For more than a year, LNG Canada has been troubleshooting problems with its flare stack in Kitimat, B.C. As The Narwhal reported, an “integrity issue” at the plant meant LNG Canada burned significantly more gas than expected, leading to increased noise and emissions for months on end. The problem could take up to three years to fix.

“It pisses me off — but it’s no surprise,” said James Smith, a community member whose name has been changed to protect his family from potential repercussions. “And it makes me say: ‘Okay, so what do we do about it now? How do we correct this?’ ”

Smith said he feels a sense of relief now the truth has come to light, because people have accused him of “being insane or being alarmist” whenever he complained about the noise.

“I can’t take a shit in my bathroom without my Apple Watch telling me I need hearing protection,” he said. “That’s a problem.”

It’s not just noise polluting the northwest B.C. community, however. 

LNG Canada, a consortium of companies led by multinational Shell, has been consistently flaring more than 15 times the amount of gas it would need to burn if its equipment was working as designed. Provincial data provided to The Narwhal shows the facility burned an average of 205,000 cubic metres per day between July 1 and Nov. 30, 2025. It was expected to only need to burn around 11,000 cubic metres per day.

LNG Canada has been flaring up to 15 times more gas than expected, documents reveal

“All I know is what I see every day: big clouds of black smoke floating over my house and flares keeping my backyard lit up all night long,” Kitimat resident Chris Godfrey told The Narwhal, adding he’s curious what LNG Canada will do now the data is public. “I don’t know what the people of Kitimat can do. They can sit and bitch about it and whine about it, but there’s nothing really we can do.”

District of Kitimat Mayor Phil Germuth said LNG Canada informed him about the issue, without specifying when he first became aware of the problem. He told The Narwhal he was unaware of many of the details, including the scale of the problem.

“They let us know a while back — I don’t know exactly when — the flare tips weren’t exactly operating as sold to them by whoever the manufacturer was,” he said in an interview following publication of The Narwhal’s reporting about the problems. “Yes, it’s a disappointment, but it’s something that couldn’t have been predicted, right? I mean, LNG Canada was as surprised as we were.”

District of Kitimat Mayor Phil Germuth said the flaring issue at LNG Canada is a “disappointment.”

When asked whether he felt the district should have shared more information about the flaring problem with the community, he did not directly answer.

“We don’t actually do communications for LNG Canada,” he said. “They do their own so it’s not really our thing to do.”

“Most people obviously realize that, hey, this is just part of the process of getting a plant up and running and you have to put up with a little bit of short-term inconvenience to get that 40 years of economic opportunities that it brings to the community and the province,” he added.

Cheryl Brown, a member of local environmental advocacy group Douglas Channel Watch, said she recalls representatives of LNG Canada being upfront about the problem during a technical meeting with the group. While the industry officials acknowledged the issue early on, she said they didn’t fully explain the extent of the problem nor talk about solutions. 

“How do they fix this? We meet with them in February, and that’s going to be my question,” she said. “Do you have to shut the whole place down? You can’t fix a flare with the other flares burning — that doesn’t make any sense at all. So how do you do this?”

Lucy McRae (left) and Cheryl Brown, with the Douglas Channel Watch, told The Narwhal they want to know how LNG Canada plans to fix the flaring equipment.

How to ‘gaslight people better’

Germuth said he believes the consortium adequately kept the public informed about flaring. 

“It’s unfortunate that maybe a little more information could have been given out,” he said. “Absolutely, that’s unfortunate — but here we are. They put their communications out to the community: ‘This is more flaring than we thought, here’s what it’s going to be, and on this day we’re expecting this height.’ … We think they’ve been fairly open and honest in that way, and doing as much as they can.”

Councillor Terry Marleau disagreed. 

Marleau directly questioned Teresa Waddington, a senior official with the consortium, during a council meeting last November, and said she didn’t give him proper answers. He said he thinks LNG Canada should have done more to ensure the public was informed.

“You’d probably do better with people and journalists and council and everybody else, if you talk about the facts,” he said. “What’s it going to cost them? Not a heck of a lot, if you actually just work on saying, ‘Here’s exactly what’s happening with those flare stacks and here’s what we’re trying to do.’ ”

He acknowledged Kitimat has a long industrial history and most residents, himself included, generally support industrial development, including LNG Canada.

“It’s a really big employer and it’s a really important part of our community,” he said. “But I also want to make sure we look after our environment and our community.” 

Built in the 1950s, the Alcan aluminum smelter is known locally as “Uncle Al.” The town’s connection to industry runs deep and councillor Terry Marleau said he believes LNG Canada should have been more open about the problems it was having.

“The downside is not as big as they think it is, by actually coming across really openly to our small community,” Marleau continued. “But we don’t control that. We can only try and work towards getting them to realize that.”

He said one resident he’s been talking with told him he’s unable to work because the flaring has impacted his sleep so severely.

“I find that horribly sad,” Marleau said. “It’s obvious that the noise is to do with the [flare] stack. It’s nothing else in the plant — they’ve said that. They’ve checked all the parts of the plant and the noise is to do with the stack.”

Smith’s experience has been the same. He’s frustrated by the paternalistic way the companies communicate.

“They say, ‘We’ve learned. We’re a better company.’ No, you’ve learned to try to gaslight people better, and you’ve learned to become sneakier, and how to control the narrative more,” he said. 

Smith pointed out recent reports of Shell and Mitsubishi, one of the other members of the consortium, looking to divest ownership of LNG Canada. The same report noted that Petronas, which also has significant stakes in natural gas wells near Fort St. John that supply the facility, already sold some of its shares.

“It’s like you realized you bought a Temu gas plant with AliExpress discount parts and you need to get out of it, because the liability risk is going through the roof,” Smith said.

“We will not comment on or validate speculation about our joint venture participants,” a spokesperson with LNG Canada told The Narwhal in an emailed statement. “For information regarding Shell or Mitsubishi’s respective interests, please contact those companies directly.”

Neither Shell nor Mitsubishi responded prior to publication.

Both Marleau and Germuth pointed out it’s in the consortium’s best interest to flare less gas — every cubic metre burned is less gas it can sell to buyers overseas. Germuth said that gives him confidence in the consortium to remedy the issue.

“It’s to their advantage to fix it as quick as possible,” he said. “We have no doubt they’re doing everything they can to rectify it, because it’s their bottom line. They’re burning gas that they don’t want to be burning. They’d rather be turning it into LNG. So, we’re confident they’re trying to find any way they can to alleviate this issue.”

Marleau echoed the thought and added he believes the consortium should also consider the costs of not being fully transparent with the residents most impacted by noise and emissions.

“I think you’d go a much further distance by actually owning up and talking about the problem,” he said. “Try and make life a little bit better in a community that you want to be part of for 30 or 40 years.”

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Under heavy rain, an electronic sign by the side of the road in a small northwestern B.C. town warns passersby, “Flare height will vary.” It flashes to the next message: “Between 15 meters [sic] and 90.”

Kitimat, B.C., a coastal community about 1,400 kilometres north of Vancouver, is home to around 8,000 people — and Canada’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing facility. For the past 14 months, LNG Canada has been periodically burning excess or waste gas, a process known as flaring. At its highest, the flame is about as tall as London’s Big Ben or New York’s Statue of Liberty — not just the statue’s torch but the whole lady herself.

At its highest, LNG Canada’s flare is about as tall as London’s Big Ben or New York’s Statue of Liberty.

Speaking in the neighbouring community of Terrace, B.C., on Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced another LNG export facility — Ksi Lisims LNG — will be referred to the federal government’s newly established Major Projects Office. Projects flagged to the office are developments the Canadian government is endorsing as part of its efforts to diversify trade away from the United States, and considering fast-tracking through certain environmental and other approvals. 

“We are home to the world’s fourth largest reserves of natural gas and we have the potential to supply 100 million tonnes annually of new LNG exports to Asia,” Carney said.

Ksi Lisims LNG will be built about 200 kilometres north of Kitimat and supplied by the 800-kilometre Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, yet to be built. At full capacity, it will export around 12 million tonnes of LNG per year.

Meanwhile, the flare in Kitimat has been impacting the lives of residents and raising concerns about health and climate impacts. On social media, some Kitimat residents are grieving the loss of the night sky, posting photos and videos of a dull orange glow looming over the town. Others worry about the impact of emissions on their health, citing research on toxins emitted during LNG operations. Many have compared the near-omnipresent flame to the “Eye of Mordor,” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Flaring is the process of burning excess or waste gas, introducing toxins into the local airshed and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Natural gas is mostly composed of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is invisible and odourless. Methane, which is responsible for around one-third of global warming since the industrial revolution, traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. In other words, methane emitted now — or leaked into the atmosphere from industrial infrastructure — will directly increase the likelihood of climate disasters like wildfires, floods and droughts over the next two decades.

Burning excess gas, as LNG Canada is, reduces the amount of methane that ends up in the atmosphere by instead turning it into carbon dioxide and other toxins — meaning it still comes at a cost for locals, and the planet. 

LNG Canada — a consortium of foreign-owned fossil fuel companies led by multinational oil and gas giant Shell — maintains flaring activity is a regular part of start-up operations and says its emissions fall within provincial standards.

“Flaring is a provincially regulated safety measure that ensures the controlled, efficient combustion of natural gas during specific operational phases,” LNG Canada said in a public notification.

Many northwest B.C. residents have compared the flare to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Eye of Mordor.”

On Nov. 9, the consortium told the public that “flaring associated with the start-up … will be extended beyond the originally anticipated timeframe” and warned residents this would mean “intermittent” noise and emissions. LNG Canada previously offered to pay to temporarily relocate some residents living close to the flare, according to a leaked document reviewed by The Narwhal and confirmed by the consortium.

The facility is currently in its first phase, operating four gas-powered turbines that supercool the gas to -162 C, reducing its volume for transport. An already approved and permitted second phase would double the plant’s production, adding another four turbines, corresponding flaring facilities — and, presumably, more warnings to residents.

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.

For the past few months, the buzz in the small coastal community of Kitimat, B.C., has been all about the flares. 

LNG Canada, the newly completed gas liquefaction and export plant, began firing up its smokestack last fall, lighting the skies with a flame that got as tall as 90 metres at one point. That’s roughly the equivalent of four 18-wheeler trucks, stacked end-to-end on top of each other. It could be seen from more than 50 kilometres away. 

“When they first started the flaring, myself, my boy and even my cats were affected by it,” Dustin Gaucher, a Haisla cultural researcher and educator, said on a phone call in early July. Gaucher lives more than a dozen kilometres up the hill from the industrial site, which was built on the Kitimat River estuary on Haisla Nation lands. “It sounded like a rocket ship going off all night and it smelled like my grandfather’s [boat’s] diesel engine, when that black burn-off initially comes out — but it smelled like that for about two days.”

The flame burns off natural gas, which is mostly composed of methane. According to LNG Canada, the largest flares are an expected part of getting the factory online. Now that production has started, the intensity of the noise and smell from the flare has abated — but the plant’s impacts are just beginning. 

“Right now, I can’t really smell it,” Gaucher said. “I just came to my front door again and I’m looking at it and there’s lots of black coming out of there. Those particulates are floating right over our river and we have the salmon running into it — that’s what’s concerning to me.”

LNG Canada’s flaring varies but residents say the flames got to 90 metres at one point this spring. “It sounded like a rocket ship going off all night.” Video: Supplied by Dustin Gaucher

On June 30, LNG Canada successfully filled the belly of a 300-metre long ship with liquefied natural gas (LNG). It was the first of an estimated 170 ships it will fill and send overseas every year — for now. This is the project’s first phase. A second, which would double production, was previously approved by the B.C. government and is pending a final investment decision.

Kitimat has been an industrial hub since it was settled in the 1950s to serve as a company town to Alcan, an aluminum smelter now owned and operated by international mining giant Rio Tinto, which was powered by the newly built Kemano generating station. About 700 kilometres north of Vancouver, the town has seen its share of industries come and go: a methanol plant and a pulp mill both brought an influx of jobs before shuttering their doors in 2005 and 2010, respectively, leaving the town in an economic slump. 

Life in a northern B.C. boomtown

LNG Canada — a joint venture including some of the largest and wealthiest fossil fuel companies in the world — represents a massive industrial investment in the community. Including the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which supplies the facility and other upstream operations, the value of the project is estimated at $40 billion. Some in the community see it as a much-needed resurgence.

“It’s been a long journey to get here, to have the plant up and running — we’re very happy that it is done,” District of Kitimat mayor Phil Germuth told The Narwhal. “We can now say that we are the LNG capital of Canada.”

Haisla leadership celebrate LNG Canada 

For Germuth, a lifelong Kitimat resident and third-term mayor, launching Canada’s nascent LNG export industry from Kitimat is clearly a point of pride.

“Back in 1956, National Geographic described the Alcan and Kemano project as the most expensive project ever attempted by private industry here in Canada,” he said. “Fast forward just over 70 years and we were able to attract LNG Canada, which is the largest private sector investment in Canadian history. It’s quite something for a small town of just over 9,000 people to have two projects like that in its lifetime.”

Phil Germuth is currently serving his third term as mayor of Kitimat.

The National Geographic article, in which the reporter complains about a $3.25 taxi fare and waxes poetic about the scenery — “milky-green water followed the long, winding, U-shaped bathtubs scoured out of the mountains by Ice Age glaciers” — outlined the engineering audacity of the Alcan project, which included reversing the flow of the Nechako River through a 16-kilometre tunnel bored into a mountain. 

The article doesn’t cover about the forcible removal and displacement of the Cheslatta, Saik’uz and Stellat’en First Nations, all of which continue to be impacted by the smelter’s operations. Nor did it discuss the generational impacts on the Haisla, only mentioning the nation in a brief aside: “A few years ago the only humans here were ‘Kit-a-maat’ Indians, the ‘People of the Falling Snow.’ ” Cʼimaucʼa (Kitamaat Village) is a reserve currently home to around 700 members of the Haisla Nation. The village sits directly opposite Alcan on the eastern shoreline of Douglas Channel.

Haisla Nation Chief Councillor Crystal Smith said the industry consortium behind LNG Canada was “unlike so many others” in that they “chose to build a relationship first before even considering building a project.” 

“They focused on understanding what mattered first and foremost to Haisla Nation, and to Indigenous communities in the region,” she said in a statement. 

The Haisla, in addition to signing agreements with LNG Canada, which include direct financial benefits as well as employment and contract opportunities, are also majority shareholders of another project in Kitimat called Cedar LNG, which is currently under construction.

When LNG Canada announced it had successfully sent its first cargo last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney lauded the milestone and celebrated the involvement of the Haisla in the new project.

“Canada is exporting its energy to reliable partners, diversifying trade and reducing global emissions ­— all in partnership with Indigenous Peoples,” he said in a statement published by the consortium. (Carney’s claim about reducing global emissions is a subject of debate.)

Germuth previously told The Narwhal one of the best things to come from LNG Canada was strengthening the relationship between the settler community in Kitimat and Haisla leadership.

“The political relationship between the District of Kitimat and the Haisla Nation Council, it wasn’t there, it was terrible,” he said at the time. “LNG Canada came in … and they would bring us into the same meeting. That’s all it really took, was the two councils just hanging out together, getting to know each other at a project that we both support and that we’re both going to be greatly benefiting from.”

Now, he’s hopeful the consortium will move ahead with the second phase.

Teresa Waddington, a vice-president with LNG Canada, told The Narwhal the five corporations — Shell, Petronas, Korea Gas, Mitsubishi and PetroChina — that make up the consortium are in discussions about the potential expansion. 

“A phase-two final investment decision will take into account factors such as overall competitiveness, affordability, pace, future [greenhouse gas] emissions and stakeholder needs,” she said in an emailed statement. “We see an opportunity to build on our early phase-one successes and the benefits it’s already providing First Nations, communities, British Columbians and Canadians.”

As LNG Canada’s first phase gets underway, discussions continue about expanding operations.

‘Built by industry’: Kitimat mayor says residents are willing to live with the flare

Gaucher, who emphasized he’s not against industrial projects, said he’s still worried about potential health impacts from the LNG plant’s operations — including impacts on wildlife. 

“What is this doing to the wolf pack that usually lives down around that area? What’s going on with the moose and the deer? We have lynx around here, we have cougars around here — how are they being affected by it?”

Dustin Gaucher, a Haisla cultural researcher and educator, said he worries about the health of the salmon, wolves, moose and other animals.

Emissions from flaring are permitted and monitored by the BC Energy Regulator. At the Kitimat site, they include carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, fine particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, according to LNG Canada.

Melissa Lem, a family doctor and president of Canadian Physicians for the Environment, said it’s important to remember LNG Canada does not operate in isolation — all of the gas it liquefies for export at the Kitimat facility is extracted from underground reserves, mostly by fracking, which also has consequences for community health. 

“Fracking and LNG production accelerate climate change and release harmful pollutants — including benzene, toluene, formaldehyde and particulate matter linked with asthma, heart disease, birth defects and childhood leukemia,” she said in a statement. “Communities near fracking operations in northeastern B.C. are already experiencing these impacts, with higher rates of adverse pregnancy outcomes and respiratory diseases. Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected, with studies showing elevated levels of fracking-related chemicals in household air, water, and the bodies of pregnant women compared to unexposed populations.”

