During the past two weeks, politicians, scientists and activists gathered in Glasgow at COP26. The Scottish city is like a climate change ICU, where decision-makers were agreeing on treatments for our feverish planet. Here in BC, after a summer of wildfires and growing concern for salmon in decline, it’s high time to implement solutions to these crises.
One of these solutions lies right under our nose: protecting BC’s world-renowned forests, grasslands, mountains, and rivers in order to create a new understanding of political, social, economic responsibilities for our selves and for what we need as growth as humanity must do, in order to survive.
There is ample scientific evidence that protecting more land — particularly, 100 per cent of old growth forests, by 2025, and even more areas by 2030 — is a key way we can address negative consequences from climate instability.
This is why I urge the BC government to take climate change and species extinction seriously by promising to protect 100 per cent of old growth forests, only two per cent of which is not logged. So, can we protect a mere two per cent of our land, the old growth forests? That’s 100 per cent of old growth, just two per cent of the total land in our province. Currently the province is going to protect only two-to-three per cent of the existing old growth forests. Destroying 99.8 per cent of everything.
Sustainable logging, jobs, cost, all the current resource management strategies are failing to recognize the truth: we are at the end of our forests, grasslands, water and we need to stop logging our old growth areas immediately.
Moira McNeill
Wynndel