Episode #35 with Jeff Olson

Jeff is a retired public servant of 36 years in the environmental field.  He has extensive knowledge surrounding farmland drainage and wetland loss as a Conservation Officer stationed throughout Saskatchewan including Yorkton, Melville, Cumberland House, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, Pinehouse Lake, and Wadena.  Jeff was the Parkland Ecoregion’s Wetlands Specialist with Saskatchewan Environment stationed in Melville from mid-1990 to the inception of the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority (SWA) in 2002.

 In the last fourteen years of his career, he was a Watershed Planner with the Water Security Agency, (previously known as SWA) as the lead planner on the Lower Souris (2006), South Saskatchewan (2007), and Upper Souris (2010) watershed plans.  These plans included extensive pubic consultation and technical research culminating in the publishing of the final watershed plan and coordinating a process to ensure the plans were implemented.

Jeff retired from public service in 2015 and in 2018, Jeff co-founded the Citizens Environmental Alliance (CEA) (Saskatchewan), a group of concerned forward thinking citizens working on innovative solutions to contemporary environmental problems.  CEA’s vision is “Working together to protect the environment for all generations now and into the future”.  He is presently the managing director of CEA.

Jeff is certified by Eco-Canada, holds a recognized Environmental Professional (EP) designation in Natural Resource Management, and is principal in Mind's Eye Consulting (Saskatchewan) which is involved in watershed management, environmental law enforcement, and present environmental water issues in Saskatchewan. 

Jeff operates a cow-calf and backgrounding beef operation in the Beaver Hills area near Parkerview with his wife Sharon, son Brandon and daughter Cheyenne.