Opinion

An Avatar-Inspired Future for British Columbia

With 1,600 species at risk here, we must protect half our land base.

By Faisal Moola and Marlene Cummings, 24 Feb 2010, TheTyee.ca

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'3D' policies link biodiversity and climate change.

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Since shattering box office records and baptizing millions into the cult of 3D, Avatar has sparked new pop psychology phenomena like, "Post-Avatar Depression" and the "Avatar blues." Audiences are so engrossed by the 3D beauty of Pandora (the planet on which the story takes place) that they experience feelings of depression when faced with the stark realities of real life outside the theatre.

Unless our provincial government can write a new ending for B.C.'s own real life Avatar story, we feel that British Columbians may be susceptible to the Avatar blues. Especially when they realize that our province is in danger of losing its own natural wealth because of one dimensional policy thinking.

A magical place of biodiversity

Pandora is incredibly rich with plants and animals and so is British Columbia. We are home to 76 per cent of our nation's bird species, 70 per cent of its freshwater fish, 60 per cent of its evergreen trees, and thousands of other animals and plants that rival the weird and wonderful wildlife of Avatar: wolves that fish for salmon, white bears that inhabit ancient rainforest valleys, and even a slug -- the dromedary jumping slug -- that can twist its body off the ground to escape predators.

On Pandora, nature is under threat -- the same is true in B.C. Government scientists believe that at least 1,600 species, including grizzlies, caribou and orca whales, are currently at risk in the province. But here's the twist: On Pandora, the threat of climate change is non-existent, while in British Columbia, it threatens to exacerbate the precipitous decline in wildlife and ecosystems that is already underway.

A new report by a former senior scientist with the provincial government, finds that when it comes to fighting climate change, nature conservation is not part of the provincial climate change strategy.

One dimensional? Yes.

Short-sighted? Unfortunately.

3D? Definitely not.

More depth is required if British Columbians are going to avoid the Avatar blues.

Tame the policy dragon

To achieve this new depth, we're not proposing that Gordon Campbell tame any flying dragons (like they do on Pandora), but we are proposing an act of policy making that requires just as much bravery:

We need to conserve at least 50 per cent of our province's land base if we're going to give our plants and animals a fighting chance to cope and adapt to climate change.

The 50 per cent figure emphasizes expansion and connection of existing protected areas as well as new buffer zones and restoration areas, allowing sustainable resource development while providing refuge for species across a landscape that is changing due to climate change.

And while this figure might sound audacious, our vision for large-scale conservation in B.C. isn't just fiction or film making.

Ontario and Quebec have already made commitments to protect more than 50 per cent of their Northern Boreal regions, and B.C. has its own successful examples to build on, including Haida Gwaii and the Great Bear Rainforest. Benefits of large-scale conservation include greater clarity for where and how resource development occurs, as well as economic and social benefits like maintaining clean air and water and new markets for carbon and conservation trading.

We need a '3D' strategy

Even at a time when the B.C. forest industry is undergoing deep structural changes and job losses, large scale conservation still makes sense, offering new opportunities for light-touch forestry and sustainable resource development.

In a recent letter to the Premier, nine of the world's top climate scientists and environmental thinkers, including Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Michael Soulé and Bill McKibben, warn that, "The continued and potentially dire impacts of climate change can only be avoided or forestalled if we act now to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to slow the rate of ecosystem degradation."

Only when we've added the dimension of nature conservation to provincial efforts to fight climate change will be have a truly "3D" strategy with the depth to tackle the real life challenges facing our province today.

Maybe then British Columbians can steer clear of the Avatar blues, secure in the knowledge that their own real life Pandora is safe and sound. [Tyee]

Dr. Faisal Moola is the Director of Science and Terrestrial Conservation with the David Suzuki Foundation and an adjunct professor of Forestry at the University of Toronto. Marlene Cummings is B.C. Forest Campaigner with ForestEthics.

17 Comments:

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  • shepsil

    2 years ago

    Difficult to take you two seriously!

    Maybe you both will be able to overcome the association I now make with your two separate organizations as traitors to the grassroots enviro movement in BC? But it won't be easy.

    DSF has a BCLiberal supporting Chairman is it? In James Hoggan, who runs the disingenuous desmogblog.com. Not to mention the great one's verbal attack on the BCNDP this past election, which he now denies he ever actully did! Shame on David!