Kitimat, in part because of its long history of exposure to potentially harmful emissions, has an abundance of data on air quality, with six active monitoring stations recording publicly available information daily. LNG Canada did not directly answer questions about potential impacts to wildlife, referring The Narwhal instead to its website.

Germuth admitted residents were concerned about the flaring when it was at its loudest and brightest but said most people he’s talked to are relieved the project is finally operating. 

“Being a town that was built by industry, people understand that every once in a while, you’re going to have to put up with something to get the bigger goal in the end,” he said.

Kitimat Rod and Gun Club calls on local government to protect environment amid industrial boom

Lucy McRae, a member of local environmental group Douglas Channel Watch, said LNG Canada has done a good job of engaging with the community over the years and addressing concerns when they arose.

“Yesterday, we were in an all-day meeting with LNG Canada as we do every three months,” she wrote in an email in late June. She said several local organizations are involved in the quarterly meetings, including conservationists, hunters and fishers, community health groups and more. 

Lucy McRae is a member of Douglas Channel Watch, a Kitimat-based environmental group.

“We talk about many topics to do with the project including environment and social issues,” she said, adding industry representatives at the meeting provide “extensive and all encompassing” updates and LNG Canada “brings in the people who can and do answer our questions and address our concerns.”

McRae said she does not support the expansion of fossil fuels, “but at the same time I understand how desperate many Canadians feel in creating jobs under any circumstances.”

“I don’t feel that I have experienced any ill effects from the project and truthfully speaking it has been good for the community,” she said.

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Note: This story discusses mental health and suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, 24/7 phone support is available with Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566, or text 45645 for help between 4 p.m. and midnight ET. Additional mental health services can be found here.

High clouds shed light rain as the Tsitsutl Mist, an orange, black and white tugboat, guides a flat-deck barge across Babine Lake. It’s early September and the cooler temperatures are a welcome respite from a hot, dry summer. A wildfire has been burning near the lake off and on for months and the smell of smoke suffuses the air. 

The barge is a conduit for logging trucks hauling timber out of cutblocks above the lake’s northeast shore to Burns Lake, B.C., a little logging town about 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver. Lately, it’s been ferrying wildland firefighters back and forth across the lake — and today, I’m joining them.

Casda Thomas, a BC Wildfire Service communications specialist, prepares to cross Babine Lake to access a nearby wildfire. The barge usually ferries logging trucks across the lake but lately it’s been used by firefighters.

Several kilometres from the barge landing, a narrow dirt road leads into stretches of black, smouldering forest. A few days ago, the fire aggressively swept through this area. Today, in the rain, it’s smoking. The road gets rougher and narrows until vehicles can’t go any farther. Ahead, firefighter crews are working on the ground to contain the fire. Below their orange hardhats, they’re wet and their red shirts are stained with soot. On their faces, they wear a combination of fatigue and resolve: the rain presents them with a brief opportunity.   

“We can kind of get ahead of it today,” Scott Allen says, his boots pressed into the muck under the weight of the coiled hoses he’s carrying. “This is kind of a blessing and a curse. We hate working in it — it gets a little slippery — but it helps us move faster.”

“It doesn’t put it out,” he clarifies. “Some people think it puts it out, but no. It’d have to rain for a week or two straight, we’ve been in a drought for so long.”

Sporting a neatly trimmed moustache and an infectious grin, Allen is the de facto spokesperson for the crew for a simple reason: he likes to talk. Everyone here knows it.

“You don’t want to talk to me; Scotty’s your guy,” one of his crewmates says as he lugs a chainsaw up a steep, smoking incline, his face streaked with sweat and black soot. Others say the same, mischievous grins flashing on their faces: “Find Scotty, he’ll talk to you plenty.”

Scott Allen says cooler temperatures and light rain are helping the firefighters get the Babine Lake blaze under control. “This is kind of a blessing and a curse,” he says. “We hate working in it — it gets a little slippery — but it helps us move faster.”

Allen has four wildfire seasons under his belt. In the off-season, he works in both industrial and structural firefighting. He’s from Edmonton but is based out of Burns Lake when he’s fighting wildfires. Like many B.C. wildland firefighters, he started the 2024 season working in B.C.’s northeast, where a fast-moving May wildfire forced communities to evacuate. At one point, he says, there was so much rain in the Fort Nelson area they thought the fire was out.  

“We had hard rain for two weeks, and we were like, ‘Okay, sweet, this is all dead.’ And then it came right back. It just blew right up again.”

He says it’s a similar story here. The fire has been behaving in ways that surprise him. 

The fact that there’s even a fire here at all is surprising. Most wildfire activity in the area over the past few decades has been on the south side of Burns Lake, towards Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, which lost about half its forests to wildfire in 2017 and 2018 and burned again last year. As multiyear drought conditions continue across the province, forests that historically wouldn’t burn, like this one along the lakefront, are increasingly lighting up.  

Allen describes the weather as indecisive, cycling between summer and fall. The deciduous trees, which hold more water than conifers, have been dropping their leaves early and catching fire. The bushy understory, which he says wouldn’t normally burn, was burning.

“It’s just weird right now,” he says, shrugging.

Most of the firefighters here were deployed to the northeast early in the season, which means that by the time I spoke to them in September, they were on month five.  That’s nearly half a year spent facing one of the most powerful forces in nature, living out of camps and barely seeing friends or family.

Smoke wafts after Allen as he trudges heavily down the muddy track. A chainsaw buzzes from somewhere in the forest. Above the ever-present humming sound of the generators and pumps is the hiss of water on embers as the firefighters hose the scorched earth.

Ensuring a wildfire is completely under control and cutting down any dangerous trees is called mop-up. It’s a less glamorous part of wildland firefighting but it makes up a majority of the work.

The way wildfire moves through a forest is simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying, a powerful visceral force we feel a primeval connection to, drawing us in even as it stirs deep fear within us. There have always been wildfires on the landscape and the sight and smell of smoke emanating from the forest is embedded deep in our collective psyche. But in recent decades, our relationship with wildfire has become unbalanced, fraught with fears about how and when the forests we love will burn and whether our homes will be consumed along with them. 

Those fears are not unfounded. 

In 2023, Canada burned like it had never burned before, shattering records as forests blazed across the country. As fires raged in B.C. and smoke blanketed the west, tens of thousands of people fled their communities and by the end of the year more than 28,000 square kilometres of forest had burned across the province. Hundreds of homes were lost or damaged and vast stretches of landscape left charred and barren. 

Last year, fire activity flared and sputtered, as unpredictable weather conditions subdued or fanned the flames. Yet the impact is still off the charts when held against B.C.’s historic records. Before setting a new benchmark in 2003, when 2,600 square kilometres burned, the province’s previous 10-year average was just 250 square kilometres burning each year. In 2024, more than 10,000 square kilometres burned, again displacing thousands. 

More than 10,000 square kilometres of B.C. forests burned in 2024. While that’s less than half the amount that burned in the 2023 season, it’s around four times a previous record in 2003. Experts say this upward trajectory will continue over time and we need to prepare for an increasingly fiery future.

Across the continent and around the world, it’s the same story. In July, the town of Jasper, Alta., was engulfed in flames as a wildfire in the national park burned through the mountain community, causing more than $880 million in insured damages. On the other side of the country, nearly 10,000 people fled Labrador City that same month as an aggressive wildfire bore down. In November, drought-fueled fires burned in Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts even as winter started to settle over the continental U.S. and fires in California continue to burn in January, forcing thousands to evacuate in the Los Angeles area. In South America, countries like Bolivia and Brazil are reeling from catastrophic wildfires that have raged for months. And in the southern hemisphere, where summer is underway, Australia is bracing for another potentially deadly season of bushfires as an extreme heatwave hits some parts of the country.

“It’s like someone turned the fire switch on and it’s just not stopping,” Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist and researcher, tells me.

Hoffman, who lives in Smithers, B.C., lives and breathes fire like a dragon. A fierce advocate for Indigenous fire stewardship, she works with First Nations to bring cultural fire back to the land as a means to restore ecosystems, mitigate risks and uphold Indigenous sovereignty. She’s a researcher with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and a National Geographic explorer who speaks passionately about rekindling our innate connections to fire and finding ways to alleviate our growing fears.

“The biggest thing that has shifted our evolution is our ability to make fire,” Hoffman says. “Collectively we all have fire within us.”

Wildfire ecologist Kira Hoffman is passionate about Indigenous fire stewardship and maintains fire can be a force of good, but she warns communities are not ready for the inevitable increase in wildfires in and around human habitation. “It’s like someone turned the fire switch on and it’s just not stopping.”

On a crisp November morning in Smithers, she shows me around the offices of the Bulkley Valley Research Centre while we wait for author John Vaillant to join us. Taking up one end of a long table is a fire-scarred “cookie” — a cross section of tree trunk a few inches thick — cut from a conifer harvested at a village site on the traditional territory of the Cheslatta Nation. Its rings tell the stories of when fires were intentionally lit on their lands, stimulating plant growth for food and medicine and managing the landscape for wildlife, which once included bison and caribou. 

“We take these cookies and then we use them to reconstruct, along with the oral histories, the ethnographies, about how often — and for what reason — cultural burning was happening,” she says, travelling through time with her fingertips as she traces the history of fires etched in the tree’s growth rings.

Vaillant arrives, sporting a plaid overcoat and a weary expression. He says the state of U.S. politics during the recent presidential election and wildfires burning near where he grew up in New England are weighing heavily on his mind. He’s the author of Fire Weather, an award-winning account of the devastating 2016 fire in Fort McMurray, Alta. A finalist for a 2024 Pulitzer Prize, the book is resonating widely with readers around the globe grappling with the new reality of devastating wildfires fueled and shaped by climate change.

“There’s mounting evidence that we need to make the effort to imagine things that seem impossible, and that includes really negative fire in this region,” he says, sinking into a chair. “We’re in a period of unprecedented acceleration where natural events and geological events and historical events and technological events are all accelerating at the same time. Homo sapiens has never been here before — it’s totally uncharted territory.” 

Wildfire ecologist Kira Hoffman explains to author John Vaillant how fire scars in a tree’s rings provide physical evidence Indigenous Peoples regularly used fire to manage plant growth and wildlife on the landscape before colonization. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal

He says the effects of climate change, which include devastating wildfires, are understandably frightening.   

“You can see why people are freaking out,” he says. “It’s not a rational time. Nature isn’t behaving rationally; it’s behaving reactively and we have ecosystems and infrastructure that are equally unsuited to what’s coming.”

There’s a brief silence as the weight of his words hang in the air like a little black cloud. Hoffman nods and says we need to be honest with ourselves about the increasing risks — and prepare ourselves for what’s coming.

Jessica Broder has firsthand experience with the new wildfire reality. She spent three years immersed in it, working for the BC Wildfire Service on the front lines of the province’s burning forests. She worked on both initial attack teams — smaller units that are first to arrive — and as a member of a larger unit crew. This year, she opted out for mental health reasons.

Broder is funny and warm and refreshingly candid. She says now — during the winter — is when we should be thinking and talking about the changes we want to see.

“When it’s August 21st and the whole province is lit up, it’s hard to have an even-keeled response when we’re just figuratively and literally putting out one fire to the next.”  

Broder hung up her hardhat at the tail end of the 2023 season. She says it was an incredibly difficult decision and while the tug to return is strong, her mental health has become a safety issue. Two of her three years on the fireline were noted as the worst wildfire seasons in B.C. history.

“What I found was the cumulative fatigue, not over just one season but over three years, and not having been able to properly process nor necessarily encouraged to process what I had felt or experienced on the line, it just caught up with me.” Her voice cracks. “And at the end of 2023, I was suicidal going to work. It was frankly really unsafe so I ended up leaving my contract early.” 

Jessica Broder fought wildfires in B.C. for three years, two of which were noted as the worst wildfire seasons in the province’s history. At the end of her third year, she says she was suicidal going to work. Photo: Kari Medig / The Narwhal

Broder says she’s not alone.

“I think oftentimes when you experience challenging moments on the line, operationally there’s not necessarily the time to sit with whatever is going on,” she says. “But it’s a really scary thing to watch; a lot of my really good friends and my own brother still work in the service and I have a lot of people who are hurting right now.”

“At the end of the season, you’re just exhausted,” she explains. “You haven’t really had a life for the past four to six months and lots of those people jump straight back into school and don’t really have time to process.”

Until very recently, most jobs in wildfire have largely been seasonal work and many wildland firefighters in B.C. and elsewhere are university and college students. As seasons stretch and the need to keep people around long-term becomes greater, the BC Wildfire Service and other organizations are starting to offer more career opportunities. Last spring, the B.C. government announced a new wildfire training program at Thompson Rivers University. While more career opportunities can provide firefighters better access to support, including for mental health issues, Broder says there is a crisis already underway.

Wildfire seasons are starting earlier and stretching into the fall. Wildland firefighting used to be largely seasonal work but organizations like BC Wildfire Service are now offering career opportunities and developing more training programs to support year-round positions.

She says counselling services often fall short because talking about the nature of a particular trauma experienced on the fireline requires so much explanation.

“I think a lot of time gets wasted trying to provide context,” she says. “And then people don’t receive the support that they need because they’re trying to give context to something that is really hard for a therapist to wrap their head around.”

Mental health impacts aren’t limited to the fireline. Like the rest of society, frontline firefighters are also subject to the stresses of social media, and misinformation can lead to them being targeted online. Coming off an exhausting shift to wade through a sea of spiteful comments inevitably weighs on the minds and hearts of firefighters. 

The BC Wildfire Service communications team is stepping up to the challenge, posting videos and other content in an attempt to quell the rising rhetoric with information and expertise, but it’s a slow process. Nearly everyone I talk to has a story about the negative impacts of social media.

All this leaves wildland firefighters in a precarious position.

“I know we can do better,” Broder says. “BC Wildfire has to do better or they’re going to see more fatalities and it’s not going to be from fatalities on the line — I think it’s going to be from people not being able to deal with their internal demons.” 

Former B.C. firefighter Jessica Broder says the provincial wildfire service needs to find more ways to support firefighter mental health. “BC Wildfire has to do better or they’re going to see more fatalities and it’s not going to be from fatalities on the line — I think it’s going to be from people not being able to deal with their internal demons.” Photo: Kari Medig / The Narwhal

While there is very little research linking wildland firefighting and suicide, a handful of U.S. studies show firefighters struggle with suicidal thoughts or other severe mental health issues more than the general population. In September, Adam Mendonca, a director with the U.S. Forest Service, wrote that the lack of data is “uncomfortable.” 

“The factors that contribute to suicide — social isolation, low pay, high stress, [post traumatic stress disorder] and substance use — are prevalent in wildland firefighting, leading to the inference that our community is at a higher risk,” Mendonca wrote on the U.S. Forest Service website. 

He noted accurate data on firefighter deaths by suicide is inherently difficult to capture, in part due to stigma around mental health and suicide. 

“Despite this, within the wildland fire community, many of us have been directly impacted by the loss of a co-worker or know someone who is struggling,” he said.

In April 2024, dozens of northwest district firefighters attended a crew leader summit near Houston, B.C. They gathered to hone their leadership skills and start preparing for the season, practicing chainsaw skills and discussing hypothetical scenarios. Just two weeks later, fires broke out near Telkwa and Smithers just as vast holdovers in the northeast quickly became fast-moving infernos.

As wildfire seasons become longer every year, firefighters are exposed to greater risks and have less time to process their experiences. More fires, known as holdovers, are burning through the winter and flaring up in early spring. Prolonged drought and rising temperatures extend the season into the fall. 

Hoffman says when she worked for BC Wildfire Service 20 years ago she “maybe had 50 fireline days my whole firefighting career.” Broder laughs when she hears the number. 

“That’s a slow season,” she says, letting out a long breath. “I got 100 days my last season, over 100.”

As wildfire seasons grow longer, firefighters have less time to process their experiences and are exposed to greater risks. Training can be cut short in the spring when fires flare up and many firefighters go straight from the fire line back to university, leaving no time to talk about traumas they may have experienced.

As 2025 gets underway, scientists say last year was the hottest year on record, eclipsing 2023’s record and exceeding 1.5 C warming above pre-industrial levels for the first time. It’s a dire prognosis but not unexpected given the lack of urgency by wealthy and oil-producing nations, including Canada, to reign in the fossil fuel industry’s planet-warming emissions. In the world of wildfires, this means our future includes an increase in what’s known as interface fires, where burning forests and communities collide. 

“Victoria is always the city I’m watching,” Hoffman says. “If there’s going to be an interface fire, it’s going to be in Victoria: highly volatile, invasive species, crazy winds, very big drought.”

She knows what she’s talking about. Hoffman lived through an interface fire when she was based in California, fleeing flames with her partner in the middle of the night. When they moved back to B.C., she says she had a false sense of security based on her understanding of what it was like in the province in the past. Now, she says that’s all changed. 

