Re: "104 hectares reclaimed 41896 to go" by Jeremy Klaszus News March 27-April 2 2008.
Revealing the false panacea of "reclamation" is long overdue. Jeremy Klaszus has removed the veil and shown the difference between reclamation and restoration. Reclamation is a little like someone with a monochrome palette and minimal creativity painting over the original Mona Lisa with a portrait of… well whoever happens to be walking by and is willing to pose for as little pay as possible. The result may be something a close friend is willing to hang on her wall but it won’t find its way into the Louvre. And the loss is forever.
If nature is left to her own processes after the mining is over restoration will happen eventually — 8000 or so years from now in the case of the McClelland Lake fen approved for tar sands mining in 2002. Reclamation may take only two generations — and that’s rushing it — but it won’t be the ecosystem it was before the shovels destroyed it.
It’s time for us all to think about what we are losing and to stop using the promise of reclamation to justify the destruction of irreplaceable complex ecosystems that we all ultimately rely on even if they’re not in our own backyards.
Joyce Hildebrand
Calgary
