June 2007

Despite the fact that most adults, including my parents, can’t find the escape key on their computers, they almost unanimously accept technology. On my morning jogs, I always pass a number of grown-ups who are plugged into their iPods, more interested in their music than in saying a polite “good morning.” It’s as if technology were someone they just met, whom they nevertheless feel they’ve been best friends with forever.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it seems as if our parents are going to continue loving what we invent. That’s fine with me — after all, isn’t one of the reasons we invent new technology to amaze old-timers, who still consider theirs the golden generation?

And yes, for those who were wondering, I do have my mother on msn Messenger. I don’t think it’s weird, just another step forward.
Scott Shallow
St. John’s, Newfoundland

Bushwhacking
Patrick White’s “Red Rush” (April) offers an excellent example of one more nail in Canada’s resource-management coffin. By ignoring ecosystem science and asserting short-sighted, narrowminded, and self-serving political agendas, Canadian policy-makers have overseen the destruction of one of the world’s largest fisheries (the northwest Atlantic cod) and are in the process of rapidly depleting the world’s secondlargest oil reserve while contributing to the climate-related destruction of our forests. By failing to protect our natural assets, they are also destroying the community livelihoods so dependent on these riches. Quite a feat, when you think about it.

From what I understand, the BC government is set to replant the forest with more pine-beetle food, and the federal government is helping keep temperatures nice and warm so the rest of our forests can die. This, alongside talk of processing the infested wood and piping it to the tar sands, where it can be used to fuel more oil extraction. Perhaps, in some warped way, this is what they mean by sustainability.
Bruce Lourie
President, Ivey Foundation
Toronto, Ontario

In Alberta, we also have a lot of aging, vulnerable pine forest, and it’s now being hit by the mountain pine beetle. Learning from the BC experience, loggers here are colluding with the government to go the same route, ramping up the cutting and going into forests that have been off limits up to now. Our minister of “sustainable development” was on the radio recently, defending plans to let a favourite company clearcut around Bragg Creek, despite the vocal objections of residents, on the grounds that doing so might stop the beetle. It won’t, of course.

As I say on page 455 of my Handbook of the Canadian Rockies,