A well written, well thought out article by Bob Osborne (owner of Corn Hill Nursery Ltd., a member of Landscape New Brunswick, an author, farmer and gardener. His column appears each Thursday in the T&T) A sustainable environment will fuel long-term wealth New Brunswick should be among the wealthiest places on Earth. It has abundant clean water, good farmland, clean air and is home to the wonderfully rich and diverse Acadian forest system, not to mention oceans, lakes, rivers and incredible vistas. We live in a garden the rest of the planet envies. So why are we in dire economic straits? Why are we kept the proverbial“hewers of wood and drawers of water”? The reason is, as it always has been, that those with economic and political power use the resources that belong to the people to enrich themselves, leaving the land degraded and leaving those who do the actual work of hewing the wood and drawing the water living at a subsistence level. Over the last century one of the most magnificent forests in the Americas has been placed at the disposal of a few large companies to do with as they see fit. Our vast crown lands,which theoretically belong to all the citizens of this province, have been handed over to companies that have grown immeasurably wealthy selling the resources of this land, while the vast majority of the people see little benefit. We are told that this system provides us employment and that the wealth accumulated by the few will trickle down to those below. Call me naive, but these have proven time and again to be promises never fulfilled. Those who believe that the average citizen will benefit in any measure by increasing the amount of wood available to corporations or by allowing them to cover the countryside in gas wells have been taken in once again by the inevitable slick public relations game. This is made easier for the companies because most of the resource extraction takes place out of the sight of the bulk of the population, who live in cities. They will not be cutting the trees in the suburbs or placing gas wells downtown. It will be those who live in the rural areas who will be most affected. The Acadian forest system has been nearly annihilated by the forestry practices of the past. A fly over the country will show that the complex forests have been replaced by vast monocultures of single species that do not support the thousands of other species that are present in a mixed forest. Huge clear cuts make a patchwork quilt of the land. Because there is little or no enforcement of even existing regulations, wood is cut right to waterways, rivers are made into roadways for machinery, and the thin soils are bulldozed and rutted by the harvesters that strip acres of wood in a day, replacing the jobs that past hewers of wood once did. Now the little that remains of our crown lands will be opened to further cutting. They will be reopening sawmills, or to rephrase, they will be cutting the best of the last. The remaining large spruce will be downed. The last ancient maple and birch will be veneered, or more likely turned into chips for paper. Who will be out in the forest managing what will be cut and how? How might we provide employment and wealth to more? Well, a few ideas might include providing more markets to small woodlot owners, supporting industries that turn raw wood into products beyond lumber and paper, encouraging industries that bring people to the forest for tourism and recreation. We could support the farmers of this province with better infrastructure so that they can provide New Brunswickers with food produced by their neighbours. If we have natural gas, why don’t we drill a few carefully planned wells that could provide inexpensive fuel to the people who actually live and work here so that we could truly become more competitive,rather than allowing multinationals to come in and fragment the countryside with webs of roads, immense well pads and ponds to hold polluted water? If allowed, there will be thousands of wells whose energy will be piped away to others and which will end up costing us millions or billions in cleanup in the future when they leave to tap another unexploited place. Better yet, why don’t we let the world know that New Brunswick wants to become the centre of excellence for clean energy industries of the future such as tidal power or small stream diversion projects for communities? We are heading down the same paths that have kept us poor in the past. It is time to demand that we become a province that encourages activities that are life affirming rather than destructive to our land, water, air and people. A sustainable, healthy environment is necessary for an economy that will provide true long-term wealth. We must seize the moment. We may not get the chance again
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 14:03:01 +0000
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