It’s just after 9 a.m. on an overcast May morning and I’m standing in the Argenta fire shed, clipboard in hand, when my radio crackles.“Alex from Hans, Alex from Hans, it looks like the fire is less than an acre at this point,” the voice says. “I tracked my path on Avenza from the pump site to the fire and it’s about 800 feet, so I think 1,200 feet of hose should do it.”

I nod at Alex to indicate I heard the message and begin digging through rubber totes for inch-and-a-half hose, ticking off the number of lengths as I pass them through the doorway. Our first aid attendant asks for a hardhat and a radio. The crew lead for the fire guard crew wants eight polaskis — axes used for digging the fire line — and four shovels. I hand them out and write it down. 

The energy in the fire shed is jovial and calm, largely because the fire isn’t real. It’s just a flagging-taped plot of forest in the heart of Argenta, the small community where I was born in the West Kootenay region of B.C.

For more than 20 years a group within the community has gathered annually on a spring weekend to build relationships and practice fighting wildfires. Last summer this preparation was put to the test when the Argenta Creek wildfire, which burned about 20,000 hectares of forest directly above the community, prompted a midnight evacuation of its 150 residents. 

While you can recertify your S-100 and S-185 wildfire training with a 15 minute online exam, the 20 or so returning volunteers on our fire crew almost always partake in this exercise. A full day of working along side one another is key to building relationships with our neighbours — and offers the benefit of hands-on experience with equipment and possible fire situations. 

“We emphasize practicality in the recertification,” Rik Valentine, the teacher and architect behind the training days and leader of the fire crew explains. “We actually get out pumps and hoses and respond to an invented scenario that’s all realistic except for the flames.”

In remote communities, response is a measure of resilience

Valentine is one of Argenta’s longest-standing residents, having moved to the community in the 1950s as a child. 

Since then he has seen the way rural areas respond to wildfire change, from locally organized crews that would be ready to fight fires nearby, to a 1980s shift towards government-run crews that respond from fire zones farther away. Recognizing the resulting delay, sometimes days-long, between a fire start and a boots-on-the-ground response, Valentine and others started Argenta’s volunteer fire crew with the aim of being able to respond quickly and competently to fires in and around the area. 

Since its inception, the crew has responded to several fires, always with the goal of holding or knocking back the flames until a crew from the BC Wildfire Service arrives and can take over. In a time of increased fire activity across the province, where government resources are stretched thin, this stop-gap measure feels increasingly important. 

In 2024, the provincial government partnered with the Fraser Basin Council to create a pilot program called the Cooperative Community Wildfire Response (CCWR) program, which aimed to equip rural and Indigenous fire crews with training and equipment so they can be hired on and deployed similarly to a contract fire crew.

To join the program, prospective groups had to be part of a registered society, have required personal protective equipment and be trained in three courses: the S-100 and S-185, which cover basic wildfire suppression and entrapment avoidance, and ICS-100, which outlines the Incident Command System (ICS) used in wildfire and other emergency situations.

After some debate, our crew decided to opt into the program in June 2024, forming the Argenta Safety and Preparedness Society (ASAP). We were in the process of acquiring our incident command courses when a massive dry lightning storm ignited over 100 fires region, including the Argenta Creek wildfire.

Thanks to decades of practice and preparation our crew was able to respond to one of three fires directly above town. Then the provincial service arrived and took over operations, integrating us into the large mobilization of people and equipment that would go on to fight the fire for the following three weeks. For the most part, our role was to fireproof properties and maintain the complex gravity feed water systems that feed homes across the mountainside. 

In the end, no homes were lost thanks to an incredible response from hundreds of people, nearly nine kilometres of fireguard and, of course, luck with the weather. 

As the smoke left our valley and word spread about our efforts, dozens of people from other communities reached out. They wanted to know how they could be prepared for similar situations.So this winter myself and other members of our fire response team travelled to rural communities who were interested in starting volunteer wildfire crews. What we found was a lot of interest in rural resiliency as an antidote to the growing risk of natural disasters exacerbated by climate change.

This interest from other communities spilled over into the spring and, as a result, we invited some people from outside Argenta and the surrounding area to participate in our wildfire training, doubling it from one weekend with 20 or so participants to two weekends with more than 40. 

Over the 10 or so years that I’ve participated in the training, I’ve been on the hose lay team, the guard digging team more than once and, in more recent years, seem to have taken on the official role of fire shed equipment sign-out guy. 

On this particular day, the fake fire is small with relatively easy access. It’s a reprieve from some of the more elaborate scenarios Valentine often puts together which can involve multiple relay tanks, hauling water in the back of pickup trucks and even surprise “accidents” that require us to call in a search and rescue team from the village of Kaslo approximately 45 minutes away — another of his strategies to create realistic wildfire environments and build relationships with other key groups outside the community. 

By 1 p.m. the fire is deemed under control and we break for lunch and a debrief before packing up hoses and equipment. Our dispatchers — the people on the other end of the radio keeping tabs on everyone and, in the event of a real fire, communicating with the outside world — join us to sit and talk about how it went for everyone. Important bits of information, like remembering to bring more nozzles than what are in the pump kits, are sprinkled in with laughter and storytelling.In many ways it feels like it always has: a gathering of people who care about this small corner of the earth, getting ready for a wildfire event that will almost certainly happen. Only now we intimately know the terrifying reality of when it does. 

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When Barry Timpany looks out his window, he can see clear across the Creston Valley: the mountains lined with trees and the valley bottom dotted with farms. He lives in Wynndel, B.C., a community of about 650 people. One day last November, he opened the local paper and saw a notice that a private logging company was applying to use forest service roads to access the Duck Creek watershed, up the hill right beside Wynndel, which supplies water to people’s homes, farms and a sawmill. 

Timpany was instantly concerned. Prior logging on private land had already left a large clearcut looming over Wynndel. He worried how logging would impact their water supply, especially because private lands are subject to less regulation than logging on Crown land. Other community members were concerned as well. But they learned there was little to be done — since it’s privately owned, members of the public have no say on how or whether it proceeds.

Wynndel is about halfway between Nelson and Cranbrook in the Kootenays in southeast British Columbia. Private logging is widespread in the region. Some communities have tried pushing back, but their efforts have run up against private ownership and lax regulations. After residents of Glade, a nearby community, mounted a legal challenge to private logging near their community water supply, a B.C. Supreme Court judge concluded British Columbians do not have any inherent right to clean drinking water.

Timpany says forestry has gotten out of hand, and the lack of management has led to forestry becoming a “corporate slaughter.” 

Timpany worries the impact on the watershed could be “devastating” to local homes and businesses. His farm has never had an issue with water, but he worries reducing trees in the watershed will reduce how much water it can hold and cause it to dry up.

And the operation is just one more example in the long line of frustrations he has with how forests are being managed in the province. Forestry companies and the government will “scream it’s about jobs,” Timpany says, but he’s not convinced. He points out many raw logs are exported rather than being processed in the province by Canadian workers. A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimated that over 3,600 jobs could be created in B.C. if exported raw logs were processed here instead.

“They don’t give a flying farmer about jobs,” Timpany says. “They’ll shut down mills to mothballs, as quick as they can.”

Private and Crown land logging planned within Wynndel’s water supply

The Duck Creek watershed is 5,221 hectares, 854 hectares of which is owned by Blue Mountain Forest Land Ltd. and operated by forest management company Monticola Forest Ltd. Another 505 hectares are controlled by the Wynndel Irrigation District for the community. The rest — 3,827 hectares — is Crown land, licensed to Canfor, one of the biggest forestry companies in the province. Both Canfor and Blue Mountain are moving towards logging in the watershed.

There’s nothing community members can do to stop the logging in Duck Creek — but Blue Mountain was required to consult the public as part of its application to use forest service roads to access its land. Blue Mountain also plans to apply to build roads that would need to cross private property.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship told The Narwhal a decision on Blue Mountain’s application is not imminent, and a decision may take one to two years.

Eddie Petryshen is a conservation specialist with Wildsight, a Kootenay-based nonprofit focused on protecting biodiversity and sustainability. He says the majority of private logging in the province occurs on the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island and in the Kootenays, due to land being given to settlers as payment for rail construction. The land was sold despite the fact that First Nations had never ceded it to the Crown, a legacy that continues to impact Indigenous Rights today.  

According to the province, five per cent of land in B.C. is private land, which amounts to 4.5 million hectares. Of that, it says just over one million hectares (or around one per cent of the province) is privately managed forest land.

‘No requirement for a sustainable harvest’ in private logging: Wildsight

Brian Churchill, branch board president of Wildsight’s Creston chapter, is also a retired wildlife biologist. He says private logging is highly visible in the Kootenays. He saw a piece of private land between Creston and Wynndel was clearcut this winter.

“Nobody knows who did it, nobody knows who owns it, nobody knows where the wood went to, nobody knows what the long-term plans are.”

Even without delving into the thorny issue of giving away Indigenous Peoples’ territory, private logging brings challenges to communities today, Petryshen says. Private logging is not subject to annual allowable cut, stumpage fees or restoration measures that logging on Crown land is. The Private Managed Forest Land Act regulates private logging, and critics like Petryshen say it lacks environmental protections.

“There’s no requirement for a sustainable harvest,” Petryshen says. “They can harvest as much as they want.” He says it’s easy to switch the land designation when they want to sell it — meaning that for a fee, the land previously meant to be kept as forest can easily be switched to land to be sold for other purposes like real estate.

“It’s a strip and flip mentality.” 

This is Petryshen’s biggest concern. Forests can regenerate, even if restoration isn’t the best — but when the land is converted for other uses, the forest is gone forever.

“There’s just a lack of regulation and a lack of protection for downstream communities,” Petryshen says. “It makes Crown land logging look very good, and that is something that scares me.”

‘It’s not logging anymore, it’s just deforestation’

The big clearcut that looms over Wynndel was logged years ago by Mike Jenks, who has earned a notorious reputation among some B.C. communities for clearing forests on private land. 

