Thank you.

I asked to have some PowerPoint slides that will help to ground my comments. While they come up, I'll thank everyone on the committee for the time that I was able to spend with you in Banff and for the impact that your report had. I've been around a little while, and I have rarely seen a report like that get the ball rolling in such a great way.

I think great things have happened relative to the stasis Canada was in with relation to nature conservation three years ago. I just hope we can keep it rolling regardless of what happens this fall. The spirit that this committee showed me about moving ahead on this was to me really inspiring when I was with you last time, and I hope we can continue.

I'm going to move quickly into my talk.

This is about land use histories. Here's the big take-away. What humans do to land determines what conservation responses we have and determines the conditions of biodiversity or nature. This first slide shows a map of Canada's land use histories. The bright red or salmon colour in the south shows where we live and produce our food. The green areas are where we've practised forestry and oil and gas and mining. The blue areas are where it's still wild.

Look at that map. That's just what we do as humans. The next map shows the distribution of endangered species in Canada. You will see the one-to-one correlation between what we do and where things are doing well or not well.

A number of speakers have talked about the south. The south is where we've cultivated, where we have our cities, where all of us live and where we get our food. Then you have these in-between areas. You can see that a narrow band is going down the Rockies where the colours are a bit better; that's the Yellowstone-to-Yukon corridor and the Flathead valley that we talked a lot about when we were together in Banff.

Those blue parts shown are the big parks in the Canadian Rockies: Banff and Jasper, and the parks in B.C. like Wells Gray, that are coming down into southern Canada. This is one area where you see that wildness coming down into southern Canada, as well as Quetico park.

We have these three really different conditions in our country, and those three really different conditions need to drive different conservation responses, and they apply all over the world. I'm the lead author on a paper we're about to publish that has been authored by people from all over the world. It's about the three global conditions that exist for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use. The same patterns that occur in Canada occur in China, Colombia and Australia. This is the way we need to go forward with our thinking on how we plan for our relationship with nature.

Basically, the world is divided into cities and farms, shared lands and large wild areas. The strategies we need for each are different. Each speaker before me has talked about various dimensions of exactly this breakdown.

For large wild areas, we need to keep the entire systems intact. Canada is blessed with large wild areas. We store a bunch of carbon in those wild areas. Some of the highest carbon storage in the world occurs in the Mackenzie basin and the Hudson Bay lowlands. This is also where we have indigenous people still engaging with nature in traditional ways, with the management regimes that are worth preserving through time.

In the intermediate areas, this is where the ideas of interconnected corridors with large protected areas, such as the Yellowstone-to-Yukon idea, apply well. We need to protect something like 25% to 75% of each ecoregion. Where we have our cities and farms, we need to do restoration, as was discussed. We need to manage how nitrogen is used. We have to keep our pollinators in the landscape. We need to practise good urban planning. We need to give people access to nature.

These three things together—these strategies together—could lead to a lot of the transformative change that the IPBES report calls for, but we need to be doing the right things in the right places across the country simultaneously. One is not more important than the other. The biodiversity in the south is not more important than the caribou in the north, nor are the grizzly bears in the Rockies more important than the frogs around southwestern Ontario where they grow tomatoes.

We need to save the whole thing, and I believe we need to help the world save the whole thing. Our country is up to that, so that's the quick five-minute version of my talk.

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