Have you found yourself saying words like ‘wildfire, floods, landslides’ more and more each year? Are you feeling the cost of spiking insurance premiums? Googling your town’s wildfire readiness?
These ‘once-in-a-decade disasters’ are now occurring at an alarming rate.
While climate change is one of the drivers of these environmental catastrophes, there’s something else at play — the biodiversity crisis.
What is biodiversity?
Biodiversity is a jigsaw puzzle made up of all living things on Earth — yes, it’s caribou and whales but it also impacts the water you drink, the food you eat, and the air you breathe.
Everyday life is made possible by the work of trillions of living creatures from bacteria and fungi to pollinators and trees. Each piece plays a unique role in creating a fertile and thriving Earth.
We homo sapiens are late to the party, and we’re ruining it. We are born into a garden where nature has already done all the heavy lifting — working tirelessly for billions of years to create complexity in life, and interdependency in all things. As species interact, a web of life forms, but this harmony is more threatened than ever.
This web is unraveling. Globally, species are declining at alarming rates. A 2019 United Nations report confirms that one million species are at risk of extinction within decades unless radical action is taken to prevent this mass extinction. [1]
Why is biodiversity important?
Healthy ecosystems rely on a rich diversity of species to provide us with clean air, fresh water, and fertile soil. The disappearance of one species has a domino effect on all other species in that food chain, causing far-reaching impacts on the web of life.
The passenger pigeon is a good example of this delicately balanced web. Once abundant in North America, they were driven to extinction in the early 20th century due to overhunting and habitat destruction. [2] Their disappearing population disrupted the ecosystem by halting seed dispersal and affecting tree growth. With fewer trees, plant diversity declined, impacting species dependent on those plants. Predators reliant on pigeons for food also suffered causing imbalances and contributing to broader biodiversity decline. The loss of the passenger pigeons highlights how the extinction of even a single species can disrupt entire ecosystems and contribute to broader biodiversity crises.
Protecting biodiversity isn’t just about saving species; it’s about ensuring a sustainable future for humanity. As biological diversity declines, our food supply and natural resources are increasingly at risk, leading to higher costs and shortages. By investing in biodiversity, we’re investing in the health and prosperity of our planet and ourselves. When biodiversity is high, ecosystems are stronger and better at coping with problems like diseases or climate change. This is why supporting conservation efforts is not only environmentally responsible, but also a smart economic and governance decision.
Declining biodiversity ultimately makes ecosystems unstable and more susceptible to floods, landslides, drought, and you guessed it — wildfires.
Why is biodiversity in decline?
Today, the biodiversity crisis is driven by weak environmental laws, which allow rampant ecosystem mismanagement by governments and corporations. Industry’s role in biodiversity decline is threatening the safety of human communities, especially through greenwashing tactics.
Unsustainable logging destabilizes soil and earth by destroying massive root networks that hold soil intact. As forest canopies give way to barren landscapes, the soil loses its ability to retain water, increasing runoff, soil erosion and depleting drinking water from aquifers while simultaneously increasing the risk of floods.
When it comes to wildfires, clearcut logging kills old-growth, fire-resistant forests, and replaces them with tightly packed single-species plantations. Chemicals are used to kill off broadleaf plants which are less flammable than other species. What’s left are single-species conifer trees, all of uniform age, densely packed — the perfect kindling for wildfires.
Unregulated industry is taking away biodiverse, fire-resilient forests and making matchbox plantations out of the wilderness. All this leads to more frequent disasters and unsafe communities.
Environmental disasters now cost Canada billions annually. To halt and reverse the biodiversity crisis we need a fundamental shift in how we view our relationship with nature. We must see nature as a remedy to preserve, not a resource to exploit. Not doing so has and will continue to cost the taxpayers billions to restore the safe water, clean air, and quality crops that are available to us in abundance.
While the government spends money on mitigation and clean-up, there is not enough effort or money spent to prevent these disasters in the first place.
The good news
Ecojustice’s fight to save the last Spotted Owl from extinction in British Columbia and to protect the Boreal Caribou in Alberta is part of our effort to try and keep the different pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together.
But we need a collective, proactive approach to maintaining ecosystem health so wild spaces and species can rebuild their resilience to environmental catastrophe.
Right now, Canada and B.C. have this opportunity!
While the federal government has committed to global biodiversity goals and tabled a Nature Accountability Act this year, the B.C. provincial government has committed to developing a biodiversity and ecosystem health law.
We need to ensure these commitment remains a top priority — we can’t afford to lose more old-growth forests and at-risk species. Ecojustice is working to strengthen these legislations and help Canada reach its goals.
Stay tuned for further developments on the Nature Accountability Act and Ecojustice’s fight to defend natural habitats that keep us safe. We will need your support at every step along the way.
References
[1] World is ‘on notice’ as major UN report shows one million species face extinction — United Nations
[2] Why Passenger Pigeons were important — Wildlife in the Balance