“You can see it from all over the valley, this bald-ass mountain,” Timpany says. 

Timpany emphasizes he is not against logging. “I come from a logging family … But the way we log now is just deforestation.”

Stephen Aryan, a mechanical engineer who grew up in Creston, bought the land that had become “a highly visible scar on the landscape.” He’s been experimenting with an autonomous agricultural robot arm and practices to reduce waste and use less fertilizer and water. His sister runs a farm-to-table restaurant; together, the siblings create juices, wines and ciders for their business, Pippin Point. Aryan’s dream is to scale up their operation into a system they can share with others to make farming more economically feasible and less labour intensive. 

His other dream is to eventually bring back forest to the hillside and stabilize the landslides and water fluctuations caused by the clearcut.

The Blue Mountain and Canfor operations mean that trucks will be driving through a forest service road that already cuts through Aryan’s property. The dust they’ll kick up near the restaurant is not ideal, but is manageable, he says. He’s more concerned that the narrow, steep road won’t be safe for logging trucks.

“[The road] is serving residents. There are kids around. It’s not a road set up for adequately handling semi traffic, especially with blind corners,” he says. “In my mind, it’s inevitable an accident will happen.”

Aryan says he wants to support local loggers. He knows businesses are struggling to access quality trees — a challenge created by historic logging practices, which cleared out ecosystems and neglected to replant robust forests. “These companies are trying to make a living,” he says. “There’s an economic benefit to the area and all that. I don’t want to block people from having jobs. But it would be nice if it was done in a manner that still enables a forestry industry for generations to come.”

He also acknowledged that the state of the land he’s trying to revitalize, logged by Jenks, has put Blue Mountain in a tough position. “The very first major private logging [in Wynndel] … is very visible, it is very ugly, and it came with quite a few problems.”

Monticola plans selective logging, says water changes will be ‘minor’

Rainer Muenter, owner of Monticola, says he sees how the previous clearcut instilled distrust in the community.

“It is common that some logging contractors buy larger pieces of private land and then slick it, and that has happened to Wynndel,” he says. “But it’s not what we are doing.”

Muenter says two-thirds of Monticola’s operations is selective logging, and the company plans to remove 30 to 40 per cent of the trees in Duck Creek. “There will be changes, but they will be relatively minor,” he says, adding that they haven’t gotten that far yet.  

“We only have applied for road access,” he said, without providing a timeline for when logging was likely to begin. The long-term goal, Muenter says, is to manage the forest for generations. Because of forest fires in the first half of the 20th century, the majority of trees are relatively young.

Muenter says he has not heard complaints about the roads application, which he attributes to the fact most jobs in the area come from the Canfor mill, logging and farming. “That’s how everybody makes a living around here,” he says. 

In response to residents’ concerns about water, Muenter pointed to the 2020 hydrology report by APEX Geoscience Consultants Ltd., commissioned by Blue Mountain, which concluded the company’s plans to selectively log the watershed have “low risk” of impacting peak flows. It found moderate to high risk of impacts to water quality due to turbidity associated with landslides. The report concluded the company must also do an assessment of terrain stability or landslide risk. 

Muenter says Blue Mountain is part of the private managed forest land program, established under the Private Managed Forest Land Act. The program, which is voluntary, includes regulations on water like stream buffers — though critics say the environmental protections don’t go far enough. “We have chosen to become a managed forest,” he says. “The Ministry of Forests oversees us and comes for audits and inspections,” he adds, explaining that each managed forest is audited every five years.

Muenter said he hears some support selective practices, but he’s also heard opposition from others, who say to get logs out faster and not leave so many trees behind. “There’s a big crunch for trees,” he says. 

Ministry of Forests says it’s still working to modernize private logging laws

In 2019, the province announced a review of the Private Managed Forest Lands Act, but no amendments to the act have been made. The ministry said it is still working with the Private Forest Landowners Association and Managed Forest Council “to modernize the Private Managed Forest Land Program.” 

“Many of the issues raised during the review are being addressed through government’s work to make sure forestry supports ecosystem values – including through the $1-billion Nature Agreement – as well as reconciliation, wildfire prevention, local community benefits, and made-in-B.C. wood manufacturing and innovation,” the Ministry of Forests told The Narwhal in a statement.

It said private landowners are subject to inspections and legislation like the water sustainability act.

“B.C. is making watershed security a priority. The Watershed Security Strategy being developed by B.C. and partner First Nations will ensure that the province’s watersheds are well managed and resilient in the face of climate emergencies, drought and competing needs for water,” it said.

According to a Government of B.C. website, public engagement on the watershed strategy began in 2021. The strategy was scheduled to launch in the winter of 2023-2024 and begin implementation in the winter of 2024, but no updates have been shared since the public feedback period concluded.

B.C. doesn’t answer whether British Columbians have a right to clean water

The private logging in Wynndel also raises questions around British Columbians’ right to clean drinking water, as potential water scarcity in the future looms. 

“There just is nowhere in the law where you can look and say, ‘There it is — there’s my right, I have a right to clean water,” Justice Mark McEwan said in 2019, ruling against the community of Glade in a dispute with timber companies.

Herb Hammond, an ecologist and retired forester who lives in the Slocan Valley, assisted residents of Glade in their fight. 

When he thinks about the decision, he says, “I’m as disgusted today as I was then.” 

In 2023, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act was amended to recognize every individual in Canada has a right to a healthy environment.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and Ministry of Health did not answer The Narwhal’s question if British Columbians have a right to clean drinking water.

In a joint statement, the ministries said clean drinking water is “critical” and that there are regulations around treating water.

“If a person considers that there is a threat to their drinking water, the person may request the drinking water officer to investigate the matter,” the statement read.  

The provincial government has warned that worsening drought across B.C. can impact households and businesses. In 2024, the province recorded the lowest April snowpack level since 1970, following “persistent, severe” drought conditions that had gripped the province since fall 2022.

Beyond bringing water to communities, watersheds are integral to ecosystems. Tree cover in watersheds slows snowmelt so the land isn’t run over by floods and landslides, Hammond explains. Older forests are also more resilient to wildfires. They also provide habitat for wildlife like caribou. The Purcells-South herd of southern mountain caribou was once in the region but are now locally extirpated. 

Muenter says some management in the Duck Creek watershed is needed because “the fuel loads and the fire risk are high.” As well, the proposed roads could be used to get to the source of the fire and “protect the watershed from larger-scale wildfire, because we will be able to keep the fire small,” he says.

Speaking generally, Hammond agrees that selecting areas at high risk of wildfire and thinning between the trees can help — which means removing “fire ladders,” shorter trees that fire travels up to reach the crowns of big trees.

But wildfire prevention is “not taking the best trees,” he emphasizes. 

“Wildfire risk has been adopted by some people as an excuse to log,” Hammond says, but there’s no evidence that it’s an effective strategy. “There’s no such thing as fireproofing… You get the right conditions, and any forest will burn.”

Poor private logging operators leave communities fearing the next one 

Blue Mountain is “a pretty good operator,” Churchill says. To him, the bigger question is whether logging in community watersheds should be happening at all. 

He wants to see B.C. come up with a water sustainability plan to manage logging in watersheds. He also emphasized he is not anti-logging, the communities aren’t anti-logging — but he wants to see more public accountability and planning to address uncertainty around water supply.

Churchill and Petryshen also want to see an updated, more stringent Private Managed Forest Land Act.  

For small scale landowners, maybe the existing regulations are relevant, Petryshen says. But “If large landowners are operating industrially and at that scale, they should be subject to the same regulations Crown operators are.”

Timpany says “if we want to fight climate change, we need to leave forests to do the work they’re meant to do,” still managing them to mitigate fires and doing some logging, but avoiding clearcuts in key watersheds and increasing oversight of forestry operations. 

The trees are here “for all of us,” Timpany says. To clean the air and provide habitat — not make a select handful rich, he argues.

“There’s just too much greed.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story is part of In the Line of Fire, a series from The Narwhal digging into what is being done to prepare for — and survive — wildfires.

Editor’s note: An evacuation order for Argenta was issued early on July 25, affecting 191 properties in the settlement and nearby community of Johnsons Landing.

Visit The Narwhal’s B.C. wildfire page for a real-time map and the latest news and resources.

On the night of July 17, a massive lightning storm rolled across the Kootenay region of B.C.’s southeast Interior, lighting up the darkness and setting dry hillsides ablaze. In my small, end-of-the-road community of Argenta, home to approximately 150 people, we awoke to at least four fires burning on the mountain directly above our homes.

It’s something many of us have been waiting for, recognizing it as an inevitable reality of living so intimately with the forests we love so dearly. It’s also something we prepared for.

With over 200 strikes reported and little rain to accompany them, mountain sides were set on fire near villages and cities that included Nelson, Silverton, Meadow Creek and New Denver. 

For more than two decades, Argenta has been developing a local wildfire crew. It’s made up of approximately 20 community members who gather once a year to get their S100 and S185 firefighting certifications. As part of the annual training, almost always held in May, people participate in a mock fire drill imagined by Rik Valentine, the course instructor and a resident of Argenta since the 1950s. 

Valentine describes the scenario: where the fire is, where the nearest water source is and what the best plan of attack might be. People are divided up into crews with assigned crew bosses and an incident commander. Pulaskis, shovels, piss cans, relay tanks, pillow tanks, pumps, fuel, fittings and an assortment of hoses — wigglers, econoline and big-inch to name a few — are loaded into trucks at the red fire shed next to the community hall before they convoy down dirt roads towards a fake fire somewhere on the mountain, marked out with flagging tape.

The idea of the community fire crew was born out of necessity. Houses and cabins in Argenta dot small clearings, surrounded by thick forest that hasn’t seen a devastating wildfire since the early 1900s. According to Valentine, in the 1970s and 1980s Argenta and the surrounding communities were home to several crews that would fight fires over the summer. As teenagers, he and his brother Ray were often called out, working alongside “old-timers” who shared their firefighting knowledge and familiarity with the landscape.

