With apologies to Max, the central character in Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic Where The Wild Things Are, and his arduous journey “in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room”, Alice the Moose puts his to shame. Alice left her home park in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, swam across the St. Lawrence river, somehow made it across the four-lane 401 highway and finally completed her 570 km-long journey by arriving in Ontario’s Algonquin Park. Talk about a wild trip!

Alice was just doing what comes naturally – migrating with the seasons, in search of safer grounds and more plentiful sources of nourishment. And not just Alice. Lots of other animals. Thousands of different species of animals in every glorious manifestation have been migrating through what’s now known as the ‘Algonquin to Adirondacks’  region (A2A) for thousands if not millions of years. We humans joined the pilgrimage for our own survival, dodging the worst of winter’s wrath and following our meal-tickets as they embarked on their own migrations.

Turns out, there’s an interconnected network of trails and wildways stretching up the east cost of North America. You – or an Alice – could travel from Everglades National Park through Georgia’s Smoky Mountains, up the Appalachians, through the Adirondacks, across the Frontenac Arch and the St. Lawrence river and on into Algonquin Park. And there’s an organization that has charted these wildways, the species (and their movements) and the threats to biodiversity, particularly the numerous species-at-risk.

In October 2019, Wildlands Network released an interactive map of the Eastern Wildway, representing a major step forward in realizing a vision of connectivity for this region:

In their own words:

The Eastern Wildway contains some of North America’s most beloved national parks, preserves, scenic rivers, and other wild places, from the wilderness of Quebec, the Adirondacks, and the Shenandoah Valley, to the Great Smoky Mountains and Everglades National Park. Protecting and expanding these and other key core areas is crucial to rewilding the East.

I like the idea of rewilding. Of our spaces and our souls. Allowing our footfalls to provide the syncopation as we walk away our worries, lost-to-be-found in nature. And allowing nature to reclaim, to repossess, what we humans have taken from them, the birds, the bees, the flowers and the trees.

I was thinking about Alice recently when I came across a tragic story about a deer. This deer had managed to swim to Prince Edward Island – akin to Marilyn Bell swimming across Lake Ontario – only to be hit and killed by a transport truck not long after its arrival on the island. Alice had somehow survived an ordeal similar to our dearly-departed deer friend in PEI. And in Alice’s case, she was crossing one of the busiest highways in North America, the 401/TransCanada. At the point where Alice dodged death, the 401 is four lanes wide and busy almost 24 hours a day. This was Alice’s reality and the reality faced by every other ground-based species that migrates through the A2A region. The animals are simply following deep programming, genetic memories of migrations from hundreds of generations. The pathways are ancient. Highways are the interlopers, the recent development that benefits one species to the detriment of all others.

There are solutions. They go by a variety off names – wildlife overpasses, animal bridges, wildlife crossings – but I like to think of them as a modern iteration on an ancient tale. In the biblical story of Noah and his Ark, human wickedness required global cleansing, as the Almighty prepared to wash the sins of humans away through the medium of an unprecedented flood. But recognizing that the animals did not cause the wickedness and therefore should be saved, Noah was instructed by the Big Boss to construct a gigantic ark, a boat, that could hold a pair of each species. This would allow the animals to repopulate the world after the forty days of ‘cleansing’.

In our modern times, humanity constructs transportation monuments that seem built to demand animal sacrifice. But when we build a bridge – a Noah’s Arch – that allows wildlife to cross our highway infrastructures, we fulfill an obligation to right a wrong.

The A2A Collaborative’s Road Ecology project is aiming “to help reduce wildlife road mortality across the entire Algonquin to Adirondacks region by making recommendations on the best possible locations for wildlife crossings.” There are strong financial reasons to support these public works projects that buttress the moral reasons. In Alberta’s Bow Valley, a study found that “from 1998 and 2010 (there) was…an average of 62 WVCs (wildlife-vehicle collisions) per year. This amounts to an average cost-to-society of $640,922 per year due to motorist crashes with large wildlife, primarily ungulates.”

An “analysis of a wildlife underpass with fencing at a 3 km section… within the project area near Dead Man’s Flats showed that total WVCs dropped from an annual average of 11.8 per-construction to an annual average of 2.5 WVCs post-mitigation construction. The wildlife crossings and fencing reduced the annual average cost by over 90%, from an average of $128,337 per year to a resulting $17,564 average per year.”

