This week, scientist and author, Rob Butler on the eradication of North America's birds; Glenda Ferris, a B.C. rural homesteader threatened by encroaching pipelines; Janine Bandcroft brings us up to speed on good goings-on in and around Victoria in the coming week.

 

Listen. Hear.

 

It's been nearly fifty years since Rachel Carson, arguably the mother of the North American environmental movement, wrote her seminal book, Silent Spring. The silence Rachel described was the absence of bird song, the harbinger of spring. The reasons for that silence would be death.

 

She warned, there would be no song birds left alive if industrial, agricultural, (and now consumer) practices did not move immediately away from the broad application of poisons over the land and throughout the air and watershed.

 

Since, silence has been the response of successive governments, and industry continues to pump out their toxins with an ever greater diversity of product and efficiency of dissemination. And now, the bird populations, whose songs have inspired countless human generations nears total silence.

 

Rob Butler is a scientist, author, and breeding bird atlas coordinator with Bird Studies Canada. He's Adjunct Professor of Biological Sciences at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, and served as a senior scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Services until his retirement earlier this year. He's also an internationally recognized ornithologist and widely known for his research on birds, his work with herons and shorebirds being broadly published in academic journals the world over. His book titles include: The Great Blue Heron,' and 'The Jade Coast.'

 

Rob Butler in the first half.

And; the grand pipeline projects proposed for the heartland of British Columbia are beginning to make their presence felt. Like a dark contagion, community after community along the pipelines' planned routes from Alaska to the United States are discovering first hand what it means to deal with energy behemoths who care nothing for the effects their efforts have on the locals in their path.

 

Glenda Ferris is one of those rural homesteaders unlucky enough to find herself in the pipeline crosshairs, and she joins us in the second half to tell her tale of secrecy, abuse of process, and the threatened destruction of a way of life that comes in the wake of the Big Energy.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the news and views coming out of Victoria and environs in the coming week. 

 

 

 

 

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