As this style of community response faded with increased regulations and certification requirements, Valentine and Argenta’s fire ranger Richard Brenton decided they should begin fostering their own crew. A grant from the BC Gaming Commission funded construction of a fire shed and the annual training began. Although the crew has responded successfully to several fires, for the past 20 years we have largely been practicing. That all changed on the night of July 17.

The next morning, knowing the BC Wildfire Service would be stretched thin across the province, our crew was set in motion. By 10 a.m., our crew was driving up a woodlot road to a fire that had been assessed by two senior crew members as something we could effectively suppress. By noon, danger trees had been felled by our two local power saw operators and hoses were being laid. A water source had been identified lower down on the road and soon three pickup trucks with 100 gallon and 150 gallon pillow tanks in their beds were ferrying water to a relay tank near the base of the fire. From there, water was pumped up the mountain. When a BC Wildfire Service crew from Revelstoke arrived in the mid-afternoon, the fire was largely contained — although two larger fires to the south roared on.

Throughout the day, on the top of the hour, our crew chiefs were in radio contact with our team of local dispatchers to update progress and verify the safety of everyone on the ground. Our incident commander was also in contact with the BC Wildfire Service, which was viewing the fire from the air. 

When we finally went home late that evening, the fire, which had grown to nearly a hectare, was smoldering, with a fire guard encircling most of it.

It is in these moments that my love for this community, already deep and wide, is strengthened. There is an incredible power in self-governance and grassroots action. There is a profound connection working alongside your neighbours in the face of uncertainty. I haven’t teared up while editing photos in a while but these ones brought my emotions to the forefront. The sleep deprivation and steady stress certainly contributed, but mostly there is just an incredible sense of love and appreciation for this place and the people with whom I share it.

On Friday morning, we returned. After several hours of work the fire was greatly reduced and there was almost no smoke. Then the wind picked up. The nearest fire to the south began to roar, smoke billowed above our heads and the call came down from the ministry that it was time for our crew to leave. Within 20 minutes, our trucks were loaded and we were gathered in a clearcut down the road, watching skimmer planes and helicopters equipped with Bambi Buckets attack the fire from the air.

Since then, the fires have grown and merged despite the plentiful resources mobilized by the BC Wildfire Service. On July 22, the fire cluster, now mapped at 400 hectares, continued to spread horizontally across the mountainside. The situation is now far beyond the scope of our little crew. While no evacuation alerts or orders in place, people are on edge and doing the best they can to prepare for a shift in wind direction that could see the fire descend towards our community.

This combination of local initiative and government resources could — and should — be a path forward as wildfire seasons grow hotter and longer thanks in large part to climate change. This year, the province of B.C. announced a new pilot program called Cooperative Community Wildfire Response, with the aim of fostering localized fire brigades in Indigenous and non-Indigenous rural communities. According to a BC Wildfire Service information sheet, the program seeks to build on “what already exists, for both Indigenous and rural, non-Indigenous community wildfire response, in co-operation with BC Wildfire Service.” It also acknowledges the value of “local and Traditional Knowledge and experience in fire management.”

Speaking after a long day coordinating local efforts to firesmart our community hall, Valentine, who also worked as our local fire warden for 13 years before retiring in 2021, tells me how much he appreciates seeing our crew in action. “I like to see [how we] get different people with different levels of experience and capabilities in situations where we try to foster working together without jockeying for position. You can think things through to the death, but when you start working with someone everything changes.”

Near the end of our phone call, with both of our voices betraying our exhaustion, he adds the evolution of the Argenta Fire Crew is basically a good luck story founded in hard work directed at addressing a need. “You start doing it and then people see the need and wisdom of it and they start getting involved — which gets us to where we are today.”

Yesterday evening, fanned by wind, the fire began to move down Mount Willet towards Argenta. B.C.’s wildfire map pegged the blaze at 735 hectares but it’s likely quite a bit bigger since no-one has been able to do reconnaissance since yesterday afternoon or evening. BC Wildfire Service crews have had to pull back from higher up the mountain and have scheduled a community meeting at the Argenta community hall. 

I’m heading out with the crew to start laying hoses from Argenta Creek, where many residents get their water. It’s supposed to be windy but I’ve also heard there may be rain in the forecast, so we’ll see what the day brings.

I’ll let you know when we get off the mountain.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Even before my mother was arrested I knew the day wouldn’t go as planned. 

The night before, I slept on a worn couch beside a steadily fed fire in anticipation of the early morning arrival of RCMP officers. They were coming to enforce an injunction and break up a camp positioned near the bottom of a forest service road at the north end of Kootenay Lake, near Kaslo, B.C.

It was being occupied in an effort to protect a 6,200-hectare strip of forest surrounded by a provincial wilderness conservancy. Parts of the area, known as the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face, were set to be logged by Cooper Creek Cedar Ltd. in April. Due to the occupation, three weeks had passed without a chainsaw or feller buncher roaring to life. 

I was there as a photojournalist to document what happened, but it’s a place I know intimately. I was born in a small cabin surrounded by these forests, in the 150-person village of Argenta, B.C. The management of these trees has been a point of community contention my entire life. Many residents have pushed to have this forest included in the Purcell Wilderness Conservancy, which surrounds it on three sides, while companies push to log it. But this camp was something new.

Grouse Camp — named after the frequently heard accelerating wing beats of the ruffed grouse — was started by members of Last Stand West Kootenay, a group of environmental activists dedicated to protecting old-growth forests. Many of their members lived in the nearby city of Nelson and a handful of them had participated in the Fairy Creek protests last year. 

Knowing that logging was imminent, the camp was erected on April 25. Throughout the 23 days leading up to that brisk May 17 morning, visits by RCMP from the nearest detachment in Kaslo and the RCMP’s Division Liaison Team — a specialized group of officers who act as mediators between protesters and industry — were regular occurrences.

According to Miguel Pastor, a member of Last Stand West Kootenay, while the RCMP repeatedly stated there was an injunction in place, they also made it clear that “if you’re peacefully protesting and not blocking the road, then you will not be subject to arrest.”

In the morning, I organized my camera gear and notebooks and was ready to document what was about to unfold between police and protesters. 

As people began to arrive, a circle was formed around a newly lit fire near the entrance of the Salisbury Forest Service Road. Songs were sung, accompanied by a lone drumbeat. One person put themselves in a sleeping dragon — a buried mass of concrete that a person’s wrist can be clipped into through a piece of PVC tube. Later, another person would follow suit.

Police officers gathered at the bottom of the road shortly after 8 a.m., approaching the roughly 35 people, about 20 of which were local residents from Argenta and Johnsons Landing. There were also a handful of children. An RCMP helicopter circled overhead. 

The script they thought would be followed, the one both sides had often read from at Fairy Creek last year, disappeared. The negotiations between appointed police liaisons and commanding officers, used to determine where peaceful protesters could and couldn’t be, didn’t happen. The rules of the game had changed. A loudspeaker blasted a pre-recorded message stating anyone blocking the road was liable to be arrested under an injunction written almost three years before.

“Usually there’s some representative from the police who speaks with some representatives from the protesters and they sort of agree to what’s going to go down,” explains David Tindall, a sociology professor at UBC who has studied anti-logging protests for two decades.

Tindall is “surprised” by the approach taken by the police, though he says there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to these kinds of enforcement. What plays out is often a “function of who the actual officers are and what their background is,” which means that similar situations can have very different results.

Shortly after the message on the loudspeaker stopped, the camp’s appointed police liaison became the first arrested, followed closely by the legal observer. Later on, officers did allow one man who was there with his four children to leave but no one else was given the opportunity.

“It’s brutal that people got arrested that had no intention to,” says Noah Ross, a lawyer who is representing many of those arrested. “It’s scary and [there’s] a lot of stress and expenses.” 

My mother was the fifth or sixth taken away after asking to leave while standing on the shoulder of the road. I bit my tongue, took a photo of her hunched, 75-year-old body being escorted away, and scribbled in my notebook. 

She had gone to the camp that morning to bring two dozen eggs to the people there and show her support for “the young people who were there who believe in protecting the ecosystem of my backyard,” she says. 

When the 30 person enforcement team arrived, along with a helicopter and drone, she says she began to feel uncomfortable and decided to leave. “I went to the front and said I needed to go home,” she says. “They told me no one was going anywhere and when I asked for the supervisor Sgt. Brady came and told me I couldn’t leave. Before I knew it, they arrested me.”

In total, 17 people were arrested and charged with civil contempt of court. When asked by The Narwhal why people who had no intention of blocking the road were arrested, the RCMP replied in a statement that “those arrested were observed or located on the road during the enforcement action,” and had “opted not to depart prior to the enforcement team’s arrival.” They also noted the narrow nature of the road, saying it does “not allow people to peacefully protest off the roadway and not impede operations.”

Bill Kestell, woodlands manager of Cooper Creek Cedar Ltd., was asked to comment on this story and said he has “no comment.”

Because Cooper Creek Cedar Ltd. applied for the injunction, it is up to them to bring the charges to court, otherwise they will be dropped.

Suzanne Simard study finds intact forest sequesters 20 times more carbon than clearcuts 

In recent years, as logging plans have moved forward, the push to include the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face in the conservancy has gained momentum. 

Mount Willet Wilderness Forever, a group of local residents lobbying for the protection of the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face, drew the attention of Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia who lives in nearby Nelson. Earlier this year, four of Simard’s students conducted a study comparing five-year-old clearcuts above Argenta with the proposed cutblocks on the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face. Among the findings was data showing the intact forest sequestered 20 times more carbon than the clearcuts.

Because of this, Simard says, when you cut down an old-growth or primary forest like the one found on the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face, you create a positive feedback loop that escalates both deforestation and climate change. 

Through logging, the natural carbon sequestration of trees is lost while also emitting carbon through the hastened decay of the forest floor and short-term products like toilet paper or pellets made from the harvested timber, Simard explains. 

