Dear editor:
I first stumbled onto a cutblock three years ago. The massive scale of the operation stunned me. Standing there, I was overwhelmed by sadness and horrified to realize this was actually happening so close to my home in Cochrane.
As a new Canadian, I chose Cochrane as my new home for its closeness to nature and its proximity to the majestic Rocky Mountains. To see first hand that we are obliterating our eastern slopes was extremely discouraging.
Accelerated clearcut logging in the Ghost Valley – a 20-year plan now condensed into two, scheduled to start this November – will degrade the (free) flood dampening this area provides to towns and cities downstream. Logging will increase erosion of soils, speeding sedimentation of our rivers and the Ghost Reservoir. But most important, it potentially jeopardizes the future of our clean drinking water supply.
On top of that, Spray Lake Sawmills (SLS) is lobbying the MD of Bighorn for permission to haul 5,300 truckloads of timber out on narrow, winding (and in wintertime extremely slippery) municipal roads. These roads were engineered for residential traffic, not the heavy commercial truck traffic it will see over the next few winters.
With 1.6 million people living in Calgary, projected to increase to 2.4 million by 2041, the time is ripe for a revision of the Ghost Valley land use plans. We must act now to protect this ecologically and geologically unique Ghost Valley for future generations.
I urge SLS, agriculture and forestry, environment and parks and our newly elected NDP government to pause the harvest for now. Let us first conduct proper science and let us take into account the socio-economic and environmental aspects of losing this key area of our mountain headwaters.
This might be our last chance before corporate greed decimates it all. The future of us all is hanging in the balance.
Olivier Du Tré
