With thoughtful and energetic grassroots campaigns, the Wilderness Committee fights to protect wildlands, safeguards wildlife, defends the wellbeing and public access to established parks, keeps rivers a vital part of the natural environment and ensures that people can live in healthy communities.
Each year humankind's appetite for the world's limited resources increases and development interests extend their reach further afield, wild places and their inhabitants become more valuable than ever. For this reason, we think big, pushing for more public awareness, stronger alliances and thus greater successes in protecting wild lands.
The Wilderness Committee's work to safeguard killer whales, grizzly bears, spotted owls, caribou, sage grouse and wild salmon is part of our broader campaign to ensure that all of Canada's 530 species at risk are adequately protected from coast to coast to coast. Protecting our wildlife is a smart investment in the future: because maintaining a healthy environment is not only good for species, it is good for us as well.
In Canada most of the land is still publicly owned, this gives governments a tremendous opportunity to manage the land base for both the environment and the public good. The Wilderness Committee campaigns to keep public land free of inappropriate private development, and to ensure parks and other protected areas are well managed.
BC's wild and beautiful Pacific coast is under threat from salmon farms and the oil industry. Wild salmon, and the web of life they support, are in trouble: salmon farming, climate change, over-fishing, and habitat destruction have extinguished over 100 stocks of salmon in British Columbia. Oil and gas development threatens the entire Pacific coast.
Clean air, clean water, an abundant and healthy food supply, and climate-friendly local economies don’t happen by accident. They are the result of careful planning. Unfortunately, instead of good planning, proposals for urban freeways and other initiatives that would negatively impact community and environmental health are far too common.
Coming from Germany on a Biology Internship, I spent three months in the Wilderness Committee office mapping critical habitat for the endangered seabird, the Marbled Murrelet. My work involved data and statistical analysis, quantifying habitat variables, assessing habitat quality and conducting road density calculations. I also spent some great time in the wilderness doing research.