I highly appreciated Preston Manning coming out to speak to a faith community. I found it curious that he did not touch on how the connection of nature/wilderness to the human spirit. I liked the notion he introduced that sometimes a slight twist of something good can leave us with something bad or even evil (Nazi's). In my work with groups of people I often used the concept that an overdone strengthen can become a weakness, or become an inappropriate use of a strength. In our quest to simplify our valuing of wilderness, moving to the application of a view of it as the provider of goods and services. One way to look at water sheds and more, but I wonder if this could all too easily be twisted or inappropriately used. An appealing concept: an environmental balance sheet or budget. The terminology is familiar to our business communities and leaders who all too often have more decision-making or influence in areas they have little knowledge about. We must be careful not to assume that we can know what is in this “environmental budget”. The complexity of the natural environment is far too complex to know what all is in the budget and when we’ve run hit tipping points or caused highly detrimental impacts causing unknowable losses. As Lois Hole described nature as an amazing "community of living things", it took thousands of years to become what it is. The web of highly diverse relationships between living things and groups of living things, I fear humans all too often minimize these species and these relationships and our relationships with them. These days the human connection and interdependency is too often remote. The concept and application of technology and reclamation could easily get overdone. While progress has been made and reclamation is important, it can only faintly approximate the original areas impacted. Preston made the point that technology is only part of the answer to some of our challenges. Without some appreciation of biology and conservation, people may not really appreciation the truth of that statement.

I highly respect the continual efforts of Preston to look and lead for the long term and to get people thinking about the bigger picture.

I hope he weaves some of my thoughts into his thinking and that Centre for Democracy continues its good work promoting democracy and sharing perspectives while honouring our scientific learnings.

Thanks Mr. Manning