“This adds to the global pool of carbon dioxide that is forming around the globe and causing the greenhouse gas effect,” she says, “which in turn exacerbates issues like wildfires and insect infestations, leading to more deforestation, reinforcing the positive feedback loop.” 

According to a 2019 report prepared by Jens Wieting for Sierra Club BC, B.C.’s forests began emitting more carbon than they stored in the early 2000s. The report also questions the provincial government’s carbon counting system when it comes to carbon emissions produced, whether from industry or wildfire, by its forests, stating that “uncounted forest emissions are now often greater than the total amount of emissions that are actually counted.” Both Simard and Rachel Holt, another Nelson-based forest ecologist, find the government’s approach to forest carbon emissions archaic and puzzling.

“[Climate change] is beginning to overwhelm society in terms of the effects we’re seeing in B.C. firsthand,” says Holt, who was appointed to the Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel by the provincial government in 2021. “Yet we’re still not taking it seriously.”

Holt doesn’t believe clearcut logging in B.C. has a place in the new paradigm outlined by the Old-Growth Strategic Review, whose 14 recommendations were adopted by the provincial government in 2020. “We should not be disturbing the soil, we should be maintaining carbon stocks, we should be keeping the biggest trees and managing for more resilient, open forest ecosystems that can withstand fire … and we really don’t do that at all,” says Holt.

When Simard presented the findings of her study to the Selkirk’s district manager of forests, she says she felt the paradigm shift, where forests are managed for ecosystem health rather than timber value, isn’t being understood or implemented by those directly managing forests. 

“They just don’t get that we need to be saving these places because they’re absolutely crucial in the carbon cycle issue and that carbon and biodiversity are tightly linked together,” she says. “If they understood the intent better they would have different prescriptions but they don’t understand the intent.”

In response to questions, a representative from the district manager’s office told The Narwhal to speak with the Ministry of Forests. The Ministry of Forests did not respond to requests for comment. 

While Holt sees the logging plans laid out for the five cutblocks on the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face as “not being the best and not being the worst,” when it comes to retaining trees and protecting old growth, she doesn’t believe the plans go far enough. “We need to really do this right.”

Thanks to its geography, Holt and Simard see the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face as a biodiversity hotspot. Its position at the north end of a large lake, along with its connectivity between high and low elevation and wet and dry forest, makes it the perfect migration corridor for wildlife.

Because of these attributes, she sees protecting the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face as both a necessity and an opportunity to enact the paradigm shift the province has verbally committed to. 

“All the ingredients are here. It’s right beside a park, it’s got endangered species, it’s got an informed citizenry, it’s got a First Nations presence. It should be a place we can save.”

‘The whole system is built to recover’ 

When Grouse Camp was born, a sacred fire was lit by Chiyokten, a man from the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations, with the blessing of Sinixt matriarch Marilyn James. In many Indigenous cultures, including the Sinixt whose traditional territory encompasses the Argenta-Johnsons Landing face, the lighting of a sacred fire sets an intention for a ceremony or action. 

“Usually a fire is lit around an intent or a purpose like protecting those cutblocks,” says James. “It’s a thing to be honoured, respected and taken care of, always with that intent in mind.” Once lit, it must be tended 24 hours a day until the action or ceremony comes to an end.

Last Stand West Kootenay is settler-led, but they say they look to uphold the land declaration announced earlier this year by James and fellow matriarch Taress Alexis, stating that all resource extractions must cease until consultations with the Sinixt are carried out and consent is given.

The Sinixt were officially declared extinct in Canada in 1956 for the purposes of the Indian Act, so issues around their traditional territory, and who needs to be consulted by those wishing to operate on it, have become convoluted. Last year, the Sinixt, who are recognized in the U.S., won a Supreme Court of Canada case, affirming their constitutional right to hunt in their ancestral territory in Canada. 

James, Alexis and others reside in Canada, where the band continues to be unrecognized and therefore do not legally need to be consulted. For the Argenta-Johnson Landing face, consultations by Cooper Creek Cedar Ltd. did not include the Sinixt. 

The goals of the Grouse Camp, according to those who created it, were three-fold: stop immediate logging; create awareness around the Argenta-Johnson Landing face and its proposed inclusion into the conservancy; and apply pressure on Cooper Creek Cedar and local government officials with the objective of initiating a meeting between them, the Autonomous Sinixt, Last Stand West Kootenay and Mount Willet Wilderness Forever to negotiate the area’s protection.

According to Ross, who is also representing land defenders arrested at Fairy Creek, the RCMP’s approach to land defenders has changed in the last decade. He’s observed an increase in the use of exclusion zones — areas where members of the press and legal observers are denied access in the name of creating safe work areas for officers. 

In April of 2021, Justice Thompson of the B.C. Supreme Court granted an application brought forth by a media coalition, including The Narwhal, to amend the injunction in place at Fairy Creek because he felt the RCMP had used unnecessarily large exclusion zones to hinder press accessibility. 

On May 17, I was twice moved beyond lines of sight to where enforcement was taking place at Grouse Camp: once when they were extracting a woman from a sleeping dragon and once when two women were being handcuffed and the situation appeared to be escalating. In both instances I was moved roughly 50 metres away. When asked about these exclusion zones, the RCMP offered a written response stating that “officers have the right to work in an area that is safe. Where and how large those safety zones are will be dictated by operations.”

Ross sees this as an escalation in tactics by the Community-Industry Response Group and believes that the arrests of people wishing to peacefully protest were unlawful. “It sounds like there were a couple of arrests of people in hardblocks, which were reasonable,” Ross says. “But I don’t know that any of the other [people] were properly arrestable under the injunction.” 

Ross says the same troubling approach was taken in November on Wet’suwet’en territory. “It seems like there’s a culture of non-accountability to civil liberties within [the Community-Industry Response Group], where they’re willing to kind of go beyond the injunction in order to try and break a camp,” adding that extending that to a small blockade in the Kootenays just seems “completely out of historical tradition in relation to rural forests.”

Pastor, a member Last Stand West Kootenay, agrees this is an escalation but views it differently. 

“It’s highly disturbing that this group of people can act with complete impunity … for the right of industrial extractivism, but I would like to say that this is just a continued legacy,” he says. 

“What’s changing now is that the settler population is waking up to the reality that this current mode of society is unsustainable and now that they’re starting to take action for these things that Indigenous people have defended … since time immemorial, they’re realizing the role of the police increasingly to be the enforcers of the destruction of land and water.”

Meghan Beatty, one of the two women extracted from sleeping dragons during the raid, says she is left with no choice but civil disobedience. 

“I’m a pharmacist, I have my doctorate, I’m a stepmom of three, I’m a tax-paying citizen of so-called Canada,” she says. “Yet I have been driven to the point that the only way I think anybody will listen to me is by locking myself into the earth to physically block people from going in to commit further ecocide.” 

Ross doesn’t believe the RCMP’s escalated response to environmental protesters will stop acts of civil disobedience. “There are strong movements that are going to keep growing and that’s, unfortunately, going to lead to more conflict,” he says. “Without public policy change, policing isn’t going to stop these kinds of direct actions.” 

Holt, the forest ecologist, agrees that without governmental action, incidents like what happened at Grouse Camp will become more common. 

“[People] have been offered a paradigm shift but they’re not seeing it,” she says, adding that the funds spent on enforcement could be better used to find common ground between industry and activists. “Why don’t we put that [money] into the solution bucket instead of into the enforcement bucket. Sending the police in to maintain the status quo is not going to help us move forward.”

At 10:45 a.m., after the last person was carried away, I was escorted down the road by two officers. By noon, the camp and all its infrastructure was cleared away. Thousands of dollars worth of personal belongings, including car keys, cellphones, tents and musical instruments, were destroyed and taken to the dump. The sacred fire was extinguished and beyond the din of logging equipment driving up the mountainside, a ruffed grouse beat its wings. 

At the end of my interview with Simard, I asked, as most journalists do, if there was anything else she’d like to add. 

“I think that people need to know that there are [solutions],” she replied. “The earth is such a resilient place that if we can do the right thing, it will heal itself. We can recover the carbon stocks, we can recover biodiversity, because…the whole system is built to recover and I think people need to know that hope is there. That’s why we’ve got to fight now.”

In the evening of May 18, a community meeting attended by 33 people was held at the Argenta community hall. Each person, most of whom were present when the Community-Industry Response Group moved in, shared their experience. Shock, rage and sadness were all present but above all there was a strong sense of resilience.

“After what I saw yesterday, I felt like all my hopes and dreams for my children and grandchildren were shattered,” said one woman who had fled through the forest to avoid arrest. “But this is giving me hope.”

“Well, yesterday was all about breaking us,” someone else added. “It’s clear to me tonight that they absolutely failed.”

Three days later another circle was formed, this time in a clearing a few hundred metres from the Salisbury Forest Service Road. Sinixt matriarch Marilyn James led the ceremonial lighting of another sacred fire, offering fistfulls of tobacco to the flames with each prayer spoken. When all the tobacco was gone, she added a large bag of cedar boughs and the fire came alive, flames dancing to the crackling song of needles igniting.

Editor’s note, June 9, 10:15 a.m.: A previous version of this story stated that as people arrived two people placed themselves in a sleeping dragon. The story has been edited to reflect that the second person did not put themselves into a sleeping dragon until later in the day.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

George Delisle ambles along a road in his 600-hectare woodlot with a snowshoe tucked under each arm. For now, the snow — compacted by snowmobiles and the daily strolls of Delisle and his wife Frauke — provides a firm footing. But Delisle wants to show me a particular tree, the largest Douglas fir on his woodlot, and that requires going off-road.

Delisle’s woodlot is a 15 minute drive west from Rock Creek in British Columbia’s Boundary region. The log home that he and Frauke recently moved into is within walking distance and sits on a property Delisle bought from his uncle in the 1980s. 

