Lend Your Voice to a Citizens Campaign to Save One of Niagara’s Most Precious Green Places from Destruction
A red-headed woodpecker. One of the many species of birds that like Waverly Woods just the way it is.
A Call-Out from Community Voices of Fort Erie, a citizens group in Fort Erie, Ontario
Posted November 11th, 2021 on Niagara At Large
A Brief Foreword from Doug Draper at Niagara At Large –
Long live Waverly Woods!
If you don’t know about Waverly Woods, it is a jewel of a green place – lush with trees and other vegetation and rich with wildlife – located along the shores of Lake Erie, just in from the opening of the Niagara River, in Fort Erie, Ontario.
Inside Waverly Woods in Fort Erie, Ontario. Places like this been good for peoples’ souls during this pandemic. Let’s not allow them to be stolen away.
Go visit it any day of the year, and you will find families and couples, young and old, hiking around it or venturing a short distance into the woods until they are stopped by “no trespassing” signs nailed, unceremoniously, to the trunks trees.
Those signs were put there by a developer bent on taking buzz saws to the heart and soul of this gem of a place because, of course and wouldn’t you know it? In their mind there is no other place in the region to build condos than on one of the last few remaining tracts of natural heritage left along Niagara’s Lake Erie shoreline.
Here we go again. They can’t build their condo on a clay-backed field. It almost always has to be in a rich green place like this.
How interesting it almost always is that some clay-backed land elsewhere in the peninsula will never do for breed of developers we so often have to contend with in this Niagara region.
This condo plan for Waverly Woods was on the books before the pandemic and is still looming despite everything ecologists around the world have tried to teach us about the role natural places can play as buffer zones against viruses, and how vital they are in addressing climate change.
Simply put, we can no longer afford to gut what we have left of places like this. Yet for too many politicians and bureaucrats in Niagara, it is pre-pandemic, pre-climate emergency business as usual.
Fortunately, there is a determined group of citizens, calling themselves Community Voices of Fort Erie, working to defeat this condo plan and they have been gaining a good deal of support from residents across the region and beyond.
One of the many friends of Waverly Woods. They don’t need a condo. This hollowed tree trunk will do just fine
Right now, Community Voices of Fort Erie, is asking as many people as possible to join it in writing letters to key political leaders in the hope of convincing them that coming out of this pandemic, and facing what could be a full-out climate catastrophe, we can no longer go on with business as usual.
For the sake of the health of ourselves, our communities, and the world around us, places like Waverly Woods have got to be saved. And developers in this region have got to be told that the old way of doing business is OVER!
With that Niagara At Large will leave you with the latest call-out for support, circulated by Community Voices of Fort Erie, with a call-out from this online news site to lend your voice to the ongoing citizen’s campaign to save this valuable place.
Here is the information from Community Voices of Fort Erie –
Hello everyone
It is of utmost importance that you send an email or letter to ALL of the following:
- · The Right Honourable Prime Minister Trudeau;
- · The Honourable Steven Guilbeault, M.P. and Minister of Environment and Climate Change;
- · The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, M.P., Minister of Canadian Heritage.
Another resident of Waverly Woods
You may use the example letter below in your emails, but editing it to choose the sections most important to you and adding your own comments is important too.
Please also add your name, address and the date. If you choose to write letters instead, mail to the Prime Minister or M.P.’s can be sent postage free in Canada.
Even if you don’t live in Fort Erie it will show how important this property is in Canada and to our American friends. Please also copy your comments to cvferie@gmail.com or simply let us know you emailed or mailed a letter.
The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca Prime Minister, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
The Honourable Steven Guilbeault, M.P. Steven.Guilbeault@parl.gc.ca, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, House of Commons. Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, M.P. pablo.rodriguez@parl.gc.ca Minister of Canadian Heritage. House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
To read the remainder of the Call-Out from the Fort Erie citizens group, including a sample letter you can send and a petition you can sign, click on the following link – https://www.change.org/p/ten-story-condo-going-up-in-waverly-woods/u/29818788?cs_tk=Auvk48vO7I_GMiS0kmEAAXicyyvNyQEABF8BvJeAKW_hCgb1_t_rua85K0o%3D&utm_campaign=04b1f9e1db3343358d2d955f7c465de0&utm_content=initial_v0_5_0&utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_update&utm_term=cs
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