Why do we love it when wildlife gets lost in Vancouver?
There was a weekend in the media where two separate articles about lost animals in the city surfaced. One covered a cow on the loose while another covered a crow riding the SkyTrain. This brought to my attention what seems to be a fixation among Vancouverites – paying attention when animals get lost in our city. The following examples have each gained significant media hype:
- Downtown Deer
- Jimmy the Squirrel (a rabid squirrel that used to bite people in Stanley Park, as read about in Vancouver Was Awesome)
- Black bears and Coyotes on the North Shore
- Whales in Burrard Inlet
- Cougars in Stanley Park
The news loves these types of stories. I suspect it has something to do with very little real wildlife managing to co-exist with us in our urban environment. Although Vancouver shares boundaries with the wild, it is a unique gift to come face-to-face with wilderness on the streets. I believe these news articles suggest that our citizens have a romantic desire to experience a ‘genuine’ nature without having to leave the comfort of the city. In a similar vein, the Museum of Vancouver recently played host to an exhibition titled Rewilding Vancouver. The exhibition and articles allude to an imagination of what living in an eco-metropolis might mean.
Rewilding Vancouver: photo interventions at the Museum of Vancouver challenge viewers to envision a future world where the city is a wilder place
What is an eco-metropolis? According to Mathew Soules:
EcoMet(ropolitanism) increases density and livability while amplifying and exploiting the relationship to the natural environment by synthesizing the production of metropolitan culture with that of ecologically designed architectural environments.
Soules further writes that the EcoMetropolis would cater to migratory birds, fish-stocked lakes, hunting, eagles, agriculture, local flora and fauna, and promote biological co-existence. The piece by Matthew and the media attention point to a shared desire to maintain a stronger bond to our natural environment. First Nations groups have been teaching similar morals since long before colonialization. Perhaps these trends in the media point to an embedded culture of diversity, sustainability, and respect in Vancouver’s future.
I don’t love the racoons that come in through my cat door and eat the cat food in the kitchen. Messy feet on those things!
But seriously, the ‘rewilding’ of Vancouver is kinda cute, but entirely pointless. If protecting urban wildlife is at all serious, we should look to places like Coquitlam and Surrey where it’s still possible, at least in some areas of the City. Surrey’s Biodiversity Conservation Strategy is a good start at what’s possible in a place that isn’t entirely urban….yet.
Any urban area can host some wildlife, especially butterflies, bees, other insects and birds. Even small areas if designed and planted well can function as a mini-ecosystem to support native plants and wildlife. BC has much wilderness but some ecosystems are endangered because they have been turned almost entirely into cities and farmland.
It is also important to keep some scrubby areas in the city and not have everything tidy and manicured. Invasive Himalayan blackberries for example provide nesting, shelter and winter food for birds and keep nests safe from cats.
Um, having heathy ecosystems isn’t pointless … and typically, if your ecosystem isn’t healthy, neither is where you are living. Case in point, Howe Sound is rewilding quickly now that its clean again … would you choose to go back to dirty?
Think of the wilderness as our canaries in our coalmine … if there’s no wilderness in your area, there’s your answer whether you should be living there.
I’m talking about the idea of ‘re-wilding’ as in having wild nature in Vancouver. This is an urban centre. Let’s not kid anyone. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have natural areas within parks, great street trees etc.
Our ecosystem is much greater than Vancouver proper, and my point is if we want a healthy ‘wild’ ecosystem, we are far better off putting significant effort into places that are already wild rather than ‘re-wilding’ something.
This blog and attitudes of those in Vancouver often make me laugh how little thought is given to anything outside Vancouver yet how critical those other places are to the very nature of what Vancouver is.
There is no reason not to work on re-wilding/keeping wild everywhere in the Lower Mainland. Every city, neighbourhood and resident can do something. There is some wonderful restoration with a salt marsh being planned at New Brighton Park, next to the grain elevators. Much work is also being done on the Burrard Inlet creeks: Brighton, Mackay, Mosquito, Lynn and Seymour. All estuaries were destroyed by rail construction and industrial activities. Pockets of natural habitat near industry and in residential areas have tremendous value. Vancouver has many streams covered by developments and roads, which could be daylighted. And of course many beaches, where the removal of rocks has destroyed fish habitat, which could be brought back.
+1
That’s all great, but my point is we already have natural streams, marshes, wetlands and especially forests in its natural condition that are being paved over in the ‘burbs with nary a second thought.
So restoring 200m of creek in Vancouver is a feel good story and sure, let’s do it. Planting some trees and creating habitat pockets–great! But let’s talk about the hectares of forests being cut down every day in the ‘burbs if we want to actually talk about keeping nature in the city/metro region.
There is also Mr. Chewy Beaver building a house near the Olympic Village.
Vancouver lost a tremendous legacy by undergrounding 26 salmon-bearing streams and cutting down the adjacent swaths of riparian forest. This is why I shake my head when some designers and planners today remain strong proponents of token stormwater management measures, like forcing small lots to provide landscaped “infiltration” areas where the winter rain infiltrates to the hard glacial till below and saturates the ground after only the first storm.
Right next door Burnaby kept its largest streams, and many of the degraded bits are being slowly rehabilitated. Daylighting parts of streams includes significant inflow into large ponds from the storm sewers. Of Burnaby’s 5,200 acres of parks, over half are designated for conservation.
Though Vancouver is really short on streams, there is still a lot of wildlife, such as the pair of racoons that were mating on my deck and sending my cat into a tizzy last spring.
A friend of mine was working on a building site on exactly one of those non-existant streams … they found out quickly that nature’s memory is better than man’s when they were being innundated during foundation construction. The water is still there, we just don’t see it.
(I wonder if this is also why the road between the railway track and Granville island (by the abandoned tram platform) very quickly went wobbly last year – its been repaved but I wonder always when driving over it just how structural the ground under is!)
“The news loves these types of stories.”
‘Four legs good’ is the second commandment of television news