Rugged, untamed lands.  Cold lakes, rocky cliffs, forests stretching beyond the horizon.  Howling wolves, hooting owls, a black bear with her cubs.
    That's Ontario's north - and there's plenty of it.  Most of Ontario lies north of the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, and most of that is on crown land - land that belongs to everyone in the province.

    There was a time when I didn't worry about Ontario's wilderness.  In northwestern Ontario, where I grew up, our puny efforts at civilization seemed so flimsy compared to the wild lands around me.  Then I moved to southwestern Ontario.
    Here almost all the forests were levelled long ago, for agriculture and other development.  In any southern city you can walk for blocks and see nothing on the ground but asphalt, cement and chemically nurtured lawns.  In summer there isn't even a place for a puddle to form!

    I knew about the destruction of the forests in the south long before I moved here.  It was a popular horror story up there, and we thought of it as a peculiarly southern phenomenon.  Now I'm afraid that wherever nature and people meet, it's nature that's in danger.

    For example, I use to object when southerners criticized the clearcuts in the north.  I've seen the vast expanses of forest there, and the tiny, fragmented woodlots of southern Ontario, few of which amount to even 50 hectares.  I knew that the northern forests were second growth at best, but I didn't realize that the new growth is not so different from the farms in the south.  It's just that in the north, the crop they grow is trees.

    Before Europeans arrived, Ontario's forests were more diverse.  Deciduous woodlands covered southern Ontario.  In the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence region, white pine forests awed industrialists of the 1800s, who thought these woodlands were large enough to supply the world for thousands of years.  In northern Ontario's boreal forest, coniferous trees predominated.

    The great deciduous forests of southern Ontario are gone, but the north has been transformed too.  White pine constitutes less then 3 per cent of Ontario's productive woodlands.  In the boreal forest, slow-growing spruce and pines are being overtaken by faster-growing poplar and birch.  Once complex, healthy communities, our woodlands are gradually becoming crops of selected young species which produce the most revenue in the shortest time.
    They are also increasingly fragmented, as large sections are clear-cut, and roads penetrate everywhere.  Where highways end on the map, an expansive, uncharted network of industrial roads invades the natural environment.

    Roads cause damage far in excess of the tracks they blaze through the forest.  They offer easy access to predators, alien species of flora and fauna, and motorized recreational vehicles.  They bring vehicle emissions, chemicals and noise.  Roads separate populations of plants and animals, and increase animal mortality.  They fragment forests, converting forest interior habitat to forest edge, reducing the type of habitat that sustains species such as lynx, cougar and woodland caribou.

    In total, 87% of Ontario's land mass is crown land - ours to protect - yet Ontario has very little roadless wilderness left.  In 1997 the Ontario government initiated the Lands for Life process, to make long-term plans for use of crown land in central and northern Ontario.  The planning area makes up almost half of Ontario's land and contains all of its commercially valuable forest.  Currently, less than 8 per cent of that land is protected, and this is our last chance to save more.  What is not added now will be devoted to industrial use.
    Still industry representatives vehemently oppose further protection, accusing conservationists of selfishness for insisting that wilderness and industry are incompatible.  They propose floating parks, which would be dedicated to recreation and conservation only until needed for logging and mining.  They talk about preserving "the perception of wilderness".

    Ontario is so vast, it may seem that its size is protection enough - but it is not.  To sustain our untamed lands and their biological and geological diversity, we must ensure there are places free from industrial use and mechanized vehicles, places with no permanent record of human intrusion.
    Wilderness is disappearing everywhere, but it does not have to disappear here.  There is no place on earth where it has a better chance than Ontario - a wealthy, thinly populated province, where the well-being of 87 per cent of the land is in the hands of its citizens.  Not only is it within our power to protect Ontario's wild places; it's our responsibility - because it's our land.

This article was published in The Toronto Star, January 29, 1999.