biological diversity

Prime Minister issues apology for wildlife holocaust

Mon, 2008-08-25 11:57 by tim

(Photo of the last wolf in Newfoundland from "Land Mammals")

Crystal ball

As the fog clears from my crystal ball I can see a press conference convened by the then Prime Minister of Canada in 2040, Mr. Jagrup Singh, as he takes the mike to issue an apology on behalf of 55 million Canadians and the federal governments of the previous five decades. It is an apology to the extinct wildlife of Canada that the mass immigration policies favoured by all political parties extinguished, policies kick-started by the Brian Mulroney government and most particularly by Immigration Minister Barbara MacDougall in the early 1990s. In retrospect, the one percent per year immigration growth target proved to be the death knell for farmland, wetlands and wildlife habitat in Canada.

Compromising Enviro NGOs to blame

Prime Minister Singh explained that the massacre occurred because governments of the day took the advice of environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club and the David Suzuki Foundation who advised them that “smart growth” strategies, that is, land use planning, would defend wildlife and farmland from any ecological consequences resulting from runaway population growth and economic development. We could invite the world here and have our cake and eat it too.

In fact, the most famous Canadian intellectual of the time, Dr.William Rees, was quoted as saying that there was “no necessary connection between immigration and biodiversity loss” and if immigrants were settled in dense urban zones strictly defined by planning boundaries then “Greenfield” acreages “would never be compromised.”

We cannot have our cake and eat it too

But Dr. Rees was proven wrong. We couldn’t have our cake and it eat it too. Not even at the beginning of the millennium. Smart growth was a failure from the start. Portland, Oregon was to be its poster child. Instead it was a showcase of its limitations. When the sheep-pen is bursting with people, the wolves are waiting in the wings to extend the urban boundaries and develop the surrounding greenbelts. And those who live in dense neighbourhoods have a footprint that reaches out to impact wildlife living in the hinterland. The residents of highrises consume more than twice the energy of rural residents. Ultimately it is not where Canadians live, but how many of them there are, that proves decisive for the environment. That was the autopsy report for Canada’s wildlife.

Too late

Prime Minister Singh’s apology followed a long Canadian tradition of mea culpas. First it was to the Japanese Canadians for their internment during the War. An apology plus cash. Then the Chinese Canadians got an apology plus cash for the Head Tax. The Liberal government of 2005 gave 2.5 million dollars to Italian Canadians who were negatively impacted by the War Measures Act during the Second World War. And then Ottawa apologized for the Komagata Maru incident. Then there was an apology for the treatment of First Nations children in residential schools. Finally in the year 2020 the Ukrainian Canadian community received an apology for the disgraceful internment of 5000 Canadians of Ukrainian descent during and after the First World War.

Now in 2040 Canada’s wildlife get an apology too. Posthumously.

Who is going to give us a posthumous apology, when we are the authors of our fate?

Recently extinguished species in Canada
(Source: Wikipedia)

Sea-mink Extinguished by fur-trappers from Global Action network

"According to the Species at Risk Act, the following animals are extinct.

Mammals

* Dawson Caribou, Rangifer tarandus dawsoni, 1984
* Sea Mink, Mustela macrodon, 1894
* Newfoundland Wolf,Canis lupus beothucus, 1911
* Banks Island Wolf,Canis lupus bernardi, 1920
* Cascade Mountains Wolf,Canis lupus fuscus, 1940

Birds

* Passenger Pigeon

Fish

* Blue Gill
* Benthic Hadley Lake Stickleback
* Deepwater Cisco, Coregonus johannae, 1952
* Lake Ontario Kiyi, Coregonus kiyi orientalis, 1964
* Limnetic Hadley Lake Stickleback
* Blue Walleye

Arthropods

* Rocky Mountain locust, Melanoplus spretus, 1902

Mollusks

* Eelgrass limpet, Lottia alveus"

Topic:

Is the human race running a fever?

Mon, 2008-06-02 10:31 by Sheila Newman

No-one with their eyes and ears open could miss the fact that economic and material prognostics are all pointing downwards for the world economy. Some may turn to fortune tellers and stock-market analysts, or even listen to politicians, at these times, but do any objective measures actually exist? A study in 2003 seems very pertinent today.

What do thermometers and spygmanometers actually measure when a physician uses them to test one person's health? They actually measure outward signs of microstates in the human body in thermodynamic terms of temperature and pressure. The measurements only mean something when compared to a range of averages over a wide number of bodies.

Taking a similar approach, but applying it to entire species, marine ecologists, Charles Fowler and Larry Hobbs, worked out a series of tests to assess the health and prognosis of our species and others in, "Is Humanity Sustainable?"