“I arrived and, oh my gosh, it’s really fiery here now,” she says. “I see it in a very different way.”

Humanity has to accept the inevitability of more wildfire-related impacts to communities, human health and ecosystems, she says — we can’t undo more than a century of fire suppression overnight and climate change will continue to fuel bigger, hotter and more intense wildfires.

“I think we need to reconcile what people consider to be normal when we’re now in this accelerated extreme,” she says grimly. 

According to Health Canada, the country sees up to 240 deaths each year due to short-term exposure to wildfire smoke, and up to 2,500 deaths each year due to long-term exposure. 

“We have this shifting baseline that’s happening where we’re like, ‘Oh, it wasn’t as bad.’ But if you were to take any of the last seven fire seasons and compare them to any other time in record, you would be horrified.”

She says we need to be having broader conversations about firefighters’ physical and mental health and ways society can support them. 

“It’s becoming a very unsafe environment,” she says. “We’re not protecting our first responders.”

Wildland firefighters also risk their lives.

Six B.C. firefighters died in 2023 while on duty or travelling home: Devyn Gale, Zak Muise, Kenneth Patrick, Jaxon Billyboy, Blain Sonnenberg and Damian Dyson. Broder says the wildfire service has to navigate the complex ways in which its employees process grief and other emotions in the wake of deaths on the fireline. In her last year, she was based out of Revelstoke — the same base as Gale — when Gale was killed by a falling tree.

“I wasn’t on scene when Devyn died but that was definitely an event that hit close to home,” she says, her voice soft and filled with emotion. “It’s tough when you’re on a unit crew of 22 to 23 individuals and everyone has a process of dealing with grief differently. I don’t think BC Wildfire currently has a good system to allow individuals their individuality to work through things.”

Firefighter Devyn Gale’s boots are displayed at a memorial in Revelstoke, B.C., following her death in July 2023 while fighting a nearby fire. Photo: Jesse Winter / The Narwhal

The big helicopters responding to another fire in B.C.’s northwest are like buses flying above the forest. You feel their weight as they thunder overhead, skimming the trees, heavy buckets filled with water hanging improbably from their bellies. It’s August, and I’m standing in a clearing on the edge of a steep slope a few kilometres below a wildfire burning in a valley on Wet’suwet’en territory, about 100 kilometres as the crow flies from the fire around Babine Lake.

The closest community is Witset, the First Nation’s largest reserve. About a half-hour drive from Smithers, Witset nestles near a stunning canyon where the Wedzin Kwa (Bulkley River) churns through a narrow gap between rocky cliffs. Thick forest coats the hills and mountains around the village, a dense green fading to scoured rocky peaks. 

For the past week, locals have been taking to Facebook to post pictures and videos of the smoke and flames on the hillside above the community. It looks intense — especially the images captured at night — and close. The Witset band council has also been active on social media, providing community members with regular updates and reassurances they will be safe. Members of B.C.’s fire service have been meeting with the nation’s elected officials at the band office twice daily to share updates about fire behaviour and the work being done to protect the village.  

Helicopters routinely drop buckets of water on the edges of wildfires, slowing their spread and creating safer spaces for the firefighters on the ground to work. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal

Christian Bichlmaier, the BC Wildfire Service incident commander assigned to the wildfire, lives on his family farm in a neighbouring community, Kitseguecla. Bichlmaier is affable and exudes calm and quiet energy. When he responds on the radio to his colleagues, he’s quick to praise their work and gives clear, concise directions. It’s not his first time working in the area; he was on the ground at a different fire near Witset last year as well. 

“Going through the same process last year has made this really easy,” he says, explaining how the wildfire service established channels of communication to share information quickly. “Knowing how tense it can get, especially when it’s close to a community, that’s something I recognized last year.” 

When a wildfire burns within sight of a town or village, fear is a natural response. That fear is exacerbated when it’s unclear what’s happening on the ground to fight the fire. Wildfire is dynamic, subject to a complex set of influences: how winds shift during the day and at night, what the aspect of a slope means in the context of decades of forest growth and decay and when and where fires were suppressed or allowed to burn in the past. Most people don’t know how firefighters interact with a wildfire, including the steps they take to ensure public safety. Fewer still understand the way fire behaves. It’s made further mysterious because those dynamics play out in the forest — from afar, a wildfire often just looks like a wall of flame coming for the community. 

“It’s not always super obvious from in town,” Bichlmaier says, adding he’s grateful for the band’s commitment to disseminating information to the community.

We climb into a white pickup and he drives me around the fire guard: a network of dirt roads and paths built on the slopes below the fire that provide access for firefighters and create a gap in the forest intended to prevent the flames from moving closer to the village. 

B.C. firefighter Christian Bichlmaier says most of the firefighters working on the Witset fire are from the local area. He himself lives “just down the road” on a family farm. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal

As the truck crawls along a rutted path hemmed in on both sides by steep, forested slopes, the smoke casts an eerie light. Bichlmaier explains how the steepness of the area makes it unsafe to send people right to the fireline: on slopes like this, burning trees fall and roll downhill and firefighters can’t safely avoid them. It’s a terrifying thought. Instead, helicopters are dousing the flames, hopefully preventing the burn from advancing towards the community and buying them time to prepare for the worst. 

He explains how the fire service has worked with community members to identify cultural features like food and medicine harvesting areas, as well as with a local hydrologist to map the location of the fire guard in a way that minimizes impact to the watershed. This will all make addressing disturbances easier once the fire is out. One reason things are going so well here, he says, is that many of the firefighters assigned to the burn are, like Bichlmaier, from the surrounding area.

“At the end of the day, these are all a lot of local people and they care about the job that they do,” Bichlmaier says. “They’re doing hard work protecting people and values and I do know they take a lot of pride in that.”

Later, as we pass half a dozen trucks parked in the dirt beside the rough road, I see my friends’ teenage daughter, who recently joined the wildfire service, and wave hello.

Wildfires are unpredictable — you never know where the next hotspots are going to be and allocating resources is a continual process of triage. It’s not always possible for the BC Wildfire Service to deploy local firefighters to a local fire. 

Responding to the blazes that burn in B.C. every year is an immense logistical challenge. Canada’s westernmost province is more than twice the size of California and bigger than the United Kingdom and France combined. Much of the province is remote and rugged. Vast landscapes of forested mountains and valleys are peppered with picturesque towns and villages and sprawling agricultural lands. 

The BC Wildfire Service employs more than 1,000 firefighters annually and manages a dizzying array of logistics, from the deployment of people and resources like helicopters and heavy machinery to setting up camps that provide food and other basic needs, many in remote locations. When fire activity is concentrated in one region, firefighters based in others are often sent to support the response.

B.C., more than twice the size of California, is home to rugged and remote landscapes. Responding to wildfires in the province is an immense logistical challenge; every fire has its own unique set of characteristics and challenges.

Hoffman says local input is vital, whether it’s on the fireline or through communication with people who know the area. 

“We need place-based knowledge and people who live here and know this place to fight fires and do controlled burning,” she says. “If you go on a fire somewhere, who are you going to ask about the weather? You’re going to ask the ranchers, you’re going to ask the First Nations communities. You want to know which way the wind’s going to blow? They’re going to know.”

She says facilitating effective collaboration between local communities and the BC Wildfire Service is a huge challenge, especially when trying to navigate issues around public safety. She says many people in the northwest choose to “fly free” — not insuring their homes and properties for various reasons, including the expense. Those residents are often unwilling to evacuate.

“I have conversations with ranchers, guide outfitters, foresters, fishers and one thing that’s very clear in this valley is that people want to stay and defend,” she says. “They want to stay and defend their properties. I’m a big believer that people should be able to do that if you’re of sound mind and you’re physically fit. You’re not a child. I really do think that you can make that choice for yourself.”

She admits it’s a controversial opinion. 

Clashes between residents who have refused to evacuate and authorities, including police and members of the wildfire service, have happened in B.C. and in other jurisdictions.

Trust takes time to build — but wildfires are not patient. The burning forests are indifferent to human politics, and Hoffman says it’s up to us to find ways to work together in the face of a rapidly changing environment. She’s been making space for those kinds of discussions and says she’s having some success.

“One thing we all have in common is fire risk — it’s a great way to start a conversation.”

Fire ecologist Kira Hoffman says everyone in B.C. shares the risks of wildfire and stresses this should bring us together to talk about solutions.

The hardest time to have those conversations is when a wildfire is on the doorstep. Broder says interacting with the public was one of the biggest challenges she experienced on the job. Wildland firefighters are often thrust into contact with people who are facing the prospect of imminently losing their homes but, she says, aren’t trained in explaining what help they can realistically offer in high-stress situations. 

“We can’t put water on a burning structure,” she explains. “We can put water around it and we can prevent the forest and the shrubs around it from burning down, but we can’t actually put out a fire — we don’t have that training, we don’t have that equipment.”

Wildland firefighters don’t make the final call on whether a person has to leave an area, and Broder says the tensions that can arise from that dynamic haunt her.

“I can’t drag someone out by their toes — it doesn’t work that way. Those are some of the toughest moments that I hold onto, seeing people in moments of very raw vulnerability and also maybe not able to think particularly rationally, because there’s a lot of fear.”

“I can’t drag someone out by their toes,” former B.C. firefighter Jessica Broder says, explaining how her interactions with people as wildfire closed in on their homes weigh heavily on her mind and heart. Photo: Kari Medig / The Narwhal

Broder says many of those moments were in Indigenous communities, which are disproportionately affected by wildfires. According to a recent Health Canada report, First Nations communities make up 42 per cent of wildfire evacuations while representing only five per cent of the population. The report notes how colonialism “forced many Indigenous Peoples to live in isolation or in communities that are isolated from the rest of society” which “makes it difficult to access basic goods, services and other resources that are necessary for mitigating and building resilience against the impacts of wildfires.”

Wildland firefighters are sometimes tasked with placing either a red or green rock at the end of a driveway, shorthand for which homes have a better chance at being saved and are therefore worth the limited resources available. It’s not a surprise residents might get upset, but the wildfire service hasn’t given firefighters adequate “skills to handle those situations,” Broder notes. 

“I have been astounded again and again by how my coworkers have risen to the occasion and responded in those moments but I know that those moments weigh heavily,” she says.

Wildland firefighters often have to tell people they aren’t able to save their homes, but former B.C. firefighter Jessica Broder says frontline workers aren’t taught how to speak to community members in those high-stress moments. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal

Broder says she’s grateful to the leadership of her unit crew who stood by her side when she made the difficult decision to leave early and not return for the 2024 season.

“I feel really lucky, actually,” she says. “It just reinforces the respect that I hold for those people.  It got to a point where I wasn’t in a headspace to make good decisions for myself and I needed someone else to say to me, ‘Go home, you gotta take some time, dude.’ I needed to be benched.”

Little flames flicker out of the mossy undergrowth near Babine Lake as I trudge up a steep slope along the edge of the fire. It’s part of the same fire I’ve been visiting, but further away from the lake, in conifer-dominated forest. It’s wet here — and yet the flames persist. A damp heat rises up from the forest floor. The contrast between the verdant green moss, the orange flames and the smoky black strip where the fire swept up the slope stirs something inside me. There’s beauty here, even in the destructive power that laid the landscape bare.

After flames move through a forest, firefighters assess the trees that remain and cut down those that are in danger of falling and injuring someone on the ground.

Amid the trees, Shea Phelan shoulders his chainsaw as smoke curls around his boots. The young firefighter glances around at the forest thoughtfully.  

“This stand is mostly spruce,” he says. “They don’t have a tap root, so basically they spread out and they’re just floating there. Once the fire comes in here, you can kind of just push them over, really, so they’re the most dangerous tree that we work around.”

Phelan is assessing danger trees and systematically falling them. It’s dangerous, exhausting work. 

When I hear his chainsaw fire up again after we speak, the scale of it all hits me. In my mind’s eye, I see Phelan — and each person on the frontlines of our new wildfire reality — as tiny dots on a map, living, breathing human beings each at the centre of a growing force that’s shaping our shared existence. It’s a dizzying thought and at first I’m unsteadied by it, like I’m one of those trees thinly rooted in the ground — precarious. But clambering downhill, bracing myself against trees that escaped the ravages of the fire with the help of these firefighters, I’m reminded of and reassured by our collective resilience. Behind me, the buzz of the chainsaws and the hiss of the water slowly fades.

Updated on Jan. 11, 2025, 4:25 p.m: This article has been updated to remove a part of a quote by wildfire ecologist Kira Hoffman about smoke inhalation and suicide. Additionally, the story previously mentioned she lost a home in Santa Barbara, Calif., to interface fire, which is incorrect.

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The lines on Eugen Wittwer’s face are like the rings of a tree — they tell the story of a life lived subject to the whims of weather. Under his salt-and-pepper beard, the Swiss-born farmer keeps a warm smile at the ready. Putting a big glass jug into an old pickup truck outside the farmhouse on his family’s sprawling acreage near the village of Telkwa, B.C., he says he needs to milk his dairy cows.

“I like my milk pasture-rized,” he quips. “They’re out in the pasture all day every day.” 

When severe drought took hold across much of Western Canada last year, many farmers saw their once-green pastures turn to barren brown deserts in a matter of weeks. As extreme heat set in, those brown fields could no longer be used for grazing livestock. Crops scheduled for late-summer harvest matured months early, causing chaos for northwest B.C. food producers. But Wittwer wasn’t as impacted as most — his cattle were happily grazing on greens for far longer than what seemed possible. 

Eugen Wittwer is no stranger to the challenges of farming and loves to share solutions that have worked for him and his family.

Since the early 2000s, he and his family have experimented with regenerative agricultural practices, using their animals to improve soil health and biodiversity. Those ways of working the land — no tilling and without chemical fertilizers — helped his soil retain what little moisture was around. While the combination of mechanical tillage with chemical fertilizers and pesticides has been around for centuries, disturbing the ground strips soil of its microbial life by exposing organic matter to the sun. That in turn leads to greater risk of erosion and runoff, both of which are exacerbated by extreme changes in the climate. 

Two decades of building up biodiversity in Wittwer’s dirt meant plant life bounced back quickly when he moved his animals to a new field.

“When we have the right soil, or the right conditions in our soil, if we get rain it actually will infiltrate,” he says. “The rain needs to go in. It doesn’t really matter how much rain we get — it’s how much can infiltrate?”

With more organic material and a diversity of microbial life in his soil, Wittwer’s fields recover after grazing more easily in times of drought.

With groundwater and stream flow levels dangerously low in watersheds across B.C. and beyond, farmers and ranchers are bracing for another potentially disastrous season. According to provincial data, snowpack is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. That means aquifers, streams, rivers and other freshwater systems are unlikely to recharge as things heat up this spring.

The B.C. government is preparing for the worst.

“The experts at the River Forecast Centre tell us these low levels and the impacts of year-over-year drought are creating significantly higher drought risk for this spring and summer,” Nathan Cullen, minister of water, land and resource stewardship, said in a recent statement. 

“We know this is concerning news. Communities around B.C. experienced serious drought conditions last summer. It fuelled the worst wildfire season ever, harmed fish and wildlife, and affected farmers, ranchers, First Nations and industry.”

Pam Alexis, minister of agriculture and food, says the province is working closely with farmers to ensure they’re supported as climate impacts intensify.

“We’re helping farmers and ranchers with $100 million going towards new or improved water-storage systems and water-supply systems used for irrigation and livestock watering,” she says, explaining the province expects the investment will fund around 600 projects that focus on systems like dams, dugouts and irrigation. 

With water levels dangerously low across the province, another year of drought is likely. B.C. is funding a number of initiatives to help prepare and support farmers.

While government initiatives are coming fast and furious, not everyone can access the funds and money can’t make more water. Wittwer has a 20-year head start on cultivating the conditions needed to retain rain in years of extreme drought. He’s been sharing his knowledge but says it’s not easy to convince farmers to make the switch, in part because doing so often means giving up built-in safety nets, like crop insurance, which comes with prescriptive requirements that often necessitate the use of chemical fertilizers.

As food producers reckon with an increasingly unstable climate, change of one kind or another is inevitable. And finding ways to make sure farmers and ranchers have enough water to grow crops and keep livestock alive is an existential challenge that reaches far beyond fields of cattle, pens of pigs, market greenhouses and rows of corn. After all, everyone eats.

Regenerative agriculture helps reduce impacts on the landscape — and increase yield

Last summer, Yoenne Ewald and many others across northwest B.C. couldn’t find enough hay to feed cattle and other livestock. As Ewald searched for a reliable source, she started thinking about selling off animals at a loss. Like others, she downsized her herd and cobbled together hay from several sources to keep her remaining animals fed through the winter.

‘Sell them for nothing or watch them starve’: farmers face difficult decisions amid B.C. drought

B.C.’s Ministry of Agriculture says it is working to put programs into place to support farmers this year, if the hay shortage persists. 

“For example, we will be partnering with BC Cattlemen’s again this summer on an access to feed program to help those in need by sourcing available hay and matching them with sellers, whether this be in Canada or internationally,” a spokesperson with the ministry noted in an email, referring to the organization that represents a majority of beef cattle producers in B.C.

