Parks, a favourite PR cover for un-green things
By Peter Gorrie Environment Columnist
Published On Sat Nov 14 2009 // Toronto Star
MERIDA, Mexico–It was a rare sight: a hall full of environmentalists standing to applaud federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice.
Prentice is accustomed to getting the virtual – sometimes actual – finger from green advocates. But his speech thrilled the international scientists and officials gathered in the Yucatán capital for a conservation conference called WILD9. He extolled this year's massive expansion of Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories, the value of preserving wilderness and – a main conference theme – how it helps to combat climate change, "one of the defining issues of our time," by storing carbon in trees, plants and soil.
"Each time I return to the wilderness ... I feel like a child," Prentice said.
The expanded park is a treasure – 33,000 square kilometres of boreal forest surrounding the iconic Nahanni River and its tributaries.
Prentice didn't mention the compromise that allows a lead-zinc mine on one of the Nahanni's supposedly protected branches.
More significantly, he was asked at a later news conference how his enthusiasm for conservation and preventing climate change squares with his wholehearted support for development of Alberta's tar sands – which is despoiling much of that province's north and is Canada's fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.
"If you examine Alberta's parks system, it's second to none," Prentice replied, citing Banff, Jasper and Waterton. "The parks set aside are pretty extensive ... something Canadians and Albertans are proud of."
The unhappy implication: once you set aside some land you can do what you want elsewhere.
Some protected areas are pristine and serene enough to nourish the souls of the few who get to them. They are also refuges for plants and animals.
But less than 15 per cent of Earth's land surface, including about 10 per cent of Canada's, is classified as protected. Some of these protected areas are busy with human activity or threatened by development, and most are too small to ensure any species will survive in them.
Nor can they store sufficient carbon to ward off climate change, and any benefit they offer is overwhelmed by projects such as the tar sands – which emit carbon dioxide not only from their massive machines and production plants but also from destruction of billions of trees and disturbance of wetlands and soil.
Alberta's oil mines are "a nightmare," says Healy Hamilton, a delegate here from California who studies whether we can predict how climate change will impact plants and animals and whether it would then be possible for us – like modern-day Noahs – to move them to new homes.
Wild areas can help to slow climate change if they're huge, like the trees and tundra of northern Canada, including the top half of Ontario. But little of ours are protected and, apart from Russia and Brazil, the rest of the world hasn't much left.
Hamilton, along with many others, views the tar sands as a 19th-century solution to a 21st-century energy problem.
Parks and protected areas, on their own, are equally old school. While beneficial, they also provide public relations cover for politicians doing very un-green things.
Think back a decade or so ago, when the Ontario government created a long list of provincial parks, in a program called Lands for Life, and then, by slashing budgets and enforcement and gutting regulations, made things worse outside their boundaries.
The real issue is whether we can increase the ability of land everywhere to provide what scientists call ecological services and stop, or at least slow, the march of humans into areas that are still undisturbed. That means, among other things, making our economy and lifestyle more efficient. It means using less.
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