Tonight we’re here looking out over this beautiful valley, listening to brilliant music, enjoying good food in the company of friends. The scene breathes harmony. But we can’t take that for granted. An ecosystem is like an orchestra—providing the music to our lives. This particular orchestra is extraordinarily complex and has many many members—the coast range as the big bowed double basses with their nearly tectonic energy, the firs are stately violas. . . . the creeks and the rivers variously flutes or bassoons. Somewhere in there are the frogs, Cooper’s hawks, the fungi, and the friendly worms whose roofs we’re perching on even now—Every voice, every member seen and unseen, plays a part. And we must not take this for granted. If one day we awake and sense that the violas have fallen silent, and later notice that the French horns have disappeared. . . and the bassoons are failing, it may be too late to get them back. This vital music will be lost. What we see around us is what we need to see in this place, and what we must leave to our children and their children. Greenbelt Land Trust has been around for 23 year to help ensure that we don’t leave our children a lonely oboist playing in a parking lot. That’s no substitute for the music our valley provides.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the Greenbelt’s recent successful campaigns have received quite a bit of favourable press recently—front page in the Gazette Times, an editorial inside, and various mention elsewhere– and this is all good. It draws in new members to the community and energizes others. Most of the work of the Greenbelt community leaves no sign indicating who was responsible– thirty years from now when some young fisherman pulls a trout from the cool waters of the Horseshoe Lake back channel, there will be no tag saying “Trout courtesy of the supporters of the GLT”—but it will be true none the less.