Ewald says she’s working on incorporating regenerative methods so she can pasture her animals in rotating fields, decreasing dependence on hay and increasing resilience in extreme weather. But it takes time to cultivate the soil conditions Wittwer has established in Telkwa. 

Last year, before the drought set in, she attended a workshop on the Wittwer ranch and has started implementing some of the techniques on her property near Hazelton, B.C. She says she wishes she had another decade without drought to encourage biodiversity and restore the land she’s farming on. 

“I just feel like 10 years from now, I would have been in a better position for this,” she says.

When drought hit northwest B.C. last year, Yoenne Ewald found herself without enough hay to feed her cattle. She’s working to restore her land so she can pasture her animals but says she needs years to develop the kinds of conditions Wittwer has cultivated in Telkwa. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal

The province encourages food producers to get involved in initiatives like the beneficial management practices program and the environmental farm plan, which include promoting regenerative techniques.

“These programs provide both education and cost-share farming to encourage the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices such as reduced or minimum tillage, cover cropping and increased biodiversity. They can also help our farmers and food producers adapt to climate change which is the biggest challenge we face.”

For Wittwer, sharing what he’s learned has become a source of joy. He started calling their operations a “community building ranch” and regularly brings in interested people to teach them his techniques.

“Farm something that fits your environment, something that fits into your community, fits your lifestyle and actually fits your beliefs,” he says. “If you have that totally wrong, it probably doesn’t matter how much of the other ones you do, it’s probably not going to work.”

Wittwer says minimizing disturbance, be it mechanical or chemical, gives microbial life in the soil more opportunity to flourish. The richer the diversity of life in the soil, the better chance it has to develop conditions that encourage growth and retain water. 

“It’s a big win-win situation,” he explains. “You can eliminate synthetic fertilizers and there’ll be no totally no till.”

Wittwer says food producers need to remember three things when working towards a regenerative farming model: maintaining a context that makes sense, minimizing disturbance of soil and creating diversity of plant and animal life.

Lastly, he says farmers need to grow a diversity of plant life and integrate animals. He points to a field pockmarked by cow patties and says grass seeds scattered on the ground there were trampled in by the animals and fertilized with their poop. He says what grows back is a wide range of plant species, which in turn promotes microbial life in the soil. As an added bonus, it’s a process that doesn’t rely on heavy machinery running on fossil fuels.

“I like to operate on new sunlight, not on ancient sunlight — that’s what oil is.” 

Local knowledge is key to finding solutions to B.C. drought

Gazing out over his fields as cows munch on the green grass and stroll over inquisitively, he stresses the importance of context. What works for him in Telkwa isn’t going to work for a farmer in Kamloops, for example. And when it comes to solutions to problems like long-term drought, locals usually have the answers.

Mark Fisher, another farmer based in Telkwa and former elected representative of the Bulkley-Nechako regional district, says locals need to come together to support local and regional food security and are already doing so in response to wildfires, flooding and other emergencies.

“But we could add to that,” he says. “What are the food networks in our little group? These structures are in place and we could just tweak them so that they hit all the basics.”

He adds the principles underpinning sustainable food production aren’t limited to rural areas like the Bulkley Valley. 

“It can happen everywhere. It could be urban, like, it can be a community garden in the biggest city in Canada.”

Chef Su Jin Lee shows her plot at the Scadding Court Community Centre garden in Toronto, where she grows a variety of foods in a small urban space. Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal

Ariella Falkowski, manager of an organic farm based in Pemberton, B.C., says the public needs to embrace a simple truth: climate change and the dinner table are directly linked. 

When she first started producing food over 10 years ago, farming was her way of facing growing climate anxiety. By making positive contributions to food security and ecological health through thoughtful, sustainable farming practices, she felt more connected to the land and empowered to protect it. But as climate disasters hit closer to home and started affecting her ability to successfully grow food, she found herself conflicted.

“I started this as a way to sort of ground myself in climate anxiety and climate worries,” she says. “Now it’s a huge source of that. Farming is getting more challenging and it’s really, really taking a toll on people’s mental and emotional health. I don’t actually want to stop doing it — it still feels good, too. But it feels more complicated than it used to.”

The changing climate is inextricably linked to things like rising food costs, which means the public can help food producers in ways that aren’t as obvious as shopping at local farmers markets or signing up for a food box program.

“Ride your bike. Lobby your politicians. Those things are going to help farmers — and everyone that eats,” she says. “Tackling this climate crisis is going to support food producers.”

Local knowledge might be the best way to find solutions to immediate food security challenges, including using farming techniques that work for regional contexts, but tackling the climate crisis is also going to benefit food producers.

Cullen, the province’s minister in charge of water and lands, said the province is drawing on community knowledge to find solutions.

“We’re hosting workshops in communities around the province to help farmers prepare for drought and to connect them with financial supports,” he said in a statement. “And we’re convening regional tables in key drought-impacted areas so communities and water suppliers can use their local knowledge to develop local solutions.”

Alexis says the workshops, which included on-farm demonstrations, were aimed at helping locals navigate water restrictions, increase efficiency and access funding.

“The goal is to ensure producers are aware of drought conditions and potential implications while helping them make more informed and timely water use decisions on their farms so they can keep producing food with the most efficient use of water,” she says.

To Wittwer, the answers can be found in the ground itself.

“If I treat the land right, it will feed me better. Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people. Simple.”

The Narwhal is continuing to look into the implications of drought and wildfires on farming and food production. If you’re experiencing impacts, please reach out to reporter Matt Simmons: matt@thenarwhal.ca.

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.

It’s early February and the fields surrounding Northern Lights Wildlife Society shelter in Smithers, B.C., are bare and brown. Extreme drought conditions that dried up watersheds across Western Canada last year show no sign of easing, with little snow to replenish the parched ground. 

Angelika Langen says the property was covered in ice a few days earlier. Now, it feels like spring and the long driveway is a mess of mud. But the unpredictable weather is not what’s on her mind. 

“Too many bears,” Langen says simply, when I ask how her day is going. 

Her wry answer hints at the connections between the changing climate and how humans and wildlife collide within it. With her family, Langen runs a small dedicated organization known for rescuing and rehabilitating orphaned bear cubs. The drought, combined with a record-breaking wildfire season last year, saw an unprecedented number of little bears, on the brink of starvation, stumbling into communities across the northwest. Langen and her team are currently caring for more than 120 orphaned black bears — the most they’ve had in their 33 years of operation.

“Every time a call comes in, you want to respond,” she says, sighing. “There’s a life at the other end and if you don’t do anything, there’s death. And it’s often very slow and painful dying.”

One of the latest cubs to arrive is perched on a platform inside a small enclosure. Less than a year old, she’s clearly scared and she follows us with her small, dark eyes as we approach. She snaps her jaws a few times, making a clacking sound to tell us she’s not happy about people getting too close. As she shrinks back into the corner, she favours one of her front paws.

Angelika Langen has been rescuing and rehabilitating orphaned bear cubs for more than three decades. Last year’s deadly combination of drought and wildfire brought more than 120 to the Smithers centre, the most she’s ever had.

Meet Wonder, a black bear cub named for a loaf of bread

About a week ago, the hungry and dehydrated cub showed up on a farm in Prince George, B.C., about 400 kilometres southeast of Smithers. Finding a hole into a store of livestock feed, she climbed in and ate her fill. After the landowners chased her out and plugged the hole, they called Langen. She told them to chuck a few apples on the ground to keep the cub around until she could get there with a live trap. When she arrived, she saw they’d put out half a dozen loaves of Wonder Bread for the little bear. 

“By the time we got there she was so full,” Langen laughs, prepping a tranquilizer to sedate the cub so she can assess its health. She says they had to wait for a few days until the cub got hungry again before they could entice her into a trap. 

Because of the bread, they named her Wonder.

Langen and Kim Gruijs, the organization’s head caretaker, successfully sedate the scared little bear and bring her into an examination room, where the two women run through an intake checklist. Holding the cub’s front paw, Langen notes an obvious injury and says they’ll need to follow up with an X-ray at the local animal hospital.

Langen (front) and Gruijs enter the enclosure as they prepare to sedate the cub so they can assess her health.

If it’s broken, they might be able to reset the bone, but she says some injuries mean a cub has to be euthanized. While a metal pin or plate might be used to help a pet heal, they can’t do that for a wild bear, which has to hibernate and withstand extreme cold. It’s a hard truth but Gruijs and Langen have been working with the animals long enough to understand that sometimes letting go is a kindness.

“We take comfort in knowing that they’re not suffering out there, even if they don’t make it,” Gruijs says.

“We don’t lose many,” Langen says, noting the survival rate of bears that come to the shelter is more than 80 per cent.

And there’s still hope for this new arrival. 

Gruijs says the cub is relatively healthy apart from the injury. At first glance, the little bear looks fine. Her fur is fluffy and she smells fresh, kind of like a dog that’s been running through the forest or a cat that’s just come in from a stroll through tall grass. 

Gruijs invites me to feel for the bear’s spine and then her hip bones. Langen says the latter should be hard to find in a healthy bear. Under my fingers, the bones are prominent. The little cub, her body warm and rising gently with her breaths, seems fragile. Her skin is paper thin, a sign of extreme dehydration. And she’s small — way smaller than she should be. But if the bones in her front leg have already rejoined after the injury, it’s not a death sentence. 

“Either way, it doesn’t mean that she can’t be released because, if it fuses, at some point it’s not going to hurt anymore and she can still use the leg,” Langen explains.

Angelika Langen and Kim Gruijs examine Wonder’s injured front leg. They’re hopeful but pragmatic and say some injured cubs that come into the shelter don’t survive.

“There’s a life at the other end and if you don’t do anything, there’s death.” Angelika Langen

Release is, of course, the end goal. 

Orphaned cubs who come to Northern Lights are only there for a few months and have minimal contact with humans to make sure they don’t get used to being around people. Langen jokingly refers to the “room service” they offer the bears, which includes a steady supply of fruits and vegetables donated by local grocery stores. Once the bears are old enough — and fat enough — the team takes them back to the region they were found, finding a suitable place away from humans to release them. 

“That’s the best part — release,” Gruijs says. “That’s your paycheque. That’s what you’re doing it for.”

As bears go looking for food, ‘we’re the ones that have to take responsibility’

Most times, no one knows how a cub was orphaned — it just shows up somewhere, alone, trying to find some food. But the connections aren’t hard to find.

An uptick in calls coming into Northern Lights starting in September closely aligned with last year’s wildfire season, which saw hundreds of fires burning through the summer and into the fall. The number of cubs showing up in communities also aligns with the natural cycle of the species and the impacts of drought. Fall is when bears are on a mission to eat as much as possible before winter sets in. In the north, months of sustained heat with little-to-no precipitation scorched berry bushes and other plants, leaving scant resources for the omnivorous animals.

Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist and professor at the University of Victoria, says it’s not surprising to see bears coming into communities in greater numbers during years when climate impacts are more severe. 

“When there’s resource scarcity, wildlife take more chances to feed themselves,” he says. “And that includes entering spaces that are dominated by humans that may not be making good life choices with their garbage or apple trees or whatever.” 

Lori Homstol, a biologist who specializes in human-bear conflict, says fall is when human-wildlife encounters typically start to increase.

“If you put yourself in a bear’s shoes, the hormones that flood their body in the fall probably make them feel hungry all the time,” she says. “No matter how much they eat, they never feel full.”

Partnering with local grocery stores, Northern Lights provides what Langen calls “room service” to the hungry cubs. Many of the cubs that come to the shelter are too small and emaciated to hibernate, so staff and volunteers spend hours each day sorting through and cutting up expired fruits and vegetables to make sure the bears are well fed.

That incessant hunger drives bears to seek out high-calorie foods, and when the likes of drought and wildfire reduce available natural sources, like berries and salmon, bears follow their noses to wherever they can get a meal. Last year, communities across the northwest saw a significant increase in the number of bears spending time within municipal boundaries. In Smithers, it was common to see young black bears strolling down streets or hanging out on trails around town. Piles of poop littered lawns and backyard fruit trees were thoroughly picked over.

“They can eat and survive on grass but that’s not going to get them fat enough to have cubs, so they’re going to seek out those better food sources,” she says.

The reproductive cycle of bears also determines how this all plays out: the species mates in the spring but embryos don’t implant until the fall. 

“The number of embryos that implant in the uterine wall depends on how much fat the bears put on,” Homstol explains. In other words, the fatter the bear, the more cubs she’ll have. And in a lean year, a pregnant female may have no cubs at all because doing so would jeopardize her survival.

Langen says this means the more human food we allow bears to consume, the more bears we’re going to see the following year. 

“You are bringing up your number in your region by letting the bears eat the garbage and the fruit on your tree,” she says.

And while population density isn’t necessarily a primary driver of conflict, she says it sets the stage where there are more opportunities for people to come into contact with bears. 

Meeting Wonder, an orphaned bear cub, left me with all the feelings

The main outcome of increased human-wildlife interactions is bears being killed. As the animals become habituated to humans, authorities are sometimes forced to shoot bears. B.C.’s conservation service office received more than 27,000 calls from the public last year and officers killed more than 600 black bears, according to provincial statistics. (But while the pressures on bears have increased, leading to more encounters and more calls, various policy changes have led to the number of animals being killed each year by conservation officers dropping far lower than averages from the 1990s and 2000s.)

Homstol emphasizes we tend to think about human-bear conflict from a very human perspective.

“Bears are just being bears,” she says. “They don’t distinguish between natural food and human food. It’s all just food, right? We’re the ones that make those distinctions, so we’re the ones that have to take responsibility.”

Tobi, a tiny black bear rescued from a Kamloops, B.C., golf course, scavenged dog food that was left outside before she was rescued and brought to the Smithers shelter. Homstol says it’s our responsibility to make sure those kinds of food sources aren’t drawing bears into contact with humans.

She says the most pressing issue of our time is finding solutions to the global climate crisis, which will benefit bears and humans alike. But we inevitably face decades of impacts that will continue to reduce those natural food sources, and in the short-term, the best way to prevent human-bear conflicts is to “take ownership of where bears are finding food.” 

It isn’t just about doing a better job of storing our garbage, she says. People can also shift how they think about harvesting on the landscape. Not only should we reduce the likes of fruit trees in places bears will likely come in times of scarcity, we also need to protect natural food sources in prime bear habitat.

“As the wildfires are getting more intense, it’s more and more popular — especially with home insurance — that people are ‘fire-smarting’ around their homes, around their properties, around towns,” she says, alluding to B.C.’s fire smart program, which encourages homeowners and communities to protect properties and prepare before a fire is burning on their doorstep. “That’s super important and it also provides ideal growing conditions for berry bushes.” 

She says that could be a win-win-win scenario, where harvesting from those berry bushes leaves more wild berries on the landscape, reduces attractants and makes sure people can still fill their freezers.

While climate change is putting intense pressure on bears, it’s not all bad news. The species can also benefit from wildfires.

“Wildfires are obviously, in the short term, pretty catastrophic,” Homstol says. “Some bears will actually die in wildfires if they can’t get out of the way, or get smoked out. But in the long term, burned out areas are actually really good habitat for a lot of species, including bears.” 

When a fire burns through a landscape, the ground is fed a smorgasbord of nutrients that encourage abundant growth of grasses and other plant species.

“As the forest succession goes through, the next things to come up are the berry bushes and you get 35-plus years of berry bushes that do really well,” she explains. “They’re sort of partially shaded in this open canopy and surrounded by standing dead trees — if they’re not salvage logged.”

It’s uncertain, however, whether the benefits can outweigh the impacts. Climate change is increasing the size and intensity of wildfires and frequent, prolonged droughts and other extreme weather events like atmospheric rivers are disrupting natural cycles and, in some cases, directly preventing that regrowth. 

“If you get a low snowpack and low amounts of rain, it doesn’t matter how good the sun and shade combination is,” she says. “Since the precipitation isn’t there, you’re going to have these very big failures.”

What we can learn from Wonder about bear cub rehabilitation

Langen emails the day after my visit with an update about the cub. 

“We had Wonder’s leg X-rayed and it turns out that she was shot, which fractured her bones,” she writes. 

That she was shot is ugly, but unsurprising according to Darimont. A hunter himself, he explains there are no requirements for hunters to account for their missed shots or wounded animals. 

“There’s no obligation for hunters to report animals they take a shot at and either miss or think they miss or think they hit and cannot recover,” he says.

“Lucky for her, the bones stayed aligned and are healing well,” Langen adds. “The vet figures that she will be just fine.”

Wonder’s leg was fractured when the cub was shot sometime before she was rescued in Prince George, B.C. Langen says the bones are healing well and, with care, the cub should survive until they release her in the summer.

If Wonder survives, she will be part of a new study this year. Northern Lights is partnering with Darimont on a project to collar 30 bears and track them after their release. He doesn’t like collaring animals if he can avoid it, but says the research could provide insight into how the bears adapt back to their natural environment, based on their relative health when they first arrived at the shelter.

