Canada has an environment week!

I just found this out thanks to a brochure about Jasper National park. Obviously, a community like Jasper town in the middle of a very beautiful and impressive national park participates with some kind of event. This Environment week was started by the government of Canada early in the 1970 - that's quite a while ago and from what I know at a time when Canada was considered an environmental leader. That's definitely not the case anymore but the environment week has not been scraped yet by the "Harper Government". 

Currently, at the website for Alberta's environment week there's only information available from last year's events http://www.environment.gov.ab.ca/edu/eweek/ Since the registration for this year's events does not start until April 1 I will have to wait a lot longer to find out what is going to happen. The Environment week is held at the end of May/ beginning of June and coincides with the UN World Environment Day whose global host will be India this year. http://www.unep.org/wed/index.asp As it is also the International Year of the Forests the official website offers some forest facts. 


Having been on a guided tour through Maligne canyon near Jasper town a few days ago I remember well what our knowledgeable guide told us about forests. Forests are too dense due to the management of forest fires, basically putting the fires out. I believe he said that it would be healthy to have 150-200 trees per acre but there are 20,000-40,000 per acre in most places now. Consequently, trees do not reach their full potential (no space to grow) and all the life underneath the tree canopy is negatively effected as well. Forests need fires to exist and maintain biodiversity but human beings that like to use forests in their own way (sports & leisure activities, tourist destination, logging, living near forests) don't want the regular fires to happen. A healthy forest would burn in patches and stop burning all by itself. But a dense forest, once it starts to burn, will be a huge fire that can't stop because there's so much to "eat". It all made sense and he gave us the reasons why logging can't ever do for a forest what fires do. Mind you, fires are beneficial while logging is not, to start with. 

If only 50 years ago we had known what we know now. It could have prevented a lot of mismanagement in our forests. Now the problem is not easy to fix and will come with dear consequences not only to the forests but to us as well. I think the huge fires in California and the inferno that happened in Australia are a good proof already. Anyway, I said could because there's lots of things we know now and still actions are not taken accordingly. How often do we hear after an environmental disaster, like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that it could have been prevented, that safety issues were known but ignored, usually due to corporate and human greed. They hoped for luck instead of taking precautions but sometimes it did not work out. I wonder how many more bad accidents it needs until we give up on the devastating way of learning the hard way and, having learnt from earlier catastrophes, take care first instead.