Embracing Mother Nature

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Kamloops This Week

• Nature is the real ‘gold mine’ we should all embrace

• EDITORIAL: Embrace the best part of the new year

Editor:

I am adding my voice to the many opposed to the proposed Ajax mine.

I have lived in Kamloops for 50 years and the smell of sagebrush is in my blood.

I have spent my whole life enjoying the beauty of the natural grasslands  and forests surrounding our city.

I choose to live here because I can step out my door and, in minutes, be hiking up a rolling hill or around a glistening lake.

I cannot count how many times a year I drive Goose Lake Road (where the mine would be located) just for the sheer beauty of the area.

David Suzuki wrote a wonderful article in the Jan. 13 edition of the Globe and Mail (‘What if Mother Nature had rights? She does in Ecuador’) in which he tells us Ecuador’s constitution is “the first in the world to give rights to nature. In other words, trees, animals, rivers — entire ecosystems have the constitutional right to exist and flourish.”

Suzuki wrote that “it’s a far cry from Canada’s Ministry of Environment, which is more about managing human use of the environment than about Mother Nature herself.”

Other Latin American countries are also making great strides in this direction.

The proposed Ajax mine would result in the destruction of many species and their habitat.

Kamloops would become just another ugly, dirty, depressing mining town like all others across Canada.

Believe me, I’ve been to many of them.

I want to live in a beautiful, healthy and life-affirming city.

I want the natural ecosystem here to be recognized as a living organism that has rights and is preserved and protected.

Like many others, I choose to embrace Mother Nature, not destroy her.

Sandi Mikuse

Kamloops