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January/February 2001 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Immigration À la carte Curious by nature Reverberations

CANADIANS ARE GETTING SOFT. Not so very long ago we were a nation of rugged frontier folk who earned our living in daily battle against the forces of nature: the blackflies, the sun, the snow. Now, relatively few of us live and work in the countryside, much less the wilderness, and those few who do are increasingly pushed to the social and economic margins. (One thinks, for example, of farming and fishing people.) These days, the typical Canuck is a city dweller, running the rapids of rush-hour traffic like a latter-day voyageur and fending off the encroachments of nature with a weed-whacker.

In the old days, our nearest neighbours were the loon and the bear. Now, apart from chickadees at the backyard feeder or raccoons in the garbage bins, few of us have regular contact with wildlife. If we crave an encounter with nature, we are far more likely to reach for the remote control and fire up the TV than to pull on our parkas and head for the backcountry. As for viewing animals in the flesh, we generally see them dead, and many of us have become expert at drive-by identifications of flattened carcasses. (If a Canadian field guide to roadkill doesn’t already exist, someone should set to work immediately to fill this market niche.)

For a nation that still thinks of itself as the True North - "land of the silver birch, home of the beaver" — our increasing distance from nature is an uncomfortable development. Indeed, it would be possible to wax melancholic about this shift in our national outlook and priorities. Could it be that we no longer care about the birds, animals, insects and plants with which we share this magnificent and richly endowed land? Are we really concerned only about getting to the store and back, triumphantly clutching that new web-ready cellphone? If this were true — if all that mattered to us was stuff — then the prospects for wild survival in Canada would be painful to contemplate.

The truth is that those prospects are already clouded. According to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, there are now 173 species — and counting — on the doomsday list of endangered and threatened wildlife in this country. We know without being told that for every species in a free fall toward extinction, many others must also be in decline, even though they may never reach the danger zone. A loss is a loss is a loss, whether or not a particular species plunges into crisis.

Paralleling the declines in wildlife abundance is a gradual but relentless loss of habitat — the wetlands, woodlands, grasslands, mountain slopes and ocean shores where wild creatures make their homes. Although this decline is difficult to quantify, we know that Canada’s wildlands are shrinking year by year, to make way for mines, clear-cuts, croplands, roadworks and housing developments. Since the focus of these activities is the production of consumer goods, nature is being diminished to provision our suburban comfort. If we don’t care what happens to wildlife in the process - out of sight and out of mind - then the trends will simply spiral on downward.

HAPPILY, human experience is more complex, and hopeful, than this bleak scenario suggests. For just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, our increasing distance from nature may have the unexpected — even paradoxical — effect of increasing our love for it. The environmental movement that has found its voice in the past 40 years represents a fundamentally urban response to the natural world. Unlike rural people, who value nature partly for what it can produce, urbanites do not expect direct financial rewards from their encounters with nature. Instead, we go out, however briefly, to seek silence, fresh air and a thrill of delight, benefits that range from the aesthetic to the spiritual. The more we walk on pavement, the more we value the living world.

At the behest of Environment Canada and other agencies, Statistics Canada periodically attempts to quantify the importance of nature in the lives of Canadians aged 15 and older. The most recent figures, which date from 1996, reveal that almost 20 percent of this segment of the population, or 4.4 million of us, take trips which provide an opportunity to see wildlife, and twice that number, or 9 million, find pleasure in viewing, photographing and feeding animals and birds around our homes and cottages. Fully 85 percent — 20 million of us — participate in some kind of nature-related activities, from fishing and picking berries to cross-country skiing. Although the 1996 survey did not include questions on our values and attitudes, the results of a similar survey in 1991 suggest that a large majority of Canadians (86 percent) place a high importance on maintaining abundant wildlife populations.

You can take Canadians out of the woods, but encouragingly, it seems, you cannot take the wilderness out of the Canadian psyche. In the view of Arlin Hackman of World Wildlife Fund Canada, the personal commitment of Canadians to conservation is "profound and growing." If we are presently losing the battle to protect our dwindling wilderness, he says, it is not because Canadians don’t care. It is because of a critical lack of political leadership. As evidence, Hackman points to the WWF’s just-ended Endangered Spaces Campaign, which set out in 1990 to achieve the "minimum and basic goal" of protecting an example of every major ecological region across the country. After a decade of effort and many significant gains, more than half of our natural regions still lack adequate protection, the result, he says, of "indecision and indifference" on the part of governments.

Having our hearts in the right place is not going to be enough - not at a time when our forests are being cut at a rate of one hectare every 32 seconds, when mining claims for a single year equal the area of our entire network of protected spaces, when (according to the WWF) Canada ranks a pathetic thirty-third in the world for its conservation efforts. If we really do care about the survival of wildlife in this country, we are going to have to do a lot more than keep the bird feeder filled. Instead of battling against nature, we must now be prepared to battle on its behalf.

For more information, visit:

• Species at Risk Public Registry
• The importance of nature to Canadians: 1996 Survey highlights
• The importance of wildlife to Canadians: 1991 Survey highlights

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