This is an excerpt from the new book, Memory, published October 1, 2018 by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.

Some years ago, I visited two places that in a different, more sensitive world would have surely been enshrined as memorials to the victims of the ecological catastrophes that occurred there. The first was the site of the last great nesting flock of passenger pigeons, a small stretch of woodland on the banks of the Green River near Bowling Green, Ohio. This story of extinction is well known. Yet until I stood in that cold, dark forest, I had never sensed the full weight, scale and violence of the disaster.

At one time, passenger pigeons accounted for 40 per cent of the entire bird population of North America. In 1870, when their numbers were already greatly diminished, a single column one mile wide and 320 miles long, containing an estimated two billion birds, passed over Cincinnati on the Ohio River. In 1813, as James Audubon travelled in a wagon from his home on the Ohio River to Louisville, some 60 miles away, a stream of passenger pigeons filled the sky, and the “light of the noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse.” He reached Louisville at sunset, and the birds continued to come.

He estimated that the flock contained over one billion birds, and it was but one of several columns of pigeons that blackened the sky that day. Audubon visited roosting and nesting sites and found trees two feet in diameter broken off at the ground by the weight of birds. He saw dung so deep on the forest floor that he mistook it for snow. He compared the noise of the birds taking flight to that of a gale, the sound of their landing to thunder.

Depiction of a shooting in northern Louisiana, 1875. Image: Smith Bennet via via Wikimedia Commons

It is difficult now to imagine the ravages that would destroy this creature within 50 years. Throughout the 19th century, pigeon meat was the mainstay of the American diet, and merchants in eastern cities sold as many as 18,000 birds a day. Pigeon hunting was a full-time occupation for thousands of people. A typical shooting club would go through 50,000 birds in a weekend competition. By 1896, there were only a quarter million birds left.

In April of that year, the birds came together for one last nesting flock in the forest outside of Bowling Green. Telegraph wires hummed with the news, and the hunters converged. In a final orgy of slaughter, over 200,000 pigeons were killed, 40,000 were mutilated and 100,000 chicks were destroyed. A mere 5,000 birds survived. On March 24, 1900, the last passenger pigeon in the wild was shot by a young boy. On September 1, 1914, as the Battle of the Marne consumed the flower of European youth, the world’s last passenger pigeon died in captivity.

***

When I left the scene of this final slaughter, I travelled west to Sioux City, Iowa. There, I was fortunate to visit a remnant patch of tall-grass prairie, a 180-acre preserve that represents one of the largest remaining vestiges of an ecosystem that once carpeted large swaths of North America. As I walked through that tired field, my thoughts drifted from the plants to the horizon. I tried to imagine buffalo moving through the grass, the physics of waves as millions of animals crossed the prairie.

As late as 1871, buffalo outnumbered people in North America. In that year, one could stand on a bluff in the Dakotas and see nothing but buffalo in every direction for 30 miles. Herds were so large that it took days for them to pass a single point. Wyatt Earp described one herd of a million animals stretching across a grazing area the size of Rhode Island. Within nine years of that sighting, buffalo had vanished from the plains.

“This capacity to forget, this fluidity of memory, has dire implications in a world dense with people, all desperate to satisfy their immediate material needs.”

The destruction of the buffalo resulted from a campaign of biological terrorism unparalleled in the history of the Americas. The policy of the federal government of the United States was explicit: exterminate the buffalo and destroy the commissary of the great cultures of the plains. Over 100 million bison were slaughtered. A decade after Native resistance collapsed, the general who orchestrated the campaign advised Congress to mint a commemorative medal with a dead buffalo on one side, a dead “Indian” on the other.

As I thought of this history, standing in that tall-grass prairie, what disturbed me most was the ease with which we have removed ourselves from this ecological tragedy. Today, the good and decent people of Iowa live contentedly in a landscape of cornfields claustrophobic in its monotony.

The era of the tall-grass prairie, like the time of the buffalo, is as distant from their lives as the fall of Rome or the siege of Troy. Yet the terrible events unfolded but a century ago, well within the lifetime of their grandparents. This capacity to forget, this fluidity of memory, has dire implications in a world dense with people, all desperate to satisfy their immediate material needs. Confronted by the consequences of our actions, there is always the path of forgetfulness.

