Richmond Campbell’s statement
I helped to found WRWEO in 1995 and to design and build The Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail dedicated at its opening in 2005 to wilderness preservation. I served as chair and co-chair many times before 2015 and more recently have represented WRWEO at meetings of Our HRM Alliance and the Backlands Coalition. In August 2025, Mike Lancaster and I proposed to the Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee of Halifax Regional Council that WRWEO’s successful eight-year Community-Based Wilderness Stewardship program be expanded to critical wilderness areas in HRM. The committee voted unanimously to move at Regional Council that staff conduct a study of our proposal. If elected to the WRWEO board, I am prepared to continue to advocate for this proposal. My academic research at Dalhousie has focused in recent decades on the evolutionary interdependence between morality and mutual survival. Because we—as a species—need wilderness to survive, its preservation is morally important.