Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson visit PFRA Community Pastures
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, two of Canada’s most acclaimed writers and lifelong conservationists will be in Saskatchewan from June 24 to 28, 2013 for the Prairie Passages Tour. The two writers are Joint Honorary Presidents of BirdLife International’s Rare Bird Club. During the tour, Atwood and Gibson will visit PFRA community pastures and Grasslands National Park. The purpose of this tour is to raise public awareness of the national and international significance of the PFRA heritage rangelands for plant and animals that live on them – natural prairie and the 32 species at...
Read MoreA vision for the future of PFRA community pastures
Earlier this year I wrote a post about the largest land transfer in to occur in the recent Canadian history, affecting management of 9,290 square kilometres of native prairie (see the article titled “What is the future for PFRA community pastures?”). In a nutshell, the Canadian government decided that it does not want to look after some of the largest un-fragmented tracts of grasslands found anywhere in the world, and told the three prairie provinces that they can do whatever they want with the land that used to be under the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (rather...
Read MoreWhat is the future for PFRA community pastures?
For over 75 years, the Canadian government has managed a large swath of community pastures across the Canadian Prairies, comprising of 929,000 hectares (2.3 million acres) of some of the largest unfragmented tracts of grasslands found anywhere in the world. If grasslands included in the Community Pasture Program (CPP) were a country, they would rank 168th in size – slightly larger than the Republic of Cyprus and right behind Lebanon. Or in the Canadian context, the PFRA community pastures cover the area that is 1.6 times the size of Prince Edward Island. The federal...
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