The B.C. government’s Look West strategy is to get four new mines, three new natural gas projects and eight new renewable energy projects built in the next six years. The same sense of urgency hasn’t been applied to protecting BC’s ever-increasing number of species at risk. Hundreds of species have been identified as threatened or endangered since 2006, yet it has been two full decades since the provincial government last updated BC’s Species at Risk list, often referred to as the Identified Wildlife list. Few protections exist for wildlife in BC that aren’t on this “Noah’s Ark” list. …While such short-sightedness may be baked into our political system, we can’t let it dictate the fate of our ecosystems and the biodiversity upon which they (and we) depend. If we throw species and their habitats overboard, we will impoverish not just our province, but our world.