We pass a large, old-growth Western larch with a wildlife tree tag tacked to its reddish, scaled bark. The tag denotes a tree, often an old-growth or dead tree, that’s used by wildlife for nesting, shelter or food. Thanks to trees like this, Delisle’s woodlot has one of the province’s highest known concentrations of the rare Williamson sapsucker woodpecker. 

Above the tag is a birdhouse that Delisle made. After placing 135 such birdhouses across his property, woodlot and neighbouring lands, he quit counting.

“It started mainly for the bluebirds but I got a little carried away,” he says. “Now they are occupied by chickadees, nuthatches, swallows, house wrens and LBBs.”

“What are LBBs?” I ask.

“Little brown birds,” he says, laughing. 

Delisle’s intimacy with the land is apparent.

He grew up in the area and has been managing his woodlot since 1984; a time that has seen him complete two passes of selective logging. Bending over to examine a set of old tracks in the snow he speculates on who left them.

“Probably a coyote by the way it’s staggered like that.” Rising from his inspection, he gestures to a high point in the forest. “There’s a bear den up on the hill over there.”

Woodlots are restricted areas of woodland that are normally harvested as a source of fuel or lumber. The provincial program has been in operation for almost 75 years, but originally it was focused on giving farmers rights to forested Crown land. Then, in 1979, an amendment to the Forest Act enabled non-farmers to get woodlot tenures and the program grew dramatically.

According to the website for the Federation of British Columbia Woodlot Associations there are approximately 850 active woodlot licences in the province, covering roughly 600,000 hectares — about 10 per cent of which is private land. 

The familiarity with which Delisle talks about his woodlot is exactly why proponents of the program, like Delisle, see the localization of forest management as so important.

As Delisle walks, he points out how the tops of trees are indicators of a tree’s health and explains which ones he might remove when he logs again in 15 or 20 years. “You have to think in passes. One pass, two pass, three pass, four pass. That’s a 100-year cycle.” He is 72 years old.

Delisle is opinionated and talkative, stopping every 10 metres to continue a thought or start a new one. He has a short, slight frame, a moustache that is almost entirely grey and a scar that runs from his right nostril, across his mouth, and down to his chin — a vestige from a chainsaw accident when he was 16 years old. Educated as a mining technologist, he ended up working as a logging and reforestation supervisor for the forest products company Pope and Talbot for 27 years. 

He believes selective logging is like a good marriage: full of compromises. “You have to be willing to change and be fluent when you’re moving through the forest,” he says.

Delisle also explains that he believes large-scale industrial forestry is too prescriptive. “Nature doesn’t work that way,” he says. “It’s extremely variable and just small changes in the microsites mean you have to be flexible and that’s where professional forestry falls down.” 

Delisle isn’t the only one with experience in B.C.’s forestry industry with those views. The Narwhal spoke with a number of woodlot owners as well as stakeholders from local communities and other experts who share similar opinions about the state of forest management in the western province. They believe that government policy has created a playing field skewed to the advantage of large corporations, leaving little room for smaller, local operations — something that ultimately damages local economies and the environment. 

The Narwhal also reached out to the Forest Products Association of Canada, which declined to comment, and the BC Council of Forest Industries, which did not respond. The provincial government’s Ministry of Forests also did not respond.

Fifty-six kilometres from Delisle’s woodlot, near the ghost town of Eholt between Greenwood and Grand Forks, a circular saw blade nearly two metres in diameter sits on the side of Highway 3. The words Son Ranch Timber Co. are neatly painted in orange letters. Beneath that, green lettering advertises cabin rentals, a logging museum, timber framing and log sales. A short drive down Son Ranch Road sees visitors greeted by friendly, barking dogs, a mecca of logging history and a unique example of forestry. 

Son Ranch is a family business run by Ross and Janis Freer along with their son Shilo and daughter Jade. Aside from a world-class logging museum, which includes a collection of over 2,000 rare and antique chainsaws, they own two woodlots, a mill, a kiln for drying lumber, an industrial planer and a moulder for creating specialty, value-added wood products. A nephew runs the planer, an uncle runs the self-loading logging truck and a second-cousin sees to silviculture needs. 

Their diversity of products and services allows for a certain flexibility and resilience, says Shilo, a timber framer who runs the 1930s-era head saw mill and believes their operation could serve as a model for forestry in B.C. “There should be a hundred operations like this,” he told me. “Last year I could turn the mill off and hear trees falling in our woodlot. Roots to roof in less than a kilometre. That’s some pretty localized logging.”

Tyler Hodgkinson, president of the Boundary Woodlot Association and owner of a woodlot near the Freers, agrees that localized forestry is beneficial but believes Son Ranch is in a unique position, unattainable for most people due to the prohibitive costs of woodlot licences and equipment. 

Hodgkinson, who considers Delisle a forestry mentor, sees tenure and the control of it by major companies like Interfor and Canfor, as the crux of forest management issues across the province. “There’s no opportunities for youth and no opportunities for junior foresters,” he says while walking across a landing in his freshly-logged woodlot. “There are no opportunities for small-scale logging.”

The Narwhal reached out to Interfor and Canfor but Interfor declined to comment and Canfor did not respond to requests for comment. 

Another mentor of Hodgkinson’s is Fred Marshall, a semi-retired forester who, at the age of 81, continues to manage a woodlot adjacent to his land between the Village of Midway and City of Greenwood. A friend of Delisle, he was once a strong supporter of the woodlot program, seeing it as a model for upstanding forestry and land stewardship. However, over the past 20 years, he feels they have “lost their flavour” due to the commodification of the licences. 

The romantic image of woodlots like Delisle’s, where wildlife flourishes and the forest hardly looks touched thanks to thoughtful, slow, selective logging, is a fading reality according to woodlot owners like Delisle, Marshall and Hodgkinson. Licences that offered small-scale operators a chance to invest a little money and a lot of time into a piece of tenure that could provide a long-term, stable living now sell for “upwards of $300,000,” says Marshall. 

“The way it’s evolved, the woodlot program has fallen off the rails,” says Delisle. “It wasn’t like this when it started because you couldn’t sell them. That changed in the ‘90s and that changed the whole face of the program.”

Tenure, tenure, tenure

Tenure is a legal agreement between a company, group or individual and the provincial government to use Crown land for the purpose of economic or recreational activity. Tenure uses range from grazing rights to ski areas and, of course, logging. In B.C., 95 per cent of land is considered crown land by the provincial government and nearly 57 per cent of that is forested. In the case of forestry, there are two kinds of tenure: area-based and volume-based.

Area-based tenures include woodlots, community forests and woodland licences. They give tenure holders exclusive rights to harvest timber from a specific area of land. The amount they are allowed to harvest is based on the annual allowable cut, which is set at least every 10 years by the provincial government’s chief forester. Volume-based tenures such as forest licences also grant rights to harvest a set amount of timber, but over a broader area that is shared with multiple tenure holders.

“An area might have an annual cut of one million cubic metres and one tenure holder might have a licence to cut 500,000 of that,” explained Marshall. “The result is you’re going to high-grade the best and most easily accessible timber.”

According to government figures based on the last cut allotment for the Boundary Timber Supply Area, set in 2016, woodlots, community forests and First Nations woodland licences made up less than eight per cent of the annual allowable cut. In a 2019 column in the Williams Lake Tribune, Jim Hilton, a retired forester and agrologist, broke down the allotment of the allowable cut province wide. Though not peer-reviewed, his analysis showed that of the total 64-million-cubic-metre allowable cut, 32.4 million cubic metres were controlled by eight corporations including Interfor and Tolko Industries Ltd., both of which operate in the Boundary region.

This overwhelming control of B.C.’s public forests by a handful of large corporations has, according to Herb Hammond, a forest ecologist who authored the seminal 1991 book Seeing the Forest Through the Trees, created a situation where a once-public-asset has become privatized and commodified. “The power of tenure isn’t exercised through woodlot licencees,” Hammond says. “It’s exercised through large tenure holders like Interfor and Canfor.” Hammond believes a crowning achievement of this lobbying power was the introduction of professional reliance by the provincial government in the early 2000s.

Professional reliance is the idea that professional orders should be the ones entrusted with the planning, management and oversight of their members who work in industry. It would give these professional orders the primary responsibility to oversee these issues, instead of the government.

“That was a huge step backwards in terms of having reasonable standards,” Hammond says. 

Examples of professional reliance gone wrong aren’t hard to find and it’s easy to equate it to having the fox plan, build and manage the hen house with little supervision or guidance. In the case of the Mount Polley mine disaster, a 2019 report by then-auditor general Carol Bellringer flagged professional reliance as a key issue in oversights that led to the mine’s tailings pond breaching and spilling into nearby water bodies, including Quesnel Lake.

A 2018 report by Mark Haddock, commissioned by the provincial government, titled Professional Reliance Review, recommended that “government establish an Office of Professional Regulation and Oversight … The office would be an agent of government, independent from the natural resource sector ministries and focus on professional governance issues.” 

In addressing the Forest and Range Practices Act specifically, the report highlights a submission from the Forest Practices Board stating that a key condition for the involvement of professionals in the government’s resource management decisions is that “government must reserve to itself the right to act when necessary to protect the public interest.” The submission goes on to say that the board has “seen situations where forestry development was putting environmental and community values at risk, yet district managers could do little to affect the development and protect public interest.”

Following the report, the provincial government created the Office of the Superintendent of Professional Governance, assigning Paul Craven to lead the office and oversee professional regulators across different industries. Other changes have included two amendments to the Forest and Range Practices Act — Bill 21 and 23 — that, according to the government website, include goals of increased participation by Indigenous nations in forestry, the clarification of provincial objectives for forest and range resources, improved information sharing in forest planning and the adaptation of resource management to changing land base and values. 

While Marshall is hopeful that the Office of the Superintendent can have a positive effect on the professional reliance model, he says only time can tell. However, he sees these changes as being incremental and ultimately believes a full upheaval of forestry policy is required to appropriately adapt to climate change, loss of biodiversity and degraded relationships between government, industry and local communities, including First Nations. He likens these small steps to “putting a bandaid on a body that’s bleeding to death.”

