BradfordToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition regarding expansion of the greenbelt.
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The Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition advocates for the expansion of the Greenbelt, both as a way to protect Simcoe County’s forests, water and farmland, and as a way to ensure growth and development happens in a way that builds healthy communities that are sustainable in the long run.
One of the key reasons we do this, which has become even more crucial over the course of the past year, is that we know that the way we utilize our resources has a strong impact on our capacity to respond to disasters, which are becoming more frequent.
How and where we build our communities are key components of our resource use and, consequently, our ability to respond to disasters and climate change. For example, consider someone who is retired and living in an area where the nearest grocery store requires driving for several minutes.
This circumstance isn’t unusual in Simcoe County. Now consider what the options are for this individual if they lose access to their vehicle or roads are closed. How do they continue to access food in a safe and reliable way?
And what about their proximity to a doctor? Again, is a car required to access safe and reliable healthcare? While these are concerns that feature prominently for seniors, they are also indicative of equity issues, with those who are less able to afford a car being forced to carry a greater burden relative to those with a higher income.
These same problems also exist for youth and those with disabilities. But these are the kinds of communities we continue to build as we sprawl into green spaces and farm fields — communities that are unaffordable for many and only useful and accessible to a small portion of the population, not everyone.
For this reason, we are proud to be a part of Just Recovery Simcoe, an alliance between 40 groups and businesses from across Simcoe County proposing solutions that focus on increasing the health of people, our communities and nature.
We want our communities to be healthy, accessible and affordable for everyone. We want government money to be spent efficiently in ways that benefit the health and well-being of people first and not subsidizing profits for a few. We want governments to cherish and protect nature, so that current and future generations can live in a healthy and beautiful world just as we did.
These ideas are not new and many communities around the world are putting them into action. We can, too. COVID has exposed our obligation to take care of each other and our natural world. We can no longer continue to ignore the plight of people, communities and nature. We can work towards a better future and a stronger Simcoe County.
For more information, click here.
Margaret Prophet
Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition, executive director
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