SOS Woody white oaks Notre-Dame-de-Île-Perrot

The 14 February 2021, we were more than a hundred people to carry the message ofSOS Woody white oaks, who asks theCity of Notre-Dame-de-Île-Perrot (NDIP) to do everything in their power to protect this rich natural environment that is the Boisé des Chênes Blancs !!! This is an exceptional mobilization to protect an exceptional woodland.

In support of the many people from NDIP who mobilized, members of MARE, but also groups from the MARE natural environment protection network were present :

For many months, the citizen group “SOS Woody white oaks“ ‘Was mobilized to protect a unique woodland. He asked the municipality of Notre-Dame-de-Île-Perrot to suspend the procedures leading to real estate development while the environmental investigation is completed and to explore alternative avenues. SOS Boisé des chênes blancs had already identified several very concrete avenues, solutions that are already used by other cities in the region to protect wooded areas and allow citizens to access them.

Unfortunately, the slaughter has started in order to make way for a housing project of 17 houses worth more than 1 million $ the unit.

However, it is a mature woody, probably of high ecological value, identified as
priority for Montreal's green belt. Indeed, this ecosystem is perhaps one of the last white oak woodlands south of the St. Lawrence.

It is, Furthermore, a sensitive sector recognized at the floristic level since several rare plants seem to grow there including the oval hickory and the American conopholis. Some white oaks in this woodland would have more 200 years ! A population of Chorus Frogs, an endangered amphibian, would also live nearby.

The MARE is aware of the difficulty for municipalities, in the current framework, to find sources of financing other than municipal taxes in order to make ends meet. We believe, however, that the increasingly frequent destruction, in our region, natural environments to allow housing development is a miscalculation that does not take into account the long-term costs of such an approach.

The unlicensed destruction of a large part of a wooded area of ​​Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac that we told you about in the newsletter of 2 January is another sad example of the rapid destruction of natural environments that is currently taking place. On our planet, the total area of ​​our forests has decreased by 178 million hectares during 30 last years.

This excerpt from press release from MARE, signed by many environmental groups in the region and filed with Hudson City Council as part of a request to protect the surrounding forest and wetlands Sandy Beach, sums up our point of view well:

There are many impacts associated with projects that attack natural environments, cumulative and exponential; they simultaneously affect biodiversity, underground waters, air quality and public health. Their assessment therefore requires a real overall vision that also takes into consideration the essential role played by our regions in terms of ecosystem connectivity and the risks associated with the fragmentation of natural environments..

The urgency of the challenges we face today requires an immediate transformation of our vision of what is economically justifiable; a status quo would necessarily imply much higher future costs (restoration of degraded natural environments, stormwater management, fight against heat islands, health problems related to poor air quality, floods) than those related to the conservation of natural spaces.

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