Oldman River Reflections

Kevin Van Tighem follows Alberta’s Oldman River through ecology, memory and human history, asking what a watershed can tell us about the way we choose to live on the land.

Oldman River Reflections brings together essays on stewardship, belonging and the future of southern Alberta’s headwaters. Drawing on a lifetime spent working in conservation and mountain landscapes, Van Tighem considers the Oldman as both a living ecological system and a place layered with human stories, public-land conflicts, memory and change.

The river leads naturally into larger questions about water security, fisheries, public lands, restoration, conservation and the cumulative effects of development. But this is not a technical watershed manual. Van Tighem writes as an essayist, grounding policy and ecology in landscape, lived experience and the complicated relationships people form with the places that sustain them.

For anyone who knows the Oldman, this book offers a deeper way of seeing it. For readers who have never stood beside the river, it makes a broader argument: a watershed is never just water, and what happens to it tells us something about ourselves.