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Up Front: Remembering a fantastic man
Emily Plihal
for Smoky River Express
As some of you know, I invest my money each year into three quarters of my personal piece of Heaven.
I’ve made it my personal mission to save those three little chunks of land from being raped, pillaged and plundered for the benefit of human. I am a strong believer in maintaining a certain amount of natural habitat for wildlife, a trait solidly passed down from my father.
I do not expect each individual to hold the same values, nor do I foresee the general population to become less goal-oriented. I cannot even claim to be a complete tree-hugger, after all I work for a newspaper which uses trees each week for my benefit. In addition, I also have a gas-guzzling vehicle and use my share of our natural resources to improve my lifestyle.
However; my frustration with logging is quite evident to any of you who’ve spoken to me of the subject. Just a couple miles from where I purchased my land, logging companies have started to clear cut many quarters of crown land for the human benefit.
I would be completely ignorant if I didn’t acknowledge the necessity of chopping some trees down, but I don’t have to agree with it. My frustration lies in the fact that there are no shelter belts maintained for the use of animals. Where do they expect moose, deer, elk, bear, and other smaller critters to find protection?
I understand we need wood for homes, toilet paper, etc., but if we pushed for more recycling as a population, would we really need to harvest so much lumber each year?
As a professional guide I see what type of damage is done to our forests each year. Since I began guiding for my father in 2002, I have personally seen three areas of timber destroyed.
Four of our bear stands were knocked down. Pardon me, three were knocked down, the fourth remained standing. The fourth stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of a barren field. No my anger does not pertain to simply the fact our stands were destroyed, my anger is centred around the lack of habitat there is for our animals.
I am constantly criticized by individuals for baiting bears during the spring time, but my question to them is... what do you do to protect the population of animals? It may seem like an odd thing to say that I harvest animals but that my main concern is their safety, however; my father taught me to be very conscientious of what is going on around me in the outdoors.
What is the future going to be for these animals as they try to find a safe place to hide in our dust bowl? Yes, that is what I foresee in Alberta’s future if we don’t do something soon. We can’t keep raping the countryside expecting it to automatically renew itself. It will take hundreds of years to replenish the damage we are enforcing in our outdoors.
I am tired of walking out into areas that have been occupied by animals for thousands of years, just to see how little of their territory remains.
Is it not bad enough that we, as humans, have eliminated the amount of habitat they have left, now we want to completely abolish it?
I wish I could see what this province looked like 200 years ago, before our destruction commenced.
Each time I travel out to my land and see how much surrounding bush has been levelled it makes me absolutely nauseous.
How can we have such little consideration for nature and its creatures?
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