The Minister of the Environment, at our expense, invites us to talk about nonsense: an unprotected protected area.
To do this, he mandated the National Regroupment of Regional Environmental Councils (RNCREQ) to organize a conference in Quebec, without any possibility of participating remotely for organizations that reside, like us, more than 800 km away. Fairness questionable to say the least.
First of all: a protected area. But against what threat? The threat of logging machinery in the North, the threat of open-cast mines, the threat of hydroelectric dams and wind farms, the threat of clearcutting, etc.
Until now, protected areas, which have been difficult to establish, must, among other things, preserve the natural character of the ecosystem and the ecological services that they provide us.
Today we want to protect 30% of the territory within five or six years, as we declared during the COP15 high mass in December 2022 in Montreal. A 30% representative of each of the 13 ecological provinces of Quebec.
Small trees
Here, in Abitibi, there are almost no intact natural forests left. Only one, in fact, not far from Louvicourt. And don’t talk about it too much… What’s left elsewhere? Small trees, scattered across the north, which always cost more and more to collect. Caribou imprisoned for life in a concentration camp and who will die out in an FSC-certified forest.
To mystify the population, we are going to create Protected Areas of Sustainable Use. APUDs. We will move closer to the planned protected areas, we will create protected zones surrounded by a buffer zone. And above all, we’re going to have a little bit of fun. And when the world is asleep, well, we’re going to burn more. We know the story.
The Ministry of the Environment tells us that it will require companies to do: “…forestry adapted to conservation objectives and subject to exemplary practices”? But, we call that sustainable development! Isn’t it their mandate, currently, to do so in the rest of our forests?
“Then, we will count them, these buffer zones, as being protected. “It will help us get 30% protection.” We will have to tell the whole world in 2030: “Here is an unprotected protected area in Quebec”. Common sense APUD.
Watchdog?
L’Action boréale OPPOSES that the part of sustainable use (buffer) which surrounds the conservation core of an APUD is included in the register of Protected Areas, with the aim of obtaining the 30% protection of the Quebec.
When the Ministry of the Environment was created in 1979, its first holder, Marcel Léger, described it as “the watchdog of our heritage”.
With Benoit Charette, the ministry has become “the sled dog of extractivists”. What is he doing there?
Boreal Action
Henri Jacob, president
Richard Desjardins, vice-president