The judicious construction of wildlife crossings saves lives and saves money. And it makes our wildways that much more alive with wildlife. It’s time for us humans to do our part and prioritize wildlife crossings on our major highways and roadways.

Alice would thank you.

The post WHERE THE WILDWAYS ARE appeared first on A\J.

The powerful industry, which bills the brute-force technology as “safe and proven,” repeatedly downplayed the earthquake risks the same way it belittled the threat of climate change.

FOR YEARS NOW the oil and gas industry has argued that “seismic activity caused by hydraulic fracturing is not a hazard or a nuisance.”

The powerful industry, which bills the brute-force technology as “safe and proven,” repeatedly downplayed the earthquake risks the same way it belittled the threat of climate change.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Association confidently declared, for example, that pumping large volumes of pressurized fluids to crack rock will indeed create small magnitude quakes but this activity “cannot be detected at the surface.”

The American Petroleum Institute was even bolder. It boasted that hydraulic fracturing “does not cause earthquakes” or create vibration “of noticeable size.”

But Canadian and American fracking operations have since proved the lobbyists very wrong. The industry has also rewritten the continent’s seismic record in shale gas fracking zones.

Read more Energy Matrix columns.

This is an excerpt from A\J’s Ultimate Health Issue

Order the Health issue or subscribe today to learn more about the relationship between earthquakes and fracking activity in North America.

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His 2013 publication, Drill, Baby, Drill: Can unconventional fuels usher in a new era of energy abundance?, was written for the Post Carbon Institute and a US audience.

J. David Hughes is a geoscientist with four decades of experience analyzing Canada’s energy resources, including 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada. He developed the National Coal Inventory and recently coordinated an assessment of Canada’s unconventional natural gas potential.

His 2013 publication, Drill, Baby, Drill: Can unconventional fuels usher in a new era of energy abundance?, was written for the Post Carbon Institute and a US audience.

Hughes notes that discussions about energy are often marred by vested interests, rhetoric and overblown expectations. In Drill, Baby, Drill, a historical examination of government oil and gas forecasts shows that production is invariably overestimated; Hughes then turns his attention to the recent enthusiasm for fracking.

Figure 1. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predictions of world oil production going back to 2000. The 2002 projection overestimated 2011 production by 13 per cent. Hughes notes that forecasts by governments tend to be optimistic due to a need to show long-term growth in GDP. So are forecasts by energy companies and oil-producing organizations. More pessimistic projections are likely to come from independent analysts with no vested interests.

Hughes critiques the common practice of estimating the recoverable amounts of unconventional in situ resources and simply dividing these estimates by current consumption rates to produce x number of decades or centuries of reserves. He says that “two other metrics are critically important in determining the viability of an energy resource.”

The first metric is the rate at which the resource can be produced, regardless of its extent. The constraints are geological, geographical and geochemical, and Hughes states that despite the immense potential of in situ reserves and massive amounts of capital that have been invested, shale gas and tight oil fields have generally yielded very low rates as shown below.

Figure 2. The production rate of 30 US shale gas plays, May 2012. The vast majority of production is concentrated in just a few plays. There is further variation in productivity within the best plays. High decline rates mean ever-increasing capital inputs for drilling and infrastructure to maintain production.

Figure 3. The production of 21 US tight oil plays, May 2012. The vast majority of production is concentrated in two plays. As with shale gas plays, high decline rates of shale oil wells mean ever-increasing capital inputs for drilling and infrastructure to maintain production.

Another metric to consider is the net energy yield of the resource: the difference between the required input and the energy embodied in the final product. The ‘energy return on energy invested’ (EROEI) is much lower on unconventional resources as the difficulty extracting them increases. The following graphic illustrates the relationship between increased energy inputs and unconventional oil and gas reserves.

Figure 4. The dashed line represents a transition point where energy inputs start to increase in relation to the energy embodied in the produced hydrocarbons. The solid line is the point at which it costs as much, or more, in invested energy to recover the resource as the final product contains.

In addition to increased energy, fracking uses large volumes of water mixed with an undisclosed menu of hundreds of possible chemicals, some of them known carcinogens and neurotoxins. The collateral environmental damage is also usually greater for higher-input energy extraction.

