Changing Seasons & Some Kind of Segue

Last weekend was Thanksgiving and here in coastal British Columbia the leaves have just started to color within the last week or so. It's been quite a few years since I have seen the seasons change like this and it's just one more layer upon the layers of natural eye candy all around us. I'm out walking every day around my house - in the forest, on the beach, along the trails. The fresh air is amazing, as are the smells of forest and ocean. They say, that breathing forest air is good for you - it reduces stress, blood pressure, blood sugar - something about the chemicals given off with the breathing of the trees that affects human beings. If we want to drive to walk, there are provincial parks, riverside trails, fish hatchery land, mountain trails, rainforest walks, public access to beaches all up the coast. Every time you turn around there is another huge park. The entire Vancouver Island seems to be just one big park, with little pockets of people here and there.

As it turns out, I'm not wrong in that observation. More than 14% of the land in British Columbia is protected in nearly a thousand parks. Some are for the hardcore hikers, campers, climbers and such but what I really like about the park system is how many are so accessible to everyone and so well maintained. Lots and lots of relatively easy trails so everyone, young and old, (and me) can experience in some way, this temperate rainforest here on the coast - elsewhere in BC there are mountains and deserts and everything in between). As for the little pockets of people in a huge geography that's true too. There's only 4 1/2 million people living in the entire province, a quarter of the number of people who lived in Manila, my home for the past 4 years. Surreal. The scale of things is so completely different from southeast Asia.

Watch out for this, my friends, for therein lies the rub. Having (enjoying) no people and huge land and resources is the complete opposite of what our friends on the other side of the Pacific have, which is NO land accompanied by large and growing populations. As their middle class explodes, China needs more and more and more resources to fuel the beast.

Already sucking up their southeast Asian neighbor's resources, it is only natural that they would cast an eye at us. And as it turns out, many on this side of the pond have no problem bellying up to the trough.

They want to build an oil tanker port on the northwest coast of British Columbia and run a pipeline through the mountains to the oil fields of Alberta.

The Enbridge corporation, the oils sands players, the politicians, the bankers and the Chinese who are quite literally invested, want to build this pipeline so that oil tankers will navigate their way up the narrow fiords and channels in these pristine and sensitive areas to slurp up the oil through the pipenipple, then turn around and go back through these channels, up the Hecate Strait with all its weather extremes and history, eventually to the ocean and onwards to China, to regurgitate into their portside pipes. Turn around go back again. 14 huge oil tankers a day, these people are proposing to run.

This through an area where fishing boats have been the major boat traffic since all time. To the north was where the sinking of the huge oil tanker Exxon Valdez happened. In the very same waters where they want to run these new oil tankers, the BC Ferry, Queen of the North, sank in the middle of a cold night in March, 2006, when it struck land with 101 people aboard. 99 of them were rescued by the people living in the nearby Gitga'at community of Hartley Bay who went out in any boat they could get their hands on, but 2 people, a man and a woman, are, as they say, unaccounted for and presumably rest 1400 feet below with the vessel.

Proposed oil tanker port between Queen Charlottes (Haida Gwaii) and northern BC.

Source National Geographic

I first heard of the proposal to build the oil tanker port and the pipeline half a dozen years ago when I visited Haida Gwaii, or the Queen Charlotte Islands as it was known then. (The name was officially changed recently to reflect the people, the Haida, who were the original inhabitants pre-white guy. These islands way up on the very north west coast of British Columbia and just south of Alaska is the home of the Haida people. The Haida are, of course, hugely concerned about this project. They have lived there for 8000 years, give or take, and they, more than anyone, know the Hecate Strait. There is no fucking way they want those oil tankers going around their islands day in day out, year after year. In that geography, some say, disaster is only a matter of time.

The thing that gives me hope about all this is that the Haida and other aboriginal tribes, as well as many other West Coasters, know a thing or two about protest and about stopping industry in its tracks. Their early history stopping Queen Charlotte clear cutting and protecting Meares Island in Tofino (not only stopping industry but enabling beautiful, pristine areas to be protected for all time) and other David and Goliath scenarios has taught a lot of people a lot of things about being effective. More drama ahead.

Check out the article in August 2011 National Geographic, Pipeline Through Paradise, Great website, it has an article explaining the whole issue, plus a fantastic article about the Spirit Bears whose home this area also is, as well as lots of pictures of what this land looks like, this land and sea that they want to change so dramatically. There is also a link to an article about the Exxon Valdez oil spill when 11 million gallons of crude spilled into Prince William Sound in Alaska. That huge environmental disaster has impacts on the life on that land to this day.

Meanwhile, the Queen of the North, resting on the bottom of a channel in the area in question, leaks diesel.

By the way, a little name dropping if I may. I was in the local bike store in town to pick up my new bike. A guy was talking to the owner about custom designing a new bike. Turns out this guy is a photographer for National Geographic and has just moved to our area. I'm impressed, those photographers are the best of the best (to say nothing of covered bridges).  Now I'm looking at these AMAZING shots of the Spirit Bear in the Great Bear Rain Forest article in the August issue and look at that, there's the new neighbor's work, Paul Nicklen. Click on his website, his photos are beyond amazing.

National Geographic - Paul Nicklen