Last week, Quebec’s Ministry of the Environment said in court that it has never refused a request by a developer for the Certificate of Authorization required to allow projects that will compromise or destroy wetlands. The Green Coalition had been trying to prevent the destruction of the Technoparc marshes on the island of Montréal, a major wetland breeding ground for what has been called the largest variety and density of bird populations on the island, and close to being so for the entire province. In part, the Ministry made its decision to allow industrial interests to destroy that valued wetland based on counts of birds made in the dead of winter, when the smallest number of individual birds and of species would be present, and nesting does not even occur.
The situation is a blatantly egregious example of challenges conservation and animal protection advocates face daily. Often, government agencies charged with protecting environmental, conservation, and animal welfare instead work to see how they can prevent laws designed to assure such protections do not prevent governments from interfering with private interests whose support, in turn, may be deemed of advantage to elected political overseers. The ability to do so is facilitated by public ignorance of what is going on, possibly in hand with a lack of knowledge about the natural world, animals, or science. Either private assessment agencies or the governments themselves, both supported by tax dollars, can be entirely complicit by pulling such stunts as assessing bird species variety and population sizes at a time when both are at minimum numbers.
The value that many of us place on the environment, unique landscapes, conservation, and animal welfare are not, I understand, necessarily shared by all. I get that. But, the fact is that very often it is in overall human best interest to protect such things as biodiversity and habitats, such as wetlands and waterways, forests, coral reefs and so on. And yet, we increasingly fail to do so due to interest in maximizing profits for short-term gain, usually for those atop the socioeconomic pyramid and at the expense of the long term interests of us all. Anyone thinking otherwise can be dismissed, in the absence of fact, with ad hominem arguments that they are “socialists” or “tree-huggers” or hopelessly naïve about what “has to” happen. And yet, even as we surge ahead on the coattails of ever more sophisticated levels of science and technology and their combined ability to assist us in so many ways, do we backslide, or fail to escape, the very habits that increasingly diminish quality of life – for all lives, human or not.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