Shale gas and tight oil fields have a very high rate of decline in productivity. The best shale gas plays are quite rare, and the sweet spots within them are the first to be exploited. The high decline rates require continuous capital inputs, estimated at more than US$42-billion per year. For comparison, the value of the shale gas produced in 2012 was only US$32.5-billion. Individual well-decline rates range from 79 to 95 per cent after 36 months. Currently, US shale gas production is declining for 36 per cent of wells and flat for 34 per cent. 

Figure 5. Typical decline rate for Haynesville shale gas wells.

Figure 6. Typical decline rate for Barnett shale gas wells.  

Figure 7. Typical decline rate for Marcellus shale gas wells.  

Two tight oil plays in the US – the Bakken/Three Forks play in North Dakota and Montana and the Eagle Ford play in Texas – provide more than 80 per cent of the country’s production, indicating the rarity of good fields. Well-decline rates are between 81 and 90 per cent in the first 24 months. The annual costs to maintain production nationally are estimated at $35 billion. Oil production is projected to peak in 2017 and then collapse – providing a resource bubble lasting about ten years.

These two plays are the source of much of the hyperbole on ‘energy independence’ in that country. But Bakken wells especially show steep production declines. Looking at the last 66 months of data, the average first-year decline is 69 per cent and production drops by 94 per cent within five years. In six years the average Bakken well is little better than marginal – a ‘stripper’ well.

Figure 8. Typical decline rate for Bakken tight oil wells.

Figure 9. Typical decline rate for Eagle Ford tight oil wells.

Hughes’ research is stunning. The recent rhetoric on US energy self-sufficiency is based on extremely aggressive forecasting of production from unproved resources. Exploiting shale gas and tight oil would require a fracking frenzy that would make current environmental concerns “pale by comparison.” Politicians and other pundits don’t differentiate between hydrocarbons of varying quality and don’t communicate the difficulty and energy required to produce them. Exaggerated claims are based on optimistic assessments of resource volumes and little else.

Read J. David Hughes’ full report. Learn about how people in New Brunswick are resisting fracking in “9 Ways to Fight Fracking,” from our Resource Wars issue.

The post Fracking’s Return on Investment is a Myth appeared first on A\J.

Click to launch the map. Last updated Nov. 13, 2014.

The development of shale gas promises to fuel North America’s energy future but with substantive environmental and energy costs. Assumptions that shale gas can be produced at low cost for over a century remain just that: faith-based assumptions. In fact the revolution could dramatically slow down while costs climb dramatically.

To date, Canada has not developed adequate regulations or public policy to address the scale or cumulative impact of hydraulic fracking on water resources or conventional oil and gas wells. Moreover, the country has no national water policy. In the absence of public reporting on fracking chemicals, industry water withdrawals and full mapping of the nation’s aquifers, rapid shale gas development could potentially threaten important water resources, if not fracture the country’s water security.

– Ben Parfitt, from Fracture Lines, written for the Program on Water Issues, Munk School of Global Affairs, uToronto

The map above shows the overlap of shale gas basins, aquifers, fracking wells and calls for moratoria below the 60th parallel. But hydraulic fracturing is dividing Canada’s northern territories as well. In June 2013, for example, the Yukon Council of First Nations unanimously passed a resolution calling on the Yukon government to prohibit fracking and declaring their traditional territories as “frack-free.”

This map also does not show potential water contamination or increased earthquake activity and GHG emissions from fracking. It doesn’t show the cumulative impact of pumping unknown chemical concentrations underground, or the heavy metals, VOCs, brine and radioactive materials that can resurface with flow back. It does not show the lack of government oversight or violated environmental regulations.

Learn about the rapid productivity decline and questionable ROI of fracking wells in Fracking’s Return on Investment is a Myth. Investigate specific fracking sites and moratoria at the Council of Canadians’ Fracker Tracker (where you can also get the most up-to-date information), and get advice from front-line fracking resisters in New Brunswick in 9 Ways to Fight Fracking.

The post Fracking Hotspots in Canada appeared first on A\J.

When I began my last post for The Green Athlete, I had no idea that I would actually participate in the trek I was writing about. In a rapid sequence of events, I found myself in my Prius on the way to the badlands of North Dakota.

I have been running ultra marathons for a number of years now because of the way that the sport melds athletics and the natural world. When I found Adventure Science, a company that combines sport and science into exploration, I knew that it was something I wanted to pursue.

