the people who support Alberta Ecotrust's mission. The bees, the bison, the wetlands, the woodlots, the trails, the rivers, the whole quiet architecture of restoration that most people will never see up close. You make it possible for us to show up in these places, alongside these partners, doing this work. It is difficult to fully express in words just how grateful I am for this support.
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Alberta Ecotrust brings together a diverse network of experts—naturalists, industry leaders, philanthropists, and government officials—to tackle environmental challenges like conservation, water quality, and emissions reduction.
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