Timely reminder about wetlands threats

Dan Kraus’s comment on wetlands is very timely for Hamilton residents. With massive urban development changing our landscape irreversibly, we have a huge responsibility to save the biggest remaining wetlands on western Lake Ontario — the Cootes Paradise and Grindstone Creek systems. Though they lie within the Royal Botanical Gardens, their health depends as much on their inputs from the surrounding area as it does on physical protection. We cannot turn the creeks of Dundas, Ancaster and Waterdown into enclosed urban storm sewers to service tens of thousands of new homes, and then wonder why flooding, sedimentation and pollution are degrading our marshes!

We need active, sustainable, on-site management of storm water with every new development. We need the natural courses of streams protected and replanted with trees that slow, filter and cool water as it moves downstream. We need strong encouragement for farmers to maintain vegetated buffers along water courses to limit farm pollution. The marshes, the lowest points in a natural, dynamic ecosystem, can only survive if we all think in terms of the entire upstream environment. Finally, we need commitment by government and planning bodies at all levels to stand up to the pressure of “big development” to assure that we build real living environments for both people and nature.

David Moffatt, Dundas