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Border Issues
Natural communities and ecosystems do not have hard definable borders, but Wilderness Areas, Special Places and Provincial and National Parks do. Wildlife, water, air and even plants constantly move back and forth from protected areas to unprotected areas and vice versa. What happens outside of protected areas has a significant impact on the environments inside protected areas. 
If water is poisoned upstream of a protected area, then the protected area will become poisoned as the contaminated water flows in. If a four lane highway is built alongside a protected area's boarder, then moose, fox and all other land animals will be greatly restricted as they perform their natural movements and migrations, some of which inevitably cause them to travel across poorly planned highways. A Mine on the border of the Tobeatic Wilderness AreaSection 16 of the Wilderness Areas Protection Act states: "The Minister shall encourage the voluntary planning and management of land adjoining or affecting wilderness areas in a manner consistent with the purpose of this Act and the regulations." However, Black Bull Resources Inc. is in the process of establishing an open-pit quartz/kaolin and mica mine a few short meters from the border of the Tobiatic Wilderness Area. The mine will require the use of huge amounts of water to extract the minerals, and this water is going to come from what is supposed to be a protected Wilderness Area. Wetlands and watercourses in the Tobeatic Wilderness Area may be devastated by the resultant change from extremely wet to extremely dry conditions. This is to say nothing of the barrier to animal movement posed by opening up a six kilometre long open pit right along the border of the Wilderness Area, or the pollution from blowing particulate matter into the Wilderness Area. If the government was truly concerned with ensuring that the lands bordering Wilderness Areas be managed in "a manner consistent with the purpose of [the Wilderness Act]", it would never even consider an open-pit mine so close to a Wilderness Area. It is a sad case for the long-term health of the Tobeatic Wilderness Area, and a sad precedent for all other existing and Protected Areas. An intermediate level of protection for land bordering Nova Scotia's Wilderness Areas, sometimes referred to as a buffer zone, is an important aspect of the successful management of our Protected Areas Network. The clear lack of buffer zone management evidenced by the Black Bull Mine project, is distressing. If our government is going to set aside protected areas, it must also be prepared to manage them in a manner which is consistant with the intent of the Act.
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© Nova Scotia Public Lands Coalition, Ecology Action Centre, 2006 |
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