Ecological corridors can provide animals — and people — with a lifeline in a warming world

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This week:

• Ecological corridors can provide animals — and people — with a lifeline in a warming world
• Alberta's renewable energy moratorium
• With a sky full of wildfire smoke, how do I give my children the carefree summer they deserve?

Ecological corridors can provide animals — and people — with a lifeline in a warming world

Lisa Mintz winds her way behind a bowling alley and down a set of stairs to a canopy of trees that provide a cool refuge from the Montreal heat in mid July. 

Lintz is a champion of this unlikely oasis. Once a dumping ground for machinery and old kitchen appliances, it is on the verge of becoming one of the city's largest protected areas. 

It's an area called La Falaise St. Jacques and it's a four-kilometre stretch of forest that snakes its way along the southern region of Montreal. Birds like warblers and American redstarts chirp overheard. For them, the Falaise is a critical landing pad — a strip of intact forest amid a sea of urban development. 

"It really makes my heart sing when I hear this," Lintz told What on Earth guest host Falen Johnson.

Roughly 60 hectares in size, the Falaise is part of a growing movement to protect ecological corridors — that is, passages of protected land or water. When planned right, corridors like the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Corridor in California serve as connective tissue between habitats and are potential lifelines for species trapped by encroaching development and shifting habitat range in a warming climate. 

"I'd love to see corridors all across Quebec, because the thing is, it's the truth that animals are being driven out of their habitats," said Mintz.

Mintz is a catalyst in the broad-based, grassroots effort to protect the Falaise, which has brought in residents, cyclists who travel its shady paths and local politicians. This urban greenspace provides a home for biodiversity, but it is also a place for people to access nature in the city and avoid intensifying heat extremes. 

Canada has set a target of protecting 30 per cent of its land and water by 2030. But as climate change and development pressures ramp up, deciding what to protect is a critical question.

Protecting corridors between larger protected areas is one approach — it aims to curb habitat fragmentation and to provide a path to the new habitats some species might need in a warmed world. At federal and provincial levels, programs to galvanize support for corridor protection are gaining momentum. 

Corridors can provide important habitat for many species, said Rebecca Tittler, who is part of the faculty at the Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability at Concordia University and is involved in research at the Falaise. But Tittler warns that protecting those strips of land shouldn't come at the expense of salvaging the amount of protected area that biodiversity requires to survive. 

"What really matters is how much habitat there is," she said. "We just need to conserve as much as we can."

About a 500-kilometre drive northeast of the concrete cityscape buffering the Falaise, the Innu of Essipit First Nation have their own plans for an ecological corridor. If established, it could magnify the effect of existing protected areas in their territory, helping support the dwindling population of the woodland caribou. 

"There's not enough left. So we don't hunt it anymore," said Michael Ross, a wildlife biologist and the director of development and territory for the Innu of Essipit First Nation.

The nation, whose territory extends across southern Quebec and along the St. Lawrence River, has spent years in court to salvage caribou herds integral to their culture. 

"Our territory has been very impacted by the logging industry," said Ross. He said intensified logging in the 1950s and '60s drove caribou from their previous habitat near the St. Lawrence River northward, where they remain today. 

"Right now, we're trying to preserve the most that we can of that last little spot in our territory," said Ross, who also noted that logging activity continues to deplete caribou habitat, and that the roads built to support logging vehicles can become a highway for predators, allowing them to hunt caribou with ease. 

The province of Quebec did not respond to CBC's request for comment by publication time.

After decades of resistance from the province, in 2020 the nation succeeded in its attempts to set aside around 285 square kilometres for the Akumunan Biodiversity Reserve. It was a substantial step, but not enough to cover the estimated 1,000 square kilometres the caribou require to migrate throughout the year, said Ross. 

The nation is now proposing a new Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area that would provide a corridor of habitat linking existing protected areas in the territory, including the Akumunan reserve.

For Ross, salvaging the territory's caribou herds is imperative for biodiversity and for Innu culture alike. 

"I don't think I will hunt the caribou on the land in my lifetime," he said. "But I'm doing all this to make sure that my daughter and other youth in our community have the chance one day to do that."

— Zoe Yunker

Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here. 

Check out our radio show and podcast. This week, we hear from two youth activists about how climate action is different in cities compared to small rural communities, and why the voices of young people in all parts of Canada need to be heard. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

Watch the CBC video series Planet Wonder featuring our colleague Johanna Wagstaffe here.

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The Big Picture: Alberta's renewable energy moratorium

Alberta is world-famous for its endowment of oil and gas, but in recent years, it has demonstrated it can also generate significant solar and wind power, which is why renewable energy projects have begun to flourish there. But a decision last week by the provincial government to impose a moratorium on new renewable energy projects until Feb. 29, 2024, left many observers and stakeholders concerned about the future of clean energy in Alberta.

