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Soluble green |
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Written by -- associate news editor Rodney Venis
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Tuesday, 22 July 2008 |
There's a new Liberal policy.
It's Chia policy -- the policy that grows. It's fun and easy. The Liberals soak a pet cause in the sleepy summer media, spread the seeds of wild idealism, water it with a spoonful of funding and watch it grow.
Best of all, it's cute, cheap and disposable enough that no one has the heart to point out it looks like a dog suffering from an outbreak of alfalfa.
It's an admittedly nasty way of describing the B.C. government's ongoing occupation of the green front, but its latest wildlife protection plan -- the Conservation Framework -- is a case in point.
The plan, presumably, was a response to a report on biodiversity -- a portmanteau of 'biological diversity' used by biologist E.O. Wilson in 1986 that encompasses 'the variety of living things.'
The report, by Biodiversity B.C., a collaboration between three levels of government and a collection of outside agencies formed about three years ago, has been acclaimed for its strong science by such authorities as UNBC's Dr. Fred Bunnell.
According to the Globe and Mail, it found that 43 per cent of the species biologists know about -- around 1,640 different plants and animals -- are in danger as are four unique 'biogeoclimatic zones', which represent about five per cent of B.C.'s land base.
To be fair to the Liberals, the report asks the government to consider some fairly radical concepts and roles. It's not new stuff, but the idea behind protecting biodiversity is not managing individual species, but entire ecosystems -- from soil and insects to the trees and the birds that nest in them. That's the problem -- in biodiversity, everything matters, but while it's one thing to ask people to protect, and possibly surrender jobs to, an animal like a polar bear, it's another for them to feel the same level of concern for, say, the plight of a fern.
For instance, a lot of mosses in the province are threatened. Now imagine the B.C. Ministry of the Environment telling the people of Mackenzie a new mill can't start up because, well, a kind of moss might get hurt. Troops would have to be withdrawn from Afghanistan to stop the riot.
Another problem is that it's hard to manage consequences that are by their nature unintended. To use a silly example, on one hand killing the moss might do nothing; on the other, it could wipe out the home of an insect which feeds a bird and so on.
One approach to this is the 'precautionary principle' -- protecting weaker species just in case. But that carries a cost -- Fisheries and Oceans Canada, for instance, used the strategy to protect Upper Skeena coho salmon but, in doing so, it shut down a large portion of the fishery for commercially-lucrative sockeye salmon, who migrated with the coho. Fishing fleets in northern B.C. eventually adapted to the rules, but it was very painful and caused a lot of anger.
It's an extremely tricky proposition -- governments have a hard enough time setting things like interest rates and funding classrooms so imagine how they do managing ecosystems. The Liberals came up with an interesting answer -- the framework, which uses a formula created by scientists, government, and environmental organizations, to rank species and then decide an appropriate response.
Unfortunately, the framework is undermined on two key levels -- what Dr. Bunnell referred to as the carrot and the stick. The stick is laws that would make protecting endangered species mandatory -- a mechanism that would force government to act. The carrot, naturally is money -- the province is squeezing out a chintzy $1.2 million in 2008 to test the plan or, as one environmentalist put it, about enough to buy a house in Vancouver.
To a certain extent, in terms of crafting the stick, the Liberals are right to be cautious because no one really knows what they're trying to hit. But that makes the paltry nature of the carrot even more egregious. According to the Biodiversity B.C. report, there's a gaping hole in terms of the number of species that haven't even been studied ("thousands, if not tens of thousands"), data that's out of date or incomplete and the fact the scientists who do this work are retiring and not being replaced.
As E.O. Wilson is quoted in the study, "In one sense we know much less about Earth than we do about Mars. The vast majority of life forms on our planet are still undiscovered
and their significance for our own species remains unknown. This gap in knowledge is a serious matter: we will never completely understand and preserve the living world
around us at our present level of ignorance. We are flying blind into our environmental future."
Again, to be fair, full marks to the Liberals for even broaching the subject of biodiversity. But unless they get serious about the money, all their plan is is a novelty item with a thin layer of sprouts.
-- associate news editor Rodney Venis
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 07 September 2008 )
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