Thank you. My name is Sarah but feel free to call me by my nickname, Sally.
Thank you for this opportunity to present my views on habitat protection in Canada. I'm a professor at the University of British Columbia, where I have been teaching biology for nearly two decades now. My expertise is in evolutionary biology. I use mathematical models and conduct experiments to better understand how biodiversity has evolved and to determine the factors that place species at risk of extinction.
Since 2007 I have served as director of the Biodiversity Research Centre, with over 50 faculty and 200 graduate students. Our research has discovered new species in places as far away as Papua New Guinea and as close as the backyard of the Biodiversity Research Centre. Our research has uncovered the evolutionary and ecological processes that generate biodiversity as well as those that are important to maintaining biodiversity. Our researchers have also been interested in what happens when a species goes extinct or is lost to a community. When will that ecosystem be robust and when will it unravel?
My comments today are those of a scientist but also those of a public citizen and a mother. When we were children we grew up in an infinite world. To us nature seemed unbounded. Forests stretched for miles with trees, and fish were teeming in the sea. I remember when I was a child that we would throw garbage out of the windows of our cars because it just didn't seem possible that we could have a cumulative impact on the world. We washed our clothes with phosphates, we sprayed our crops with DDT, and we drove our cars as plumes of smoke were emitted from their exhaust pipes.
This infinite world is not the world of our children. Our children grow up in a bounded world. They know that every point of earth has been affected by our actions, even areas where no human has ever set foot. We have learned that the cumulative impact of billions of people has entirely reshaped our earth from the seas to the skies.
Scientists such as Alberta's David Schindler have discovered that our lakes and streams were being transformed into algal soups by the phosphates in laundry detergent. The soap in our homes no longer contains those phosphates. Scientists also discovered that DDT thins the shells of birds, leading to catastrophic declines in many raptor species. The ban on DDT has allowed these species to recover, and visitors to Vancouver can now watch as peregrine falcons and bald eagles soar over our skyline.
Scientists have also discovered the impacts of many of the pollutants, leading to increasing regulations on emissions, with some success. For example, reductions in CFC emissions have led to the beginning of the recovery of the ozone layer and the ozone hole. It's been estimated in the United States by the EPA that over a million people in this century have been saved from death due to cancer by these regulations.
The bounded world in which our children now live contains many fewer natural resources than there were when we were born. In southwestern British Columbia, 75% of the old-growth forests are no longer there. In the world's oceans, 80% of the larger fish, the predatory fish such as tuna, are now gone because of overfishing in the last century. Globally, over one in five species of vertebrates and plants are at risk of extinction—I'm including critically endangered, endangered, and threatened. These rates of extinction we now know are 100 to 1,000 times higher than background rates of extinction, because of human activities. This is not the background level we're talking about.
These dramatic reductions in resources from our oceans to our forests have had tremendous negative impacts on local communities and on jobs. In British Columbia, direct employment in the forest sector has gone from 100,000 to 50,000 since 2000. In part, this is due to the declining availability of our old-growth forests, management practices that are focused on short-term returns, and the shift of timber-processing jobs to other countries.
In the maritime provinces, as you well know, 40,000 people lost their jobs due to the cod fisheries collapse, after warnings by scientists that sustainable management was essential were repeatedly ignored. Poor habitat protection and environmental policy also puts at risk Canadian exports as the world's markets increasingly demand sustainably harvested and low environmental impact products.
In my opinion, the situation is only getting worse. A comparison of the status of species in British Columbia from the 1990s to the 2000s found that more than half of the species had declined. Likely, over your term in Parliament another species will be extirpated from Canada, the northern spotted owl. When I became an adult there were hundreds of owls in British Columbia, and at this point there are only two breeding pairs left in the wild. This decline is directly due to the loss of old-growth forest.
Gone already from my province of British Columbia are the sage grouse, the pygmy short-horned lizard, the white-tailed jackrabbit, and the list continues. More worrisome is that habitat does not necessarily recover if we push it too far. If we remove a species, we do not know how the interactions among the remaining species are altered, how the food web is altered. That means we can't necessarily stop our actions and have the ecosystem recover. For example, cod remain in extremely low abundance 20 years after a moratorium on their catch, in part because of these shifts in the food web once they had been overfished.
Science has helped to point the way to recovery from major environmental catastrophes such as those brought on by phosphates, DDT, and CFCs. But we, as scientists, do not know all that we need to know to safeguard our future economy and welfare.
We do not know, when we lose a species, what potential medical discoveries we are losing with them. Who would have guessed, for example, that sea slugs would be important in discovering how memories are laid down, and figuring out what is going wrong in patients with Alzheimer's? Who would have guessed that the rosy periwinkle, a pretty little pink flowered plant, would be the source of a drug to help combat childhood leukemia? Who would have guessed that soil fungi would be responsible for some of the most important medical discoveries ever—antibiotics such as streptomycin, neomycin, and erythromycin?
Scientists cannot say for certain which species, when lost, will unravel the ecological communities within which they are embedded. We cannot perfectly predict which habitats will form key refuges and corridors linking the current habitat of a species to the future habitat of that species, an issue of particularly increasing concern with the rising temperatures due to global warming. We do not even know all of the species that are out there to lose.
Given scientific uncertainty, the only way forward that I see is to protect our natural lands and waters from our impact. The precautionary principle impels us to set aside more of our country from our impacts before those have become too severe to recover from. Why? Habitat protection provides a buffer, a reserve where natural ecosystems can prosper and continue, and those reserves act as a source of species and individuals to surrounding areas, whether that source be fish larvae or pollinating bees. Habitat protection is also a promise to our children to save some of Canada relatively untouched for their discoveries.
Canada is one of the signatories to the 2010 UN Convention on Biological Diversity set out to preserve at least 10% of marine areas, and 17% of terrestrial areas and inland waters by 2020. We are not on target. We currently have about 1% of marine areas and about 10% of Canadian land in protection. But the slope of the changes in these numbers is too shallow for us to reach the targets. Furthermore, many of our protected lands are disconnected and they are often very far away from the ecosystems and species at greatest risk.
I believe so strongly that we must act to protect land for future generations that last year I donated $100,000 from an award I received from the MacArthur grant to the Nature Trust of B.C. and the Nature Conservancy of Canada to help purchase lands in the Okanagan, one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada. But this donation is a drop in the bucket. We must work together, individuals—