Nature's Need not Industries' Greed
The FRIENDS OF Caren vow to not let clearcutting like this occur again in the Caren. This small creek flows into the stream that supplies the Pender Harbour fish hatchery. Photo credit: Paul Jones
The inclusion of the eastern slopes of the Caren down to the ocean shore is essential to make the Caren Park function to preserve biodiversity and to provide a full range of shore-to-summit recreational activities. Photo credit: Paul Jones
The B.C. government has decreed that the vast 4.15 million hectare region surrounding the city of Vancouver shall have only 13 percent of its land base left natural-preserved in parks.
The politically-drawn boundary of the Lower Mainland region extends from Manning Park and the new Stein Valley Provincial Park on the east to Texada Island on the west. It includes the entire Sunshine Coast, Powell River and the coast north to Bute Inlet and encompasses the headwaters of the Lillooet and Squamish Rivers where WCWC is advocating a 260,000 hectare Randy Stoltmann Wilderness Park to protect the last large stands of oldgrowth coastal Douglas Fir.
The government's 13 percent (544,000 hectares)limit has no basis in science. Conservation biologists, who study ways to preserve biodiversity (wild species of plants and animals as well as the complex ecosystems they survive within) estimate that protecting only 12 percent of lands will lead to extinction of 50 percent of Earth's species. Some say that 40 percent of the land base must be protected in a system of large, interconnected parks in order to preserve natural biodiversity.
A 1.6 metre-in-diameter western henmlock growing in the Caren not far from where the oldest specimen of this species was found (a log with 1,238 annual growth rings). Photo credit: Mavis Jones
In the Lower Mainland, 440,000 hectares of land are already set aside( 10.6% of the region)...mostly in large parks that predominately encompass rock and ice. These include the 195,000 hectare Garibaldi Park, 71,000 hactare Manning Park, 58,000 Golden Ears Park and 38,000 hectare newly-created Pinecone Lake/Boise Valley/Burke Mountain Park. The B.C. NDP Government says that it will add only another 104,000 hectares to the Lower Mainland's park system. Yet this system must protect spotted owls, grizzly bears, marbled murrelets, and the recreational needs of more than half the population of B.C.—approximately 2 million people.
The human population of the Lower Mainland is projected to more than double in the next 25 years, eventually reaching the size of Los Angeles. If this projection proves to be correct, how can nature survive without at least 40 percent of the surrounding land left in a state of wilderness?
We must make room to protect the entire 8,500 hectare Caren Range Park and much, much more.
