Protect green spaces before roads
Over 3,500 species, plants and animals call Rare Charitable Research Reserve in Cambridge home. Thirty of these species are designated at risk, which means they are under various degrees of threat, many of them due to significant habitat loss. The healthy relationships among these species, the landscape and humans are of key importance because we all rely on clean air, clean water and healthy soils for our well-being and survival.
In an anthropocentric worldview, people often focus on the human species alone and consider it separately from its environmental context; however, all of us, in fact, play a significant part in the environment. We can all be grateful to live in a community that values not only carefully-planned economic development, but also understands the value provided by a place like Rare.
As a land trust and environmental institute, Rare protects over 900 acres of conservation land, an area that is larger than Central Park in New York City, and we share a border with the proposed Cambridge West development. The Rare lands are part of the Blair Bechtel Cruickston Environmentally Sensitive Landscape (ESL) system, based on a policy framework that was put in place due to the ecological significance of the area. The core of our mission and vision as a land trust is to protect and steward the rare property, beyond municipal or other policy frameworks, intact in perpetuity, on behalf of the public. This means we are charged with the responsibility to protect the lands in one piece, within its existing boundaries, beyond our own lifetimes, for your benefit and that of your children and grandchildren, on into the future.
We want to make it clear that, in spite of some confusion, we are in opposition to any proposals that roads be built, enhanced or directed through the Rare lands. We have made our standpoint known to community members who have brought up related propositions, including road options, such as a West Bypass—an option that was dismissed from any further planning many years ago. At that time, hundreds of Rare donors came forward and over $1 million was raised to provide critical information that demonstrated the significance of the hydrology, geology, habitat diversity, species diversity and many other features of the Rare property.
We led this effort to ensure that the Rare lands remain intact in perpetuity with no further roads and bridges built, and the Region and City showed foresight and leadership ahead of their time by deleting these road options and creating the ESL designation, the first of its kind in Canada. Mayor Craig took the opportunity at the planning meeting on Nov. 7 to remind the community of this history and to stress that, for good reasons, the option of a Cambridge West bypass was ultimately and permanently dismissed.
We also do not endorse new Rare property boundary lines or land swaps that are proposed by community members in order to support the construction of roads through the ecologically significant lands that Rare currently owns, by bringing them under new ownership and opening up opportunities for development of these lands. Such suggestions not only disregard the very core priorities and values of our organization, but they are also not permitted within the existing policy framework and ignore the realities of the actual landscape. The area in question is important in many ways, including as habitat for threatened grassland birds and aerial insectivores. The effects of any roads or land swaps would increase fragmentation of the original Rare lands, create barriers to wildlife movement and come with severe edge effects, thereby altering and destroying critical habitat.
The undesirable impact of roads cannot be mitigated by building additional roads through existing conservation lands. The “green infrastructure” provided by Rare, including habitat and ecological services, has an estimated annual benefit to our communities of more than $10,000 per acre, for a total exceeding $9.5 million annually. Our conservation efforts are welcomed by thousands of supporters from across Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo and beyond, including environmental activist and author Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who says “This organization has a very important role to play on the world stage and I intend to do my part to help it achieve its vision.”
We invite the community to explore our eight km of trails to learn more about the importance of green spaces in their neighbourhoods.