Welcoming the salmon home

It's a bit unnerving to see all the people gathered on that bridge, but here are the people of Moricetown and the surrounding communities gathering to welcome the salmon back into the river and express their concern about the possible impacts of the proposed pipeline.

The caption on the photo reads :"On July 27, 2012, once again, members of the Wet'suwet'en nation, hereditary chiefs, Moricetown elected chiefs,  representatives of local governments and other residents of the valley came to Moricetown to celebrate the return of the salmon in the river and to express their opposition to proposed Enbridge rarsands/bitument pipelines."

On Monday, July 30, Smithers welcomed the people from the Hazeltons who were forced to come to Smithers to make their oral presentations to the Joint Review Panel. Once again, the presentations were thoughtful, respectful and charged with emotion at the ways in which people's lives could be affected by this project. Each participant said a resounding, "No!"

The Current

Such an apt  name for the CBC  radio show doing a piece on the Northern Gateway project just as the hearings are opening. After listening to the reasoned analysis, here's what I wrote to the show:

It was good to hear Gerald Amos this morning on your pipeline piece; at least one voice from BC's northwest. I was raised on the south coast and moved to Smithers, just downstream of the proposed pipeline route, over thirty years ago. It is finally dawning on me that part of the disconnect in the conversations about this project comes from a phenomenon that Mr. Harper, the Alberta and international oil industry, and many Canadians don't understand.

Salmon.

Except for that beleaguered pocket of extraction in BC's northeast, all of BC is connected by the salmon-bearing arteries of the Fraser, the Stikine, the Skeena, the Nass and all the smaller rivers running to the Pacific. Even the poor Columbia. Salmon feed us, our wolves, our bears and our forests all along the lengths of our rivers. They inhabit and enrich the rivers and surrounding ecosystems from beginning to end. We don't need "foreign" money to organize ourselves to fight this absurd project. We've been doing fighting this fight for decades in the northwest - and we'll keep doing it, no matter what comes out of the so-called hearings.

Holding up this project is not what we're about, Mr. Harper. Stopping it is our goal. And if anyone is being inconvenienced by this process, it's the people who live here and know there are other ways to live than by exporting jobs and endangering our rivers and coast. We all have better things to do, but right now, we don't have anything more important.

The salmon are in the rivers

Sheila Peters

The salmon are in the rivers now and still there are more stories of oil pipeline leaks - is it just because I'm thinking about pipelines these days, or are there more happening? (If you want to get really depressed,  you can go to the American Checks and Balances Project to get specifics). As roads washed out yet again in the Peace, I thought about all the stream crossings, and the ones that are salmon-bearing.

On a more positive note, I heard about the work that Neil Ever Osborne, a Toronto member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, has begun. He's flying the proposed route: got to Great Bear Rainforest Tripods in the Sky Project for details and photographs.