Canada by rail, a 2,775-mile journey from Toronto to Vancouver, impresses a traveler with the vastness of our neighbor’s wilderness and wildlife. But those who fall in love with the beauty, the bears and the elk, learn next that, however plentiful, these too are fragile, threatened by global warming and the pressures of people. The ancient trees of British Columbia are still being lost to logging, while many there battle to protect old-growth forests. Herds of southern mountain caribou have disappeared from logging-ravaged forests. Now the government, aided by the indigenous peoples Canada calls First Nations, has presented a bold new vision of expanding protected areas to cover 30 percent of the landscape by 2030. We who rarely pay attention to Canada can pray for the effort’s success. –Fletcher Farrar, editor
This article appears in Teaching Jewish traditions.
