To whom it may concern: I…

To whom it may concern:
I totally disagree with the proposed regional consolidation of Ontario's conservation authorities, reducing 36 authorities in Ontario to only seven.
As a lifelong Ontario citizen who relocated from Toronto to Midwestern Ontario 18 years ago, I have witnessed how people living in rural and remote areas, including Indigenous communities, are treated like second-class citizens with continuous disregard for the damaging impacts of industrial and residential developments. Public participatory processes that welcome citizen input too often are ignored and, worse, increasingly, reduce time limits for input if it is allowed at all.
The egregious and persistent foci on mining and housing developments ignore the deepening impacts on the watersheds, both in regard to contamination - which is not adequately monitored nor cumulative effects recognized - and also in regard to the drop in water tables from ever growing water use that ignores longer term trajectories whether drinking water will continue to be available. Furthermore, boil water advisories continuing in Indigenous communities is shameful.
All of the above illustrates the need for more provincial funding - not less - to be given to rural and remote communities, to strengthen water the existing conservation authorities can oversee, and also would empower local citizens to feel that their lives matter and be more motivated to engage locally to work more pro-actively in collaboration with local conservation authorities, to protect not just human health yet also the health and well-being of the natural environment.
Centralizing decision-making authority undermines not just democracy yet, moreover, the planet's life support system, which calls for vigilance locally where, for example, testing for toxins from local types of industry, can be done regularly by local communities with the expert input from local conservation authorities. As well, local outdoor education programmes for all ages must be encouraged and developed more so in our schools and in the wider communities.
I learned about the natural environment during the 1970s while doing a Bachelor's degree, for example, about the sequence of trophic levels on how organisms are interrelated at all levels of existence. In that decade I had so much hope for the future, if and when such basic awareness could be instilled in younger children and throughout their formal and community-based experiential education.
Today, I weep at how regressive our human society has become, overly focused on excessive materialism and, totally inexcusable, the environmental illiteracy of people at all levels of government who are making decisions that more often than not are undermining the planet's life support system and utter stupidity in ignoring how so many human practices are perpetuating climate change rather than refocusing on co-creating new ways to heal environmental damage which could create jobs with that trajectory instead of being so destructive to the natural world.
So much healing and transformation could happen if and when we adapt an act of will to do so.