Threatening the threatened

Butternut trees. Red headed woodpeckers. Piping plovers. Cougars. Woodland caribou.

And now, monarch butterflies. All are on endangered or threatened species lists in Canada and Ontario. So is the little redside dace – a minnow that helps us by dining on mosquitoes.

They are threatened by habitat loss from human activities like urban development, road construction, overuse of pesticides, deforestation, disappearing wetlands, invasive species and climate disruption.

They’re not alone. Author and University of Delaware bug expert Doug Tallamy points out we’ve lost 45 percent of our insects in four decades. And we’ve lost an estimated three billion birds since 1970. A recent report by World Wildlife Fund Canada shows that about half of 910 vertebrate species monitored over the same period are in decline.

In Ontario, 270 plant and animal species are listed as threatened, including some turtles, salamanders, frogs and fish. On its website Ontario Nature points out that “we are facing the largest mass extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.”

All of this is bad news for us. The complex web of diverse plants and animals provides us with air, clean water, a liveable climate, medicines, food, healthy soil and so much more. Its degradation threatens life itself – including ours.

The good news is that our federal government in 2022 signed on to an international biodiversity agreement to conserve 30 per cent of land and waters by 2030. Since then, financial support has gone to nature conservancy groups and some provinces to expand parks and conservation areas.

But there are grave concerns that Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing the Economy Act, will seriously undermine those efforts. It allows for “special economic zones” where developers could ignore environmental regulations and local bylaws. Ontario is also replacing its Endangered Species Act with a much watered-down Species Conservation Act (SCA). Provincial politicians, not wildlife experts, will decide which species get protection. The new act limits that protection to a plant or animal’s immediate nest, den, or root area. That’s like telling us we can’t leave the house to buy groceries.

Once the SCA is in effect, 106 at-risk species will lose all provincial recognition. Their only protection will be the federal Endangered Species Act.

All of this helps pave the way for projects like Highway 413 that cuts across some 132 rivers and streams, hundreds of acres of Greenbelt and farmland, and impacts 29 species at risk – including the redside dace and red headed woodpecker.

Recently, the Ford government also proposed selling to developers 60 per cent of environmentally important shoreline in Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, nesting area of the piping plover. And it redrew the boundary of a protected natural area in Port Hope at a developer’s request.

Concerns are also surfacing about the federal government’s Building Canada Act. Will all this streamlining trample Indigenous and environmental rights?

We don’t need to stop all development, but it needs to be thoughtfully located.  Let’s write those letters and call those politicians to tell them that.

A 2024 EKOS poll found four in five Canadians want stronger government action to protect forests and wildlife. And recently-deceased environmentalist Jane Goodall had been urging quick and urgent action on climate change to protect habitats.

“We’re forgetting that we’re part of the natural world,” she once said. “There’s still a window of time.”