Archive for May, 2009

Wildlife of Pelham: Past and Present

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

By Adam Shoalts. First Published by the Voice of Pelham, May 23, 2007.

Once upon a time, black bears, eastern cougars, and wolves all roamed the hardwood forests of what is today the Town of Pelham.

However, these large predators, as well as several other species, were gradually extirpated from Pelham and most of Southern Ontario as a result of increasing human populations and rampant hunting.

Today, these creatures’ ranges have been pushed further north, far away from Pelham, which personally, as an avid naturalist, I consider to be rather unfortunate. (Though there are claims that the eastern cougar is making a comeback.)

On the brighter side, some species were once extirpated from the area but have since been successfully reintroduced. The most outstanding example of a reintroduced species found in the woods and fields of Pelham is the wild turkey.

For years now I have encountered these large birds while on my frequent excursions in woods across Pelham. Just the other day while taking a stroll through the forest surrounding my family home in Fenwick I collected a couple of turkey feathers.

Indeed, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources’ wild turkey reintroduction program of the 1990s was such a success that the birds are once again hunted for sport in the province.
Another popular game bird that can be found in the fields of Pelham is the ring-necked pheasant, which in fact is not native to North America. These beautiful-looking birds were actually introduced here from overseas for the purpose of providing ideal game for sport hunters.

Certain other species, such as the coyote and opossum, have expanded beyond their historic ranges on their own account, and are now prevalent throughout Southern Ontario. Warmer winters might explain the opossum’s migration northward to this area, whereas the coyote was able to expand its range in the wake of the wolves’ extirpation.

For those of us who enjoy a jaunt in the woods after dark, the howl and yapping of coyotes is a common sound.

Perhaps quite a few readers would be surprised to learn that Canada’s national animal, the beaver, is one species that has managed to maintain a foothold in Pelham despite the widespread destruction of its habitat.

Specifically, a beaver colony exists on the lower reaches of Coyle Creek, a slow flowing, meandering waterway that stretches across the Pelham-Welland municipal boundary. The creek is an important tributary to the Welland River, and drains much of Southern Pelham.

I first became aware of this little colony of beavers in the spring of 2001, while fishing on the creek with a couple of friends. We first noticed the telltale signs of several pencil-shaped tree stumps, which could only be cut by a beaver, and later discovered a few beaver lodges.

Last summer, out of concern for Coyle Creek’s beavers, I decided to form the Friends of Coyle Creek (the FCC), with the aim of preserving the creek and thus the beavers. The FCC has since grown into a group of over a dozen dedicated volunteers.

In order to keep the human impact on the beaver’s fragile environment to an absolute minimum, we conduct all our clean-up operations via canoe. In this manner, we are able to avoid disturbing the beavers on land, where they gather wood for their lodges and bark saplings for sustenance.

Pelham’s bears, cougars, and wolves may all have disappeared long ago, but the town remains home to plenty of fascinating creatures from the animal kingdom. Hopefully, these creatures, from the beaver through to the turkey, will continue to find homes in Pelham if we all do our best to preserve the local natural environment.

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Harper vs. Dion: How History will Likely Judge

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

On October 14th, Canadians will deliver their verdicts on the leadership abilities of our political elites. Or perhaps more accurately, we will deliver our verdicts on each party’s ability to condense complex issues to sound bites, propaganda, and rhetoric. The business of actually assessing the merits of a leader is left to history.

Historians, unlike politicians, political strategists, and much of the media, do not concern themselves with debating the intricacies of near-irrelevant policies, like raising mandatory sentencing by a mere one year.

Historians instead focus on the positions particular leaders took on the biggest, most significant issues of their time. Each decade seems to furnish a few of these crucial issues that shape the course of history. Taking the 1930s as an example, we may safely say that the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarian regimes were the two most significant events of the decade.

How has history judged our Canadian leaders’ responses to these two grave events of the 1930s? Well, they actually come off rather poorly. Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett (1930-1935) is widely judged to have badly handled the Depression.

Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King, on the other hand, who was both Bennett’s predecessor and successor, is often harshly criticized for his response to the rise of totalitarian states, particularly the Nazi regime. King was notoriously wrong in his opinion of Hitler, and confined in his diary that he both admired the man and thought he was someone who would never start a war.

But let us now focus our attention on the present decade, the first of a new century. The two single most important events, in my view, will be judged to have been the illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by the United States, the United Kingdom, and various lesser allies, and the international response to climate change.

The war in Iraq polarized world opinion, divided even NATO, and has led to the deaths of untold thousands, and made two million people refugees. The price in blood has been enormous, and so has the price in dollars: the U.S. alone has spent 800 billion to date on the war. (Or put another way, an even greater sum of money than what is now needed to bailout Wall Street.)

Instances of torture by American soldiers of Iraqi detainees shocked the world, and the lies told by the Bush administration to justify the war, (i.e. all those non-existent weapons of mass destruction) seriously undermined the already shaky creditability of the American government. In Spain and elsewhere, governments fell for having found themselves on the wrong side of the debate over Iraq.

