At 09:14 AM 8/4/00 +1200, Chris Perley wrote:
>Yep!
>
>I have heard of recent things Patrick has said, and though I don't agree
>with it all, his views are robust (he is quite utilitarian - and justifies
>it in his claim that no one species can be claimed to have gone extinct
>through forestry practices in BC, PNW etc - he keeps demanding evidence of
>ONE species that has gone extinct - but is species extinction an indicator
>for "good" management? I don't know). He does think about things and
>present a case. From past writings I can say that the idea that he would
>claim that forests were redundant is completely at odds with what else he
>has written. I simply didn't believe it.
British Columbia is a very large area. It has over 95 million hectares.
There are many species that are extirpated from their native ranges: the
mountain caribou in the southern interior are down to only 3000 animals, the
Grizzly bear is down to perhaps a 6-12 animals in the southwest part of BC
in the Cascades. The fischer population is very low in the southern interior
and on the coast. The wolf is nearly extinct also in Southern BC. Several
runs of salmon are nearly extinct in the Fraser River drainage. One run of
Chinook is struggling in the North Thompson River. There are no salmon runs
in the Columbia River any more in Canada. There are many red and blue listed
species here that are too numerous to mention. The Steelhead run in the
Thompson has been closed partially. The whole fishing industry has collapsed
in the Fraser River and Georgia Straight. Two species of salmon valuable to
sport fishing have been closed.
Patrick Moore stated one time was that the Marbled Murrelet has lots of
habitat left along the midcoast of BC. That is because there has not been as
much clearcutting of the ancient rainforest. He supports the idea of
surogate trees. But marbled murrelet is endangered in BC now especially on
Vancouver Island and in the Gulf of Georgia. Well it is proabably extirpated
in the Gulf area islands. Only 1 percent of the Coastal Douglas-fir
biogeoclimatic zone remains intact.
The recent declaration placing the Mountain caribou on the endangered list
is going to be a cause celebre here.
Anyway I will post some more information on this. You see BC was a vast
wilderness for the most part as recently as 50 years ago. There are still
some large wilderness areas, but they are dissappearing fast. We only have
3.7 million people here but I think we have four times the area of New
Zealand. We have the same population as Costa Rica, which has an area of
only 3.5 million hectares, but Costa Rica has 24 % of it's entire landbase
in protection forests.
So why? are we still chopping down the ancient rainforests?
chao,
john foster
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|