Victoria's Earth Day Walk
by C. L. Cook
 Blustery weather greeted this year's Earth Day Walk in Victoria. Around 400 came out to parade uptown from the provincial Legislature Buildings, along Government Street to Centennial Square, home of City Hall. Despite the conspicuously political route, the event was mostly music, the atmosphere seeming more seasonally concerned with getting the garden in than joining an Eco-mobilization.
The casual numbers that turned out this year is symptomatic of a dangerous societal cognitive dissonance when it comes to the state of the environment. As with hypnotic trance-inducing Climate Change, the populace seems too to be stunned when it comes to more immediate, and alterable, local environmental matters of extreme importance.
Nowhere is this more true than in British Columbia, one of the last vestiges of large track wilderness remaining in the world. Despite the province's immensely diverse geography, all eco-systems are under threat; barely hanging on in some cases. B.C.'s thousands of miles of coastline are too facing unprecedented exposure to ecological disaster as the province hooks up with Alberta's Tar Sands, providing an outlet, via thousands of miles of pipeline, for that project.
It's a scheme promising industrial-sized ocean tanker traffic up and down the jagged, and treacherous British Columbia seaway.
That project is already underway, in the form of condensate, a petrochemical "detergent" used to help make the viscous bitumen goo taken out of the vast strip mines of Northern Alberta liquid enough to be pumped. The condensate is a chemist's stew as dangerous to life as one could imagine. It is currently being shipped to British Columbia from Asian refineries, across the Pacific, and up the narrow Douglas Channel to Kitimat.
Every navigational expert will tell you it is "insane" to run large ships up the windblown fjords; hull-ripping rocks line the passage, and one spill in there would linger long enough to wipe out just about everything in the water. It's about as insane as making condensate and shipping it around the world to be used to create something to be burned in the disappearing atmosphere.
 Insane describes too the Salmon "fish farm" industry. Everywhere the, mainly Norwegian, companies go with their fish and tales, local Salmon populations die. That is as true in the Atlantic, where the fish "farmed" come from, to the Pacific where five other Salmon species survive.
Alexandra Morton: Looking out for Wild Salmon survival.
There is so much bad to say about these death hatcheries, their very existence leaves you a little dumbfounded. "Who...", you find yourself saying, ".... could go along with this madness?" Diseases, both exotic and mundane; antibiotic resistance; chemical exposure; pollution; pestilence; and finally, genus-cide. Yes, the salmon farming industry in B.C. threatens the extinction of multiple species of Salmon. Wiped out. Finished. Forever.
The Salmon is a cornerstone species in the Northwest. It's not just cliche, or quaint Indian tradition; without the Salmon there is no Orca, there is no bear, there is no eagle, there is no forest, there is no nothing. I talked about the fish farms to my Member of Parliament down at the Earthday Walk. Her name is Denise Savoie, and she's a concerned citizen too, but she's not in the government, or even the official opposition; she's with the New Democratic Party, (NDP) a vocal and largely ignored perennial also-ran in federal elections. She said she was walking a portion of marine scientist, Alexandra Morton's trek down the length of Vancouver Island with the aim of presenting people living around here the opportunity to rally to: Save the Salmon. She says it's her last straw.
Alexandra Morton has been to the courts, she's been in the fields, she talked to the ministers and the media, and nothing has yet slowed down the inexorable expansion of fish farms on the wild coast of the province. Piece by piece she has put together the picture of a total collapse of the Pacific Wild Salmon.
The British Columbia government is not a body composed entirely of fools. Seeing the writing on the wall, they have again OK'd the now annual Grizzly Bear hunt. The idea I suppose is to get 'em before the trophy gets too scrawny to impress the dens of the Bwanas who travel the world to get in on B.C.'s big game, and kill the once indomitable Grizzly.
All in the name of fun and good economy!
But, it's not all bad news here. British Columbia has A-One alternative energy generating potential. Massive, windblown coastlines, micro-hydro, geothermal, biomass/waste, and a collection of good schools teeming with bright minds, all just waiting to be plugged in to a new, clean British Columbia. Now it needs the will of the people to first change the momentum of the Campbell's and Harper's, and turn the tables of both our economy and our way of living within our essential ecology.
These are not only possible and practical transitions, they are vital. The world is changing, we must change too. The question now is: "Do we choose our change, or does it chew us?"
Sadly, it will take a bigger and angrier contingent than seen today to win the fight Alexandra Morton is recruiting for.
*The mining, forestry, Orca and bottom fish decline, and the whole rest of the tragic Panoply of environmental problems in British Columbia will have to wait for another Saturday afternoon.
|
