Sir: Recently, I decided to check out Google Earth just to see what my house and community looks like from space, the kind of thing you can do when you are retired and the weather isn’t ideal.
It’s amazing that I can look down on our municipality the same way I could look down on my backyard from the second storey of my house when I was a child.
I can also compare our municipality with our neighbouring municipalities the same way I could compare my yard with my neighbours’.
I would encourage everyone to take a couple minutes to take a look for yourselves. What you will see when looking at the map of our municipality is an expanse of light area with a number of small spots dotting the municipality and a couple of large dark spots in the Rondeau area and Moraviantown. The dark spots are the treed areas.
If you are my age, the dots of trees may be difficult to see. You may be surprised with the lack of trees outside of Rondeau and Moraviantown.
When comparing the forest cover in the municipality with other areas of the world, I made the following observations.
Chatham-Kent has a forest cover of approximately 4.3%. That is a number that was estimated before the big slash-and-burn episode during the tree by-law debate a couple of years ago, so it can be argued that it is even lower, but I will go with that number. That puts us about equal with the sub-Saharan countries of Chad, Mali and Sudan and below the desert countries of Oman and Iran.
If you just consider the area that does not include provincial parks or first nation territories that are not really under the management of the Chatham-Kent municipality, then the forest cover in the area controlled by the municipality is about 1.7%.
Now you fall below desert countries like Syria and Iraq.
The good news is that we are doing better than Antarctica, Egypt, Kuwait, and the state of Nevada.
Looking at our more immediate neighbours we have Essex at 8%, Lambton 10.5%, Elgin 15.2% and Middlesex with 12.3% forest cover. Looking at our neighbours to the south with large farm communities, we have Ohio with a forest cover of 28.9 % and Indiana at 18.9%.
There are some groups in Chatham-Kent doing great things when it comes to planting trees, but they are struggling to keep up with the number of trees lost each. And there are two problems with new plantings. They take 20 years to reach any degree of maturity and when planting new trees you do not get all of biodiversity like the small ground cover plants, wildflowers, insects etc. that birds and animals need to survive.
Chatham-Kent is one of the main flyways for birds. We can either be a major contributor to the health of our environment or a major threat. The fact that there are more than 200 species of animal and plants at risk in Ontario and a third of the migratory birds are under threat of extinction (Bird Studies Canada).
I will let the readers determine whether we have been a positive or negative influence.
I wonder how many endangered species there are in that pile of trees I see along the 401 as I travel to London. We’ll never know.
There is one benefit to the lack of forest cover in our municipality. A large tree cover would block the view of the majestic windmills throughout the municipality and who wants that?
Al Farquhar
Chatham Kent