    And Forest Ethics, there is not much to say about Tzeporah Berman, except that her ego has gotten the better of her. I heard last fall from a BC politician that Berman was thinking of leaving Cortez Island because she had become 'personna non grata" there. Then on Twitter almost 2 weeks ago, she tweets:

    "It's true. Just accepted job helping lead Greenpeace International's Global Climate & Energy Campaign. Moving family to Europe #climate 5:43 PM Feb 13th via web"

    That old saying, "keep your friends close and your enemies closer", may have some bearing here.

  • freebear

    2 years ago

    Digitally preserved species

    As long as the 'leaders' mantra of grow the economy is peddled, and followed by the sheeple consumers; some species unfortunately will only be preserved on video!

    And the co-opted environmental 'leaders' haven't helped!

    I hope Suzuki is ashamed, and especially about his silence now!

  • Takuan

    2 years ago

    just get the ball rolling here

    http://www.theprovince.com/technology/well+blows+from+Ludwig+property/2607258/story.html

  • Takuan

    2 years ago

    burning too

    http://www.am770chqr.com/News/Local/Story.aspx?ID=1199901

  • OhCanada

    2 years ago

    The problem is bigger than we think

    This is just one problem - species at risk.

    The bigger problem that I see is our children pretty much got used to what is 'normal'. Most live in cities and have no clue about nature and wild life. So for them nothing is going to be missing.
    Children grow up where winter is like spring and summer is like fall and whatever. To them this is normal. To them seeing a clear cut forest is normal.

    We are on a dangerous path and I find it useless to argue over David Suzuki and otherr and who said what or didn't say antyhing and etc.

    The time is for action and not for argument.
    How are we going to act? What needs to be done?

    Waiting for the government is useless. We need to take things into our own hand even if that means to take it to court and demand protection status for all species and territories.

    Most of us and most of our children are already suffering from landscape amnesia coupled with species amnesia. What a bright future for today's generation.

  • freebear

    2 years ago

    Without sacrifice - won't happen

    "The time is for action and not for argument.
    How are we going to act? What needs to be done?"

    If we do not do it together, sacrifice together; it won't be enough!

  • Booker

    2 years ago

    Land

    Whenever I fly into Vancouver I'm always struck by how we humans have devoured virtually all of the prime land. There is a postage stamp of undisturbed habitat here and there, like the Reifel Bird Sancuary, but it's insignificant. We really do not need to take up all the good ground, and should start, bit by bit, returning some of it to the non-human inhabitants of the earth.

  • OhCanada

    2 years ago

    Freebear

    You are sadly right. And the problem is that no one wants to sacrifice. We became a greedy society and greedy individuals. And that is what is going to end it all. Our greediness is our main problem to everything that is happening today in our world.

  • OhCanada

    2 years ago

    Freebear

    You are sadly right. And the problem is that no one wants to sacrifice. We became a greedy society and greedy individuals. And that is what is going to end it all. Our greediness is our main problem to everything that is happening today in our world.

  • ME2

    2 years ago

    Just a suggestion, of course.

    My solution for the Climate Change Peril is to tether up all the Warmists and have them dog-paddle against the currents that drive the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation - bith of which in turn drive Climate Change in the Eastern, Central, and Western parts of our Northern Hemisphere.

    That would have a far more positive effect than the hot air they presently generate. Don't believe me? Do your own research.

  • Frank

    2 years ago

    1600 species

    According to the Right we don't need those 1600 species anyway, they're just taking up room that would be better utilized by logging and then selling the land to Americans as "wilderness" cottages.

    But then the David Suzuki Foundation supports the BC Liberals so reading anything from them reads like a Liberal party brochure. Except when they need donations of course.

  • Janie Jones

    2 years ago

    All falldown.

    Let me guess. This is a ploy to cover the collapse of BC's once mighty forest industry much the way the spotted owl issue was used to cover the collapse of the Washingon/Oregon forest industry. Much better to say we're doing the right thing and ending logging rather than admit we lied to the public and overlogged right up to the long predicted falldown.

  • NadineAlexis

    2 years ago

    An Avatar in Real Life

    Avatar audiences are viscerally connecting with the beauty of the Pandora world and the central message of life's interconnectedness. This is not science fiction. This is how the real world works. Everything is interconnected, and when we save nature, we save ourselves. The BC government is responsible for protecting our safety, which depends on a thriving environment. By allowing vital ecosystems to be destroyed, the government is being negligent in its duties. The BC government has an opportunity to become a hero by preserving 50% of its land base and thereby sustaining real 3-D life for current and future citizens. Now that would be a blockbuster happy ending worth cheering.