Hammond shares his sentiment. “If we keep tinkering with the system, then we’re just layering on another attempt to fix the system on a system that is fundamentally flawed,” he says. 

When Hammond reflects on the book he wrote over three decades ago, he is, by and large, happy with it. He sees the issues he raised then — like the politics of forestry, industrial control of policy and profiteering at the expense of forest health — as still very relevant. When it comes to the solutions — like localizing control of forests, working with Indigenous governments and placing value on biodiversity and watershed health — those too seem as pertinent as ever.

When asked whether he believes those solutions will be implemented from the top down, he says that’s not where he’d start. “My own personal experience with change through the years is to put together grassroots, community-based groups and begin the work to make those changes happen.”

Hodgkinson, who worked as woodlands manager for Kalesnikoff Lumber Co. Ltd. for seven years, also envisions a grassroots-led shift in policy that would empower rural communities and First Nations to control how their local, public forest is managed. “Mills shouldn’t own tenure,” he says. “It should be owned by [First Nations], woodlots and community forests who would sell logs to the mills [through auction].”

Less than 30 kilometres away, Vaagen Fibre Canada, a mill on the outskirts of the Village of Midway, is already modelling itself in this image.

A reimagining of forestry in B.C.

Dan Macmaster lives in Grand Forks but spends a lot of time driving across the Boundary, Okanagan and West Kootenays. As fibre supply manager for Vaagen, a mill that doesn’t own any tenure itself, his job is to develop and maintain relationships with tenure holders to ensure the mill has logs. This model necessitates partnering with woodlot owners, First Nations and community forests — both the West Boundary Community Forest and the Osoyoos Indian Band , contract Vaagen to manage their tenures. 

“Our community forest is spread out over 27 different little parcels,” explains Macmaster. “Every four weeks we meet with the board and the public to talk about what we’re doing and what we’re planning to do.” This communication with surrounding residents and local stakeholders allows for ideas and concerns to be aired, Macmaster says, describing this as the “crux of a community forest.”

A community forest, like a woodlot, is an area-based tenure that is locally managed but differs in the direction of profits. With a woodlot, revenues usually go to an individual or family, whereas a community forest’s profits end up in the community that owns them. In the case of the Village of Midway and the City of Greenwood — the two stakeholders in the West Boundary Community Forest — the profits are often reinvested in the community through grants, community services or forest improvement projects.

Macmaster also notes that 95 per cent of the work required for managing the community forest — from block layout to road building to silviculture — is done by local contractors. In a region known for its logging history, he is never forced to choose a poor contractor.

“The amount of talent and expertise we have in the Boundary is incredible,” he says.

Macmaster believes that when people are informed and educated, they’re almost always supportive. “It’s been a good model for us even though it’s not easy,” he says. “It’s a lot easier to make a 40 or 80-hectare cutblock … but we don’t believe that’s the direction professional forestry is headed.”

This approach has led to a relationship between Vaagen and the Osoyoos Indian Band that appears mutually beneficial to both sides. Amanda Anderson is the senior referrals officer for the First Nation and works with Macmaster closely on forestry permits submitted on their traditional territory. “Vaagen really tries to ensure that our voices are heard,” she says, adding that they respect culturally important values — like hunting, berry-picking or archeological sites — in their forest plans. “We have a lot of faith in [Dan] and the knowledge he has.”

The vision that Hodgkinson has, of tenure being redistributed from large mills to smaller, diversified operators, wouldn’t be without its bureaucratic challenges. He sees redistribution as a government buy-back program, something that would take millions of dollars. In 2020, Canfor sold a tenure for a combined 349,000 cubic metres of annual allowable cut to Interfor for $60 million. 

Hodgkinson is quick to note that redistributing tenure doesn’t mean removing companies like Interfor or Canfor from forestry. “We can’t exist without Interfor and other major companies who have access to larger markets,” he says. “I really think the way forward is removing tenure from major companies but also supporting them.”

In October 2021, the provincial government introduced Bill 28, a 160-page forest amendment act that, according to a government press release, aims to make the province “landlords of the forest again.” In November, Minister of Forests Katrine Conroy told the B.C. legislature that “the proposed legislation will establish a tool that will enable government to reduce timber harvesting rights of existing forest tenure holders, provide compensation and redistribute timber harvesting rights to First Nations communities.”

This comes after the provincial government announced it would be deferring up to 26,000 square kilometres of old-growth forests as recommended by the strategic review of old-growth forest management released in April 2020. What happens with the deferred areas will largely depend on the First Nations whose traditional territories the forests are on. 

For Anderson, from the Osoyoos Indian Band, First Nations involvement and leadership is non-negotiable because what the provincial government sees as Crown land is largely unceded. “Our land has never been given up,” she says. “It was never surrendered and we are the rightful title holders.” 

These kinds of changes lead Macmaster to believe that things are moving in a positive direction, but he’s aware of how difficult and complex implementing sweeping reforms is. “If it moves too fast it leaves First Nations and local communities in the dust and if it moves slow then nothing gets done. It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” he says.

Despite these challenges, Hammond believes positive change is possible and necessary to save an industry that has played a fundamental role in B.C.’s economy and identity for centuries. “We’re past the point of an emerging problem. We’re right in the middle of the problem,” he says. “When it comes to forestry and if we don’t do something, then the influence of a few, small examples of good forestry gets lost in the extent of large, industrial forestry.” 

Back on the woodlot, Delisle is crouched down, tightening his snowshoes. Standing, he stares into the open woods. “Forest health should be the driving principle of everything we do,” he says, before beginning to walk atop the knee-high snow. 

After a few minutes, we reach the prized Douglas fir. It’s impressive. The trunk, covered in thick bark with deep fissures, ascends skyward. For the first three metres, an abstract, crosshatch pattern covers the tree — claw-inscribed messages from black bears. 

“It’s 54 inches in diameter or five grade ones,” he says. 

I give him a puzzled look.

“It takes five Grade One kids to reach around it,” he explains, laughing at his own joke. 

We continue on. Past the big fir’s twin that fell down in a windstorm, through an open area filling in with small poplars and alder, across an old set of tracks left by a moose; our own footsteps leading us back to Delisle’s home. Pausing, he points to a stand of trees thicker than the surrounding forest.

“I left this little corner alone this time because there’s an owl’s nest in it,” he says.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Kenhté:ke Seed Sanctuary is in the heart of Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, just west of Kingston, Ont. It is home to a 40-year-old living collection of almost 300 seed varieties, including rare heirloom crops like blue Cayuga flint corn and ancient ones like Jacob’s cattle bean, a red and white legume dating back to the 1700s.

Since 2019, the collection has been cared for by Ratinenhayén:thos, an Mohawk-led non-profit whose name means “they are farmers of seeds” in Kanyen’kéha, chosen because it denotes a strong spiritual and cultural connection that grounds the organization’s work in community and place.

Here, Kahéhtoktha, a founding member of Ratinenhayén:thos, talks about the sanctuary and the importance of seed saving. 

Can you tell the history of the seed collection and how it came to be in the hands of Ratinenhayén:thos?

We received the seed collection in April 2019 in a seed rematriation ceremony that was planned by Ratinenhayén:thos, the Kingston Area Seed System Initiative and the Sisters of Providence. The Sisters had the collection for 20 years. When they began they were taking care of the collection themselves but many of the sisters are quite elderly, so as time passed they hired a professional gardener, Cate Henderson, and we’ve also adapted that model. 

Prior to that, Robert and Carol Mouck had formed the collection at their farm in Napanee, which is fairly close to here, so many of the seeds are indigenous. Our connection to these seeds goes back to our creation story, which is the foundation of our origins, our language and our culture. That’s how deeply significant the seeds are to us. To recognize that these seeds were once ours and are returned to us. We’re really glad to have them back and to be taking care of them. 

What does “rematriation” mean to you?

It seems that when people talk about artifacts and things that are being returned to their Indigenous owners, they often use the word “repatriation.” But “rematriation,” for me anyway, is about a spiritual, land-based relationship and connection to our Mother Earth. I think it’s also about returning women to their prominent leadership roles and responsibilities of taking care of the Earth and transferring cultural knowledge, language and skills. In this context it’s seeds, foodways and reconnecting to our spirituality and sacred ecology. 

When we embarked on our relationship with The Sisters around the seed collection, it was actually them that put forward the word “rematriation.” It made me realize that these women are probably feminists, that they really value women’s contributions in society and that the way they live also embodies a relationship to the Earth. Caring for seeds, caring for the next generation, that was some of our common ground early on which made it really special. 

I think Native people generally are a little bit afraid of nuns and sisters because of residential schools and things like that. We were careful as we approached the relationship. We were really careful to be respectful and to not pre-judge anything or be too influenced by the pain that people had experienced. We just wanted to try to have a fresh start with these women. They’re elderly as well and we respect our elders. We care about them and recognize them to be an important part of our society. I think that deep respect and reverence for them and who they are was surprising to them. We were trying to build on a foundation of peace, respect and love. 

How are the seeds stored? What are some of the challenges around caring for such a large collection?

Right now the seeds are stored at the public library, which is located in the heart of our community. We wanted them to be in a public space and also in a secure environment, but in the long term we hope to have our own space for storing the seeds. The temperature that we like as human beings isn’t always the ideal temperature for seeds. Some seeds are kept at the sanctuary in the seed drying room because they can withstand a bit of fluctuation in temperature.

Some of the important challenges are land and a place to grow out the seed collection year after year. We don’t grow all 300 items all at once. We have to grow it in a cycle of about five to seven years. That’s one of the challenges of a large, living seed collection. 

Also, it takes a lot of resources and a professional gardener. It’s a full, year-long process to look after all the seeds. You go from planting a seed in the greenhouse to then transferring it outside. Then it’s there through the growing season before being harvested. At that point some seeds are taken into the seed drying room to cure. 

It takes time and it takes a lot of educating people about this seed conservation work and all the things that are needed on site in order to care for it. A greenhouse and potting shed. A place to store equipment, and also an office and things like that. Eventually we hope to have all those things in place and that they can then be used into the future to keep curating and expanding the collection with more indigenous varieties. 

Can you share some success stories and heartbreaks?

I feel like this can be answered on so many different levels. One, with Ratinenhayén:thos and the board. Another with the gardener and the volunteers and being able to bring everyone together to establish the seed sanctuary and get it off the ground. All of the energy and work that has been poured into it is a success story. Even the fact that seed conservation is virtually unheard of and yet so valuable and so important. 

Some of our success and heartbreaks have been trying to raise the funding for fencing the gardens, to protect the things that we’re growing from wildlife. We did experience a few losses from feathered friends and four-legged friends. Thankfully it didn’t break us. In some jars there’s only one or two seeds and in other jars there are many seeds. It’s like that across the entire collection. 

We really want to ensure that we have things in place to protect the rare varieties such as the Cayuga flint corn that we grew this season. This corn is newly brought into the care of the collection and is very distinct, old and lesser known. It’s less available to people in seed and even less available in quantities to be eaten, so this is really important to Indigenous people. When we rematriate that seed back into communities, it will help improve the seed, the food system and the chance that this variety will survive for many, many generations. That is the role that we play. 

It’s something that we’re really excited to celebrate because we are the first Indigenous seed sanctuary that we know of in Canada. 

How does the sanctuary help the Tyendinaga community build resilience and connection to the land?

I love that word, resilience. I think we have a lot of resilience already, which can only be strengthened by our further connection to the land and increasing our relationships with the sacred ecology. I think a big part of the resiliency building that is happening here is that we are sharing seed-saving education for our present and future generations. There’s been a disruption in the flow of this information and it’s caused a lot of ill health, physically and overall. 

At the seed sanctuary, and in all that we do, it’s part of our mission to follow the Haudenosaunee cosmology. It asks us to honour all of what we know, all of the teachings that we have been given about who we are and how we’re supposed to live. When we increase access to traditional seeds, more people have the opportunity to grow them, taste them and incorporate food, like Cayuga flint corn, back into their diet. 

In so many ways it’s really important. It’s always reinforcing our language, it’s always reinforcing our culture. This work is part of cultural revitalization and it’s part of language revitalization. It’s the revitalization of our food ways and our spirituality through these activities. I do love that resilience. It makes me feel really happy. 

What are your visions for the future of Kenhté:ke and Ratinenhayén:thos?

I think as we’re building up our capacity to care for the collection, we hope to expand the gardens and our internship program. Some people have already come forward and offered seeds from their personal collections that they’re concerned about and would like to see continued because of their food value or their place in our culture. 

We’re planning larger grow-outs of the seeds as well. That’s important because when you can have a larger grow-out population, you’re strengthening the genetics of that plant and that species. As an example, a proper grow-out of corn should have 200 plants because more plants means more genetic diversity and therefore greater genetic resilience. Some of the foods we grow we’ve never eaten because there aren’t enough seeds yet. That’s a really horrible thought isn’t it? I think every youth deserves to taste this corn and to recognize how valuable it was to our people. 

In our view, something as important as our food source should be nationalized. Across the country, other First Nations or regions should have something like this. It would be great if they worked with Native People because much of our diet is Indigenous even though we’ve lost that connection. Native People have made lots of contributions to the food system and I think we still have a lot to contribute. There’s a lot that isn’t known or understood because we’ve sort of been left out of that equation for a while. 

There were already gardens and beautiful food resources here, but through colonization [settlers] planted a garden over top of it and gave [the crops] different names. That kept people from being able to recognize what came from the Indigenous Peoples of these lands.

Updated January 11, 2022, at 12:58 p.m. ET: This story was corrected from a previous version that misstated the name of the Kingston Area Seed System Initiative and the surname of gardener Cate Henderson.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story is part of When in Drought, a series about threats to B.C.’s imperilled freshwater systems and the communities working to implement solutions.

Doug Fossen’s cowboy hat bobs rhythmically as he strides across his family’s ranchland west of Rock Creek, British Columbia. Beneath a large, oval belt buckle bearing his surname, his boots swish through a pasture of green alfalfa. To the right, rows of tightly spaced feed corn stretch uphill towards an open forest of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. 

Abruptly, the sound of his walking changes. Instead of whispering, each footfall crunches, dead grass breaking beneath hard soles, dust and insects beginning to rise in his wake. He stops and points to the parched earth. “See? As soon as you leave our irrigation area you enter grasshopper land,” he tells The Narwhal.

Since the first week of August, the Kettle River watershed, located in central southern B.C., has been under level five drought, the provincial government’s highest rating. According to the B.C. drought information portal, areas assigned level five are “almost certain” to face adverse impacts on socio-economic and ecosystem values. Until recently, the region was the only one listed at level five, but in the past two weeks the Salmon River basin east of Kelowna and both East and West Vancouver Island have joined the extreme rating. 

Since a province-wide heat wave in June, stream flows across the Kettle River watershed’s eight sub-basins have been dangerously low. For cattle ranchers like Fossen, who rely on creeks to irrigate pasture and feed crops, this means making adjustments and praying for rain.

“We’ve consolidated a lot of our irrigated land to conserve water,” he says, adding that they recently installed centre-pivot irrigation systems which, although expensive, use water more efficiently. “It’s just really stressful right now and you’re not sure if you’ll make it.”

According to an Aug. 13 article in the government of Alberta’s Agri-News, severe drought affecting much of Western Canada and the U.S., is leaving ranchers facing tough choices when it comes to managing their herds. A scarcity of feed due to strained, dry pastures has led to increased feed costs forcing many farmers to cull large portions of their stock, which could flood the beef market, lower the price and compound the hardship — something that Fossen is already thinking about.

“Our biggest problem is this fall we’re going to have to deal with a price drop,” he says. “That’ll be our biggest hit.”

Despite this, Fossen, who serves as the president of the Kettle River Stockman’s Association, considers himself lucky. Since his father bought the ranch in 1976 they have been combating drought by adding seep-fed water troughs on the Crown land where their herd — currently sized at 350 mother cows and their calves — graze between spring and fall. They have also built weirs on some small creeks to create pond-like reservoirs from which they can pump water. Because of this and their irrigation systems they, unlike some other ranchers in the region, may not have to buy feed in the fall at exorbitant prices.

“That’s what ranching teaches us,” he says, “in these drought years we are living off our management decisions of the last 20 years.”

Connecting the dots between clearcuts and drought

According to a drought management plan published by the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary in 2020, the Kettle River watershed is dominated by a “nival hydrological regime,” meaning the watershed relies primarily on snowmelt to sustain the flows of its rivers and streams. This makes the watershed especially susceptible to both flooding and drought as the majority of the yearly flow is released during the spring freshet when the bulk of the snowpack melts. 

In 2018, Grand Forks experienced severe flooding which some residents and industry professionals linked back to excessive clear cut logging in the Boundary timber supply area. Residents of Grand Forks launched a lawsuit against B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources and several logging companies in September 2020 over damages caused by the flooding. The defendants included Interfor, which operates a mill across the Kettle River from downtown Grand Forks.

According to Peter Waldmann, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, only one of the companies has filed a defence and the case, which is being overseen by Justice Gaul of the Victoria Registry, is waiting for a case conference to be set. 

In these times of drought, similar connections are being made by people across the region, including ranchers, biologists and retired forestry workers. 

Jamie Haynes, a 70-year-old farmer from Rock Creek who also ranches and runs a small-scale, selective logging company, believes “massive logging” to be one of the biggest issues impacting drought in the region. “The future of our forests is in jeopardy because we’re not managing them properly,” he says. “I know this is off the subject of agriculture, but it’s all connected. It all starts in the watershed.”

Haynes has lived in the region his whole life and now resides on the family land where, in 1907, his grandfather built the existing barn with hand-hewn timbers masterfully erected atop dry-rock masonry. Up until 15 years ago they kept all their cattle on the property but a lowering water table forced them to relocate the herd to lower pastures.

About a decade ago Haynes turned to no-till, regenerative agriculture to help conserve water. This method maintains moisture in the soil because it isn’t being exposed to sun and wind which induces evaporation. He’s also moved to growing more cover crop mixtures that include daikon radishes, triticale, peas and oats. The results have been tangible, especially on dry years like this when water retention in the soil is paramount. 

According to Ray Hanson, a retired forester from Grand Forks who worked for the Ministry of Forests for 32 years, this simple act of water retention, across all parts of a watershed, holds the key to mitigating both drought and flood. 

In an intact watershed, Hanson says, the forest floor is made up of a thick layer of debris called humus which collects over decades or centuries. This layer, along with the root systems of trees and plants, acts like a sponge, soaking up the melting snow before releasing it later, once the initial spring freshet has passed. This not only lessens the effects of spring runoff but also injects a vital source of water to streams and creeks once the heat of summer sets in. 

The other piece that intact forests provide is shade, something that plays a big role in how fast snow accumulates and melts. With healthy forests, drastic temperature swings, like the Kettle Basin experienced in June, are mitigated, again helping to slow runoff.

The opposite scenario, where a forest fire or intensive logging has decimated the humus layer, leads to increased flow volatility and rapid erosion. “It’s a cumulative effect,” he says. “If you’ve lost the shade and burnt up or disturbed the humus layer too much then the ability of the topography to manage the water is diminished and that’s basically a lot of what the problem is here in the Kettle River drainage.”

In a report published on the provincial government’s website, Rita Winkler, an adjunct professor in the Department of Forest Resource Management at UBC, states that harvesting with large machinery, including skidders and feller-bunchers, “can compact soil surfaces and cause overland flow,” which can then lead to an “increase in the flashiness of streamflow response and the magnitude of surface erosion.” 

