Parks should be protected – not logged
June 4, 2015
Today the Wilderness Committee is launching our campaign to end park logging in Ontario and Manitoba, with the release of a new educational report, logging maps for Duck Mountain Provincial Park and Algonquin Provincial Park, and opinion cards aimed at the Manitoba and Ontario governments.
I vividly recall the painful loss I felt the first time I stepped into a clearcut in Manitoba’s Nopiming Provincial Park in 1986, where a forest ecosystem I had grown to love was forever damaged. In 2009, the Manitoba government protected all parks from logging...except one.
Last fall in Duck Mountain Provincial Park, I felt that pain again as I stood in another massive clearcut. I also felt anger that logging was still destroying lands that were set aside for the preservation of nature.
Around Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park, loggers make a lot of noise about how their selective logging leaves little impact on the park. Yet thousands of kilometres of logging roads – and basic common sense – say otherwise. The giant forests of yesteryear will never exist for future generations if we continue to log our parks.
The respected voices of the Environment Commissioner of Ontario and the Clean Environment Commission in Manitoba have stated that logging in parks must stop.
These are the last two parks in Canada with long-term commercial logging. It’s time for us to end park logging, once and for all.
You can find our full educational report, End Logging in Ontario and Manitoba Parks, on our website here.
Please use the letter-writing tool on our website to let the Premiers of Manitoba and Ontario know that you want to end logging in provincial parks.
Click here to write your letter!
The time is now – we have to end park logging. Please take action today!
- Eric Reder | Wilderness and Water Campaigner
Click the links below to view PDF maps of the logging activity in Algonquin and Duck Mountain Parks:
