By Patsy Cotterill
The other day I was reading through my file of old BEN (Botanical Electronic News) newsletters. BEN, which has since ceased publication, was a newsletter written by botanists for botanists, full of keys, plant descriptions, accounts of rare finds, biographies and obituaries of botanists, and occasionally, when some egregious event warranted it, politics. It was compiled by Adolf Ceska. He and his wife Oluna are probably the most eminent all-round botanists in Victoria, BC. With their Czech heritage, their interests span the botany and mycology of northern Europe as well as North America.
Adolf also has a great sense of humour. I was privileged to be on a field trip with him once. Guiding us through a Victorian forest, he told the story of how he originally misjudged the height of salal, Gaultheria shallon, a very common ground cover in Vancouver Island forests. He was standing on a log and wanted to jump down, but he couldn’t see the ground. Alongside him was the top of a salal bush, so he assumed it couldn’t be far. He jumped, and went on falling, falling, until he eventually hit the ground…and broke his arm, or was it his leg? (Salal can grow to 3 m tall.) The moral of the story: it pays to know your botany!
Anyway, this is an aside. The article in the BEN, January 23, 2003 issue, I wanted to talk about was entitled “Plant Rescue: An Ethical Confusion” and was pre-printed from The Victoria Naturalist, 60:4 (2004) 8-9, under the title “The Ethics of Plant Rescue” and was written by Moralea Milne.
Milne describes how as a member of the Victoria Plant Study Group she took part in plant rescues. For a while everything seemed good: the salvaged plants were planted in gardens or donated to restoration projects and to nurseries for propagation, and membership in the study group soared with the increased interest.
Then in 2002 and 2003 she took part in a rescue of plants on property that backed onto Mill Hill Regional Park, in Langford, B.C., and included a Garry oak ecosystem (now considered endangered). The property was a cornucopia of interesting species and when a professional inventory was done of the park, turning up even more species, including rare ones, she began to question whether they were doing the right thing. She second-guessed even more when one of the rescue volunteers commented: “I felt like a kid in a candy shop!” (I know what the volunteer meant. All that free abundance. A bit like coming upon a shipwreck’s worth of beached cargo maybe, or simply a patch full of wild berries; one feels a sort of zealous greed, a compunction to make use of the resource!)
Milne asked herself: what if the volunteers’ time and effort had been put towards a conservation effort instead – there was evidence that the developer might have been willing to sell to Capital Region District Parks. What if they had worked with local, provincial and federal governments and conservation organizations to save the property? She writes: “Perhaps if we had not been so focused on ‘rescuing’ individual plants, we could have rescued an entire ecosystem. What good are the plants that we saved really? They have become mere gardening material rather than part of a dynamic ecosystem, is that a worthwhile trade?”
Her article should give those of us in ENPS pause, a moment to warn ourselves not to take the easy way out. The first principle of conservation is preservation.
ENPS has been involved in a few plant rescues, and I actually don’t have a bad conscience about them. The first one was at Little Mountain, a piece of remnant parkland in northeast Edmonton. We did everything we could over several years (until 1999) to try to save that land. On our side we had a newly minted City natural areas policy, ripe for testing, a city councillor, Brian Mason (who was constantly negotiating deals and compromises with the developer and Council so the City could purchase the land), and bags of publicity, yet still we could not save it. We did a salvage but it is only small consolation that there are legacies of that Little Mountain flora left in Edmonton, but so dispersed as to be invisible.
Another rescue took place a few years ago along Highway 28 near Gibbons, prior to a widening of the northbound lanes. The expansion removed part of a farmer’s sandy field, which had a native prairie flora maintained by light grazing. Again, those plants have provided a valuable source of native plants and seeds, some of which are flourishing elsewhere. (Unfortunately, all the plants I planted into Nisku Prairie eventually got overtaken by the existing residents, mainly invasive smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass.) The speed with which both the Little Mountain and Highway 28 ecosystems deteriorated with disturbance was painful to see. In the latter case, the large numbers of prairie crocus and three-flowered avens once easily visible along the roadside verge are critically diminished. Again, although we intervened to highlight the value of the site, there was nothing we could have done to stop development.
Still, there is little cause for satisfaction in a plant rescue, even if the plants would have been immediately destroyed otherwise. Rescue is still the easy way out. Digging up plants and replanting them elsewhere is hard work, obviously, but is still easier than mounting a conservation campaign: doing online searches, reading documents, writing letters, talking to politicians and authorities, organizing meetings and chasing publicity over a matter of years. Conservation is also hard because it is so often unsuccessful: it feels like a waste of time. The answer to the juggernaut of development is beyond the reach of volunteers and unorganized citizens. It requires a paradigm shift away from that of the constant growth of cities, indeed of population growth in general, to a situation where protection of natural ecosystems is a priority.
In some other respects, however, my conscience does trouble me. I sometimes contribute to environmental impact assessments (EIA), the entire purpose of which is to permit a development to go ahead. The idea is that the EIA will suggest mitigation measures if environmental damage is anticipated. Mitigation often doesn’t work, especially if it involves the relocation of plants, and in any case, nothing can mitigate the loss of an entire ecosystem subsumed under development.
I wonder what Moralea Milne is doing now, all these years after her ethical epiphany?
On the same topic and also in my files, was this article, which I had copied from the Iris newsletter No. 11, Fall 1991. I reprint it in full, because it is so eloquent.
Pillaging the Prairie
by Dana Bush
I admit it. I am a thief. I steal yards of unbroken prairie from untouched windswept hills. I hastily dig rough fescue and Parry’s oatgrass, loading it into the back of a pickup truck. I drive away with pockets bristling with seeds of gaillardia, smooth aster, and wheatgrass.
I plead extenuating circumstances. I plead a lesser evil for a greater good. I am rescuing this prairie, days and hours in front of belly scrapers clearing land for new homes and six-lane highways. Like a looter before an invading army, I load up precious jewels, rare manuscripts, multicolored carpets, always one step behind those who abandoned them and one step before those who will destroy.
I plead innocence and make excuses, because a persistent voice tells me that this is not the answer. Transplanting native prairie may be good for public relations; it may be good for my conscience (and my well-muscled arms), but it fails to protect the ecosystem.
Neither sod transplants nor reclamation with native plants can honestly restore native prairie. No matter what the technique, we lose birds, animals and insects, land area, diversity and complexity. It is second best. Conservation must come first.
We can never know how successful our restoration attempts are unless we can see the original healthy ecosystem. The prairies, the boreal forest, and the rain forest must be maintained in good condition in large sites. Conservation is the baseline for any restoration or reclamation work. Conservation is important because we don’t and may never know enough fully to restore the delicate balance and magic complexity of a natural ecosystem. The only way to protect it is to preserve it.
Beneath the goal of conservation lies a more basic issue – our consumption of natural resources. Unpleasant as the thought may be, our lifestyles are directly responsible for the loss of the aspen parkland, the fescue and mixed grass prairies and the boreal forests. The hillside from which I plundered fescue prairie was slated for 2000 sq. ft. homes with three-car garages. The boreal forests are cut to provide the walls, the floors, and the book-lined shelves. The aspen parkland provides the very paper I write this protest on.
We must stop the army of development. We must remove their reasons for expansion. We must change ourselves to protect these jewels of the planet. Small houses, efficient appliances, single children, buses and bicycles. This is the base for conservation.
(Dana Bush is a botanist living in Calgary. Iris is the newsletter of the Alberta Native Plant Council.)
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