More than a dozen Peninsula politicians and business leaders attended a luncheon last week aimed at increasing awareness of the human impact on local ecosystems.
Featuring guest speaker Peter Robinson, CEO of the David Suzuki Foundation, Thursday’s luncheon – hosted by the South Surrey & White Rock Chamber of Commerce and held at the Morgan Creek Golf Club – covered a range of topics including the importance of recognizing the connection between nature and the economy.
“We’re talking about natural capital as a tool to help us, all of us, deal with the negative and unintended consequences of human activity and mechanisms that would integrate nature back into our communities,” Robinson said. “Economics has largely been detached from environmental sciences, which is unfortunate, but that’s what happened.”
Robinson noted that the base of economics was the allocation of scarce resources, but added that there remains silence on the natural foundation of production – the Earth.
“Today, nature has become a scarce resource. We only have to think of the state of the fishing industry to know what I’m talking about. A century ago, the only limiting factor to the province’s fishing industry was the number of fishing boats in the water. Now, it’s the number of fish. Something has shifted,” he said.
While he admitted there was clearly room for improvement, Robinson lauded Surrey for the steps it had taken in recent years to preserve and protect its natural resources, including a sustainability charter and a bio-diversity conservation strategy.
“Surrey is in a real key place right now in the Lower Mainland to drive the kind of changes that are needed,” he said. “Without healthy ecosystems and species diversity, we can’t hope to have a healthy economy.”
For more information on upcoming chamber events, visit www.sswrchamberofcommerce.ca
