Let’s make Montreal a sanctuary city for nature
Coderre administration is failing to protect biodiversity, Shloime Perel says.
Only a short time ago, much of l’Anse-à-l’Orme Road in Pierrefonds was under water, with Gouin Blvd. partially flooded. Yet Mayor Denis Coderre supports developing and building homes on a 185-hectare site in western Pierrefonds whose massive absorption capacity prevented worse flooding. It was no small irony that the Office de consultation publique de Montréal ended up moving some of its public hearings on the future of the site to its downtown office after flooding in the Pierrefonds/Roxboro borough building.
This year marks the 55th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring. Its worldwide impact on nature conservation and environmental protection continues. Silent Spring anticipated what many now term the “Anthropocene era,” in which the power of the human species is considered to be the dominant force in the future of life on Earth.
The anti-nature-conservation policies of the Coderre administration are its “contribution” to the Anthropocene era.
City Hall’s support for building a city-within-a-city in western Pierrefonds, in this area of extremely rich biodiversity, is a crucial case in point. The proposed 5,500 housing units, with their accompanying infrastructure, will destroy most of this pristine nature area, if this travesty is allowed to proceed.
The more than 170 migratory bird species of this wetlands area, the amphibians, reptiles and small and large mammals, some of them endangered, will lose their homes with the bulldozing of trees, plants and topsoil.
During the past 50 years, urban sprawl has significantly reduced the island’s forested lands, wetlands, grasslands and farmlands, according to a recent academic study. In 1966, 45 per cent of the island had a high ecological connectivity — meaning green spaces in proximity to each other — the same research tells us, reduced to 6.5 per cent today.
The green corridor that exists linking the threatened Pierrefonds eco-territory on the one hand and Cap-StJacques and l’Anse-a-l’Orme parks, the Senneville migratory bird sanctuary, Parcagricole Bois-de-Laroche, Angell Woods and the north Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue nature area, on the other, will face irreparable damage if the Coderre administration and the developers have their way.
In fact, it appears that on every single additional issue where the possibility of preserving significant green space exists, the Coderre administration sides with the developers:
The Reseau électrique metropolitain train, if built, will entail the destruction of considerable green space and will encourage further urban sprawl.
The Technoparc project in St-Laurent threatens migratory bird wetlands.
The city has done little to protect the Falaise StJacques; many of its trees have been cut by the Quebec transport ministry.
The Coderre administration approved the destruction of some 1,000 trees in Parc Jean-Drapeau to make way for an amphitheatre.
On April 16, 2016, more than 40 Montreal environmental groups put forward the “Charter for the protection of Montreal’s green spaces and natural environments.”
The Green Charter asks for a permanent moratorium on the destruction of green spaces and for the protection of biodiversity and all natural environments on the entire island, as well as an end to urban sprawl. It asks for expanded access to green spaces for everyone, including children and people with reduced mobility.
As Montreal’s municipal election approaches, the Green Charter shows us a way forward against which the environmental programs (if any) of the various parties should be compared.
Consider that in 1972, 10 years after the publication of Silent Spring, an important report by Barbara Ward and René Dubos, commissioned by the UN Conference on the Human Environment, was published, titled Only One Earth. They ask: Is it not worth our love? Does it not deserve all the inventiveness and courage and generosity of which we are capable to preserve it from degradation and destruction and, by doing so, to secure our own survival?”
This is one of the crucial questions of our time and for us should be answered locally, right here in Montreal.