They wrote, "Avoiding abnormal or pathological conditions has long been standard practice in medicine. In recent decades, this has become recognized as a critically important tenet of management at all levels of biological organization. That is, management and restoration have the objective of keeping components of complex systems (e.g. individuals, species, ecosystems and the biosphere) within their normal range of natural variation in much the same way we do medically with body temperature, body mass, pulse or blood pressure for the individual human."

Objective assessment requires, of course, that humans be considered as "part of ecosystems and the biosphere, subject to the same natural laws and benefiting from the same supporting services as other species."

Does Homo sapiens fall "within the spectrum of variation observed among species"? Fowler and Hobbs tried to test whether the human species falls within the normal range for comparable species, using a range of measures that are also applicable to other species.

This scientific study proposed that the "principles and tenets of [good] management require action to avoid sustained abnormal/pathological conditions. For the sustainability of interactive systems, each system should fall within its normal range of natural variation."

"This applies to individuals (as for fevers and hypertension, in medicine), populations (e.g. outbreaks of crop pests in agriculture), species (e.g. the rarity of endangerment in conservation) and ecosystems (e.g. abnormally low productivity or diversity in 'ecosystem-based management')."

Almost every test showed that the human species was not ecologically normal. Tendencies in the human species usually varied way beyond the safe range.

The authors wrote, "For example, our population size, CO2 production, energy use, biomass consumption and geographical range size differ from those of other species by orders of magnitude."

These differences must have practical consequences, but these are not well known.

The full study may be downloaded at http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/cnvwhur9u2crk6le/fulltext.pdf

Topic:

The 'aging population' hoax

Sat, 2008-02-02 18:47 by admin

The Aging Population Hoax

Originally published on 1 February as "The Aging Hoax" by Canadian population stability activist Brishen Hoff on his blog site ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com/

Over and over, the media tells us that we have an aging population, and that it is a bad thing.

Never mind the problem of growing overpopulation, the media is only concerned with the aging population angle.

They claim that the cost of taking care of these seniors will be tremendous.

They propose a solution: multiculturalism.

How do they define multiculturalism?

To them multiculturalism is the injection of 260,000 immigrants into Canada annually. In other words, cheap labour for big business and lowering of labour standards.

They claim that this makes for diverse, vibrant communities.

They would classify an unsustainable urban nightmare with 6 lanes of gridlock traffic, smog, sewage smells, etc such as Toronto as a diverse, vibrant community.

Multiculturalism/Mass-Immigration is the friend of big business as a way to boost their profits by adding more customers.

Big businesses like the Royal Bank of Canada lobby hard for the Canadian government to accept more immigrants so that they can make more short-term profits at the expense of Canadians and their environment.

The media has had a powerful influence deceiving the Canadian public.

People like Sean Webb from TVO's "The Agenda" forum discussion ask:

"And how do we deal with our aging population? In the next twenty to thirty years we are going to have a very old population. Who is going to care for all of these people when they are not able?"

To which I would respond:

Actually, children are more expensive than elderly.
Europe has a more aged population than Canada. Do you see any crisis there in looking after their seniors? It is countries like Brazil with a young population that really cause social problems.
Population growth can't go on forever, so therefore it is not a long-term solution to an aging population.

Could it be that big business wants us to fear an aging population only so they can gain public acceptance of bringing in a quarter million immigrants each year to Canada so they can grow their short-term profits at the expense of Canadians and their environment?

The media has tried to convince the public that it is more compassionate to let the world into Canada than to protect the rights of existing Canadians and Canadian wildlife by not letting the world immigrate into Canada.

Sean Webb says: "It doesn't make any sense to just close off the border and seclude ourselves from the world. Not only do we hold a huge percentage of the world's available fresh water relative to our population, but we are really good at water purification. If we aren't willing to continue taking in so many immigrants can't we offer our expertise and resources to nations that need clean drinking water?"

I agree that Canadians should try to help other nations solve their problems. The best way would be making sure they have access to birth control.

There is no point in giving other countries the utmost water and sewage technology if it just means they'll grow their population so much that they'll make extinct all of their native species. Canada can't possibly play the parent of every other country in the world let alone allow in everyone who wants to immigrate here.

We must help other countries in their country of origin, when appropriate. Bringing them here is not a solution. We are a cold, arctic land with hardly any arable land and we are liquidating all of our fossil resources as exports to the point where in a few decades we won't even be able to sustain our present population.

What does Sean mean by "close off the border" when he says "It doesn't make any sense to just close off the border and seclude ourselves from the world"?

Is having a negative net migration synonymous with "closing off the border"?

If we have more freshwater than the rest of the world per capita, is it really ours to play Santa Claus with or should we protect it for all the salmon, otters, brook trout, etc that call Canada home?

biological diversity

Prime Minister issues apology for wildlife holocaust

Topic:

Is the human race running a fever?

Topic:

The 'aging population' hoax

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