The government has said that the moratorium is meant to evaluate a number of policy issues, including how new renewable projects will affect the electricity grid and what should be done with wind and solar projects when they're no longer operable. Alberta says it is just trying to manage faster-than-expected growth. But environmental observers aren't buying it. In a statement, Evan Pivnick, clean energy program manager at Clean Energy Canada, said: "While Alberta moves full speed ahead on approving new fossil fuel projects, it inexplicably has put the brakes on developing renewable energy projects."

The federal government has set a target of 2035 for a net-zero electrical grid countrywide. On Monday, Alberta said the moratorium was partly because of Ottawa's insistence that the province couldn't bring more natural gas plants online as a way to provide backup power when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. On Thursday, Ottawa released its Clean Electricity Regulations, which allow some natural gas power generation as part of the 2035 net-zero vision.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Extreme heat is the deadliest kind of natural disaster, but doesn't qualify for U.S. disaster relief funding. Lawmakers in the western U.S. are lobbying to change that. 

• After a Pittsburgh coal processor shut down, heart-related ER visits fell by 42 per cent, a new study found. The researchers say it suggests we're "grossly underestimating the health benefits of shutting off fossil fuel pollution."

• Amid rising temperatures, architects are redesigning buildings to keep them cooler and reduce the need for air conditioning. Here are some of the techniques they're using.

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is trying to get the "chasing arrows" recycling symbol removed from plastic and replaced with a solid triangle. The goal is to reduce the amount of non-recyclable plastic contaminating recycling.

With a sky full of wildfire smoke, how do I give my children the carefree summer they deserve?

This is a First Person column by Magdalena Olszanowski, a writer and communications professor who lives in Montreal. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

My family and I were eating breakfast when we heard on the radio that wildfires were raging out of control in northern Quebec, and that wind would soon carry the smoke down to Montreal.

That was on Monday, June 5, and far more of our province was burning than usual. But I couldn't understand what it meant for us in a major urban centre. Wildfires might be ubiquitous in weather reports elsewhere, but not here in Montreal.

When I followed my 17-month-old daughter to the yard, as I do every morning while my seven-year-old son is at school, I immediately noticed something was different.

The leaves of our green ash tree were veneered in a pink glow that a sunset usually brings. Except it was not even 10 a.m. I shook the branches. The sky wasn't the neon-orange blaze I've seen in the news about the wildfires along the West Coast. This colour, an atomic tangerine mixed with coral, was eerie and beguiling.

My daughter and I stayed outside for about an hour. An hour seemed reasonable given the air quality, but this was a made-up time frame as I had never encountered weather conditions of "smoke" in place of "cloudy" or "partly sunny."

Later, my son told me his school trip to Mount Royal was cancelled. Students weren't even allowed outside because of the smoke. I did my best to help him process his anger over the cancelled field trip, while carefully treading my own anger and grief.

The next morning, the smoky air turned the sun outside our window into a halo. It looked like the world I see when my glasses are bedaubed with my children's sticky fingers. Though I knew it to be toxic, the air somehow smelled like cinnamon sticks with star anise and honey on the stove, like all the firsts experienced at summer camp my children may never get to have.

"Air quality is another thing on the morning checklist now," my partner exclaimed. I agreed, and saved the AQI index to my browser toolbar.

We saw an AQI reading of more than 400; it seemed alarming but completely abstract. My son asked what it meant. The air quality is bad, I explained, and we should avoid the outdoors.

"Bad how?" he asked.

Air quality readings, radar maps, time frames — this is intricate, quantified data that is a result of the climate emergency, but I have no idea how to make sense of it in a way a seven-year-old would understand.

I took my children outside and left the windows open for longer than I probably should have, because my common sense and carbon dioxide reader told me outside air is best.

Then the anxiety kicked in: there's nothing common or sensible about our times.

My partner, whose resolve often holds our family together, is at a loss of what to do. How do we react when health and safety communication is piecemeal, when fossil fuel executives and lobbyists have robbed my kids of clean air?

My toddler craves nature. My seven-year-old, who has lived much of his life with the threat of catching COVID-19 in public indoor spaces, must now contend with the outdoors, too. How can I deny them what summer is all about? Isn't indoor air often worse than polluted outdoor air? What happens when our parental instincts are unmoored by the climate crisis?

I feel guilt for not anticipating this reality. I've had the privilege of having a home in a city that has yet to see the devastating consequences of our climate emergency like so many around the world.

I wish my children had the free and messy outdoor summers we had. They deserve it; all children do.

But as climate scientists predict that extreme weather events like wildfires will continue to invade our lungs all summer, we must adapt to safely live with them whether we want to or not.

I just can't help but wonder what else we are losing when summer — the season of skinned knees, ice cream beards and bedtimes under the stars — becomes a season of staying inside on high alert.

— Magdalena Olszanowski

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Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty