How to stop mass extinction
The noted American biologist E. O. Wilson once called it “the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.” The human-driven destruction of biodiversity poses a threat to our food, water, the health of our economy and the sustainability of our planet. Yet we have allowed it to continue effectively unchecked over the past four decades, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London.
Since 1970, worldwide populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have plummeted by 58 per cent and current trends suggest that, by 2020, two-thirds of the world’s animals will be gone. The cause: us. Population growth, climate change, pollution and hunting are among the sources of the steep decline.
There are no easy solutions. Staving off what scientists call the “sixth mass extinction” will require governments to rethink their priorities. But in the short term, as the WWF suggests, conservation policies must be strengthened before it’s too late.
In Canada, by virtue of our vast wilderness, rich wildlife and enormous holdings of fresh water, we have a special responsibility to conserve. Yet in recent years we have seen a disturbing pattern play out again and again: a government introduces ambitious protections for wilderness and wildlife and then, over the years, under pressure from industry, erodes them.
It’s a pattern we need to break if we’re going to start doing our part on this existential challenge. To start, Ottawa should:
Enforce the Species at Risk Act The Harper government often said the Species at Risk Act, perhaps Canada’s strongest environmental law, was an “inefficient” tool for protecting our more than 5,000 troubled species. But the inefficiency was the government’s alone; the law didn’t work over the past decade because Ottawa didn’t enforce it.
The Conservatives repeatedly contravened the act, ignoring the legal requirement to develop recovery strategies for some 200 threatened species. The environmental non-profit Ecojustice took the government to court at least six times for failure to identify at-risk species or protect threatened ecosystems. It won every time.
The Trudeau government should break with recent tradition and follow the law.
Restore the Fisheries Act Once a celebrated law, the Fisheries Act was gutted by the Harper government in its 2012 omnibus budget bill. The act originally sought to prevent “the harmful alteration, disruption and destruction” of any fish habitat. But at the urging of industry, the Tories drastically narrowed its scope.
The result of this and other changes is that some 99 per cent of Canadian lakes and rivers are now unprotected.
The Trudeau government should restore the provisions stripped from the Fisheries Act and ensure the environmental assessment process, also hobbled by the Harper government, is sufficiently robust and well-funded to enforce it.
Protect the Gulf of St. Lawrence Also in the 2012 budget was an explicit invitation for resource companies to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the world’s largest estuary. This despite the fact that the seismic method of exploratory drilling that would be used in the area is known often to maim or kill some of the 2,000 species of marine wildlife that live in the gulf and are essential to the Atlantic and Great Lakes fisheries. Worse, an oil spill would probably permanently disrupt that ecosystem, not to mention sully the coastlines of Canada’s five easternmost provinces.
At the same time, the budget removed the requirement that the federal government assess all development projects. If Ottawa is going to be complicit in the degradation of a rich and sensitive ecosystem, it should at least understand the risks. Ontario also has a role to play. It should: Repair the Endangered Species Act In 2013, the province watered down this once-lauded law, granting a series of ill-judged exemptions to industry. The most controversial of these allows someone to kill caribou or destroy the animal’s habitat if that person is engaged in a government-approved forestry operation. The woodland caribou, which are classified as a threatened species, are considered a bellwether for the health of the boreal forest.
Save the moose In her annual report last week, Ontario environmental commissioner Dianne Saxe called the “large-scale loss of biodiversity” a “crisis in our province and around the world.” In particular, Ontario’s moose population has declined by some 20 per cent over the last decade, the result of habitat degradation, climate change and, in particular, overhunting. The province should look closely at the commissioner’s recommendations for increased protections for moose and other at-risk wildlife.
These are just a few among many steps governments can and should take to preserve our natural heritage and end our part in this unforgivable folly.
Since 1970, worldwide populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have plummeted by 58 per cent