Abstract

In 1997 and 1998 Western Heritage Services Inc, working in conjunction with staffs of Millar Western Forest Products, the Alberta Provincial Government and several other forest products firms, produced a prototype heritage management process to protect heritage resources within the province for the foreseeable future. Millar Western Forest Products subsequently pursued development of the prototype, and implemented a final version of the heritage management process in May 2000, the first forestry company in Alberta to begin the process of achieving compliance to the Alberta Historical Resources Act. The heritage management process, developed specifically for use in Alberta, consists of a number of interrelated study components, each of which provides specific data for managing concerns in the Millar Western FMA. The key approaches in protecting resources while maintaining a viable forest harvest involve predicting where heritage resources are located, determining what forestry practices will harm them and devising a solution to prevent or minimize the chances of damaging those resources. The process follows a step-wise set of procedures that are integrated into the existing Millar Western forest management process. Once the heritage potential of a given area is known (using information from a heritage potential model) and various levels of forestry practice impacts have been determined, a heritage management prescription is produced for every forestry operation. Since heritage values are considered automatically at every stage of the planning process, there is a greatly reduced chance that heritage resources will be encountered unexpectedly, causing forestry operation delays or disruptions. Since heritage values are integrated into the forestry planning process, costs for heritage compliance are reduced and heritage values are fully protected. The double poster set illustrates how heritage potential is determined, how impacts are classified and how heritage prescriptions are assigned and used by forestry planners to avoid disturbing cultural resources in a variety of forestry and other industrial development situations.