Local environmentalists and politicos weigh in on the region’s top threats for Earth Week

Local environmentalists and politicos weigh in on the region’s top threats for Earth Week

Most Monday readers probably spend more than just the seven days called Earth Week thinking about the issues confronting this tiny blue-green planet of ours, but one thing is sure: Victoria is host to a multitude of activists, authors, students and scholars who make it a full-time occupation. We asked some of them what they think are the most serious threats to local ecosystems . . . and hey, we even called a couple of politicians, just for good measure.

• Sarah Cox, communications director for the Victoria chapter of Sierra Club BC, offered a list she titled “Five Big Threats to Our Local Environment.”

1. Global warming and the lack of green transportation initiatives.

2. Loss of local wetlands to development in Metchosin and elsewhere that are crucial for maintaining biodiversity.

3. The Bear Mountain development and other unchecked urban sprawl that destroys wild spaces, increases local greenhouse-gas emissions and threatens ecosystems.

4. Contamination of our marine environment from effluent, pollution from shipping and other sources.

5. The removal of tens of thousands of hectares of private forest lands from tree farm licenses for housing developments.

• Richard Hebda, adjunct professor of UVic’s school of environmental studies, feels the biggest threat comes from the constraints our short-term actions place on the ability of ecosystems to respond to long-term issues—such as the disruptions wrought by climate change.

At the municipal and regional levels, says Hebda, we are failing to maintain natural areas in their complex entirety. “At the ecological process level, saving a rare species here or there is irrelevant; [we need to] save the process, and natural areas and natural functions across the landscape. We need to be maintaining and fostering and reforming the natural complexity that sustains the safety net or network that humans, as well as all other creatures, depend upon.”

• Ken Wu, campaign director for the Victoria chapter of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, says, “We need to protect the surplus military lands in the Department of National Defence that have phenomenal old-growth Douglas fir and Garry oak meadows. There needs to be a provincial parkland acquisition fund to buy up private lands so we can protect endangered ecosystems throughout suburban areas threatened by sprawl. The deregulation of forest lands to the west of the city is a big problem.

“I’d also like to see marine no-take zones as part of the national marine conservation areas that are being proposed in the southern Gulf Islands,” he continues. “And, of course, protection of old-growth forest in the region.”

• Naomi Devine, UVic student, co-founder of Common Energy and member of the Province’s Climate Action Team, says, “I think we need to start supporting things that we don’t necessarily connect to direct ecosystem threats but are going to help in the long-term. We need to look at the institutions that we have around us now and how they need to be designed to have the flexibility that’s going to be needed to respond to things like climate change.”

The issue, says Devine, is how to create decision-making structures that take on environmental sustainability as a matter-of-course, not as a discrete issue. “Rather than see sustainability or the environment as a side-issue, it has to be much more holistically integrated into how we do business.”

• Nancy Turner, distinguished professor, UVic school of environmental studies, replied via e-mail while travelling. “Loss of native habitat—through urbanization, industrialization, highway building, etc.—is the number-one local threat for southern Vancouver Island,” notes Turner. “I grew up in Victoria, and I have watched the little wetlands, prairies and woodlands disappear one by one; and when you consider that these places are home to many different native species—from garter snakes and alligator lizards to deer, Chipping sparrows, goldfinches and wild caraway and wild strawberries—it means these species have all diminished drastically.”

• Ingmar Lee, inveterate direct-action activist, who was one of the forces behind the recent Bear Mountain tree-sit, feels the “collaborationist” tactics of established environmental groups threaten the protection of local ecosystems. “The confrontational aspect—the direct action, the front-line blockades—are still effective, but the [environmental] groups have all eschewed them,” Lee says. “There’s this beehive of activity at the grassroots, and there’s stodgy old envirocrats asleep at the switch haggling with Gordo. I think that disconnect, that vast schism, is really a problem.”

• Charles Campbell, communications coordinator with the Dogwood Initiative, says, “The biggest environmental issue is that communities have very little control over their local environments. For things to change, ultimately, communities have to be empowered to take on the stewardship of local areas with a view to their long-term sustainability.”

Once again, the Bear Mountain development and the deletion of forest lands from tree farm licences are offered as examples of government decisions decried by local citizens. “If there was a more transparent and democratic government, then things would look very different,” says Campbell.

• Barry Penner, Liberal MLA and Minister of Environment, wrote in an e-mail, “As minister of environment, my priority is to continue working with the CRD to secure an environmentally sound liquid waste management plan that will minimize the cost to the taxpayer while maximizing environmental benefits. I’m told the CRD will be actively pursuing opportunities for greenhouse-gas reduction and resource recovery, including beneficial reuse of energy and recovered water. MOE will continue to encourage sustainable growth as an integral part of future development in the Capital Regional District.”

• Meanwhile, Shane Simpson, NDP MLA and environment critic, says one pressing local environmental issue is the decision of which alternative will be used to design and build the massive overhaul to Victoria’s sewage system. On one hand, says Simpson, emerging technology would use four-to-six smaller decentralized processing facilities to capture and use energy in the sewage; on the other hand, old-school “big pipe” technology would see a centralized system with sludge being trucked away from one or two large waterfront facilities. (Potential privatization is an associated issue.)

From a biodiversity standpoint, the conversion of tree farm licences held by Western Forest Products to real estate and the preservation of marine habitat are top of the list, he says. “The other issue I’m hearing more and more about in the South Island is improved public transit options,” says Simpson.

• Guy Dauncey, author and president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association, says, “The absence of vision is the biggest threat. Because in the absence of vision we get the same old, same old, ‘Let’s be comfortable and pretend nothing’s wrong.’”

Municipal councils that oversee development have an exciting opportunity to finally get things right, as exemplified by Dockside Green, says Dauncey—but if they don’t break out of habitual patterns, they will get it wrong . . . as in Bear Mountain, which Dauncey likened to “a dead Disneyland.” In terms of substantive issues, he feels we need to focus on food, transportation, buildings and energy.

Development and democracy

It should come as no surprise that many of the responses relate to the politics of development and decision-making. As several people pointed out, municipal decisions like Bear Mountain that degrade local ecosystems by removing trees and inscribing energy-wasting, CO2-emitting homes and automobiles on the landscape epitomize politics.

Municipal decisions are made in a context set by the province, so local decisions are always nested in a hierarchy of political and economic interests—as shown by the uphill battle locals have waged for a say about what should happen with the forest lands removed from tree farm licences. And now, confronted by the reality of our collectively unsustainable lifestyles, environmental problems challenge us to rethink politics.

Perhaps we could take a lesson from the ecological worldview that regards organisms as interrelated and interconnected beings, not as individual and discrete entities. The systematic functioning of our capitalist consumer culture tends to replace natural complexity with simplistic tropes. (Monday readers, I’m sure, can use their own critical-thinking skills to identify any “simplistic tropes” contained in this article.)

However, the intricate and multifaceted dynamics between humans and the environmental problems we create means we have to generate understandings that are more complex, informed, reflexive and relational. A broad-based public critique of how we are collectively responding to environmental threats might be facilitated by a perspective that regards politics as complex as the natural world we inhabit.

Meaningful change can come through electoral politics: the power of legislation to shape our environment is clear-cut. But any discrepancy between the promises of democracy and the way actual decisions get made challenges us to make explicit the networks that are involved in decision-making processes and show where relations of power are obscured by simplistic tropes. As UVic’s Hebda put it, “Conservation of natural areas, biodiversity, water quality, keeping organic matter in the soil rather than releasing it into the atmosphere, making climate change worse—these are all parts of that big picture and relate to the loss of complexity and simplification for profit.”