Well, if the Gordon Campbell government was serious about protecting water, they could start by protecting designated community drinking-watersheds from the incessant scourge of logging. Take a Google Earth flight over the Nanaimo drinking watershed for example and see the horrific legacy of private-land logging. The entire 350 sq.km. drinking watershed has been stripped of not only every stick of its once-magnificent primaeval forest cover, but so too have the second forests been stripped off.

  

T he Jump Lake reservoir, from where the residents of Nanaimo obtain their drinking water has the highest concentration of logging roads in the province. After heavy rains, massive turbidity plumes can be seen running into the lake. The entire watershed was utterly destroyed by the giant American logging corporation, Weyerhaeuser, which after buying out Mac/Blo, immediately proceeded to clearcut 4 separate 100 hectare tracts of old-growth which had been set aside for the benefit of Blacktail deer.

 

The entire watershed is owned as ‘private land’ with virtually zero oversight nor even the slightest environmental protections.

 

Weyerhaeuser, unbeknownst to the Greater Nanaimo Water District spread more than 60 tons of chemical fertilizers into the area around Jump Lake before it was proven that the Agrium product they were using was derived from US industrial waste containing dioxins.

If the Campbell government is serious about protecting the water supply, it should immediately confiscate all privately held community drinking water supply areas, and designate all such areas, public and private, as off-limits to any sort of logging.

 

We need the very highest standards of protection for these lands which must be set aside solely for the production of pure drinking water, - in perpetuity. Politically, such action would be easily accomplished. However, such action will naturally be resisted from the giant corporations to which the Campbell government is so beholden.