Protecting species is everyone’s job

The lamentations began even before BC’s sweeping report on the state of its natural environment was released last week. The usual leaks from organized critic groups to friendly media laid the spin down for the city folks: nice scientific work and pretty maps but no endangered species law, so it’s logging as usual.

The poster animals for the environmental movement are well known: spotted owl, mountain caribou. A closer look at those reveals the complexity of the issues involved.

Spotted owl habitat was set aside in 1997, but despite that the numbers in BC have fallen so low that a captive breeding program was set up. Green activists say ‘it’s the logging, stupid,’ but in fact one of the key problems found in a decade of intensive study is that the owls haven’t chosen to occupy some of the protected areas. One reason is barred owls pushing them out. And it’s not often mentioned that BC is actually the extreme northern fringe of continent-long natural range for spotted owls.

Shifting protected areas is one delicate issue ahead; “managing” barred owls is another. That will be criticized by the same activists who give this species disproportionate attention.

Mountain caribou are probably BC’s most intensively studied animals, and here at least we have most of the world population. Key areas were protected in 2007 after the population fell below 2,000 and two small herds disappeared, but land clearing has shifted the whole predator-prey balance, and BC is now resorting to “managing” cougars and wolves and relocating herds to maintain viable breeding populations.

There is plenty of good news in the 300-page report, entitled Taking Nature’s Pulse: the Status of Biodiversity in British Columbia. Overall the pulse is strong, starting with the observation that human activity impacts a relatively tiny portion of the province’s vast land area. About nine per cent of BC’s total land area has been logged since the 1970s, although almost all the coastal Douglas fir zone had already been harvested before then.

Alien species are another growing problem, from purple loosestrife to European starlings unleashed by early Shakespeare buffs. Sitka blacktail deer were introduced to Haida Gwaii in the late 1800s and overran the place. The report notes that they have “dramatically altered the ecology of entire rainforest systems, with deleterious impacts on many species.”

The worst threat to BC’s biodiversity, the report says, is climate change. Tracking data from 1971 onward, it projects major warming effects by 2050. This informs the provincial government’s strategy to sort at-risk species in a kind of triage, selecting those that need direct intervention from those less urgent. If warming takes place as expected, the shifts in forest type, wetland and elevation zones may make biologists long for the days of arguing over clearcut logging.

It may seem contradictory that while undertaking one of the biggest efforts anywhere to study and protect the environment, the BC government is also advertising for more people to visit parks and get out fishing. Yet this might be more important to biodiversity than difficult-to-enforce endangered species laws.

In this vast place of personal freedom, imposing some sort of green martial law may be impossible as well as unwise. Only individual pride in our environment can ensure lasting protection.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers.