Wilderness Committee Ontario educates and advocates for stronger provincial climate action including stopping urban sprawl, phasing out gas-fired electricity and supporting investment in public transportation and nature-based solutions.
Protecting more nature from urban development and destructive industries such as mining and logging is essential to safeguard our future in the face of the global climate crisis and accelerating biodiversity loss.
The world is facing a biodiversity crisis. Habitat loss and climate change are pushing more than a million species towards extinction. Wilderness Committee Ontario is committed to exposing the deficiencies in the current ESA regulations, advocating for even stronger laws, and supporting grassroots efforts to oppose projects that threaten at-risk species and their habitats.
Many of our environmental policies are the hard-earned result of grassroots community advocacy and reflect the values of the majority of Ontarians. At the same time, they are always at risk of erosion by the powerful corporate interests of developers and industry and require constant vigilance to maintain and evaluate.

Peatlands are the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink, making them one of the greatest climate change mitigation tools available. Mining for peat releases this vast carbon store into the air and stops the area from sequestering new carbon. Mining for peat further affects local water quality, and removes a distinct...

The Skagit Headwaters Donut Hole has got to be one of the strangest names for a wilderness area we’ve ever seen. As its name suggests, this area is a “hole” in provincial park protection afforded to the wildlands that surround it.

Native Okanagan grasslands with blue mountains rising in the background
Photo: Gwen Barlee

The South Okanagan and the Similkameen Valleys are one of our greatest conservation opportunities! It's the campaign to protect desert, grasslands and ponderosa pine forests in Syilx peoples' territories (southern BC).

Three southern mountain caribou run across a snowy landscape
Photo: Isabelle Groc

Southern mountain caribou are threatened by industrial logging eliminating large swaths of their old-growth forest habitat. This sub-population of woodland caribou found in lands now called BC and Alberta need these forests for a source of their main food in winter – tree lichens.

A spotted owl stares into the camera from its tree perch
Photo: Wayne Lynch

This handsome medium-sized owl, with its unusual dark-brown eyes, relies on old-growth forests to roost, nest and forage. In Canada, the endangered northern spotted owl is found only in the southwestern corner of British Columbia. Due to ongoing logging of old-growth forests only one spotted owl remains living in the wild in Canada. Currently biologists have only been able to locate one female spotted owl residing in the Spuzzum Valley near Hope BC. About 30 spotted owls are in pens at Fort Langley in the British Columbia captive owl facility with plans to reintroduce captive raised owls back into the wild. Several thousand spotted owls are living in the forests of the west coast of the USA.