Founded in 2008 by Simon Donato, Adventure Science has held past treks such as searches for missing people in Nevada and the Sierra Mountains as well as archaeological searches in Oman Musandam, Donato. The organization strives to take athletes to the untouched corners of the world for the sake of science.

The trek that I participated in, 100 Miles of Wild, was the product of years of preparation and research on the impact of fracking on the untouched badlands that inspired Roosevelt to create the National Parks System. We were informed on the first night at base camp that a great amount of the terrain we would cover had been largely untouched by humans for years.  

Over the course of six days, we covered over 250 miles of badlands, stopping every couple of hours to record our findings of local vegetation, wild life, oil pads and other notable things we encountered along the way. We would take a panoramic video, shoot the same sequence with a camera and reflect on the whether the area felt “wild” or if we felt the presence of civilization.

It was a monumental trek for me, as I was surrounded by geologists, orienteers, archeologists and elite athletes. Although I was not professionally trained in any of these practices, I felt I played an important role in the trek. The trek had two main goals: To provide data to assist local citizens in their decisions regarding the 30,000 – 50,000 new oil wells said to be coming to the badlands in the next five years and to see if the badlands could be as enchanting for visitors today as they were hundreds of years ago when they inspired Theodore Roosevelt to create the National Parks System.

Since returning and reflecting on this proposal for an anarchist ecology, I have come to understand that my role in the trek was to embrace un-expertness and re-enchantment. I learned the geology of the landscape by walking it, examining soil layers in creek beds and holding petrified wood. Finding native tools and flints in a creek bed, surrounded by ancient bison bones was a thing of wonder for me. Learning how to manoeuver over difficult terrain with a map and compass for the first time was an awkward and thrilling experience.

I spent over a week immersed in the habitat of the badlands – watching the wild life, maneuvering the terrain and witnessing spring arrive to the landscape. It was an experience that connected me to nature beyond anything I could read, watch or discuss with anyone.

The badlands are raw, wild and admittedly not that pretty. The buttes that consume the area were affectionately called “Kitty Litter Mountains” and the cattle grazing areas had the trekkers dodging cow patties and barbed wire fences, but they hold a deep history and a wildness that is redeeming. The love of the Badlands was demonstrated at the press conference that Adventure Science held upon completing the trek, where many dedicated North Dakotians shared their love of the badlands and the struggle with the impending oil pads that threaten to overtake their favourite hiking spots.

What does it mean to have travelled 100 miles across the badlands? In terms of the impending fracking, oil pads and other environmental disruptions, I am not sure. I travelled to the furthest reaches of the badlands to really see them, observe the interaction of oil and nature and share it with others so they can see it too. Like many things in the environmental sphere, what happens is beyond my control, but there is a deep satisfaction in knowing I did everything I could do.  

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Adventure Science is currently carrying out 100 Miles of Wild: North Dakota Badlands Transect, a trek across the badlands to explore, discover and record the wild terrain that inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to create the National Park System.

It may stretch our imaginations a little to merge the worlds of marathons and fracking, but that is exactly what is happening this spring in the badlands of North Dakota.

Adventure Science is currently carrying out 100 Miles of Wild: North Dakota Badlands Transect, a trek across the badlands to explore, discover and record the wild terrain that inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to create the National Park System.

In 100 Miles of Wild, ultra marathoners and environmental scientists join forces in order to help nearby communities understand what’s at stake with the spread of hydraulic fracking into the badlands:

North Dakota is in the midst of an unprecedented oil boom that has led to a rapid increase in road construction, drilling, pipelines and infrastructure throughout the oil-rich Bakken Formation. The new oil boom has brought with it new technologies, and oil extraction is now accomplished by drilling lengthy horizontal wells, and then fracturing the shale formation (fracking) to release trapped oil. The rapid pace of this massive industry has caused an astonishing expansion of drilling pads and roads into the wild interior of North Dakota. Questions about the environmental impact abound, and there is concern about potentially hazardous frack fluid entering the aquifers relied on for drinking water, cattle, and agriculture. 

While Adventure Science doesn’t take a stance on fracking itself, the team members feel strongly about the need to “help communities gather the information they need to make informed decisions.” And gathering information in inaccessible, wild spaces is Adventure Science’s specialty.

