Today is World Wildlife Day

Dear Editor: March 3 is World Wildlife Day. Do British Columbians have just cause to celebrate on this day? I always urge citizens to take a broad, historical perspective on government and social issues like land and wildlife conservation. It’s not just where we are today, but where we’ve been, and importantly, where we’re headed, that paint the picture.

The province has no stand alone endangered species legislation. Federal legislation applies to less than 1 per cent of the province. Few British Columbians can be proud that almost one-third of the province no longer has viable grizzly bear populations, or that woodland caribou are on the verge of extinction.

After a century of monopolizing public lands for resource extraction, this government still has no agenda to designate and protect roadless security landscapes for wildlife. In contrast, over a decade ago the U.S. protected 53 million acres with a “roadless rule.”

We must give thanks to citizens of the 1990s for the Protected Areas Strategy but it was then, and is now, incapable of protecting landscape wide ecological function and unable to cope with spiking human population, destructive numbers of off-road vehicles and mountain bikes, or the consequences of single minded resource exploitation.

The destruction of wildlife habitat that fuels private, mostly corporate wealth, continues to rage on. No aspect of land use destroys wildlife habitat more insidiously than roads; there are now over 600,000 km of “resource” roads in B.C. Each road has an “impact zone” that extends at least one kilometre from the right of way. In that “pit” wildlife mortality escalates and ecological and behavioral losses erode effectiveness of wildlife habitat.

There exists today no process through which the public has legal entitlement to systematically engage or influence wildlife management and land use decisions. There is no fundamental obligation to use science based evidence to make decisions. Almost without exception, wildlife management in British Columbia means killing animals either to cleanse what governments and some citizens considered to be exclusively the human environment (take cougars and “urban” deer, for example) or to broadly suppress wildlife populations, actions which are dismissively dressed up as “progress” (never ending residential creep), recreational opportunity (for hunters and trappers) and “protection” for livestock and private property.

Compounding the systematic failure of regulatory conservation in B.C. is the deeply engrained personal intolerance, sometimes morphing into outright hate, of wildlife in parts of the province, even thought the vitriol is confined to relatively few individuals or groups. Government has failed its moral, social and legal obligation to defend wildlife or defend citizen interests in ownership of wildlife; it has rarely engaged in educational efforts to point out to these people, in no uncertain terms, that wildlife belongs to the public, and that it has deep seated spiritual, ecological and economic value. Regulations and legislation that embed the social and personal values of wildlife are shunned by this government.

The dismal and abusive treatment of wildlife and the ecosystems wildlife depends upon are the ever dominant by-product of government and public service obedience almost exclusively to economic corporate interests. The malfeasance continues with Premier Clark's recent budget; it ignores the environment, and makes no mention of wildlife or land conservation.

We rarely cast a vote based on our land and wildlife conservation expectations, but surely we ought to be aware that the well being of British Columbians is dependent upon social and environmental integrity, and only a visionary and democratically honest government can or will act in our favour. Brian L. Horejsi Penticton