Photo by Robert McCaw.
wildlife needs wilderness
Manitoba’s east shore wilderness offers incredible unbroken boreal forest and water networks ideally suited to its rich mixture of flora and fauna that includes the threatened Woodland Caribou.
According to the Manitoba government’s Woodland Caribou Conservation Strategy for Manitoba, released in May 2000, the Nopiming caribou herd is classified as High Risk, with the main threat to its survival being “timber harvesting operations and increases in other activities.” That is an astounding assessment, since the Nopiming herd is located within Nopiming Provincial Park – which in most other provinces would be completely off-limits to logging. But this is Manitoba, where timber companies are allowed to wreck and defile even our most sacred wild places.
Photo by Shelly Sandhu.
Woodland caribou depend upon mature forests for habitat and mature-forest-floor lichens for food. Clearcutting in Nopiming Provincial Park, as done by multinational Tembec, is destroying this endangered herd’s habitat. Our province’s Eastern Region Management Committee’s “Adaptive Management Plan” recommends protecting only two thirds of the caribou concentration zones in Nopiming Provincial Park. This recommendation is completely insufficient. Logging is not allowed at all in parks in most provinces – and should not be allowed in Manitoba parks.
The Manitoba government has banned all hunting of caribou in Nopiming Provincial Park and recreational camping is prohibited in areas where caribou are known to rear their young – which is a prudent move given the fragile state of the herd. Yet the major cause of habitat destruction, clear-cutting, is allowed by the Manitoba government to continue within Nopiming Parks caribou habitat! This shameful looting of Manitoba’s wilderness legacy must stop now. The Wilderness Committee will work to make sure that Tembec’s customers learn that when they make purchases from Tembec they are paying for the destruction of Manitoba’s park system and they are literally buying the ruined habitat of the endangered Nopiming caribou herd. We ask that consumers make an informed consumer choice and not buy from this company.
The Manitoba government has declared Manitoba’s Woodland Caribou as a threatened species. This majestic animal, one of the greatest wild symbols of Canada, has already been wiped out of the Whiteshell and Duck Mountain parks by human activity including clearcut logging. The Nopiming herd and other caribou ranges on the east side of Lake Winnipeg will be next if strong action is not taken.
Photo by James Richards
Three other Caribou ranges further north on Lake Winnipeg’s East Side support larger herds but these areas are certainly not safe. As it stands, of these three ranges, the Atikaki-Berens population is listed as High Risk and the Gunisao-Hudwin Lakes and Island Lake (the largest concentration of Caribou in the province) are Low Risk. However, if the proposed road up the East Side of Lake Winnipeg is constructed, all of these ranges will suffer severe degradation by clearcutting and other industrial development dooming the already threatened Woodland Caribou to extinction.
This is where you and I come in. WE are citizens and taxpayers and as individuals and families we have a right and a responsibility to protect threatened and endangered species and the wilderness habitat they need for survival. Join our fight to save our endangered species and their habitat. Let’s work together to realize the dream of the East Shore Wilderness conservation vision - a network of interconnected fully protected parks for our children, our children’s children and beyond into the future.
