A major step towards more park and wilderness preservation in B.C.
Three-year-old male grizzly bear "cubs" playfully wrestling in the Khutzeymateen, one of the areas needing preservation left out of the current planning process.
Let's tip our hats to the B.C. Parks and Forest Ministries. At long last Parks has gone public with its system plan. And Forests has come up with proposed areas to be evaluated for wilderness protection status under the Forest Act. Both Ministries have dragged their heels when it comes to completing B.C.'s protected areas systems, but they're on the move now and need our help.
Presently only about 5 1/2 percent of the province is fully protected in parks. Another 1 percent is partially protected in Recreation Areas or Wilderness Areas, where roads, mining and in some cases logging are permissible. More than half of B.C.'s 73 eco-regions has less than 1/2 of 1 percent of their areas fully protected.
Of the rich biodiversity found in B.C.--the area that has the greatest diversity of all the states, provinces and territories in North America--from old-growth forest to alpine tundra, grassland to semi-desert, many ecosystems are completely unrepresented in the current protection systems. In some cases little or none remains in natural condition; the time for protecting these ecosystems is gone. Meanwhile, logging and other developments proceed relentlessly around the province. So, completing the parks and wilderness system is an urgent matter!
Parks has developed a systematic approach to protecting areas, subdividing the province into 59 distinctive landscapes (for example, Cascade Ranges). They'd like to protect at least one large representative area in each. Forest has not taken a systematic approach. The Forest Service's map of proposed wilderness study areas features only some of the areas that those in the wilderness preservation movement have been asking be protected--primarily those with low timber values.
WCWC supports the Parks concept of using a rational system. The Committee prefers the Ministry of Environment's (MOE's) Eco-region classifications because of their ecological basis and greater detail. MOE subdivides B.C. into 73 distinctive terrestrial Eco-regions based on climate, physical features and broad plant and animal distributions.
There are severe deficiencies in the current programs presented by Parks and Forests. The Committee will be elaborating on these in a detailed brief to government as our contribution to the current public input process.
We believe that there must be full representation of all the Eco-regions. There must be adequate wilderness preservation in all 70 Eco-regions that still have wilderness remaining. The combined Parks/Forests program, on the other hand, leaves 14 Eco-regions (for example, the South Thompson Upland) without protected wilderness.
We believe that there must be full representation of all ecosystems. Each Eco-region contains a wide variety of plant and animal communities, including mature forests of different forest types, early successional forests, meadows, wetlands, etc.
Our vision is that protected wilderness should include sustainable-sized examples of every one of these communities (ecosystems) in every Eco-region. For example, alluvial Sitka spruce should be protected in the Hecate Lowland regardless of whether any may be protected on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Biodiversity will not be adequately protected if Sitka spruce is not protected in all Eco-regions where is occurs.
The Parks and Forests programs do not consider ecosystems to this degree. The combined Parks/Forests program does not come remotely close to representing all of B.C.'s distinctive ecosystems.
We believe that there must be a comprehensive approach to evaluating potential parks and wilderness candidates. Completion of the protected areas system will involve designating at least 100 new Parks or Wilderness Areas. Each will have competing interests. There are no high-park-value roadless areas in the province that are not also coveted by logging, mining or other interests. In order to select the optimum areas, several alternatives will need to be looked at.
Parks has identified 42 wilderness areas for possible study and the Ministry of Forests has identified 59. They expect to screen some out during the public process, leaving probably fewer than 100 for study. Our view is that each and every large block of land in B.C. of potential park value should be thoroughly evaluated; there are several hundred such areas.
We believe in full public involvement in the planning process at every stage. The studies should not be left to government planning teams or consultants. The evaluation of each area should involve open public hearings. Sounds like a lot of work, eh? Yet every sizeable roadless area left in the province is a precious and valuable commodity. Are any of them not worthy of open public discussion and evaluation as to their best use?