Founded by Simon Donato in 2008, Adventure Science combines outdoor adventuring with the scientific exploration of nature, from back yards to remote locations. Adventure scientists explore the world in a low impact manner, using non-motorized means whenever possible to make new discoveries.

Rather than take the established Maah-Daah-Hey Trail, the team, comprised of accomplished volunteer scientists and ultra marathoners, will navigate primarily off-trail through areas of interest. They will begin at Killdeer Mountain, a sacred location and site of a large battle between U.S. and Sioux Forces in 1864, to tie the trek to the history of the area and head to Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, concluding at a camp used by General Custer.

The goal is to travel on foot over 100 miles to seldom-visited, isolated places within the Badlands. The Badlands (once referred to as “Hell with the fires gone out”) seem an unlikely place for a trip on foot, and that is precisely why the team undertook this project. The difficulty of the trek leaves the majority of the wilderness undocumented and unexplored.

Teams will stop every hour along the way to document the flora, fauna and geology through photos, video and notes on their experiences on observations. What they collect will be shared with researchers at North Dakota State University and used to produce public educational materials about the natural and historical significance of the area and “the relationships between oil development [and] natural and cultural resources.”

The creative solutions of the scientists and athletes at Adventure Science should inspire us to look at ways to merge our talents for the environment in Canada. Combining science and sport to explore the natural significance of our wild areas (and to expose the harmful effects of fracking) is something to be imitated and admired.

While researching for this blog post, Jessica, an ultra-marathoner herself, was offered a spot on the team to replace an injured athlete for the last few days of the trek. She set out two days later for North Dakota and will hopefully be able to send us occasional updates along the way this week! You can follow along with the adventure at the 100 Miles of Wild blog or Facebook page.

The David Suzuki Foundation’s 30×30 Nature Challenge is a great opportunity for you to get and explore the great outdoors, wherever you are! To fulfill the challenge, you just need to spend 30 minutes outside, 30 days in a row in May. A\J has signed up, and you can too!

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IN THE COLDEST NIGHT of the season, well below freezing, and the tawny grasses are stiff with frost. Since dawn we’ve been trekking through a shadowy forest of pine and fir, eventually reaching a wide, arched meadow with views extending to the south and west. Ts’yl?os [pronounced, Ts-eye´-los], sacred mountain of the Tŝilhqot’in First Nation, rises above a sea of ranges and valleys, catching the autumn sun on its barren, snow-dusted flanks. 

Our guide is Alice William, a local Tŝilhqot’in woman with a soft voice and introspective eyes. She wears a thick wool scarf and carries an old rifle across her back – “for the grizzly bears,” she says, grinning. William was born and raised in this remote corner of the province, a region of crystalline lakes, pristine meadows and ice-bound headwaters known as Nabas. She knows every creek and spring, and the legends of distant peaks. Though timid, she stops often to describe the importance of wild foods to her people, and how things have changed. “Until the 70s we were still haying with antique, horse-drawn machines,” she says, pointing to an old track in the grass. “We were like gypsies, travelling around by wagon.”

The Tŝilhqot’in First Nation has been caretaking and depending on this vast stretch of forest, rock and salmon-rich waters for centuries. Like so many other Indigenous groups throughout Canada and abroad, the key to their form of survival lies in respecting and protecting the sacred places that sustain them. Also like so many others, the Tŝilhqot’in land and livelihood are under threat from outside interests, in this case by Taseko Mines Limited’s (TML) proposed New Prosperity gold-copper mine. After nearly four decades of exploration, intense lobbying and one development proposal rejection (by a federal review panel in 2010), TML has managed to initiate a new review for its $1.1-billion project, with a decision by the federal government due in June 2013.

At the edge of the forest, our small group pauses in the sun and surveys the meadow. “Everything you see would be underwater,” explains JP Laplante, a graduate student from the University of Northern British Columbia who works for the Tŝilhqot’in National Government (TNG) as their mining, oil and gas manager. “But it wouldn’t just be water. It’d be hundreds of millions of tonnes of ground-up waste rock, with a skim of water on top. And there’d be a dam over there, in this direction.” He points north, where Fish Creek drains into a larger system, eventually making its way to Fish Lake.