The report goes on to note that the “significance of this soil compaction and resulting overland flow depends on the degree of compaction and how much of the watershed area is disturbed.”

When asked about the links between clear cutting and forest hydrology in the Boundary timber supply area, the Ministry of Forests said they were unable to comment due to pending litigation of the class action lawsuit.

Kristina Anderson, who works as the watershed planner for the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary, has spent the summer monitoring water levels and temperatures across Kootenay Boundary and compiling weekly drought reports which are made available to residents. What she has been seeing is alarming.

Many creeks and rivers, including the upper West Kettle and Granby River drainages, are breaking new lows and the mean annual discharge — a measurement used to determine the health of fish ecosystems — in most water courses continues to be dangerously low despite recent rain and cooler temperatures. 

Anderson says that people are responding well to municipalities and water suppliers requesting a curtailing of water use, something that isn’t always easy given the agricultural nature of the Kettle River watershed. 

“We’re also in a high to extreme fire season at the moment and I’m very conscious of that,” Anderson says. “I really want to make sure we message water conservation in line with strong fire smart practices.”

Despite this, on August 30 the provincial government issued water restrictions for the West Kettle River watershed limiting water usage for the irrigation of forage. The bulletin states that provincial staff are “monitoring the situation, as well as the protection orders that are in place, and will continue to work to balance water uses with environmental flow needs.”

This delicate balance between industrial use, human need and ecosystem health is becoming increasingly tenuous. For Michael Zimmer, a fisheries biologist who works for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the core of the issue lies in the relationship between human settlement and something as fluid and changing as a river and its riparian zones.“We like the river,” he says. “We like coming to places like this so we can enjoy the aesthetics, we like floating it with our kayaks and our tubes. But the minute it imposes on us, well we’ve gotta engineer something to control it.”

During the heatwave in June, when air temperatures in Grand Forks reached 48 C for three straight days, water temperatures in the Kettle River spiked to 25 C — a dangerous temperature for the trout that call the river home. This, coupled with low flows, prompted the province to close all streams across the Boundary region to fishing from July 19 to Sept. 15.

Zimmer says that despite being an avid angler, he has rarely fished in the Kettle River since moving to Grand Forks in 1999 because he knows how hard it is for fish to make it in the struggling waterway. “Knowing that the trout are in trouble — knowing that they’re struggling just to survive — makes putting them through more stress unappealing to me.”

Anderson says that one of the major concerns with the river is the “really, really high water temperature.” Shade from overhead vegetation can be an important factor in offsetting that relationship between air temperature and water temperature, she says. But much of the riparian area (the often-lush, transitional zones between water and land) surrounding the river have been degraded or destroyed.

In an emailed response to The Narwhal, the Ministry of Forests accredited the Kettle’s warm temperatures in part to high ambient air temperatures, especially overnight, which “give fish little reprieve.”

Bringing back the riparian

Near the banks of the Granby River, a half hour’s drive north of Grand Forks, tall black cottonwoods rise from a green understory, thick with dogwood, ferns, tall grasses and a myriad of other plant life. A kingfisher appears as a streak of blue, landing for a moment on the outstretched branch of a cedar tree, before returning back to the river’s edge. The air here is cool and the soft, moist earth seems worlds apart from the dusty farmland found only a stone’s throw away. 

For Jenny Coleshill, a biologist who coordinates projects for the Granby Wilderness Society, the unique ecosystems found in riparian areas make an important contribution when it comes to limiting the impacts of both droughts and floods.

“Riparian areas help shade the river and provide a lot of both habitat and ecosystem services,” Coleshill says, adding that they can also be a source for seeds and propagation following severe drought and fire events.

According to Coleshill — much like an intact forest higher up in the watershed — low-elevation riparian zones act as buffers between water and land, soaking up water during times of high flow and protecting against floods. Those same zones then release that stored water later in the year, offering much-needed, cooled groundwater to summer streams suffering from low flows and high temperatures. 

But even beyond their ability to help regulate flood and drought, for Coleshill, the foremost benefit of healthy riparian zones is habitat. 

“Seventy-five per cent of birds in western North America use riparian areas for nesting and over 90 per cent of vertebrates use them at some point in their lifecycle,” she says. “They’re used as travel corridors for animals and they protect our waterways by filtering out bad pollutants, dust and agricultural runoffs.”

Coleshill believes that a lack of regulations governing riparian areas in the Kettle River watershed, coupled with a lack of understanding regarding their ecological importance, has led to a regional history of these areas being damaged or altered. Farmers, who prize low-lying, damp soil clear out riparian zones; cattle trample understories in their search for water and shade; developers wipe them out to create desirable housing near waterways; and settlers of all stripes manipulate them in an effort to control water, whether in the name of agriculture, personal use or safety. 

In a riparian threat assessment report that Coleshill co-authored for the Granby Wilderness Society, she performed a historical comparison to showcase the extent of riparian loss in the region. In the city of Grand Forks, it was found that there had been a 50 per cent loss of vegetation within 100 metres of the river — a loss Anderson believes has a negative impact on waterways during times of flood and drought. 

And there’s indication that damaged riparian zones can and should be brought back to life. Research published in Ecohydrology in 2018 found that riparian areas disturbed due to cattle ranching could be successfully restored. Researchers Emily Fairfax and Eric Small from the University of Colorado Boulder, used remote sensing to monitor two creeks in Nevada and found reestablished riparian areas were repopulated by beavers, which, in turn, contributed to water retention. This eventually led to resilient, moist areas that provided oases of habitat in an otherwise arid landscape.

“Your intact riparian ecosystem helps with erosion as well as water temperature,” Anderson says. “If you have channels with overhead vegetation you’re able to moderate heat spells like the one we had earlier in June.”

These effects on water temperature and fish habitat are subtle and cumulative, Zimmer says, which makes them difficult to pin down. “It’s not an instantaneous thing but rather what they call a continuum. You can’t point to a certain spot and say ‘Oh, I know exactly what the impact is right here.’ It’s all these cumulative things that happen along the way.”

Yet in this continuum Zimmer also sees a solution, one that Coleshill and others have been working on for years. 

“All the problems are stretched out,” he says. “But if you do the reverse and you do little projects here and there, working your way upstream, then you can reestablish those riparian areas.”

Although replanting cottonwoods and native plant species might seem like a simple task Coleshill says it is both challenging and expensive. Naturally sandy soil makes erosion common and white-tail deer, which followed agriculture into the Boundary in the 1920s, feed on small cottonwood shoots, making it almost impossible to replant them without human protection.

Despite this Coleshill and her colleagues at the Granby Wilderness Society have been working with local farmers, ranchers, and residents to establish areas of regrowth. “We’ve probably got 20 landowners across the Boundary that are working on restoration with us on their properties,” she says, adding that she believes riparian projects are the biggest bang for your buck and, as a bonus, they aren’t controversial. “No one can get mad at us or tell us we’re bad for planting trees.”

Sitting in Grand Forks’ City Park, near an informative sign explaining the importance of riparian areas, Zimmer commends those taking these difficult steps towards restoration. “It’s important to do this riparian work because, the alternative is, that we write off this river completely.”

‘People don’t notice the little things’

Near the Sand Creek watershed to the northwest of Grand Forks, Dieter Bay walks through a cutblock. Stooping to the ground, he examines a brown, larch seedling planted this spring and shakes his head. This is the second time the block has been planted and with the heatwave, the drought and a lack of overstory to protect these fragile trees, they hardly stood a chance. Bay sighs, slowly rises and continues walking. 

Bay, who worked as a landscaper for 30 years, lives with his wife Elizabeth near the lower banks of Sand Creek where it enters the Granby River. They operate a modest, 1.5 acre permaculture market garden and supply a local food co-op with fruits and vegetables, including grapes, apples, raspberries and peaches.

With five more cutblocks slated for the Sand Creek watershed, Bay worries for his water source, a well that draws from the same water table that Sand Creek feeds. But more than that, he is deeply concerned about natural ecosystems as a whole and what global losses of habitat and biodiversity means for people and the planet. 

“What worries me is that people don’t notice the little things,” he says. “It’s like the whole world is a symphony and if one violinist stops playing nobody notices. But if 50 violinists stop, then all of a sudden it doesn’t sound the same anymore. If you look at it as a net of life, the holes get bigger and bigger with every species disappearing.”

Originally from Germany, Bay has experienced this species loss first hand and worries that Canada, known for its wilderness, wildlife and freshwater is slowly following suit.

“That kind of scenario worries me a lot because it’s almost undetectable,” he says. “The forest relies on a healthy water table and we rely on a healthy forest. It’s all connected. It’s that simple.”

To the Syilx Okanagan people, whose traditional territory includes the Kettle basin, this connection to water — or siwɬkʷ — is everything. Siwɬkʷ in nsyilxcən, the language spoken by the Syilx Okanagan, translates into “humans and animals lapping water equally.” To Tessa Terbasket, a member of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band who works for the Okanagan Nation Alliance in natural resources, this is a clear indication that water needs to be respected and kept healthy.

“I think one of the biggest challenges in our work is to try and get others to see that water is a living entity and not just a resource that we can control,” she says. “It’s for all life and we’re only a small piece of that.”

She also sees years like this, when water is scarce, as an opportunity to spark change and raise awareness around its use and conservation. “In times of drought you really see what water brings and that it’s really the essence of all life,’ she says. “There’s just so much to be learned and I think youth awareness and more water outreach in our education system is a good place to start enhancing [our] relationship with water.”

Back in Grand Forks, Zimmer glances out at the low, slow-moving water of the Kettle River. 

“All the things that are happening here,” he says, “whether it’s medicines, things you can eat, or water you can drink, is our responsibility to take care of so it’s always there for generations, not just right now.”

The Narwhal’s When in Drought series is funded by the Real Estate Foundation of BC, which administers the Healthy Watersheds Initiative, and the BC Freshwater Legacy Initiative, a project of the MakeWay Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.