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LETTER: Jumbo Wilders seek small wilderness pocket

Reader Rowena Eloise wants a small pocket of wilderness embedded in the onslaught of human population and development.
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“Today the pattern of human population growth is more bacterial than primate with the human biomass being more than a hundred times greater than any other large animal species that has ever existed on Earth.” E.O. Wilson, biologist.

All’s quiet in the Jumbo Valley area and it may remain so for a while longer according to the mountain resorts branch of the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations. It is to the branch that the proponent of the scaled-back version of a Jumbo Glacier Resort would turn to avoid another environmental assessment. At the time of this writing there has been no formal submission for a reduced sized resort (fewer than 2,000 beds) under the auspices of the all seasons resort policy.

But the proponent has made inquiries into the extensive requirements of the policy and has submitted three points indicating that an application is their future intent.

The Valemont Resort presently requires the full attention of its developer proponent which happens to be the same proponent for Jumbo Glacier Resort.

“Building the resort is about not losing to the protestors,” said Grant Costello in Jumbo Wild, the movie. Grant has been a major player for many years supporting the Jumbo proposal.

“For one species to radically alter the entire natural world is unprecedented in all of Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, and while creating our human environment we’ve subdued over 75 per cent of land surface into which we’ve embedded a very small fraction of the natural world as preserved pockets we call wilderness.” Diane Akerman, author of The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us.

Be what it may for Mr. Costello’s ilk, all we Jumbo Wilders are endeavoring to achieve the embedding of another small pocket of wilderness.

Rowena Eloise, West Kootenay Coalition for Jumbo Wild, Argenta