Some bears come in “in really good condition,” he says. “They’re there because the mom got smucked on the highway or they come in later in the season when they’ve reached a certain size and biomass.”

Others arrive when they’re tiny, he says. Those cubs may have lost their moms when they were a few weeks old or experienced conflict or injury that stunted their growth.

Comparing these two different groups by tracking their fates means they can hopefully answer whether those early factors matter.

“We might as well learn something important about these bears,” he says, noting the rescue and rehabilitation work requires significant resources. “It would be nice to know their fates and the ways by which they die, too.”

The research can also help rehabilitation centres navigate difficult decisions about cubs like Wonder, as they continue to deal with increasing numbers of orphans. 

When she’s released in June, Wonder will be fitted with a collar and her movements tracked via satellite.

“If we find, for example, animals with a pre-existing injury never make it, well, then that may be important when centres like [Langen’s] and others have to make tough decisions where they’re busting at the seams and there may be animals that are just not suitable candidates for rehab and release,” he says. 

Langen says they’ve rescued and rehabilitated more than 800 bears since she started doing this work, but they rarely know what happens to those animals.

“There’s no evidence that it’s causing harm,” she says of the work they do. “There’s also no evidence that the bears are surviving. But that will change this year.”

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 a collaboration between The Narwhal and IndigiNews.

Under a protective blanket of low clouds, the Wilps Ni’isjoohl memorial pole returned to Nisg̱a’a territory almost a century after it was stolen in 1929. Imbued with the spirits of ancestors and carved with the crests of names that live on today, the pts’aan (pole) is more than an object — it is an ancestor. Its return to Nisg̱a’a lands was observed with comparable ceremony and protocol for bringing home a loved one who passed.

In Lax̱g̱alts’ap, a few kilometres from where it once stood in the village of Ank’idaa on the banks of Ḵ’alii Aksim Lisims (Nass River), the clouds drifted away and the ancestor breathed Nisg̱a’a air and felt the warmth of the late September sun. An eagle flew slowly across the valley and ravens watched from the surrounding forest as family from Wilps (House) Ni’isjoohl of the G̱anada (raven/frog) clan gathered to celebrate with other citizens of the Nisg̱a’a Nation and guests.

Four Nisg̱a’a villages sit along K‘alii Aksim Lisims (Nass River). The Wilps Ni’isjoohl memorial pole was originally raised in Ank’idaa, a few kilometres from Lax̱g̱alts’ap. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

Nisg̱a’a Matriarch Joanna Moody was around 25 years old in 1860 when she commissioned the pole to honour her relative who died defending Nisg̱a’a lands. 

“She undertook her leadership at one of the worst times of genocide that we’ve experienced as Nisg̱a’a peoples,” Sigidimnaḵ’ Nox̱s Ts’aawit (Amy Parent) said of her ancestral grandmother. “She also had to undertake her leadership during a time of great grief as she was called upon to erect this memorial pole to honour Ts’waawit, our family member.”

It took around a year for the carver, Oyee, and his assistant, Gwanes, to complete the pole, during which time Joanna Moody housed and fed both, a sign of her wealth and power — derived from the richness of the land and the river that annually brought saak (oolichan) and salmon up from the coast to villages along its banks. Carved from a giant red cedar that Oyee chose from its towering peers in what’s sometimes now called the Nass Valley, the pole depicts several figures, including a raven associated with the G̱anada clan. The hat of the pole is encircled with four rings, commemorating the number of feasts held by the former house chief. 

Finally home, the ancestor breathed Nisg̱a’a air and felt the warmth of the sun, as Nisg̱a’a Nation citizens and guests gathered to celebrate its return.

An educator who works in Nisg̱a’a language and cultural revitalization, Nox̱s Ts’aawit is a descendant of Moody, who lived to 115. She said holding four feasts, particularly during that time period, signified the great wealth of the wilps (house.) At every feast, the chief and family give gifts to everyone seated in the feast hall, honouring their role as witnesses. This is true today. 

The pole’s creation was rooted in grief and kwhlix̱hoosa’anskw (respect). But respect was not what it received when it collided with colonization.  

In 1929, Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau took the pole from the Nisg̱a’a village of Ank’idaa and shipped it to the National Museum of Scotland.

Museum records indicate that Barbeau was commissioned by the institution to purchase the pole for $600. Though these colonial documents show a sale by a Matriarch from the House of Ni’isjoohl, that signature is believed to have been falsified since it contradicts the family’s oral history, according to the Nisg̱a’a. 

The family says the pole was stolen by Barbeau with the permission of the Government of Canada during the summertime, when people in the village were away for an annual fishing, hunting and food harvesting season.

“This pts’aan left Ank’idaa and it left under a terrible situation because it was removed without the consent of our community, without the consent of the family,” Apdii Laxha, Andrew Robinson, said. He helped bring the pole home in his role as the former chief administrative officer of the Nisg̱a’a Village of Lax̱g̱alts’ap. “It encountered horrendous weather and … storms where some of the poles that were wrapped up with it were lost.” 

Trafficking totem poles during this era was often done without consent, something that is highlighted in field notes from Barbeau and others involved with taking totem poles — which colonial officials described as “specimens.”

Barbeau had a special affinity for the Nass Valley and for Nisg̱a’a in particular, viewing the carvers from the nation as “on the whole the best in the country,” according to his writings. Though he recognized the significance of the Wilps Ni’isjoohl memorial pole to Nisg̱a’a, having spent time studying their protocols, that didn’t stop him from removing it. 

Barbeau’s entire career took place during the Potlatch Ban, a federal law first enacted in 1885 that made potlatching and raising totem poles illegal for 67 years. Barbeau was known for “preserving” the existing northwest coast totem poles during this time — then seen by colonizers as a dying artform — by taking them from Indigenous village sites and distributing them to museums. 

“Nearly all the Nass River poles by now have been purchased and removed by the author for various institutions in Canada, the United States, Great Britain and France,” he boasts in the first of his two-volume book Totem Poles, published in 1950.

“The art of totem-pole carving,” he once declared, “now wholly belongs to the past.”

Transporting the towering poles from the remote Nass Valley to museums was no simple task, and often involved cutting them in pieces where they could more easily be floated downriver and later be moved by ship and rail.

When it came to the Wilps Ni’isjoohl memorial pole, the Scottish museum received the pole “in one piece, except for the upper extremity, and certain projecting portions, which have been carved separately and fitted on,” according to a 1931 note from a curator.

It’s now believed by museum staff that the pole was coated with a protective paint so it could be floated down K’alii Aksim Lisims and transported to Edinburgh, where it arrived at the museum in 1930 and remained until its return this September.

The Lax̱g̱alts’ap Cultural Dancers commemorated the return of the ancestor with songs and dances.

Members of the four Nisg̱a’a pdeek (tribes/clans) — G̱anada (Raven/Frog), Laxgibuu (Wolf/Bear), Gisk’aast (Killer Whale/Owl) and Laxsgiik (Eagle/Beaver) — gathered to observe ceremony.

The National Museum of Scotland stands in the centre of Edinburgh — a landmark among the many ornate buildings in the city. Nearby looms the historic Edinburgh Castle, housing royal jewels that were recently presented to King Charles III following his coronation.

Prior to returning the pole, the museum’s staff set about readying the space in order for a group from Nisg̱a’a to gather and follow protocol to prepare the pole for its journey home.

Exhibited alongside the pole were various other Indigenous belongings; the museum has an extensive collection from North America, Australia, the Arctic and beyond. But on an August day shortly before the Nisg̱a’a group’s arrival, many of their cases were wrapped in plastic or boarded up for protection, in preparation for the totem pole’s imminent departure.

It was a bright summer day, and bagpipers played outside of the museum, their sound singing out as tourists crowded the streets for the popular annual Fringe Festival. But inside, it was quiet and calm as John Giblin — who oversees the museum’s department of global arts, cultures and design — looked up at the totem pole.

Adjacent to the main hall, the 11-metre pts’aan towered over the gallery as a stunning centrepiece. 

Giblin, a courteous man in a well-fitted suit, explained it’s the first totem pole to ever be returned to a First Nation from a United Kingdom museum, calling it an “incredibly significant” moment for both Nisg̱a’a and the National Museum of Scotland.

This return could set a precedent for more returns of cultural items from the United Kingdom and Europe, where other totem poles and many more stolen Indigenous belongings ended up. 

A totem pole typically weighs one tonne, and Giblin explained that moving such a large and aged item in one piece is “quite a feat in terms of the logistics.”

“It’s been on display in the museum since 1930,” he said. “The museum’s kind of been built around it in many respects, in different ways. It’s not that easy to actually move the pole out through the museum.”

Giblin said that the museum contracted a company to build scaffolding around the pole and a cradle beneath, “so there is no weight or pressure going on the actual surface of the pole.” Then, it will be gently lowered horizontally and rolled on a trolley through the museum’s underground gallery and outside. The last leg of the journey is by air; the Canadian military organized its flight home.

The Wilps Ni’isjoohl memorial pole stood in the National Museum of Scotland for more than 90 years. Photo: Neil Hanna

Saying goodbye to the pole and bringing it to the next phase of its life in Nisg̱a’a homelands, Giblin said, feels right.

“It’s been beneficial for many, many generations of Scottish public and international visitors that have come to see it and learn, but its place now is back home in the Nass Valley,” he said.

“[With] many, many generations of the Nisg̱a’a community who have been separated from it for such a long time.”

When an earlier Nisg̱a’a delegation first asked for the pole’s return in the early 1990s, they were told it was too fragile to be moved. Yet, as Nox̱s Ts’aawit found out, it was later moved to accommodate renovations at the museum.

“That made me very angry,” she said.

“It’s our ancestor, our great-great grandmother,” Sim’oogit Ni’isjoohl (Chief Earl Stevens) said. “We had to get her back on her home soil.”

In 2022, Sim’oogit Ni’isjoohl, Nox̱s Ts’aawit and other Nisg̱a’a leaders went back to Scotland to tell the museum directors they wanted the pole returned. 

“We went in with much uncertainty, but with even more determination,” Nox̱s Ts’aawit said. “And I truly believe that we went in with one of the biggest strengths that we have as Nisg̱a’a people. We went in with our hearts and our minds working as one in unity together.”

“It’s our ancestor, our great-great grandmother,” Sim’oogit Ni’isjoohl said, explaining why it was so important for the pole to return to Nisg̱a’a soil.

Nox̱s Ts’aawit said all Nisg̱a’a have been impacted by the Indian Act, as she stood with generations of Matriarchs beside her for strength. “It’s a process that we’re still working on healing through. That’s why today is so important.” 

The Scottish museum, Giblin said, has been putting a larger focus on reconciling the institution’s colonial legacies in recent years — which has included updating displays and labels to address historical biases and updating research behind the scenes. In some cases, those discussions result in returning items in the collection to their original owners.

When the museum eventually agreed to give the pole back to Nisg̱a’a in December 2022, they still had to figure out how to get it safely home.

Andrew Robinson was part of the 2022 delegation. While in Scotland, the group travelled to the University of St. Andrews where Nox̱s Ts’aawit gave a lecture. On their way back to Edinburgh, Sim’oogit Ni’isjoohl said they needed to stop and pause for a moment on Nisg̱a’a lands. 

“We stopped at McDonald’s,” Robinson said, laughing. “We’re Nisg̱a’a, it’s part of our territory.”

While they were inside, the building started shaking. 

“We heard this big rumble and we were sitting there going, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ We’ve seen these big fighter jets taking off from St Andrews Air Force base and Earl looks at Amy and goes, ‘Wonder if those are Canadian? Maybe we could get the totem pole on that and they could just fly it home,’ ” he said.

“That’s exactly what happened.”

After supporters in Ottawa reached out to the federal government, the Canadian military agreed it would support the rematriation and worked with the Nisg̱a’a delegation to make arrangements.

Members of the Canadian military who helped facilitate the transport of the pole joined the crowd in celebrating the return of the ancestor.

Less than a year later, the Nisg̱a’a delegation visited Edinburgh again, this time to bring the ancestor home. On August 28, a closed ceremony was carried out to put the pts’aan to sleep in preparation for its journey out of the institution and into the belly of a military plane.

To see the pole off, the Nisg̱a’a leaders gathered with officials from the museum and the Scottish government, and also requested that a group of Scottish children be present to share their culture — reminding them to hold the story for future generations.

“We felt it was important to emphasize to the Scottish people we were interacting with … our shared history of colonization,” Nox̱s Ts’aawit said. “We understand that we have some common experiences with the British and what it means to try to free ourselves from these colonial shackles.”

Scottish people have also historically experienced dispossession at the hands of the English — such as the infamous Stone of Scone, an ancient sandstone artifact that was stolen during the English invasion of Scotland in 1296. The British government returned the stone to Scotland in 1996.

Nox̱s Ts’aawit explained that although these shared histories created a path forward, it wasn’t an easy process, and included some misunderstandings and cultural clashes along the way. However, the two parties have managed to meet in the middle and set a new precedent.

In February, Giblin and the museum’s head of collections Chanté St Clair Inglis travelled to Nisg̱a’a territory to directly experience the culture. Nox̱s Ts’aawit humorously recalled Inglis driving a big Ford pickup truck “on the wrong side of the road” and Giblin participating in a totem pole raising ceremony “in the freezing cold” without proper snow gear.

Bringing Giblin and Inglis to Nisg̱a’a territory bridged a divide in a way that couldn’t be done without a connection to the land and the stewards of that land.

“They saw where we came from, they felt the relationships, they saw our culture and that we weren’t just a totem pole or something behind a piece of glass,” Nox̱s Ts’aawit said. “They saw hundreds of us, thousands of us dancing, and they saw all these different aspects of who we are. And then people started talking to them. And they understood how much it meant to us.” 

“There’s always going to be a clash, when we’re engaging with settler colonial institutions and their worldviews,” she added.

To challenge those worldviews and push back against colonial and patriarchal ideas, she said they consciously chose to use the word rematriation. It also just made more sense — Nisg̱a’a society is matrilineal.

After the pole arrived in the town of Terrace, it was driven in a family procession through a winding valley onto Nisg̱a’a lands and to the village of Lax̱g̱altsʼap. The pole was held in a protective box but opened to the air and sun during the public arrival ceremony on Sept. 29. The pole was raised inside the Nisg̱a’a Museum in early October and is available for the public to view until the end of the month.

Around 260 years ago, a volcanic eruption from Wil Ksi-Baxhl Mihl created the Laxmihl (lava beds), destroying two Nisg̱a’a villages and killing more than 2,000 people. The vast lava beds serve as a memorial to those who lost their lives.

The pole was returned to the village of Lax̱g̱alts’ap, a few kilometres from where it was originally raised in Ank’idaa.

At the ceremony, two kids jogged after their dad as he walked to get something from their truck.

“You’re a wolf — why are we frogs?” one of the kids asked.

“You follow your mother’s clan, that’s why,” their dad replied.

“The more that we learned about the story and about our ancestral grandmother and her strength and everything that she did in her time, it seemed ill-fitting to call it repatriation,” Nox̱s Ts’aawit explained. “Recognizing that we are a matrilineal society, it’s important for us to return to that and also to look at the complexity of what that means now in a modern era, after the residues of the Indian Act.”

She said reclaiming this identity is part of a healing process. 

“It requires all of us — our men, our women, our Two Spirit — working together to create balance by honouring each other’s roles and responsibilities and supporting our children.”

At a feast held by Wilps Ni’isjoohl following the ceremony, Sim’oogit Duuḵ’ also highlighted the importance of language. 

“Artifacts belong to extinct civilizations,” he said. “We are not extinct.”

Eva Clayton, president of Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government who holds the name Sigidimnaḵ’ Yats’, called the moment historic. 

“It brings a lot of emotions to our nation, emotions that are filled with happiness, filled with grief, filled with tears,” she said. “We’re so very happy to have our ancestor home. We are on a journey together to show the world what reconciliation in action looks like.”

Completed in the mid-1800s by Nisg̱a’a carver, Oyee, and his assistant, Gwanes, the pole depicts several figures, crests and names that live today.

The pole was returned with an understanding that once it was back on Nisg̱a’a lands, the family would make decisions for its future.

Theresa Schrober, director of the Nisg̱a’a Museum, said this is an important distinction, explaining the museum has over 300 cultural belongings that have been returned by settler institutions — but those returns were conditional. 

“The nation was required to construct a … facility to house those belongings,” she said, standing under a pole that was returned from the Royal BC Museum in Victoria after the Nisg̱a’a Museum was built in 2011. “That is very much a reach into the future: ‘we’ll return but we’re not letting go.’ It’s shrouded in a colonial way of thinking about how those belongings need to be conserved, treated, the kind of space they need to be in.”

She said the only condition Scotland included in the final negotiations was the pole had to go to a “like institution.” 

“Should the family have made other choices, the museum would have facilitated those other choices,” she said. “That is really critical because I think it’s a learning moment for other institutions, about respecting that the people whose belongings they have should be making the decisions about those belongings’ care and futures, and that they should not be infiltrated with the belief systems of the people that were inappropriately housing them for all that time.”

