A vote for nature a vote for our quality of life

Ontario’s natural environment is the foundation of our quality of life in the province, particularly in the Golden Horseshoe where most of us live.

The Ford government has significantly weakened Ontario’s environmental legislation, reducing protection and public engagement in favour of sprawling development and infrastructure — at the expense of good environmental analysis and mitigation. They promised to protect the Greenbelt, yet are determined to build the unnecessary Highway 413 through it. But you cannot run a highway through the headwaters of our river systems or the heart of the Greenbelt without harming the environment at its core and severing its connections.

The natural environment is a series of systems that need to be connected to each other to function. Our green spaces can be considered a form of infrastructure — green infrastructure — doing the work of built infrastructure. Green spaces are like sponges; they soak up and hold water to prevent flooding, while also reducing the heat generated by cities. Trees can reduce air temperatures up to 12 C. They clean the air and provide habitat for local and migrating birds and wildlife, and deliver a healthy dose of nature for people.

At one time we thought just protecting features such as individual woodlots would be enough, but that led to islands of nature unable not thrive on their own. Natural areas were separated from the water systems they needed to survive and animals from habitats they needed to complete their life cycles.

We then moved to natural heritage systems, intended to capture all the elements of the environment needed to sustain them. The Greenbelt is an amazing natural heritage system, but to be sustainable, it needs links between its different parts — both inside and outside it — to let plants, animals and people move freely. Highways sever those linkages.

We need more green infrastructure, not less. Visitation to conservation areas in the GTA has gone up by approximately 200 per cent over the past decade. According to a recent report by the Green Infrastructure Ontario Coalition, “Improving Access to Large Parks in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe,” 42,000 hectares of large parkland need to be created over the next 30 years to maintain the same level of access to green space that people have now — access that has proved lacking in the era of pandemic lockdowns and in lower-income neighbourhoods.

Protecting the Greenbelt is not just about putting a line around it and pronouncing it protected. Ecologists learned early on that doing this without consideration of nature’s functions and linkages is doomed to fail. There is ample land already within our urban boundaries to develop for affordable housing and livable cities without having to bulldoze farms, forests, green space and wetlands.

Nature needs to be valued, protected, and connected — not paved. Vote for nature on June 2.