‘Conservation’ laws a joke
In April 2018, Canada’s most southerly caribou population, which we share with Idaho, dwindled to three animals, all females. Along with numerous other scientists and honest activists, I expected and predicted this 30 years ago when the population numbered only 40.
Extinction is happening not because caribou were or are somehow malfunctioning, but because our so-called regulatory system is.
“Our” public service and elected officials have treated and continue to treat environmental protection and conservation as the little red wagon bouncing along in the dust and debris behind the economic bulldozer.
Canada’s environmental protection and management system is broken – and it has been for a very long time.
B.C. has barely nibbled on the fringes of serious environmental conservation; an exception is the protected areas program in the 1990s.
In April, the B.C. government dredged up about $2 million to “protect” caribou habitat; it amounts to dollars down the drain, just another case of “gently try and nudge the gate closed after the horse is out of the barn.”
Without a regulatory regime that carries a big legal stick, and builds on core public support, Canadians will suffer through extinction of native fish and wildlife populations again and again.
It is a self-perpetuating aggravation to mismanage forest resources by systematically overcutting; analogous to someone hooked on opiods, it forces dependency on the economic euphoria of extreme over exploitation.
An entire system – a house of cards – builds around it. That’s where B.C. finds itself today.
B.C.’s actual forest harvest level is two or three times greater than that which would allow public lands ecosystems, biological diversity, watersheds, and carbon storage cycles to survive in a measurably viable and functional ecological, social and economic state.
Self-serving blather about mitigation, “adaptive” management, “not significant,” “not imminent” dominates public service analysis and policy surrounding land use and habitat, all while the proverbial elevator, free falling from the 50th floor, screeches by the first floor on its way to extinction.
Politically driven deferral to First Nations has crippled essential reforms, impaired conservation progress and siphoned off millions of dollars desperately needed for conservation, habitat acquisition and easements.
It is no surprise that conservation has lost “the will” of many people. I attribute that almost entirely to failed public service leadership – they consistently find a way to mitigate, “trade off,” or “balance” environmental protection, but never, it seems, to draw, and stand on, a line in the sand.
Most environmental activists and organizations have also failed, with notable exceptions (in Interior B.C., for example). Our dominating “economic” system was designed to try to force the natural world to accommodate industrialization and explosive human consumption.
While by no means perfect, Americans protected 53 million acres of roadless habitat over a decade ago, and have a legislated wilderness system that protects another 50 million acres, so please, don’t test my patience with the mindless argument that we need to exploit every scrap of public land for our consumption economy!
It may be that we will never see the kind of necessary reality that would protect you, and I, and the ecosystems and fish and wildlife we value. This deplorable situation betrays all of us.
Dr. Brian L. Horejsi is a wildlife and forest ecologist. He writes about environmental affairs, public resource management and governance and their entrenched legal and social bias.