Today, I held hands with my 7 year old niece and walked in the Climate Strike in Orillia. Organized solely by youth over 100 people gathered together in the fight to end fossil fuels, advocate to governments at all levels to take critical action on climate change for a brighter future.
Any engaged environmentalist can tell you how hard you have to work to protect land, oppose environmentally destructive policies and educate the public to keep our Earth habitable. You must master patience, persistence and tenacity in equal measure and this precipitates disproportionate burnout in the environmental community. This unending clash is in the news daily in Ontario as communities campaign across the province to protect Ontario’s Greenbelt, the largest of its kind on the planet.
No matter where you stand on the Greenbelt issue, we can all agree to the basics; the Greenbelt was set aside in 2005 for farming, recreation and the environment; healthy food, clean water and protected green spaces, and now we have found it is vulnerable to development. Despite its importance to a healthy Ontario, and the wisdom that laid it down, other pressures are at play and putting these provincially significant lands at risk.
The greenbelt is in danger.
The function of a land trust like The Couchiching Conservancy is to own or steward the land our organization deems vulnerable, or valuable; not in dollars, but in ecology. The philosophy of a Land Trust, is that when we take ownership of land, or add a conservation easement to the title, we have taken it out of circulation. There will never be a debate about Grant’s Woods, the Adams or Sweetwater Nature Reserves being developed because they can’t be. It’s done, they’re protected, and the land is resting.
As owners and stewards who have helped protect almost 15,000 acres of land locally, The Couchiching Conservancy is ensuring a healthy legacy for these lands, forever. No controversy, no mass organizing, no opposition. Just a safe space for life to thrive. Every time we protect a new nature reserve, we move on to the next one, because we know we are in a race for the environment against the pace of development. We no longer have to mobilise every twenty years to keep it safe. In order to support our work your party lines don’t matter, all that matters is that you think our natural heritage and way of life are worth protecting.
The antidote to despair is action, and action is what we do.
Courtney Baker is the Office and Acquisition Coordinator at The Couchiching Conservancy, protecting nature for future generations.
