Re: “Appeal court sides with province over Jumbo decision,” Aug. 8
Thomas Lovejoy coined 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 percent of the land environments. The loss of species is now happening at 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 that there will need to be massive investments in forests.
A while ago at a lecture, David Suzuki said there should be no more harvesting of wild forests (basically no more harvesting of pristine ecosystems). Tree farms are for harvesting, or, second or third-growth planted forests. I was in step with that idea at the time and still am. No doubt the planet would be in better shape than it is now should that have happened.
So, here are some of us in industrial nations having raced to the top rung of the materialism ladder only to acknowledge we’ve nearly killed our home planet Earth.
At this point being involved with helping keep the Jumbo eco-system wild for 32-plus years, we can only shrug and laugh together and be grateful for the bigger, pristine, bio-diverse, wild eco-system called Qat’muk in the Ktunaxa language. And it’s the Ktunaxa Nation who will pull it all together and hold it in perpetuity. With this unexpected turn of events, I, and many others I’m sure, feel a huge relief for the long distant future of the huge and very healthy Jumbo ecosystem.
Rowena Eloise
West Kootenay Coalition for Jumbo Wild