We believe Canada is home to vast forests teeming with wildlife. What if that’s not true anymore?
In the face of head-spinning political times, a leading Canadian scientist says cutting ‘red tape’ and doubling down on resource extraction won’t help wildlife — or humans
Biologist Justina Ray is the president and senior scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada
March 3, 2025 4 min. read
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Human health is intractably linked to the health and survival of wildlife and ecosystems, biologist Justina Ray writes on World Wildlife Day.
Photo: Ryan Dickie / The Narwhal
We are living through some pretty head-spinning political times, making it harder than ever to focus on longer-term, bigger-picture issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet these problems are not only persisting — they are escalating.
As scientists, we know we simply cannot ignore the link between human health and well-being and the health and survival of wild species, ecosystems and our planet. No amount of economic growth is going to insulate us from the continued deterioration of critical life support systems.
The growing impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss are becoming impossible to ignore, from record-breaking wildfires and extreme weather to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects. Even rising infant mortality rates have been linked to increased pesticide use, driven in part by the loss of natural insect control from species like bats.
Our political and social systems don’t just overlook the inconvenient fact that we can’t survive without healthy natural systems — they actively accelerate the unsustainable, extractive status quo, chipping away at the very systems that are vital for our well-being.
On World Wildlife Day, biologist Justina Ray says our political and social systems are chipping away at the ecosystems crucial to our well-being and survival. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal
Research shows Canadian identity remains wrapped up in the idea that just outside our urban boundaries, landscapes stretching across endless expanses of forests teem with moose, wolves and bears. While Canada still holds some of the largest expanses of unroaded landscapes on the planet, many wildlife species have been pushed back by human settlement and displaced by resource development in Indigenous homelands. Caribou once ranged as far south as Algonquin Park and inhabited many parts of southern Canada. Now they struggle to survive in remote forests or, even more tenuously, on rugged mountain slopes.
It’s the same story for hundreds of species — from fish to plants to our most iconic mammals. So far, where we have pursued industrial-scale extraction, efforts to mitigate impacts at the margins have largely failed. Industrial development has learned little from the original Indigenous stewards of these lands.
And now, as we confront mounting political threats, we seem poised to double down and push even harder to leverage our natural resources, further entrenching an extractive-driven model of development.
Extensive logging, mining, oil and gas extraction and urban development have whittled away at the ecosystems that species — from the tiniest insects to the largest mammals — rely on. Photos: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal
The scale of the challenges facing wildlife and wild places today demands a different and bolder approach — one that acknowledges that while past efforts have helped slow the pace of loss, they have not been enough to reverse it. Incremental, piecemeal responses — through a jumble of after-the-fact assessment processes, mitigation measures, patchwork resource regulations and even efforts to recreate what has been lost — have consistently failed to keep pace with accelerating threats. This system will not work any better with minor tweaks or so-called “red tape” cutting.
We can start to make actual progress by changing the frame through which we view these challenges — shifting from seeing the health of the natural world as a fringe, distant concern to recognizing it as a central, immediate necessity embedded in decision-making from the outset. This shift will allow us to plan beyond the short term and adopt a mindset where mobilizing adequate funds and resources is not an afterthought or a discretionary expense, but an essential investment in the well-being and resilience of future generations.
Making conservation investments more effective (and productive) requires proactive approaches to addressing growing threats to nature — and ourselves. For example, this can mean planning at a regional scale before major industrial developments, such as road development and mineral extraction in Indigenous homelands. Or it could mean implementing serious forward-looking measures to control ship noise in increasingly ice-free Arctic waters.
Proactive action is far more likely to succeed than reactive efforts — whether attempting to restore waterways contaminated by mine waste or cajoling ship operators to shift routes away from whale-calving areas only after harm has been done.
Restoring and protecting wildlife and their habitat is essential for our long-term prosperity and survival, Ray argues. Photo: Jesse Winter/ The Narwhal
If that sounds radical, it is — but only because it requires a fundamental shift in how we prioritize the systems that sustain us.
Assigning proper value to wildlife and ecosystems will drive investments in their protection, benefitting society today and even more so for future generations. This is not anti-development or blind to economic realities — it is practical, forward-looking and essential for long-term prosperity and survival.
Another year of keeping a close watch
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
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