The rematriation of the Wilps Ni’isjoohl pole from a European institution was preceded by the return of the Xenaksiala/Haisla Gʼpsgolox pole from Sweden in 2006. That, too, had conditions attached initially. 

The pole was to be returned only if the nation could house it in a climate-controlled building — something that didn’t exist, nor did the funding to build one. After the family of Gʼpsgolox offered to carve a replica pole for the Stockholm museum, the Swedish negotiators eventually conceded the original. After spending six years in Kitimaat Village, the pole was taken back to the Xenaksiala village of Misk’usa, where it was first raised and where it is slowly returning to the land.

Finally home, the Wilps Ni’isjoohl memorial pole was draped with cedar boughs, welcomed and honoured by its kin. The family decided the pole would live at the Hli G̱oothl Wilp-Adoḵshl Nisg̱a’a (Heart of Nisg̱a’a House Crests, also known as the Nisg̱a’a Museum) where it will stand in soil gathered from Ank’idaa.  

Sim’oogit Luudisdoos walked slowly forward to stand next to the pts’aan as he shared a song and said a prayer.   

“We’re gathered here on such a special occasion to bring healing to our people,” he said, his clear voice wavering with emotion. “This is one of our ancestors that has been brought home and all our ancestors are here today.”

“Great spirits, grandmothers, grandfathers: so grateful for bringing us together in a good way with a good open heart and open mind. Guide us well.”

Nox̱s Ts’aawit said when news of the ancestor’s return was announced on the Wilps Ni’isjoohl Facebook page, house members began sharing emotional responses. “They started posting pictures of their family members who [had] passed away and talking about how their mom had been a Matriarch or their father had had a specific role in our house, and how they never had the chance to know that this was going to happen, they never got to see the pole. There’s a lot of grief, but also pride, in terms of thinking about our family members and how proud they would be to know that we’ve done this.”

The day after the ceremony and feast celebrating the pole’s return, community members gathered on a street outside a house in Lax̱g̱alts’ap to honour a family member who had passed away. When someone dies, the house holds a settlement feast and, roughly one year later, the headstone that was created for them is taken to the graveyard and a stone moving feast is held.  

To accommodate the return of the ancestor, stone movings and feasts had been postponed. Now, with many of the same Simgigat (Chiefs) and Sigidimhaanaḵ’ (Matriarchs) who spoke at the ceremony standing in the cold outside the house, proper protocol was observed. One by one, each Sim’oogit walked up to the headstone and spoke softly in the Nisg̱a’a language as kids, aunties and uncles, cousins and friends listened.

Later, standing in a temporary tent set up to protect the pole before it’s raised in the museum, Nox̱s Ts’aawit spoke about the deep connections between the ancestor and the Nisg̱a’a today. 

“Many of the crests on here represent particular names in our house,” she said, gently resting her hand on the pole. “Those names are tied to pieces of land that are within what we call our ango’oskw, our house territory. In each generation, these names are passed down so the names never die, the people do and the people get replaced. We are living descendants of these names that are carved in this pole.”

For the Nisg̱a’a, she said, bringing the ancestor home is the first part of a long journey.

“In the spiritual realm, I don’t know what that’s going to mean,” Nox̱s Ts’aawit said. “I think it’s going to mean a gift in terms of our healing. I think there will be a transformation. But I don’t know what that’s going to feel like until we go through it.”

Until then, she’s relieved the pole made it safely home.

“Welcome home, dear ancestor. It’s been a journey.”

During the reporting of this story, The Narwhal’s Matt Simmons and photographer, Marty Clemens, made a mistake that resulted in a breach of protocol. Protocol specifies no one but family members of Wilps (House) Ni’isjoohl is allowed to touch the ancestor. While taking photos of the ancestor from above, the ladder Marty was standing on gave out and he fell, touching the pole. We are working with Nox̱s Ts’aawit and Wilps Ni’isjoohl to make things right. For transparency and teaching, we wrote about what happened and why it’s important for journalists to decolonize their work.

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The town of Kitimat, B.C., is folded into a forested valley, tucked back from where the ocean meets the land at the end of a roughly 100-kilometre long inlet. The hub of the community is a jumbled complex of malls with a handful of shops, restaurants and offices serving the population of around 8,000. You can’t see the ocean from here or the sprawling industrial complexes that crowd the waterfront.  

Kitimat was settled on Haisla lands in the 1950s, a planned community built on a promise of prosperity from the Aluminum Company of Canada, also known as Alcan. The town was designed to serve the company’s energy-intensive smelter, which would be powered by a dam built on the other side of a range of snow-capped mountains. Now owned by international mining giant Rio Tinto, the smelter’s smokestacks have been puffing ever since.

Across the harbour from Alcan is Cʼimaucʼa (Kitamaat Village), a reserve home to around 700 members of the Haisla Nation. Nestled along the shoreline directly opposite the industrial complex, the village has had a front-row seat from day one.

Built in the 1950s, the Alcan aluminum smelter is known locally as “Uncle Al.”

Kitimat’s slogan is a “marvel of nature and industry.” But which comes first: nature or industry? Can they exist in harmony? As the community adapts to a burst of new growth linked to LNG Canada, Cedar LNG and other proposed projects, it’s a question the town has to answer, one way or another. 

With “Uncle Al,” as it’s known locally, paving the way in the 1950s, other companies saw a chance to capitalize on the industry-friendly town and its access to marine shipping routes. In the 1970s, Eurocan opened a pulp mill a few kilometres up the Kitimat River estuary, and in the 1980s, Methanex started producing and exporting methanol and ammonia from the waterfront. Neither stood the test of time. In 2005, Methanex announced it was shutting down, citing high gas prices. Five years later, Eurocan followed suit. With two of three major employers gone, Kitimat slipped into a period of economic decline.

Then LNG Canada, a joint venture including some of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world,  started talking about building its liquefaction facility on the former Methanex site. The promise of good, high-paying jobs fit a familiar narrative of industry taking care of the community. With buy-in from the Haisla elected council and support from the town, the project was approved by the provincial and federal governments in 2016. When the consortium announced a final investment decision in 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called it the largest private investment in Canadian history. 

Four years after the first shovel hit the ground, Kitimat is undeniably busier. A continual parade of white work trucks funnels through the town and convoys of shuttle buses ferry workers between job sites and temporary housing. That housing is like a small town, complete with streetlights, roads, restaurants, medical care and other services — all fenced off from the surrounding community. 

The B.C. government is putting the BC Energy Regulator in charge of issuing permits for a $3-billion transmission line to power liquefied natural gas (LNG), mining and other projects.

Protected by razor wire and a high fence, the LNG Canada site sprawls over hundreds of hectares of waterfront and butts up against the Kitimat River. Temporary housing for thousands of construction workers is like a small town, fenced off from the surrounding community.

For more than a decade, the B.C. government has been courting the gas export industry. The province has subsidized LNG Canada and the Coastal GasLink pipeline to the tune of more than $6 billion in tax breaks, incentives and other forms of financial support. The pair of projects will connect rich gas deposits in B.C.’s northeast to overseas markets. Kitimat sits in the middle.  

Whether it’s the proverbial boom-and-bust cycle or a different kind of trend, the coastal community is full of anticipation. The Narwhal spent some time in Kitimat hearing from locals what life is like during this period of change. Here are their stories.

Phil Germuth, District of Kitimat mayor

Mayor of Kitimat, B.C., Phil Germuth.

Phil Germuth isn’t shy about his support for industry. He grew up in the community and is currently serving his third term as mayor. He said the jobs at the smelter kept the town alive after Methanex and Eurocan shut down, but there were hard times for several years.

“People have said a lot about boom and bust,” he told The Narwhal in the town offices on the top floor of the City Centre Mall. “I would never ever call us ‘bust’ because we’ve had the aluminum industry here for 65 years now. Things were really tough then. The housing market was down and you saw a lot more places starting to look pretty bad.”

“That’s clearly changed,” he added with a smile.

Through an agreement with LNG Canada, the community has received more than $16 million in taxes since 2019 and will get an additional $8 million this year. Once the facility starts operating, the municipality will get $9.7 million annually for the first five years. New houses are being built and old ones renovated. Residents directly inconvenienced by the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which winds its way through suburban neighbourhoods, are financially compensated. Germuth said there’s a “confidence in the community” that hasn’t been felt for more than a decade.

“Families that had to leave after Methanex closed are now coming back, and their kids are now working here,” he said. “I believe the overwhelming majority of Kitimat does support industrial development — when it’s done right.”

But the influx of industry in the community doesn’t mean the “streets are paved in gold,” he added. Many businesses remain boarded up, derelict buildings sit on overgrown lots and housing is a major issue. 

Boarded up businesses in Kitimat tell a story about the town’s economic decline after it lost its pulp mill and methanol export facility. Germuth said the town recently started an expropriation process to remove one derelict building, called Nechako Centre, which he called an “eyesore.”

“Having that industrial tax base is clearly much more of a benefit than it is a burden, but it does give you unique challenges that nobody else has,” he said, noting as an example local businesses have to offer competitive wages to keep employees happy. “Otherwise they’re all going to leave and go to industry.”

He said the town, like many others in the north, is overdue for major infrastructure updates and the council is trying to balance its priorities during this period of rapid growth.  

“We haven’t been able to pave a road now for over two years because we just don’t have that in our budget. We’re trying to do everything else that we have to do.”

The town recently replaced a decades-old bridge over the Kitimat River and is building B.C.’s first 24-hour daycare to support shift workers. A new firehall is on the table as is an upgrade to the swimming pool.

Kitimat’s downtown core is made up of a series of malls, like the City Centre Mall, which houses a handful of businesses and offices, including the council offices. Germuth said the industrial taxes the town gets from LNG Canada are a benefit but the influx of new industry also brings challenges.

To Germuth, a key success of the LNG Canada project is it strengthened connections between Kitimat elected leaders and Haisla elected leaders. 

“The political relationship between the District of Kitimat and the Haisla Nation Council, it wasn’t there, it was terrible,” he said. “LNG Canada came in … and they would bring us into the same meeting. That’s all it really took, was the two councils just hanging out together, getting to know each other at a project that we both support and that we’re both going to be greatly benefiting from.”

He believes the town’s future is promising.

“Kitimat is built on industry. We realize the advantages you have by having industry in your town. Clearly we’re not perfect — we have challenges like everybody else. But if you were to look at most other communities, I would say we’re probably in a little better position.”

Tracey Hittel, fishing guide, lodge owner, marine first responder 

Kitimat, B.C., resident and guide, Tracey Hittel.

A self-described “Saskatchewan farmboy,” Tracey Hittel moved to Kitimat when he was 21 for a job at the methanol plant. He met his wife there and they have two kids together. When the plant shut down, he shifted gears and started up his own businesses — fishing charters, water taxi services and a lodge. He recently handed over the reins after a stint as president of the Kitimat Chamber of Commerce.

“We don’t plan on going anywhere,” he said, driving his boat across the harbour from a small marina while checking his phone for a picture of a halibut he caught a few days before. “It’s pretty easy living here, you know?” 

Hittel loves fishing. He scrolled through his phone to find photos of halibut he recently caught with his family. The beauty of Kitimat is best seen from the water — it’s also the best view of the town’s industrial backbone.

Between Alcan and LNG Canada, there’s almost no access to the water from town. Hittel said that means a lot of the community is disconnected from the ocean and unaware of risks associated with increased marine traffic and disturbance to fish habitat.  

“I’ve been doing this for so many years, working at Methanex and then starting my own fishing guiding [business],” he said. “I’ve got to see all aspects of it, from the environmental side and the industry side. Most people are naive. People here don’t understand what’s coming. I would say 80 per cent of the population has never been on the ocean.”

“People here don’t understand what’s coming.” Tracey Hittel Fishing guide

LNG Canada is built on the former Methanex site in the Kitimat River estuary. Hittel said most locals don’t understand the size of the LNG carriers that will start navigating the Douglas Channel daily when the liquefaction facility starts operations. He described them as towering over the “biggest cruise ship you’ve ever seen.”

LNG Canada will employ up to 350 people in full-time positions for its first phase of operations. It will also support more in ancillary positions, like tugboat pilots and other related jobs. For example, LNG Canada recently awarded a contract worth more than $500 million to a Haisla-led  marine services venture.

Construction jobs have kept the community buzzing for the past few years. In April, there were nearly 7,000 workers in Kitimat building the facility, according to an LNG Canada spokesperson. The majority are employed through the consortium’s engineering, procurement and construction contractor, known by its acronym JFJV, which is not locally owned. Hittel said this means few local businesses have been able to grow as a result of the project.

“One thing I don’t like about what’s happening with these contractors — that money is not staying in the community,” he explained. “It’s not somebody that had the gumption to say, ‘I want to start my own company and start being a supplier to LNG Canada,’ like many young companies have over the years working for Rio Tinto. This opportunity hasn’t really flourished in Kitimat.”

LNG Canada didn’t directly answer questions about how many locals were employed at the project but said less than two per cent of the workers come from outside Canada.

“In both construction and later in operations, LNG Canada is committed to hiring locally first, then within B.C. and Canada,” the spokesperson told The Narwhal in an email. “As of April 2023, LNG Canada and its contractors and subcontractors have awarded more than $4.1 billion in contracts and procurement to businesses in British Columbia.” 

The consortium has also invested $5 million in “meaningful trades training and development programs designed to increase the participation of local area residents, Indigenous communities and British Columbians in trades and construction-related activities,” according to LNG Canada.

Hittel said he’s not convinced the project is living up to the promises that were made when the consortium first came to town. On the water, he pointed at the LNG Canada terminal, looming up above his boat. 

“All these modules, see them all sitting there? They all have to go on site. They came from ships, they got offloaded and they’ve got to be moved.” He said building the modules overseas and bringing them to Kitimat to be assembled was a lost opportunity for more local jobs.

Components, or modules, of the LNG Canada project were built overseas and shipped to the Kitimat site.

He added the construction of the liquefaction facility and the pipeline is taking a toll on the town. Between LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink, the number of people in Kitimat has more than doubled.

Though it’s hard to pin down the exact impact these projects — and the shadow population they bring in — have had on local infrastructure, Hittel said everything from roads to water supply have taken a hit. 

For all his frustrations, Hittel is decidedly not anti-industry. He just wants his community to fully benefit. He’s doing what he can to make the most of the industrial boom. He noted he’s getting trained in spill response and will be at the Alcan dock that evening. 

“Rio Tinto has a ship coming in here at six o’clock tonight,” he said. “What we do for them is when a ship comes in and the ship throws the ropes to the people on shore, we have our boat right there in case someone goes into the drink.”

And when the big LNG carriers start arriving, he’ll be around.

Dustin Gaucher, Haisla cultural researcher and educator

Dustin Gaucher, Haisla researcher and educator.

Dustin Gaucher, grandson of the late Wa’xaid Cecil Paul, a revered Xenaksiala Elder who passed away in 2020, stood up from his kitchen table and shook a frog rattle he made. Eyes closed, he boomed out an ancient song.

“When I get my name, this is what I want sung at my feast. All the Kitlope chiefs used to sing this.”

Gaucher lives with his family in a small, expensive rental house in a Kitimat neighbourhood overlooking the town. He has a complicated relationship with his community and ongoing conflict with the Haisla elected council. 

His focus right now is on his responsibilities to “wake up” his language and culture and pass it on to youth, he said.

“What I’ve been doing is basically learning everything that we’ve forgotten,” he told The Narwhal, describing his journey with the Haisla language, stories and songs and connections with the land. He credits the teachings of his Elders for guiding him as a child, and now.

Gaucher explained the connections between language, culture and stories are also reflected in place, tools and songs.

“That’s my magic canoe,” he said, pointing to an image painted on a drum he made. “This is the world of the physical realm, so that’s the world we live in and that’s why it has a normal killer whale. And this is the realm of the dead — that’s Wa’xaid’s magic canoe and that’s my baba (grandfather) G’psgolox, Wa’xaid’s brother. That’s them guiding me from the other side in my canoe so I always stay on track.”

In late 2021, when police arrested Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters who were attempting to prevent Coastal GasLink from drilling under the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River), Gaucher and a few others travelled to Gitxsan territory to show solidarity. They were met with heavily armed tactical units of the RCMP.  

“We had sniper rifles [aimed at] us,” he said, choking back tears. “I told these officers, ‘This is Canada, you are not allowed to point guns at unarmed civilians.’ ” He said he called them out for “pointing guns at innocent people and children” as helicopters flew over the gas station and an elementary school.

Gaucher said he’s not totally opposed to LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink but he doesn’t stand for colonial violence against Indigenous people. Speaking out publicly alienated him from much of his community, he said, who he described as “too afraid to speak.”

“What’s crazy is being classified as one of those ‘crazy anti-pipeline people’ because not once did I say I was against it,” he said, his fists clenched on the table. 

Gaucher said he’d never let photographers see his frog rattle before. He said it helped him unlock the rhythm to an ancient Xenaksiala song.

