Necessity can easily become the mother of destruction. And, in our self-centred human way, we abound with necessities. We need more electricity to keep our high energy lifestyle functioning, and more oil to keep our transportation systems moving. We need more land to feed our growing populations, more oceans to supply our fish, more resources to fuel our industries, and more consumption to satisfy our corporations. So we can always find the justification for destroying something we haven't yet ruined.

Consider the plight of Gold River, a small town that is struggling to survive by economically diversifying in a West Coast world of shrinking forestry. Western Forest Products wants to log the last remaining old-growth forest available to the town, a remnant patch of natural beauty that the company magnanimously spared during its more prosperous years. Now that the company is struggling for profits, its priorities become clear. Never mind that this is the town's "backyard", the special place where folks can walk and bike on their carefully built trails, where they can pick mushrooms and geo-cache, where they can introduce their children to the pittance of wonderful wilderness that remains on an over-logged Vancouver Island. Never mind that this little patch of forest is also refuge habitat for elk, deer, bear and cougars.

This patch of primeval forest and its two lakes, Scout and Antler, are the hope for the town's economic future, an enchanting sample of biological magic that might attract new residents and visitors so the town can survive its abandonment by the forest industry. But forget children, beauty, nature, wildlife or the town's prospect for the future. As the company's West Coast regional manager said in offering a few stingy buffer zones along trails, "I think it's probable that everyone can co-exist, unless they don't want to see any logging at all on blocks of timber we own." In other words, the company intends to sacrifice a community's irreplaceable heritage for a little short-term profit. Corporate necessity trumps all other considerations.

Necessity is also the rationale driving the run-of-river projects that threaten to convert a notable portion of BC's wilderness into industrial sites. These projects – on potentially hundreds of rivers and tributaries – are not environmentally benign when considering the networks of roads, tunnels, diversions and transmission lines involved. Without a moratorium that will stop and then examine the implications of such a wholesale exploitation of BC's natural heritage, the public won't be able to assess the environmental costs, consider lower-impact options, judge if the strategy is sound or even decide if energy demands necessitate such projects. Some critics are now whispering the dreaded NAFTA implications – once BC initiates agreements with American investors such as Plutonic Power and General Electric, the projects in Toba and Bute Inlets may become precedent for comparable claims on other rivers.

In another necessity that is sleazy enough to suggest politically nefarious motives, the Canadian Conservative government has bundled into its national budget an amendment to the 100-year-old Navigable Waters Protection Act that would end mandatory environmental reviews associated with projects on such waterways. Stimulus spending during a recession seems to be the economic argument that justifies the setting aside – at ministerial – the stricter federal reviews of these projects in deference to the more casual provincial reviews. Like deficit budgets, this hurrying of construction on waterways is effectively a method of relaxing environmental standards so the resulting damage can be fixed later. In other words, economically challenging times justify environmental abuse on a planet that is already staggering under the stress of excessive maltreatment.

In yet another example of necessity gone awry, consider open net-pen salmon farming along BC's coast, a practice that is fraught with environmental controversy and is even more topical given the industry's overtures to nearly double production. One of the primary arguments presented by the industry is that the production of farmed salmon takes pressure off the fishing of wild stocks, thereby allowing native species to recover. In an irony that begs to be noted, the transfer of pathogens – particularly sea lice ‹ from open net-pens to wild stocks is threatening the very stocks that the industry purports to be saving. Necessity, once again, becomes the mother of destruction.

Other examples abound. The need to drill for coal-bed methane threatens to destroy the spectacular Flathead Valley in southeastern BC, the "Sacred Headwaters" of the Skeena and puncture the rural tranquility of the Comox Valley and the Campbell River region. The need for Quinsam Coal to fill its orders results in toxic leaching of acid and arsenic into its namesake watershed. The need to build more highways and bridges for our burgeoning cities merely creates bigger traffic jams. The need to fill the tanks of our cars with grain-based biofuels just raises the cost of food and empties the stomachs of the planet's hungry. The need to avert an oil drought justifies Alberta's tar sands and the poisons from more pollutants. The need for fish protein is causing the over-fishing of the world's oceans and the extinction of all commercial species.

These are gloomy scenarios but they have hopeful prospects if we are willing to think smart, try hard, anticipate consequences and make concessions. We can change objectives. No more destruction is an available choice. Indeed, most of what we call necessities can be negotiated and redefined as wants. And wants – unlike the ecological viability of our planet – are optional.