Environment Essay
by Tony Eberts
Greater Vancouver residents have solid reasons for believing ours is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan place, but to much of the world its chief importance is as a gateway to a vast, natural world.
Our greatest treasure lies around us in the mountains, sea, rivers, lakes and forests, not in what we’ve built. We don’t have the Louvre or the British Museum; we have one of the world’s richest salmon rivers. Instead of the Leaning Tower of Pisa we have mountain ranges with flower meadows in summer and skiing in winter. No Taj Mahal, but an inland sea offering unrivalled cruising, fishing and watersports.
Compared with much of the more populated world, our environment remains reasonably clean, green and inviting, despite a long history of friction between the conservationists on the one hand, and the resource industries and developers on the other.
The 400-hectare Stanley Park is the most famous symbol of Vancouver. Ask a first-time visitor what tops his or her itinerary, and odds are it will be Stanley Park first, and maybe Grouse Mountain or Cypress Bowl next.
Almost all of the Lower Fraser Valley was logged, much of it by settlers hacking fields out of forests. More recently a push for more golf courses threatened such ecologically sensitive areas as Boundary Bay and some forested slopes above West Vancouver.
But reasonable compromises seem to be getting more popular. Dozens of municipal, regional and provincial parks provide habitat for smaller wildlife, from hummingbirds and hawks to cottontails and coyotes. The coyote is a story in itself. This small, wily animal has adapted marvellously to the influx of humans, and its clan is more numerous now than it was a century ago. Major new parks and ecological reserves are on the way as the fast-growing population of Greater Vancouver demands more wild and semi-wild green spaces for outdoor recreation and breaks from the pressures of urban living.
Public awareness of environmental issues has expanded dramatically and shows itself in many ways, from recycling programs for householders’ bottles, cans and paper to bans on trash-burning (and cigarette-burning) in public places.
As recently as the 1950s and 1960s the air quality of Greater Vancouver was heavily affected by the fumes from the many coal- and sawdust-fuelled furnaces, and by the smoke that poured from the infamous “beehive” waste burners at sawmills dotted around the Lower Mainland.
The buildup of smoke caused some monumental fogs on winter nights. Once I tried to drive home by following the tail-lights of a motorist who seemed to be going in the right direction and ended up in his driveway. Such mystery trips have been largely eliminated with the switch to heating with oil, natural gas and electricity, and the virtual elimination of sawmill waste burners.
In many parts of the world there is a move to make the economy better serve our environment, rather than sacrificing environmental quality to make extraction of natural resources more profitable. For years we have been told by politicians and industrialists that the economy must keep growing at all costs or the good times will wither and die. But for the new millennium, the movers and shakers are beginning to realize that the key word is sustainability.
The concept is simply to reduce consumption of even a renewable resource like trees so there can always be a steady flow of timber to the mills with enough natural forest left untouched to support all the other, non-consumptive uses.
Tourism is our fastest-expanding industry, but it won’t prosper if all our valleys and mountainsides are stripped bare to feed non-sustainable industry.
It’s taken a while, but there are strong indications that the people of Greater Vancouver are getting their environmental priorities straight. We just have to be sure officialdom gets the message.
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