conservation

Lake Wilcox should be safe. It is on the Oak Ridges Moraine, an area specially protected under Ontario planning law. But if Lake Wilcox isn’t ruined by spreading suburbia, it will owe more to Sharon and Jim Bradley than to planning policies.

Imagine walking down a street of a suburban subdivision built in 2000, somewhere on the outskirts of Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto. Only now it’s 2020. To your right is one of the single family homes that survived a physical transformation initiated in 2007, when it became clear that surviving the oil crisis required neighbourhood intensification. In his home, a retired minister sells polished and drilled semiprecious stones – amethysts, agates and tourmalines – out of a living room he has transformed into a showroom. His workshop is in the basement. ...

The example of the Siska watershed highlights important differences between the philosophies and worldviews that guide decision making in indigenous and Canadian societies. When discussing the BC government’s decision to allow the logging of the Siska watershed (then the last untouched watershed in the Nlaka’pamux territory on the eastern side of the Fraser River and a place of tremendous spiritual and cultural importance), a Nlaka’pamux elder once told me that the problem with the newcomers was that they were famished.

These steps serve as a basic guideline for creating a water soft path plan. This process can be undertaken at the community, regional, watershed and even provincial level. ...