Re: “Appeal court sides with province over Jumbo decision”
Thomas Lovejoy coined the term biodiversity in 1980. He now advocates that we not only keep all our current, whole ecosystems, but we also restore degraded ones. He says that will be a big help to correcting Earth’s warming problem. He says wild places are in decline everywhere. Habitat destruction is the leading cause. Corporations and governments continue to harvest the public’s wild ecosystems. He emphasizes the need to restore all ecosystems immediately around the world to correct centuries of destructive degradation.
And the still-wild Jumbo area continues functioning as part of the well established ecosystem vitally necessary as part of a much larger ecosystem which helps to keep the lay-of-the-land healthy and perfectly balanced.
The May 2019 United Nations Biodiversity Report says human activity has “severely altered 75 per cent of land environments. The loss of species is now happening tens of hundreds times as fast as the average rate over the past million years and poses a dire threat to ecosystems all over the world.”
Scientists say there will need to be massive investment in forests.
My B.C. government contact person, the land officer for Jumbo under the Ministry of Forests in the Mountain Resorts Branch, says they, and the Environmental Assessment Office, are mulling over what rights Jumbo Glacier Resorts Inc. has, if any, now that the 10-year deadline has expired. Previous governments gave Oberto and Tommaso Oberti, resort proponents, the Master Development Agreement and created the Municipality of Jumbo Glacier Resort with a mayor and council who do meet regularly and do get paid.
At this point being involved with helping keep Jumbo wild for 30-plus years, I am grateful for the long-lived, large, wild, biodiverse ecosystem busy sequestering CO2.
Rowena Eloise
West Kootenay Coalition for Jumbo Wild