There are a lot of buzz words out there today. Everyone is familiar with at least a few – organic, natural, green. As powerful as they seem to be, they are marketing tools, designed to sell. Often, the only thing green about a product is the colour of the label and, at the end of the day, the net profit. Labels must be read carefully.
The latest buzz word to hit the market place is “environment”, and variations thereof. Suddenly, we have new wave environmentalists popping out of the woodwork, many of whom were indifferent in the past, and seldom gave much thought to the environment. Once a dollar sign was attached, the word became fashionable. Fortunately, they are fewer in number than those who identify themselves as conservationists. Few can even pronounce the word correctly. How many times during heated discussions, have we heard, “I have always been a ‘conservation-a-list’, however....”
The current controversy down our way concerning the placement of so-called “green energy” wind turbines has generated a new batch of quasi environmentalists who, up to this point, had not been vocal about environmental stuff. That is, not until the folding type of green entered the picture, then the “conservation-a-lists” started pouring out of the woodwork. They did Internet research and became instant experts overnight, while ignoring the soon to be destruction of a globally significant bird migration area, annihilation of Species at Risk and the raping of a natural area that is enjoyed by hundreds of visitors each year and millions of migrant birds that have just made the perilous flight across Lake Ontario, en route to the boreal forests to nest. All this destruction for just nine wind turbines that the new wave faction claims with fists pounding on the table, will save the world.
Don’t get me wrong – it is good to see the current interest in our environment, however misguided it may be at times. Environmentalism in its truest sense, however, involves far more than just claiming to have interest, admirable as that may be. There is so much more at play than just a professed interest. We cannot downplay interest, of course, for it’s a start and we applaud that. But we have to be mindful of the much larger picture. We need to look beyond how we feel, or how we believe, or how we might think. We need to back up claims with evidence and examples and that is precisely what naturalists have done in Prince Edward County.
I will not use the word “biodiversity” in today’s column as some readers claim that I use it too much in my weekly prose. We are communities in strife. Our population continues to burgeon, uncontrollably, and it is causing conflict. Something always has to go, to make room for us at the expense of something else. The Endangered Species Act is causing grief among farmers. Yesterday it was loggerhead shrikes; today it is bobolinks. The solution is not storming onto property and saying you can’t do this or that. The solution is working cooperatively with farmers, one on one, to come up with a reasonable solution. Farmers are, after all, pretty reasonable people. Treat them with respect and they won’t be shooting shrikes (as some have reportedly done), or fail to report them at all, or, in extreme cases, bulldoze shrike habitat into oblivion (which, in turn, creates habitat for the even more endangered Henslow’s sparrow!). As one landowner from Roslin told me just last year, “Seems to me if a bobolink has flown all the way from Argentina, and has picked my hay field, the least I can do is give just a little, and make sure its breeding season is successful. I don’t need legislation to do that.”
We need to work together. Those who know about the importance of certain plants, birds, mammals, and everything else that’s out there, need to sit down with those who don’t know, and explain these things to them – succinctly perhaps, but also calmly and in an sensitive, caring, educational way. And we need to get the message across that, while nuisances they may become from time to time, we cannot live without wildlife. They are as much a part of our lives as we are of theirs.
One writer contributing in the Pitch Pine Post, published by Parks Canada, explained, as I have in past columns, that a healthy ecosystem is essential for healthy human populations. “We require a healthy ecosystem for our basic needs – food (agriculture, pollination), water (clean sources), and shelter (ozone layer, air quality, stable climate). If a single component of the ecosystem, such as a snake or turtle species, is removed, the ecosystem ceases to work as it should.”
We must learn that everything in the natural world is important. It’s not about birders in shorts and Tillies, dashing around with binoculars, or boys playing with snakes, or kids wielding butterfly nets. That’s fun stuff. We’re talking about the serious stuff. How everything in the natural world, including us, are interconnected. How we depend on wildlife for our very existence and how they depend on us to offer some protection at a time when our population is exploding and their population is declining due to our carelessness, arrogance and irresponsibility, and nature deficit disorder.