He choked up as he talked about colonial violence. He said he’s not completely opposed to Coastal GasLink and LNG Canada, but he stands in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders who were arrested at gunpoint in late 2021.

He hopes neighbouring nations would come show their support if Haisla people were subjected to the same treatment as Wet’suwet’en land defenders. What he wants most is to repair what was broken during colonization. He talked about grease trails and how the trade networks connected the Haisla, Xenaksiala, Wet’suwet’en, Nuxalk and others. When Indigenous people across B.C. were moved onto reserves and forced into residential schools, the trails grew over and the connections were severed.

“They’ve trained us to hurt ourselves,” he said. “And then they’ve trained us not to talk to our neighbours, to the neighbours we used to trade with — we’re isolated and we fight amongst ourselves. That’s what my grandfather calls ‘crabs in a bucket.’ ” 

He paused and shook his head. “The only destination for it is in your boiling pot on the stove.”

To heal and move forward, the youth need to reconnect with songs, stories and language, he said. Through the youth, those rekindled connections can be brought back to the Elders and to his generation, spreading through the community. 

“My whole goal in the long run is to support the youth,” he said, dreaming about bringing ceremony, songs and dances back to Haisla territory. “I want to start dancing them again in our lands — our trees, our plants, they all remember. When we hit our drum, it’s the heartbeat of Mother Earth.”

“The old ways are good. That’s why they’re there.”

Cheryl Brown and Lucy McRae, conservationists, Douglas Channel Watch

Lucy McRae, left, and Cheryl Brown, members of environmental group Douglas Channel Watch.

As members of a local environmental group, Cheryl Brown and Lucy McRae have been working for years to minimize the impacts of industry and ensure development is done with transparency. They have a good grasp of provincial and federal environmental assessment processes and keep a watchful eye out for potential infractions. They attend municipal meetings and try to keep one foot in the door with industry.

“Kitimat is touted as ‘nature and industry’ but when you listen to most of council and a lot of the chamber of commerce people, they refer to it as industry and nature,” McRae said. “Industry always comes first.”

As they stood chatting with each other on a path that follows Sumgas Creek through the middle of town, a passerby grinned.

“This looks like a regular meeting of the Douglas Channel Watch,” he laughed.

For all its current busyness, it’s still a small town.

The creek is being restored as an offset project. To compensate for damages to fish habitat at the site, LNG Canada is required to complete several restoration projects to previously impacted areas. A series of concrete weirs built decades ago cut off fish access in the Sumgas system. They’re slated for removal, getting the creek closer to its once-natural state. If successful, the restored waterway will see trout and salmon repopulate the heavily disturbed habitat — but Brown and McRae have their doubts.

“This could be a really good news story. It could come out really nice,” Brown said. “The part that wasn’t done properly, though, was they felt there was no need to consult with anyone.”

The Coastal GasLink pipeline cuts through Kitimat neighbourhoods. Residents directly impacted by the construction are compensated by the company.

She said during the environmental assessment process for LNG Canada, there were numerous opportunities for public engagement, ways in which residents could voice their concerns or get answers to questions. But since the project’s approval, that dynamic has changed.

“As soon as the decisions were made, it was just like,” Brown made a slicing motion, “cut off. We’re always scrambling, trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s really difficult to get the full story.”

LNG Canada told The Narwhal it established a quarterly “environmental forum” in 2019 to “inform and engage with local environmental organizations” — including Douglas Channel Watch. A spokesperson said its contractor, JFJV, sends regular notices and invitations directly to the environmental group and others for public engagement opportunities.

The goal of the group is to hold companies like LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink accountable and make sure they’re playing by the rules. Brown said she wishes the pipeline company listened to locals more, noting a section of the route flooded in the fall of 2020, stranding heavy equipment for days. Brown and McRae gestured to the creek and said everyone knows the river and its tributaries regularly flood — Kitimat gets a lot of rain. 

Members of the Douglas Channel Watch compare historic photos of Kitimat’s industrial area to how much land has been cleared to build LNG Canada.

They recently managed to meet with the council to discuss the pair of projects and to share information. They were visibly relieved as they told The Narwhal the most recent meeting went well.

“As groups, we’ve been working towards working better with council,” McRae said. “They are willing now to sit down with all the groups and listen to concerns.”

She insisted they’re not coming from a position that shuns industrial development. After all, without Uncle Al, the community wouldn’t exist. 

“My biggest concern is everything is for export,” McRae said. “Can we manufacture more stuff here? Once this project is finished and everybody who’s renting houses in town leaves, this town is in big trouble.”

“For me, it’s about the environment,” Brown said. “Maintain the integrity of the land base, the biodiversity. There are huge opportunities here to do this right — and the window is closing.”

Nick Markowsky and Brandon Highton, co-owners, Two Peaks Brewing

Nick Markowsky, left, and Brandon Highton, owners of Two Peaks Brewing in Kitimat, B.C.

For Nick Markowsky and Brandon Highton, opening a brewery in Kitimat was more than an entrepreneurial leap paired with a love of craft beer. Growing up in the town and knowing what it has to offer, especially in terms of access to outdoor recreation, they wanted to help Kitimat’s identity evolve. 

“My background is my grandfather came here in the ’50s for Alcan,” Markowsky said, leaning on the bar of the recently opened brewery. “I moved away for a fair bit of time, went to school and kind of just lived all across Western Canada, and missed what Kitimat has to offer and being close to family and friends.”

Like many others who’d left the community, he came back to a job working on Rio Tinto’s smelter modernization project, a $4.8-billion expansion that was completed in 2015.

“It’s been nice to get back into the lifestyle,” he said. “I love knowing that I can walk into the bush and disappear.”

Markowsky said part of the vision behind the brewery was “trying to get away from it just being an industrial town with services being provided to industry.”

“The biggest thing that we, as born-and-raised Kitimat guys, want to share and promote is growth outside of industry,” he explained. “More being given back or produced for the community and less about industry, industry, industry.” 

Opening up a brewery in downtown Kitimat was more than just an entrepreneurial leap, Markowsky said. It was also a means to bring something new to a town historically reliant on industry.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that their business isn’t serving industry workers as well. In the evenings, the parking lot is full of work trucks. Inside, high-visibility vests and steel-toed boots look very much at home in the warehouse-like building. But, as Highton explained, working with the district on the project and building a brand new space in the heart of the community has a knock-on effect.

“They had this downtown revitalization plan that we’ve heard about for years and years, but we’ve never really seen anything be developed down here,” he said. 

Since opening in April, they’ve been hearing from people about a desire to see Kitimat invest in infrastructure like more biking and walking paths, green space and other ways to improve quality of life in the community. 

“With us going up, we’re starting to see them put more work into developing some of these spaces, starting to pretty up this town because we are a bit dated in some areas,” Highton said. “It’s time for us to get a bit of a refresh here.”

Updated on June 27, 2023, 2:28 p.m. PT: A previous version of this story included a photo of a boarded up Century 21 office alongside a caption about economic decline in Kitimat. Following publication, the owner notified The Narwhal that the business had moved locations. As a result, The Narwhal removed the photo.

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This story is part of Going with the Flow, a series that dives into how restoring nature can help with B.C.’s flood problems — and what’s stopping us from doing it.

Adrienne Dickson rests one hand on a barbed wire fence she recently installed on her property in the small rural community of Topley, B.C. Behind her, across a sprawling hayfield, dozens of sheep graze in the shade of a forested hill and cattle are up in a pasture beyond. 

Two years after Dickson and her family bought the farm in 2013, there was a major flood and the Upper Bulkley River started changing. The rising waters eroded the banks at two bends, huge chunks of the property fell off into the river.

Like farmers in river valleys around the world, Dickson was facing a loss of land caused by flooding, a problem predicted to grow in pace and scale with climate change. She wanted to find a way to avoid losing more land.

“My dad says in the olden days they would have just took a Cat and cut the corner off,” she says, chuckling and explaining this would widen the river and allow sediment to get flushed downstream. 

These days, putting an excavator in the river is frowned upon, so she set out to see what options were available. She first met with a Ministry of Agriculture representative to discuss potential solutions, most of which came with a hefty price tag and would involve the use of riprap — engineered placement of rocks and sometimes concrete blocks that armour riverbanks against erosion.

Later, she serendipitously connected with some locals working to support the health of the watershed. One of those was Cindy Verbeek, northern B.C. coordinator for A Rocha Canada, a faith-based conservation organization. Verbeek and others had recently opened a hatchery in the nearby community of Houston to mitigate declining salmon populations.

“I grew up on this river and was just bullshitting with Cindy and I was talking about how the river was eating away,” Dickson says. “They were working to try to improve these sites, where they had a lot of sediment hitting the river, to try to improve the spawning grounds.”

The CN rail line cuts through the Upper Bulkley River system, severing sections and holding back the waters with riprap, engineered placement of rocks designed to reduce erosion.

Verbeek visited the farm and proposed addressing the erosion as part of a multi-year restoration project A Rocha was partnering on. Dickson jumped at the chance.

By planting fast-growing willow and cottonwood shoots into the eroded bank, they attempted to replicate what the ecosystem was like before the land was cleared for agriculture and development. The method — called low-tech riparian restoration — is a cost-effective alternative to mechanical flood mitigation projects and can be tailored to any impacted river ecosystem. The idea is that imitating natural systems, such as beaver dams and brushy banks, sets the stage for nature to take over and heal the damage that was done. 

“When I was a kid, I remember the fish in here, like tons of salmon,” Dickson says. “I caught my first rainbow when I was six years old in this river. I want to stop the erosion of my land — and it will help the fish.”

These days, few salmon make it this far upriver due to the combined impacts of climate change, forestry, mining, agriculture and the CN Rail line, which cuts through the watershed. 

“It just got ignored, for lack of a better word: ‘Oh, that’s the baby Bulkley, who cares? It’s just a little stream,’ ” she explains. “Actually, it had a lot to it and people didn’t realize. The fish supported a lot of things. And when they left, the birds left, the critters left.”

Willow shoots planted throughout a bank of the Upper Bulkley River will develop root networks that will hold the riverbank together, preventing further erosion during flood events.

‘Protection and restoration’ builds river resilience

What’s happening to Dickson’s farm and the associated impacts on the ecosystem are far from isolated. 

As the climate crisis intensifies, flooding, drought and unpredictable extreme weather events are becoming more commonplace. Wading through the muck of a flooded hayfield and losing a few feet of property to erosion isn’t just an inconvenience to farmers — these changes are indicative of bigger problems facing river ecosystems worldwide.

In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted loss of productivity in rivers can impact “climate regulation, water and food provisioning, pollination of crops, tourism and recreation.” In other words, rivers on their myriad paths through landscapes are an indispensable source of life. 

Globally, rivers have increased in temperature by up to 1 C per decade since 2014, according to the panel. Salmon especially depend on cooler waters. As Dickson says, without the fish, everything else disappears as well.

But there’s still hope. The panel also noted “there is evidence that protection and restoration of ecosystems builds resilience” which can help river systems to continue supporting and benefiting species — including humans.

‘Salmon is where we connect’

The Upper Bulkley floodplain is a perfect proving ground for restoration work. The area is home to “some of the most intense public and private land use in the Skeena watershed,” according to SkeenaWild Conservation Trust. 

This is a region where farming, forestry and mining play starring roles in the economy and the pickup truck reigns supreme. Not everyone here sees eye-to-eye on issues, whether that’s vaccines, religious beliefs, politics or pipelines.

Against this backdrop of divides, the riparian restoration project is a model for collaboration — it’s a partnership between conservation organizations, the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and environmental consultants, with buy-in from farmers and landowners. 

“The Wet’suwet’en supported the restoration project directing [the work] and were involved in the development of the project through collaboration within our networks,” David de Wit, natural resources manager with the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, told The Narwhal. 

Those networks include the Upper Bulkley roundtable, a working group that meets regularly to discuss watershed initiatives, and the Morice Watershed Monitoring Trust. The trust is a science-based collaborative group that includes de Wit, on behalf of the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, and representatives of the provincial government. The group folds in monitoring data collected by industry to support its goals: “water quality and quantity suitable to sustain the health and well-being of the Wet’suwet’en.” He says they collectively secured funding to cover two years of work related to the project.

The Upper Bulkley floodplain is one of the most impacted landscapes in the Skeena watershed. Restoration work that supports the health of the river and protects farmland is a collaboration between conservation organizations, the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and landowners.

Verbeek, who is a member of the roundtable, downplays her role in the project, saying she just helped facilitate connections with landowners with properties on the river. But it’s clear she gets people — she’s a good listener and knows the community. She says the lynchpin that brought people together is salmon.

“I’ve been working in Houston for many years and sort of struggled to find something that captured the imagination of the community — until I started with salmon,” she says. “It doesn’t matter who you are and what you do, whether you’re a logger or an office person or teacher, whatever, salmon is where we connect. And so as soon as you start talking about things that are going to benefit the salmon, people want to be a part of that.”

She says part of A Rocha’s mission is to help bridge divides. Some of those divides, she says, are between settlers and Indigenous people and also between rural and urban dwellers.

“It’s fun to see people of all walks of life being part of it,” she says, beaming. “Because, yeah, we have so many things to be divided over — let’s find the things that we’re not and work on those.”

Changing the cycle

Adam Wrench, a local environmental consultant, was contracted to help lead the work.

Wrench, who is friendly and approachable, says projects like this — when added up across the landscape — have the potential to impact the entire watershed. 

“Over time, it’s going to give a chance for the water table to come up and rehydrate the land. And then you’re just creating this massive sink of energy and water and nutrients, hopefully changing the cycle.”

The cycle he’s referring to is a negative feedback loop, where the river continually bursts its banks because of the constrictions placed on it from development. When it floods, it flushes sediment from the surrounding land into the water. As it recedes, that land is left compacted and stripped of nutrients. 

“You can see here, right, there’s the railway,” he says, pointing across the river as a train rumbles past. “On the other side of that railway are huge sections of river that are no longer in play.”

“On the other side of that railway are huge sections of river that are no longer in play.” Adam Wrench

He explains the natural floodplain once covered a much larger area of land. Now, all that’s left is Dickson’s farm.

“All that energy has nowhere to go,” he says. “What was happening here where they’re losing 15 to 20 feet a year, think about the amount of material that was going down the river from this one corner and it’s mind boggling. And then multiply that across the watershed.”

Natural cycles do see higher levels of sediment introduced into the water during spring flows and rivers are not static — they move and change. But this is different, he says, squinting in the sun as his phone chimes in his pocket. “It’s more where is that getting deposited? It’s covering spawning beds. It’s just totally destroying the hydrology.”

‘Money well spent’

On Dickson’s property, the meandering river lazily flows past a scrubby bank punctuated with what looks like the remains of a stand of trees, their tops lopped off haphazardly.

But these stumps didn’t grow in this spot — they were hammered into the crumbling riverbank to provide stability and, eventually, food for mycorrhizal fungi, underground fungal networks connecting plants to nutrients via their roots. Threaded throughout the site are young willow shoots that will hopefully establish themselves, growing up to not only protect the bank from flood-related erosion but also provide shade, keeping the river cool.

Tree stumps were hammered into the riverbank to prevent erosion while willow shoots establish root networks. Eventually the stumps will rot away, providing nutrients and supporting the growth of underground fungal networks.

Adam Wrench, an environmental consultant based in northern B.C., says the need for restoration of this type is “essentially unlimited” in the Upper Bulkley system. “Nearly every outside corner on the river where it hits a field looks like what we started with on Adrienne’s property.”

Cindy Verbeek works with A Rocha, a faith-based conservation organization. “It doesn’t matter who you are and what you do, whether you’re a logger or an office person or teacher, whatever, salmon is where we connect.”

“Yeah, they came in and I got no complaints about it,” Dickson says. “It was a big learning curve, because it was something new for them — this whole concept is a new idea. I said: got to start somewhere.”

Wrench says while low-tech restoration has been around for awhile, no one had tried it here. And what works in one watershed may not work in another. 

The method comes with a lot of benefits, not just for the ecosystem and the farmers. It also provides employment. Whanau Forestry, a Smithers-based silviculture company, provided most of the workers.

Whanau owner Chris Howard says the project helped extend the season for a lot of his workers, most of whom come from communities with high levels of poverty and unemployment.

“This is good, significant wages, and there are skills being learned and built,” he says. “I think it’s money well spent.”

Howard says the workers — mostly Indigenous youth — live on reserves like Witset, Fort Babine and Tachet. There was even a family from Tachet that came as a package deal.

“Dad was slinging a chainsaw, doing some of those tasks, mom and daughter were doing a lot of the pruning and bucking down of the willow and whatnot. Everybody had a task and they rotated off of it.” 

The first attempts to sink the posts into the bank were unsuccessful so they rigged up an attachment on an excavator and used it to pound the posts in as deep as possible. Wrench notes that without the help and expertise of the landowners, the project would have cost a lot more, and maybe not happen at all. Farmers have deep knowledge of their lands — necessary to keep afloat in the competitive agriculture industry — and they typically have a lot of equipment at hand, things like tractors, trucks and backhoes. 

