Dropping a line in the lakes of the Lakeland as a young boy, has given a one-time Cold Lake area resident a direct line to working in the great outdoors. It has also earned Dan Gagne a $1,500 scholarship towards his fourth year of schooling at the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Sciences in Environmental and Conservation Sciences. Gagne now calls Okotoks home.
“Fishing is the earliest outdoor activity that I can think of,” said 21-year-old Dan Gagne. “There are pictures of me fishing when I was really young. They didn’t put a hook on my line, only weights.
“I would just be casting out, and fishing is something I really enjoyed.”
Gagne is a recipient of a $1,500 Alberta Fish and Game Association Conservation Scholarship that was announced last week.
He grew up and fished in the Cold Lake area before moving to Okotoks in 2012.
It wasn’t just fishing that hooked him into pursuing environmental conservation as a career - he received encouragement from a now retired guidance counsellor at HTA.
“I always thought that maybe I would go into medicine but when people asked me what I wanted to do, I always said I loved being outdoors, fishing and hunting and I thought I wanted to be outdoors,” Gange said. “Mrs. (Marlene) Donnelly suggested I go for conservation biology and I don’t regret it one bit.”
He is in his fourth year at the University of Alberta and has four more classes to earn his degree.
He’s hoping the degree opens a few doors for his career – a door leading outside.
“I do want to work outside – I would love to help serve and protect the environment,” Gagne said. “Right now, I have been working at a forestry job and hopefully this summer I can get on with Alberta Wildfire. I think working wildfire would be amazing.
“There are so many conservation jobs out there that I would love to test out the waters of some of them.”
He said conservation doesn’t mean leaving nature alone.
“You can still be able to get uses out of the environment, but you want to be able to do it sustainably and protect the environment for future generations,” Gagne said.
He said industries such as forestry and oil and gas can work with the environment.
“They spend millions, if not billions on environmental research and I have gotten to see that first-hand,” Gagne said.
Gagne is a member of Nature Alberta and he took courses from the Alberta Hunting and Education Instruction Association.
“I wanted to hunt at a younger age and they provided education programs,” Gagne said. “At the beginning of COVID they even offered a free fishing program.”
He’s helped pass on that knowledge of fishing,
He was in Lac La Biche last year when he had a fish on the line, which caught the attention of three young girls and their mother.
“They all ran up to me and I asked if they had ever fished before and they all said no,” Gagne said with a laugh. “I said alright hold the rod, and I got all three girls a chance to reel it in.
“We got a pretty good picture of all four of us with a pretty good pike.”
Gagne was more than a worthy candidate for the scholarship said Matt Zazula, the second vice-president with Alberta Fish and Game Association.
“We look at the program a person is going into and how it relates to a conservation career,” said Zazula, who is also the president of the Okotoks and District Fish and Game Association. “We also looked at some of the things Dan has done. He worked in the forestry field over the summer while attending university.
“And he’s an avid outdoorsman.”
That love of the outdoors got in the way in rewarding the scholarship.
“He was out on the water fishing and he said: ‘It is a pretty poor cell signal, can I call you back,” Zazula said with a laugh.
The $1,500 will come in handy – Gagne plans to use it to pay for his tuition for his final term.
Well, most of it.
“Due to COVID they (the association) said that they might just send the money directly to me rather than the school,” Gagne said with a chuckle. “I’m not going to lie, I might end up keeping a $100 of it or so and buy some fishing gear.”
