Budget Bill Appals
Dear Senators,
I am appalled and disgusted to hear that you have passed budget bill (Bill C-9), including the provisions that dismantle environmental protections put in place by the Environmental Assessment Act. The changes - buried in the budget bill in the hope that the stench of them would not reach the nostrils of the public - do away with rigorous environmental screening and meaningful public consultation, removing most of the safeguards we have against the rash development of major projects that have the potential to wreak irreparable damage on already fragile ecosystems.
This is especially shocking because these changes negate the recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that prohibits breaking major projects up into smaller pieces for the purpose of avoiding a complete environmental assessment, and mean that we no longer have the ability to determine the full impact of mega-projects or to make a reasoned assessment of their worth or danger.
The changes effectively devolve responsibility to provinces, which often have less thorough environmental assessment reviews. In British Columbia it almost certainly means a green light for Taseko's controversial Prosperity open pit mine, destined to drain rainbow trout-filled Fish Lake, a traditional holy place in Tsilhqot'in traditional territory, and build a toxic tailings pond. In compensation the company cynically offers to "create" a "replacement lake".
If we have learned anything during the last century it is surely that our future is ultimately dependent upon the health of the ecosystems of which we are a part.
In my seven decades on this planet, I have seen the seemingly infinite tropical and northern rain forests, which shelter the majority of the planet's life forms, driven to near extinction. The Appalachians and other mountains have been levelled to get at their carbon, much of which has now been released into the atmosphere. Falling ancient aquifers and retreating glaciers threaten to make agriculture impossible in many of our most fertile regions.
We were already deep into the process of destroying the life in the oceans even before the current catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The 'limitless" Atlantic cod almost went extinct, and Pacific salmon dwindle as their spawning streams and rivers are destroyed and fish farms, placed in all the most inappropriate places, infest wild salmon smolts with an unbearable burden of sea lice. Most major fisheries have been so depleted by overfishing, and particularly by the huge drift nets that indiscriminately scour great swaths of the oceans of all life, that we are fishing further and further "down the food chain" for species that were once deemed inedible by humans but are now themselves coming under heavy pressure. I have seen coral reefs - the "rainforests of the oceans" - dying off in the face of warming seas and changing pH levels due to excess CO2, and now we are seeing huge dead zones growing in the planet's seas. Just recentlyI learned that these dead zones have become incubators for billions of giant jellyfish that pose yet another imminent danger to the dwindling fish stocks in the oceans.
I fear that our grandchildren, if not indeed our children, will live to learn in the hardest way the wisdom of the Cree proverb, "Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught, will we realize that we cannot eat money." This lesson has been learned too late by many human societies, from Mesopotamia to Easter Island. The Romans' insatiable craving for wood for fuel turned North Africa's vast forests into the planet's greatest desert. But never before has mankind had the potential or the apparent intention to destroy whole planetary ecosystems.
We may live in air-conditioned urban cocoons and gated communities made "safe" by armed guards, but what we will always depend on planetary ecosystems for the air we breathe, the water that forms the bulk of everything we drink, and which together with the (now rapidly changing) climate makes possible the food we eat.
Rather than shredding our already weak environmental safeguards to grease the way for mega-projects that offer short-term benefits for a few but possible long-term disaster for us all, this is surely the time when we must look carefully at the environmental impact of every major project to make sure that benefits are real and the dangers acceptable.
Surely any rational person who was not blinded by fear of change and greed would be insisting on the most rigorous environmental assessment of everything we do, not tearing down the few safeguards we have against our folly.
Caspar Davis
Ex-chair, Sierra Club Victoria Group
