2-for-1 Wetland Sale / Nate Smelle
Since becoming Greening Niagara’s new Executive
Director last October it has been both a pleasure
and a shock reconnecting with the place where I
was born and raised. While some things have
changed for the better, many others have not.
Revisiting some of my favourite haunts throughout
the region, I have discovered that many of the
fields, wetlands and forests where I used to play
are now gone – consumed by progress.
Should such losses of our dwindling wildness be
considered a step forward?
At first the concept of biodiversity offsetting
grabbed my attention like 2-for-1 pizza. Two
wetlands for the price of one; only a fool would
walk away from that bargain...Right?
Then I remembered that biodiversity was not a
pizza. Biodiversity is the entirety of life on earth; an
interconnected web of ecosystems composed of
mutually evolving beings, interdependent with one
another for the sake of their survival. Walking
through a wetland its wildness cannot be
overlooked. Birds bursting from the cattails,
beavers, turtles and frogs sliding under the cover of
the water, insects feasting; all doing what they do
best – surviving.
Many of these species such as turtles have
hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary
experience that we could learn from if we took the
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