NATURE UNDER SIEGE. (cover story)

Our battered planet has many wounds, World Wildlife Fund Canada notes this week in its first-ever 'Nature Audit,' a 104-page document subtitled 'Setting Canada's Conservation Agenda for the 21st Century.' The wide-ranging study, borrowing from the world of accounting, tallies Canada's natural capital. It takes stock of our present-day environmental "equity," and compares what's left to the situation prior to European settlement, circa 1500-1600. The 'Nature Audit' concludes that the way we've accounted for nature in the past -- by basically ignoring its destruction -- is a recipe for bankrupting biodiversity. Still, there's room for optimism -- if we're prepared to take action. Several industries and individuals are already finding sustainable solutions to our seemingly perpetual problems. Plans for the gas pipeline in the pristine Mackenzie Valley are taking the environment and Aboriginal peoples into account as never before in this country. To build on this momentum, we have to get away from the myth that Canada is a sprawling swath of untouched landscapes. Despite repeated government promises to turn things around, the natural environment is under siege all across inhabited Canada. In the spring 2000 federal budget, then-finance minister Paul Martin asked an independent advisory body, the Ottawa-based National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, to devise indicators to track the impact that our century-old economic practices have on our natural and human assets. In a report released on May 12, the organization called on Ottawa to make profound changes to the way it keeps the books. To account for the true state of the economy, the report says, federal budgets need six additional indicators -- air pollution, water quality, wetland extent, forest cover, greenhouse gases, public education -- to add meaning to popular yet insufficient indicators like gross domestic product.