One Community's Firm 'No' to Tourist Boom
TheTyee.ca
Looking across Columbia Lake to Lot 48, the small cleared section in the distance. Photo A. Bergles.A quarter of us, many in rural areas but many more in the suburbs of the Lower Mainland, on Vancouver Island, in the Okanagan and elsewhere, depend on wells for tap water. Business and industries in those areas do the same. With each passing year, we're pumping more from the buried lakes and slow-moving underground streams known as aquifers.So says Chris Wood in Pumping Blind and I think we'd better pay attention. If you use a well, how has it performed over time? Do you know the level of your water table? Is it rising, falling, staying the same? As for the big picture - how many wells in this province pumping how much water? etc. - it seems that nobody knows.
If the plan goes ahead, the Gateway pipeline will be the largest petroleum pipeline project undertaken in North America in more than 50 years; at a cost of over $4 billion, it will be among the largest private infrastructure investments in B.C. history. Planned to begin construction in 2008, . . . that pipeline will employ 5000 full-time workers for two years, generating $25 million in taxes each year between B.C. and Alberta. In B.C. alone, the underground pipeline will be engineered to cross at least 1000 streams, rivers and lakes, each necessitating a separate file by Transport Canada.Read: Massive Gateway project faces serious legal obstacles. A special report.
The number of known mating pairs of Canada's rarest bird, the northern spotted owl, has dropped to three from six and the overall population to 17 from 22 since last year, says the Sierra Legal Defence Fund.
The organization is urging the B.C. government to act immediately to save the endangered species. "If 17 birds doesn't constitute an imminent threat to survival, nothing does," staff lawyer Devon Page said in an interview.
"If they don't step in to save the spotted owl, they won't step in to save any species."
In the 1950s, Dr. Edward Teller ("Father of the H-Bomb") championed a scheme to use nuclear weapons to carve out a harbor in Arctic Alaska. Successful resistance to "Project Chariot" united native villages.says Joel Connelly in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
In British Columbia, native leaders in ceremonial robes blocked logging trucks on Lyell Island in the Queen Charlottes. The protest helped create Canada's Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.According to Connelly, without the public exposure of the 2010 Olympics, we might be without most of the South Chilcotin Provincial park.
Vancouver newspapers love to depict B.C. environmentalists as strident and unreasonable, while putting industry's plans in the friendliest focus. With natives, however, the sneering stops.
