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| landscape courtesy of Hamilton Greenwood |
"The loss of Canada’s prairies is also a loss for the world."
That is a line from a
terrific essay recently posted by
Dan Kraus, the Nature Conservancy of Canada's Weston conservation scientist and senior director of conservation program development.
My favourite line in the piece amounts to the strongest statement in favour of publicly owned community pastures that I have seen NCC make to date:
"There is also a key, and immediate, opportunity to conserve large areas of prairie and maintain local ranching economies by protecting community pastures in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — public lands that are managed to protect both biodiversity and sustainable grazing in local communities."
Anyway, just read the essay. Dan says it all and says it well.
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Posts
I've long thought that protection of grazing land in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta was vital to preserving natural communities, in whole or in part, and could be justified economically by the cattle ranching that such preservation supports.
ReplyDeleteFor sure Lars--cattle ranching has for generations been that economic anchor, but now land prices are beginning to drive people toward finding "higher" uses for rangeland--e.g. ranchette development or planting pulse crops that are designed to produce on light soils.
DeleteNot good news. Still, it might take a while before all of this progress reaches the Manyberries area - hope so, that is where I did most of my field work and the region I love the most.
ReplyDeleteJust finishing your book (The Road is How. Good read.
thanks for reading it Lars!
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