“We could get it done in short order, because of the landowners,” Wrench says. “If we didn’t have them involved, this would never have happened.”

“These posts are providing the physical structure to stabilize the bank to allow all this live vegetation we planted to root,” he explains, pointing out the fresh green shoots amidst the darker brown woody debris. “Using the stingers — which is a piece of steel pipe we use on a fire pump blasting water — we can plant some of these live willow cuttings and cottonwood cuttings down six feet plus into the ground.” 

Once those cuttings are established, the root network spreads throughout the entire bank.

“The idea is, by the time these posts rot off and that structure disappears, there should be a fibrous root mat all the way through this corner to hopefully stabilize it.”

And the posts have another role to play. They also reintroduce nutrients that were stripped away after generations of farming, he explains. 

Wrench says they completed work at six sites, including two on Dickson’s farm.

“The need for restoration of this type in the Upper Bulkley is essentially unlimited,” he says. “Nearly every outside corner on the river where it hits a field looks like what we started with on Adrienne’s property.”

He adds the work being done here can also be done on other impacted rivers, but cautions each river is unique and comes with a different set of needs.

“They’re all different: different soils, different climate.” The trick, he says, is to get your hands dirty and see how it goes — the cost of low-tech restoration is a fraction of larger-scale mitigation work.

Cindy Verbeek shows a baby lamprey eel, scooped up from the riverbank.

Trying to find funding for people, not machines

While the restored banks held up well during high flows in the spring, no one is sure how successful the approach will be in the long term — and the funding to replicate the work on other properties in the watershed dried up this year. 

The project was originally funded through the Healthy Watersheds Initiative, a $27 million B.C. government program in partnership with the Real Estate Foundation of BC and Watersheds BC. This year, the province rolled out another $30 million but the riparian restoration project didn’t make the cut. 

“Direct funding agreements totalling $15 million were made between the province and a number of [Healthy Watersheds Initiative]-funded organizations that met provincial criteria,” a representative of the initiative told The Narwhal. “Watersheds BC and MakeWay are partnering under the Indigenous Watersheds Initiative to steward the other $15 million of this funding specifically to support Indigenous-led initiatives that are advancing watershed health.” 

Wrench says the low-tech approach needs regular monitoring and maintenance in some cases, unlike flood mitigation projects that deploy big machines and riprap, a common sight near rail lines, highways and pipelines.

“We need to inventory what’s been done and what’s actually worked 10 years up, because we have this idea this is gonna just pop into healthy riparian, but we don’t know that for sure,” he adds. “It’s the part that’s not as flashy because you’re not just pounding out the sites, but it’s the most critical piece.”

“Funders really love to fund stuff, but they don’t necessarily want to fund people,” Verbeek says. “We can have all the stuff we want but if you don’t have the people to use the stuff to do good things, then you’re not doing anything. That’s one of the biggest struggles for us, especially with our little project, is finding funding for people.”

Verbeek puts on hip waders, preparing to walk the river and check for spawning salmon and see if there are any changes to the habitat since she was last here. The ecosystem supports the likes of otters, beavers, lamprey eels, wild cats like bobcat and lynx, bears, moose and more. Even though it’s a river that still has a lot of healing to do, even with the train rushing past, it’s undeniably beautiful.

On the far bank, she scoops up the sand, looking for baby lamprey. Her eyes light up as she shares her dream.

“The Upper Bulkley River is the most negatively impacted river in the Skeena watershed because of human activity. And I just think: wouldn’t it be cool if in the next 100 years, this would be the most positively impacted watershed in the Skeena system because of human activity?”

Going with the Flow is made possible with support from 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.

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.

Sebastian Audet navigates his paddleboard over to a floating dock on Seymour Lake, a small freshwater body tucked into the forested hills at the base of Dzilh Yez (Hudson Bay Mountain.) A few minutes drive from Smithers, B.C., the lake is a local favourite for summer swimming and winter skating. But 12-year-old Audet isn’t here to play — he’s monitoring the health of the aquatic ecosystem.

“Dissolved oxygen is what the fish breathe,” he explains. “Right now, the dissolved oxygen is on the bottom but there’s some on the top. If it gets worse and we have a turnover, which is when it mixes it all together, we could have a fish kill and all the fish would die and float up and stuff.”

His mom, Shawna Audet, asks him how the lake’s levels are doing and he makes a face.

“Most fish can live but you couldn’t have any ‘fishing fish’ like trout because they need higher dissolved oxygen levels,” he answers.

Reine Vizcarra and Johanna Pfalz from Skeena Knowledge Trust watch as water rangers Kian Staplin, Kaiya Staplin and Sebastian Audet collect a sample from Seymour Lake, near Smithers, B.C.

On the dock, accompanied by his friends Kian and Kaiya Staplin, Sebastian unzips a blue waterproof case and starts unpacking various vials and test equipment. One of the threats to the lake, the Audets explain, is that many recreational users don’t clean up after their dogs while ice skating.

“Everyone wants their magical skate with their dog but as soon as their off-leash dog is behind them they can’t see what’s happening,” Shawna says.

“The magical skate people, you can’t even talk to them, they just get really mad at you,” Sebastien adds. He doesn’t know how much of a direct impact dog poop has on fish but says it’s one of several factors changing the ecosystem.

The Audet family received the free equipment — a Water Rangers water quality monitoring kit — from Skeena Knowledge Trust, a local non-profit.

Young water rangers collect data on the health of Seymour Lake.

“I think a lot of people just don’t understand the connection between the environment that they’re recreating in and how other people use that environment,” Johanna Pfalz, lead coordinator at the trust, tells The Narwhal.

The Skeena Knowledge Trust works with interested groups and individuals like Sebastian to provide tools, education and resources to empower people and generate much-needed data. Pfalz says when the World Wildlife Fund published its first watersheds report in 2017, it identified alarming data deficiencies in the Skeena watershed. 

“This Water Rangers program was one of the responses to help to fill those data gaps,” she says. “We connect groups like this with Water Rangers and try to facilitate, to take it to that next level where kids like Sebastian actually get out there and start contributing.”

Johanna Pfalz is the lead coordinator at Skeena Knowledge Trust, a non-profit dedicated to enhancing understanding of the Skeena watershed.

‘Reports you don’t even know exist’: conservation scientist

The Skeena Knowledge Trust was formed in 2017 to address data deficiencies on wild salmon and salmon habitat in the Skeena River watershed, but it had its genesis almost one decade earlier.

In early 2009, after four years of research and consultation with stakeholders across the province, a provincially appointed panel of independent scientists presented B.C. with a report on Pacific salmon that made dozens of recommendations. Among them, the panel said the province should create a new ministry to oversee information on salmon and salmon habitat.

“A new provincial governance system will require many changes, beginning with the creation of a single water and land agency responsible for making all water and land decisions in watersheds in accordance with ecosystem principles,” the report noted. “It will also require that federal, provincial, First Nations and local governments collaborate on watershed governance, and that ‘ecosystem goods and services’ such as carbon storage are valued in decisions.”

When the province hadn’t responded to the report many months later, Skeena residents convened a conference to discuss what action they could take. 

“Part of what came out of that conference is that, when it comes to knowledge and information management — the information we use to make decisions around salmon ecosystems — there’s nobody managing that,” Pfalz says.

Pfalz works with her technical team to develop ways of making science and policy data more accessible to the general public.

Ekaterina Daviel is a technician with Skeena Knowledge Trust. Her work helps make fisheries data more accessible to the public.

The Skeena Knowledge Trust formed in 2017 to address data deficiencies on wild salmon and salmon habitat in the Skeena watershed.

People and programs — such as Fisheries and Oceans Canada and provincial ministries — were collecting information, but there wasn’t a one-stop shop for data on salmon and salmon watersheds.

“If you have a question about the salmon ecosystem in the Skeena, you have to go to a dozen different sources,” she points out

For most people, that kind of digging (and the time required to do it) just isn’t feasible. Once the trust was formed, it developed a mapping portal and a Skeena salmon data centre, compiling all available information in one place.

Michael Price, conservation scientist and new trustee with the organization, says the data centre  is indispensable for both the general public and researchers.

“One thing that the Skeena Knowledge Trust has been doing is compiling all these old fisheries reports,” he says in a phone interview. “To me, they are absolutely fascinating because they provide us with such important context for salmon.” 

As an example, he points to the detailed reports written by creek walkers, the Fisheries and Oceans Canada contractors who monitor spawning salmon populations by walking the freshwater systems and counting fish. Their reports include much more than the numbers of fish returning to their natal streams.

“Some of the notes on whether there were floods or what the winter was like, they give some real context that you can potentially start to see patterns with,” he explains.

Decades of cuts to salmon monitoring leave B.C. scientists uncertain of fish populations

Historic reports are often difficult to find, or only available by request, but their importance cannot be understated. Conservationists relied heavily on high-quality, trusted data during the campaign to protect the Skeena estuary from the potential impacts of a proposed liquefied natural gas facility on Lelu Island, Price notes. 

“What surfaced through that process — and it was quite a lengthy process — was a report that I feel was quite seminal to the argument that industrial development really needs to take care in this sensitive area.”

That report, he says, was an old Fisheries and Oceans Canada document. 

“The question was posed, ‘If we have development in the Prince Rupert area, in the Skeena estuary, where are some areas that have high sensitivity to salmon?’” he explains. “They reported that they didn’t think that development should occur in the Lelu Island, Flora Bank area. So here’s a historical report that could easily have been buried, that could have been overlooked — and the whole decision could have been different.”

“It’s those types of reports — that you may not think are significant —  that the Knowledge Trust is really trying to bring to the surface so that, yes, it’s easier for us as researchers or individuals that are concerned watershed citizens to find that information, instead of it being buried in some box, maybe on paper and not even digitized yet.”

“If we don’t have that information or if we forget that information, we are bound to make mistakes of the past — it’s just inevitable human nature,” he adds.

As for which reports make it into the salmon data centre, Pfalz says there are criteria to ensure credibility.

“The short of it is that basically anything that is generated through a public land-use planning process, whether it’s the Gitanyow land-use plan, or another First Nation’s land-use plan or fisheries-sensitive watershed plan, anything like that, especially the [Environmental Stewardship Initiative] work, that’s all fairly credible.”

The Environmental Stewardship Initiative is collaborative landscape-level research conducted by the B.C. government and Indigenous communities across the province. Recently, B.C. tried to argue against data collected under the program in a Supreme Court case launched by the Blueberry River First Nation. In a precedent-setting ruling, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Emily Burke dismissed the province’s arguments, included the data as evidence and found the province guilty of breaching the Nation’s Treaty Rights.

“It’s not our goal to filter information,” Pfalz says. “Maybe there’s a report that could be controversial, but it’s still very credible. It’s up to our audience to determine what they do with that information.”

Water testing is a way for the public to contribute and advocate for protection

On the water, Sebastian and friends note baseline data and test for conductivity, dissolved oxygen, hardness, alkalinity and more. They all agree their favourite is the test for dissolved oxygen.

“I kind of like getting to smash the vial,” Kaiya Staplin says.

“They’re clear to start with and then when you smash them it kind of immediately turns blue,” Kian Staplin adds.

Sebastian doesn’t mince words when he talks about why it’s important to collect the information.

“Because this lake’s almost at the stage of death. This lake’s going to die, like, weeds die, fish die — done.”

Kaiya Staplin takes a water sample from Seymour Lake.

Ian Sharpe, a retired aquatic biologist who worked for B.C.’s Ministry of Environment for 25 years, says that’s part of the natural evolution of ecosystems.

“It will be a wetland and then it will be a meadow and then it will be a forest, with a creek running through it,” he says on a call from a Vancouver Island ferry terminal.  But he adds it’s important to ensure human impacts don’t speed up the process.

Sharpe wears many hats in what he describes as “semi-retirement,” but all are connected to water and watersheds. 

“I’m going to do this until I croak,” he says.

Among his multiple roles, he’s a trustee with the Morice Watershed Monitoring Trust, an organization that collaborates with the Skeena Knowledge Trust.

“Our purpose is to conserve and protect water for the benefit of Wet’suwet’en people,” Sharpe says, noting the importance of collaborating with Indigenous communities. 

He describes what Sebastian and others are doing as the first step towards influencing decisions on a watershed level.

“You can start them off at the basic level and your hope is that there will be some kind of sustained effort and they will get more and more interested in getting deeper and deeper into the science,” he says. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t — it’s a mixed bag.”

Water rangers play on a lakefront property near Smithers after collecting data on water quality.

Pfalz says Sebastian’s depth of understanding of his local ecosystem sets the stage for him to interact with decision-makers.

“The more knowledgeable your public is, then that empowers the public to interact on a more knowledgeable base with the province and the feds,” she says. “It’s hard to argue with data.”

Kat Kavanagh, executive director of Water Rangers, says she’s thrilled to hear about the work Sebastian and his friends are doing. On a Zoom call with The Narwhal, her smile gets bigger and bigger as she hears about the youngster’s dedication and achievements.

“How is he doing all this stuff already?” she asks, beaming. “I love it!”

She says the idea to develop the Water Rangers kits and create the network first started when she watched her father collecting water samples, sending them away to a lab, getting the results back and having no way to make sense of it or share that data.

“Even when we were collecting data, we weren’t very effectively bringing it out into the community, bringing it to decision makers.”

After piloting the project in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, the demand for the test kits skyrocketed.

Water ranger Sebastian Audet explains the importance of monitoring water quality at his home near Smithers.

“The Skeena [Knowledge Trust] was one of the groups in a data deficient area that was going to be using the Water Rangers test kits,” she says. “And then we were going to give the data back to [World Wildlife Fund] in a format that they could use to help these groups start to fill those data gaps.”

Kavanagh describes herself as a tool-maker and she’s clearly passionate about the impacts the tools are having.

“Talking about climate change, people don’t know what they can do and I think that they’re looking for things that they can do to contribute,” she says. “The reason I think we’re resonating is not only is it an easy way to get eyes on the ground, we’re also a way to get that baseline data so that we can notice when things are really starting to change.”

Kavanagh says they’re working with the University of Regina on a five-year project and partnering with groups in northern Saskatchewan, where many communities don’t have the capacity to do their own water quality testing. The network extends across the entire country with different groups using the kits to address a wide range of issues.

“We had one group in New Brunswick monitoring a little river because there was a proposed mine upstream,” she says. “If the mine gets approved they have some baseline data. They can say this was the pre-state and they have some ownership of that. They said they felt helpless before and now they have a plan.”

‘People protect what they love’

Because data on fisheries and water quality is often hard for the general public to understand, both the Water Rangers and Skeena Knowledge Trust use charts and graphs to present the data in a more palatable format.

At an office in Smithers, Ekaterina Daviel, a technician working with the trust, shows how the Seymour Lake information is organized.

“It has a nice little timeline of all the reports that we’ve had in the salmon data centre,” she says, scrolling through the page. “It gives you a quick overview of when the reports were put together and what’s been done more recently, as well as a quick synopsis of some of the issues. We also put in a water chemistry piece and this is currently using the data from the government.”

Daviel also shows how the trust has amalgamated historic and current data from the Tyee Test Fishery, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada project that has acquired data on Skeena River sockeye populations since 1955. The interactive visualization makes it easy for users to compare historic runs to current numbers. That context is especially useful for the younger generation, which hasn’t been around long enough to witness the steady decline in salmon populations across the province.

Shawna Audet helps youth water rangers upload data to the water rangers website, which charts trends on water quality. The data is publicly available and includes information about watersheds across North America.

Returning to shore, Sebastian and his friends head out to play in the woods behind the Audet’s house while Shawna inputs the data to the Water Rangers portal on an iPad. It only takes a few minutes. She demonstrates how the site charts all the data over time. On a local level, she says the work has already paid off. 

“We had someone throw a whole bunch of salt in the water and I was like, ‘Wow, Johanna, our hardness just went crazy,’ ” she says. 

She pulls up the graph, which clearly shows a significant spike, recalling how she had overheard a neighbour talking about throwing salt into the lake, to kill off the vegetation in the hopes of  creating a sandy beach area, around the same time the spike popped up on the charts. 

“It led Sebastian to go and have a conversation with the neighbour. It’s awkward but really valuable that you can speak up about what’s going on.”

Pfalz says one of the next steps is advocating for data collected by people like Sebastian for use in policy-making.

“There needs to be some more connectedness around integrating citizen science into provincial level decision-making,” she says. “The government needs data, right? That’s how they work — everything has to be documented.”

Sharpe points out decisions can also be made on a smaller scale.

“As a scientist, I connect what you need to learn with what decisions you might wish to influence,” he says. “So that’s what kind of data are you going to need, how are you going to use it [and] how are you going to interpret the information?”

For Sebastian and his friends, the water testing is a bit of a means to an end — a chance to hang out and play — but it’s also sowing a seed of awareness and creating a connection to an ecosystem that is going to need their help.

As Kavanagh puts it, one of the most important objectives is to get people out into their watersheds.

“People protect what they love. The more often you go out to the water, the more connected you are to it, the more likely you are to feel like you can do things, you can speak up for it, you can become an advocate.”

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.