When asked how this possibility makes her feel, William gazes out beyond the trees. “It’s pretty hard to take,” she says with a grimace. “I just can’t envision it. All the water will be going down over the hill, all the runoff. I’ve got pictures of Fish Creek from this spring, just roaring. And that all goes to the Taseko River – it’s all connected.”

It could take a lifetime to fully appreciate the myriad connections between this landscape and its inhabitants. It’s one of the few remaining places where humans move, act and speak in accordance with nature’s patterns, led by the shadows of their ancestors. For 10 days I’ve been travelling through the rugged, hauntingly beautiful Tŝilhqot’in territory, scrambling up mountainsides, avoiding grizzly bears, attending gatherings and talking with residents about TML’s controversial New Prosperity mine. My liaison is Laplante, who acts as the link between government, industry and the Tŝilhqot’in.

While speeding over the deeply rutted track to Nemiah Valley, an isolated community several hours west of Williams Lake, Laplante rambles off facts about mining laws and regulations. He explains the online process for staking that was established in 2005, which enables miners of any citizenship to claim subsurface rights without ever stepping foot on the land. “With so many proposals, the system is overwhelmed,” he explains. “With the price for metals, it’s like a modern day gold-rush.”

Laplante’s job frequently takes him to all six Tŝilhqot’in communities, spread over hundreds of kilometres between the Coast Range Mountains and the Fraser River. With just 30 to 40 days to respond to most development proposals, he’s often bouncing from meeting to meeting, trying to reach agreements with chiefs on which to fight and which to let go. “The impacts from exploration – from the use of water, to access issues and habitat fragmentation – are often of concern to the communities,” explains Laplante. “It becomes a strategic decision: How do you preserve certain areas when the rights have been sold to the companies without any consultation? There’s never an easy answer.”

Local chiefs are open to dialogue with companies and are not exclusively anti-mining or anti-development, as they are often portrayed. But their opposition to Prosperity, and more recently New Prosperity, has been firm and unanimous.  

Explored extensively beginning in 1969, the Prosperity gold-copper mine is one of Canada’s largest proposed open-pit excavations. Located in the heart of the Tŝilhqot’in vs. BC (William) Aboriginal title claim, the proposed mine – with its likely potential for contamination, not to mention its certain destruction of critical habitat and cultural sites – has always been contentious. The Tŝilhqot’in have actively resisted for two decades, and federal ministries have never offered approval.

“This place is really important to us,” says David Setah, a ranger at Ts’yl?os Provincial Park and lifelong resident of Nemiah Valley, the community closest to the proposed mine. As a witness to the impacts of industrial logging, Setah speaks passionately about protecting areas such as Nabas, both for the sake of dwindling wildlife and the cultural survival of his people. “It’s where we go for moose, berries and fish,” says Setah. “Our heritage is there, our spiritual connection – this is our knowledge.”

Throughout the valley I speak with elders, children, councillors and chiefs. They feel there is too much risk to their sacred sites and the wild salmon population that spawns only a few kilometres away in Lower Taseko Lake. “Our fish, water, plants, the burial grounds – it’s all connected,” says Xeni Gwet’in councillor Lois Williams. “How can you practice your culture if you don’t have a land base to do it upon? It’s an everyday kind of thing. We depend on this area.”

So far, this argument has been relatively successful. In November 2010, after the provincial government had already fast-tracked approval for Prosperity mine, the Harper government rejected TML’s proposal. Based on an independent panel’s scathing report, commissioned by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA), the feds agreed that the impacts were too great. Of particular concern was TML’s usage of a loophole in the 2002 Fisheries Act, which would enable them to drain Fish Lake (Teztan Biny, to the Tŝilhqot’in people) and use Little Fish Lake (Y’anah Biny) further upstream as their “tailings impoundment facility” – or, more appropriately, the waste dump.  

That rejection, however, was short-lived. With an environmental certificate issued from the provincial government – “a rubber stamp,” Laplante contends – the company quickly submitted another proposal based on Mine Development Plan 2, the costlier and potentially more harmful alternative, dubbed New Prosperity. To the surprise of the Tŝilhqot’in and other non-first nation opponents, the federal government offered the company another chance at assessment.

“What you have is a project that was rejected,” says Tŝilhqot’in lawyer Jay Nelson, “and just weeks later the company proposes an option that was rejected by the panel and the company early on as a bad alternative that will pollute Fish Lake anyhow.” 

