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ONE HAPPY FAMILY [WHATEVER THE WEATHER]
THE IMPETUS of one or two people, and a decade of work, is all it takes to turn an idea into a protected area. Tat’s the mes- sage conservationists are taking away from a surge of recent announcements protecting vast areas of prime paddling wilderness—including the Dumoine and Noire rivers in Quebec, the north shore of Ontario’s Lake Superior and the east arm of Great Slave Lake in the North- west Territories (NWT). “Tis is bottom-up conservation,” says
Rob Powell, the World Wildlife Fund di- rector for the McKenzie Basin in NWT. “Te local communities and First Na- tions are demanding that certain ar- eas are protected. Tey know they have something valuable and they know it’s threatened. Ultimately the federal and provincial governments say, ‘Okay, we’re going to protect that.’” Te new Lake Superior National Ma-
S I G N U P T O R E C E I V E O U R N E W S L E T T E R
H T T P : / / C A N A D A . S I E R R A D E S I G N S . C O M / J O I N C A N . H T M L
rine Conservation Area in Ontario and large parcels of protected wilderness in NWT are good examples. Trappers, an- glers, paddlers, First Nations and local communities were all involved in turn- ing 10,000 square kilometres of north- ern Lake Superior and its coastline into the world’s largest freshwater conserva- tion area. “It’s a good hub around which local northern communities and people can create a future based on protecting rather than exploiting,” says Joanie Mc- Guffin, a local paddler involved in the grassroots move to protect the area. Further north in NWT, the federal government temporarily protected an
area twice the size of Nova Scotia last November. The move keeps mining and other developers at bay while gov- ernment, communities, First Nations, industry and environmental groups do the groundwork to decide where park and conservation area boundar- ies should be drawn around the east arm of Great Slave Lake and another area called the Ramparts River and Wetlands near Fort Good Hope in the McKenzie Valley. These are the first of more than 20 areas identified in the NWT Protected Areas Strategy as lands that local communities say should be off-limits to development. Equally big news for paddlers, though,
is in Quebec, where the provincial gov- ernment has announced an approvals process to protect the Noire and Du- moine rivers. Te Dumoine, in particu- lar, is a classic whitewater canoe trip and one of the last un-dammed rivers in Que- bec that links intact boreal forest with southern deciduous forests. While the conservation organizations
are celebrating the news, and the grass- roots efforts that achieved them, they say this is not the time to party. Te WWF and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Soci- ety say even with these announcements Canada is far short of protecting 50 per cent of the boreal forest, a goal both or- ganizations are working toward. “Tese announcements support that,”
Powell says, “but they took a decade to achieve. If we can’t speed up the process we may not succeed in time.”—Ryan Stuart
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