What sort of judgment did Stephen Harper demonstrate in the lead-up to this ill-conceived war? Well, if you recall, Harper at that time was the leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, and in that position he passionately argued in favour of an American-led invasion of Iraq. He demonstrated shockingly naiveté in accepting at face value the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Moreover, Harper wrote letters to American publications in which he stated that Canadians should be fighting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Americans in their invasion. He did this even though opinion polls indicated over eighty percent of Canadians opposed the war.

Conversely, Stéphane Dion, now the Liberal leader and at that time a senior cabinet minister in Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s government, opposed the war, and fortunately, that was also Chrétien’s ultimate position.

So on this crucial issue of the decade, which future historians will doubtless scrutinize in great detail, it seems clear that Dion will be deemed to have displayed much better judgment than Harper.

On the other major issue of this decade, the international response to human-induced climate change, the responses of Dion and Harper have been even more at odds. Harper has denied the science behind climate change (even though he himself has no scientific expertise), dismantled all federal programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and proudly promised to kill Kyoto.

Dion on the other hand, was among the chief supporters of the Kyoto Accord in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, and in his capacity as Environment Minister, acted as president of the UN’s Montreal Summit on Climate Change in 2005. With his Green Shift, he has made addressing carbon emissions a central plank in his platform in this ongoing election.
If global warming continues as the world’s leading scientists predict it will, history shall not be kind to political leaders, like Harper, who led the fight against adopting measures to reduce carbon emissions and ignored the dire warnings of scientists.

Although Canadians seem poised to decisively reject Stéphane Dion’s leadership on October 14th, perhaps Dr. Dion can take some solace in the knowledge that history will be a much kinder judge of him than it likely will be of Stephen Harper.

Published by the Welland Tribune, October 1, 2008.

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The World’s Vanishing Forests

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

A few summers ago a friend and I drove Ontario’s remote highway 599, the most northern route in the entire province. From the trans-Canada highway halfway between Thunder Bay and Manitoba, this small, winding highway stretches north deep into the wilderness of the boreal forest.

Driving along this two-lane road we saw few other traffic, but plenty of wildlife: cow and calf moose, even a black bear. Hemming the roadway in on both sides was seemingly endless coniferous forest; interrupted only occasionally by pristine blue lakes and raging white water rivers.

That is, until we suddenly came across a vast clear-cut section where every tree had been felled for as far as the eye could see. Where once had been a virgin forest stood a barren moonscape of lifeless land.

It was the sort of spectacle most people associate more commonly with the massive clear-cutting of the Amazon rainforest rather than northern Ontario. But sadly, the reality is our frontier forests are suffering the same fate as the rest of the world’s.

Despite all the hype about the environment these days, there is a major disconnect between green rhetoric and concrete action. Particularly with regard to the strain of the environmental movement that has always been near and dear to my own heart: wilderness preservation.
Although this is the oldest strand of the environment movement, and its origins can be traced far back in history, today it garners considerably less attention than the “Al Gore” variety.

In Canada, it can be dated from 1888: when the first National Park, Banff, was created. Then in the 1930s the wilderness preservation movement found its most charismatic champion in the legendary Grey Owl, a woodsman and writer.

But in point of fact, the longstanding fight to save the planet’s wild places has been a losing battle. Today, precious little remains of the world’s once vast forests, and what does remain is typically fragmented and second-growth.

While many different organizations and individuals across the globe are fighting hard to save what little is left of our planet’s wilderness forests, victories tend to be few and far between.
Indeed, in the latest issue of Canadian Geographic an up-to-date global map vividly displayed the world’s shrinking frontier forests—essentially pristine wilderness forests able to support biodiversity. The world has become astonishingly barren of virgin forests.

Europe and the continental United States possess virtually no remaining frontier forest, and the rest of the world is rapidly heading in that direction. Asia, for example, has lost 95 percent of its once vast frontier forests.

The famed jungles of Vietnam are almost no more, as human populations swell and logging and other practices clear the land. Even in the heart of underdeveloped Africa, the once vast Congo rainforest, where Joseph Conrad set Heart of Darkness, only small patches of frontier rainforest remain today.

Few Canadians, I suspect, realize that the largest intact wilderness forest on earth is right here in our own country: the boreal forest of the north. It is larger than even the Amazon jungle, which has been depleted at an alarming rate and continues to vanish. Moreover, the thickest and largest track of it is in fact confined here in Ontario.

So, since we Canadians still possess forested wilderness, which has become so exceptionally rare today, you would think we would be leaders in protecting it. Not in the slightest.

Our own wilderness is disappearing rapidly, under the pressures of logging, mining, new highways, and expanding human populations.

In 2004, I explored the Otoskwin-Attawapiskat River, deep in the heart of the remaining frontier forest, and subsequently published the first account of that remote river in history. Today, that river, a mere four years ago one of the most pristine on the planet, is now home to a massive mine.

In fact, only 10 percent of our boreal forest is protected at all.

If that figure doesn’t change soon, it will not be long before Canada’s wilderness goes the same way as the rest of the world’s. And then, when people want to see and experience the majesty and mystery of frontier forests, the only place they will find it is in books or their imagination.

Published by the Welland Tribune, June 11 2008.

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