(Vancouver Courier, Jan. 19/2010)
I'm pro-Beaver Lake, the four-hectare two-metre deep wetland in Stanley Park, our city's evergreen chunk of seaside woods.
On Monday, thanks largely to park board commissioner Loretta Woodcock, the board approved an environmental assessment of Beaver Lake (price tag: $100,000) to determine how best to save it from extinction.
And why wouldn't they? One hundred grand is a small price to pay for being green, the mandatory colour of Vancouver politicians. Of course, post-assessment costs are yet to be determined. But they will surely soar like Stanley Park's majestic blue herons.
Nevertheless, according to Woodcock and friends, Beaver Lake is disappearing before our very eyes.
The culprits: water lilies introduced to Beaver Lake in the 1930s, and two-legged mammals who jog or waddle around park trails carelessly pushing dirt and other debris into the lake. It's a natural process called succession. And apparently, it must be stopped.
"If we lose Beaver Lake," says Robyn Worcester, spokesperson for the Stanley Park Ecology Society, "we would lose all of the species that are associated with that natural wetland. Everything from amphibians like frogs and salamanders, invertebrates like rare dragonflies, and birds--lots of birds."
Well, not quite. We'll lose them on four hectares in Stanley Park.
Despite flowery rhetoric about nature and dragonflies, the history of Beaver Lake is decidedly unnatural, crafted not by providence but the cold brutal hand of 20th-century man.
Originally a marshy pond, the lake was created in 1929 after 100,000 cubic metres of mud was removed from the pond floor. Beaver Lake was beaver-free for decades. Until three years ago, when two web-footed rodents--buckteeth in front, broad tail in back--magically surfaced in the swampy water. Nobody knows where they came from or why they choose Beaver Lake as their home. (Rumours involving David Suzuki and a midnight beaver dump are unsubstantiated.) After settling in, the beavers sought to dam Beaver Lake's outflow. Fearing floods, park board workers installed an underground pipe to foil the dam plan.
According to the aforementioned Stanley Park Ecology Society, a group of advocates and public relations folk, Beaver Lake will disappear in "10 or 20 years" unless we act now. The lake floor, they say, must be dredged by heavy equipment to raise water levels. Similar predictions were made in the 1990s.
Dire prophecies are nothing new for environmentalists. In fact, the green industry relies on doomsday scenarios. Organizations such as England's disgraced eco-think tank at the University of East Anglia causally mix research with advocacy to stoke public fears. The mainstream media, in prescient form, parrots interplanetary apocalyptic predictions--in 20 years, 50 years, 100 years—while meteorologists regularly fail to accurately predict weekend weather forecasts on the nightly news.
But like I said, I'm pro-Beaver Lake. I hope the two resident beavers make many little beavers who slap their tails among the dragonflies and butterflies forevermore. However, a costly intervention featuring heavy equipment and untold man-hours seems preposterous for a cash-strapped park board, which last month threatened to close public washrooms due to budget woes.
Hopefully, after the November 2011 civic election, the park board regains a semblance of sanity and scuttles the Beaver Lake plan before more money is dumped into its muddy depth. And if, as Woodcock predicts, the lake fades into the weeds and the invertebrates move elsewhere, take comfort. In the great history of planet Earth, with its genocides, wars and famines, the natural succession of a four-hectare wetland barely makes a ripple.
You shouldn't have to wait five minutes to get the parmesan cheese or ketchup that you asked.
Posted by: hollywood restaurant | September 20, 2011 at 03:28 AM