  • mopled

    2 years ago

    You may not want this, but it's what we will get

    Leaked UN Documents Reveal Plan For “Green World Order” By 2012

    "Massive $45 trillion transfer of wealth to fund creation of “global governance structure”Leaked policy documents reveal that the United Nations plans to create a “green world order” by 2012 which will be enforced by a structure of global governance and funded by a gargantuan $45 trillion transfer of wealth from richer countries, as the globalists’ insidious plan to centralize power, crush sovereignty while devastating the economy is exposed once again.

    As we warned at the time, the failure of Copenhagen in December did not spell the end of the global warming heist, but merely a roadblock in the UN’s agenda to create a world government funded by taxes paid by you on the very substance you exhale – carbon dioxide.

    Using the justification of the vehemently debunked hoax that carbon dioxide is a deadly threat to the planet, the UN is already working to resurrect the failed Copenhagen agreement, with a series of new Copenhagen process negotiations set to take place in April, May and June."
    From the UNEP Provisional Agenda, Bali, Feb 24-26 Comference.

    Welcome to the Green Totalitarianism!

    http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/022510_greeneconomy.pdf

  • mopled

    2 years ago

    Mistaken label

    The quote is from http://www.prisonplanet.com/leaked-un-documents-reveal-plan-for-green-world-order-by-2012.html

    More
    "Leaked planning documents (PDF) obtained by Fox News lift the lid on the UN’s plan to impose global governance by the time of their 2012 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio, which will mark the 20th anniversary since the notorious “Earth Summit” held in the same city.

    “The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a “focused political document” presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order,” reports Fox News’ George Russell.

    “Just exactly what that environmental order will look like, and the extent of the immense financial commitments needed to produce it, are under discussion this week at a special session in Bali, Indonesia, of the United Nations Environment Program’s 58-nation “Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environmental Forum,” which oversees UNEP’s operations.”

    The document outlines the globalist’s mission to enact a “radical transformation of the world economic and social order” by putting “a new treaty in place as the capstone of the Green World Order”.

    This system will be managed by “an additional governing structure composed of exactly those insiders,” writes Russell.

    “Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities,” states the white paper"

  • G West

    2 years ago

    Sounds like a great idea to me!

    ...gargantuan $45 trillion transfer of wealth from richer countries.

    The West has pretty much soiled its nest and wasted its resources for the benefit of a small selfish elite.

    Transferring that stolen wealth to the 3rd world sounds like the fairest thing I've heard in a generation.

    Bring it on - the 3rd world is sick of reluctant charity.

    Maybe they can do a better job of passing on a decent future to our grandchilden than we've done.

  • Bailey

    2 years ago

    Distinctions

    This movie is about us ourselves, not hot aliens of any kind. It's about our tendency toward genocide, and our inability to see ourselves for what we are, while focusing our attentions instead on imaginary distinctions between things between which there are no real differences. No boundaries.

    This is also a characteristic peculiar to modern economics. I say this with a strong nod to Mr. Ed Deaks.

    The article here makes important points about things which need to be preserved. Things without which we cannot do. When they say, however, that 50% must be protected, I must beg to differ.

    We need it all. Every single bit of it absolutely must be conserved, and pretty soon too.

    The whole idea that things can be divided is an illusion, and one that rests in a nest of economics. It's just not true. A businessman can tell you what exactly he owns and what he isn't responsible for, he can tell you to a penny which of his activities is profitable and which is not, because he bases his analysis on economic concepts.

    If we simply admit that the recent looting of our economies was successful, and that our currencies are wrecked, we become suddenly free to do two things: to remove the ill gotten gains from the perpetrators, whether corporations or their controllers, and to rethink these unprofitable distinctions.

    We only have the world to sustain us. Even if we come up with other worlds, that statement remains true. We need a system of balance to take the place of classical economics, provide global balance and sufficient means of concentrating capital to function, while creating decent means of life for all living creatures, ourselves included.

    And it must also provide means and incentives to treat the world we need so dearly like the fragile sweet gem it is. It must be preserved yes indeed it must, or we're all for it, I'm afraid

    All 100% of it.

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