Despite TML’s claim that it would safeguard Fish Lake by moving the tailings dump two kilometres upstream to Little Fish Lake, the 2010 CEAA report clearly states that “the placement of a storage facility located upstream of Teztan Biny would in time likely result in contamination of Teztan Biny.” The report also found that trying to avoid contamination “would likely result in mine water discharge into another watershed,” thus impacting not one, but two critical river systems – Taseko and the Fish Lake drainage. 

Curiously, the most damning evidence actually came from TML. By stating its intention to extract the full deposit of gold and copper, company spokespeople have also admitted that saving Fish Lake was all but impossible. “Developing Prosperity means draining Fish Lake,” Brian Battison, TML’s vice president of corporate affairs, told the CEAA hearings in March 2010. “We wish it were otherwise. We searched hard for a different way; a way to retain the lake and have the mine. But there is no viable alternative. The lake and the deposit sit side by side. It is not possible to have one without the loss of the other.”

Laplante says there’s a myriad of impacts that TML’s proposal glosses over. “They claim to be saving the lake, but there’s no possible way. If they maximize the extraction as they hope to, then they’ll kill the lake. And eventually the tailings pond will dump into the lake. And besides this, the mine is literally going to surround the lake. It’s pure spin.”

Moreover, Laplante argues that the possibility of approval taps into a much broader issue. “The decision – whether to respect the Tŝilhqot’in or not – forms a pivotal moment in Canadian history. Will the government respect Indigenous rights, or are they going to continue a new century of denial?”

The thought of another exhausting environmental review – another process in which the Tŝilhqot’in must testify for their lands and way of life – is disheartening. There is also deep concern about the Harper government’s recent revision of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which determines how major projects are reviewed.

Critics say that revisions have gutted the legislation to ensure that controversial and environmentally risky projects will be approved no matter what first nations and other citizen stakeholders have to say. Hundreds of smaller projects will now bypass the review process altogether, and those that are reviewed will receive a weakened analysis with strict timelines, limitations on public participation and a general disregard for social impacts.

“The main issue is that the federal government does not recognize first nations as an official government,” says Karen Hurley, an environmental studies professor at the University of Victoria. “This project – this process and new legislation – is symbolic because if the government approves, they’ll be going directly against first nations’ wishes.”

Locals are afraid that Ottawa may simply nod “yes” to TML’s resubmission, in spite of evidence that the new proposal is much riskier than the rejected one. The vision of cultural and environmental protection coming out of nearby Williams Lake and the provincial capital certainly feeds this fear. A majority of government officials have expressed unwavering support for New Prosperity as a means to economic diversification, especially in light of BC’s mountain pine beetle epidemic.

Yet Tŝilhqot’in leaders remain steadfastly optimistic, and vow to protect their sacred lands by any means necessary. “For centuries we’ve been fighting like this, to secure our area,” says Chief Francis Laceese of Tl’esqox, one of the six Tŝilhqot’in communities. “We look at other places where people didn’t fight, and they’re losing their way of life. Here, we still fish and hunt. We speak our language. There’s no amount of money that could replace that.”

Back at Teztan Biny, locals gather in the coming darkness of late afternoon. Along the lake’s edge, anglers cast their lines, and the evening fires are lit. Despite its apparent serenity, this place buzzes with energy. It holds a raw and indescribable beauty, making it easy to understand why generations of medicine women and men, hunters, fishers and dreamers have travelled here, and still do.

“I feel that every five or 10 years this place gets more special, because if you look around, everything’s getting destroyed,” says former chief Roger William. “The more years that go by and we keep this place pristine, the more important it will be – to everyone.” 

Keep up to speed on the New Prosperity proceedings via the Friends of the Nemiah Valley and Xeni Gwet’in People’s websites. fonv.ca | xeni.ca

The overhaul of Canada’s environmental assessment policies in the 2012 budget bill has changed the approval process for large resource extraction projects like New Prosperity mine. For sharp insight about those changes (and a healthy dose of anger at your government), read Jeff Gailus’ “An Act of Deception” in issue 38.5.  

West Coast Environmental Law has released a mini-documentary on the importance of environmental laws, which profiles the threats to Fish Lake, the Fraser River, and the Tŝilhqot’in communities. Read their guest blog post, watch Part I of the documentary below, or find out more on envirolawsmatter.ca.

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