***

Humans, of course, have long impacted their environments. Pre-Columbian peoples deforested much of Andean Peru long before the rise of the Inca. The severely eroded and barren hills of the Loess Plateau were once a flat and fertile plain covered with forests and rich grasslands, the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization. Romans and Greeks over many centuries destroyed the rich forests of Lebanon and virtually all timbered lands surrounding the Mediterranean. The extent of deforestation caused by successive Mayan civilizations in the lowlands of the Peten is only beginning to be fully appreciated. Successive generations of Polynesians exhausted the resources of Rapanui, or Easter Island, literally eating themselves out of house and home.

The story of Easter Island has become an ecological fable because it speaks directly to the fate of the world today. Yet we remain haunted by a capacity to forget that lingers like a vestigial and necrotic appendage on the body of humanity. Perhaps ecological amnesia served our needs in the past, as we gradually degraded the natural world over generations.

But today the time frame has contracted dramatically, even as our capacity to destroy the environment has expanded to an industrial scale, with no place on the planet beyond reach. If the Mediterranean forests fell to the Roman axe over centuries, the landscape of Sarawak, homeland of scores of Indigenous cultures dependent on the forest for their survival, was converted by chainsaw and bulldozer to wasteland in a mere generation. And yet we continue to forget.

How many of us remember, for example, that as recently as the 1920s the Colorado River delta was lush and fertile — a “milk and honey wilderness,” in the words of Aldo Leopold. Today it is a wasteland of barren mudflats, with the river but a toxic trickle in the sand. The Gulf of Alaska once turned a golden hue with the sheer numbers of returning salmon, a sight unlikely to be seen again.

Off the shores of Newfoundland, cod were so abundant that ships with wind in their sails made little progress, blocked by the density of fish in the water. Europe and much of the New World lived on the catch for 300 years. Then, in the years of my youth, factory ships industrialized the fishery and in a single generation reduced the species to a shadow in the sea.

Bison skulls await industrial processing at Michigan Carbon Works, outside of Detroit, in 1892. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As recently as the 1920s, Haiti was 80 per cent forested. Today, less than two per cent of its forest cover remains. I recall one day walking along a barren ridge with an old man who waxed eloquent as if words alone might squeeze beauty from the desolate valley of scrub and halfhearted trees that reached before us to the horizon. Though witness to an ecological holocaust that had devastated his entire country within a century, he had managed to adorn his life with his imagination.

This capacity was inspiring but also terrifying. People appear to be able to tolerate and adapt to almost any degree of environmental degradation. As the farmers of Iowa today live without wild things, Newfoundlanders survive without cod, and the people of Haiti scratch a living from soil that may never again know the comfort of shade.

***

From a distance, both in time and in space, we can perceive these terrible and poignant events for what they were, unmitigated ecological disasters that robbed us and the future of something unimaginably precious in order to satisfy the immediate mundane needs of the present. The luxury of hindsight, however, does little to cure the blindness with which we today overlook deeds of equal magnitude and folly. In a manner that will be difficult for our descendants to comprehend, we drift towards a world in which people take for granted an impoverished environment, transformed by foolish negligence and reduced by expediency to a shadow of the glory that once was.

“Our capacity to forget and adapt to successive degrees of environmental degradation is less a human trait than a consequence of culture.”

In three generations, a mere moment in the history of our species, we have throughout the world contaminated the water, air and soil, driven countless species to extinction, dammed the rivers, poisoned the rain and torn down the ancient forests. As Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson reminds us, this era will not be remembered for its wars or technological advances but as the time when men and women stood by and either passively endorsed or actively supported the massive destruction of biological diversity on the planet.

Given the dire consequences, how might we explain this peculiar and ultimately self-destructive capacity to shed memory and shift our expectations as we adapt to an increasingly impoverished world? Were this to be a fundamental adaptive trait of our species, we would surely find evidence scattered throughout the ethnographic record. But most assuredly we do not.

The Colorado River Delta. Photo: Stuart Rankin via Flickr

Indeed, to the contrary, most Indigenous peoples cultivate fidelity to the deepest of memories, myths that both link the living to the ancestral past and illuminate the way to the future. Take, for example, the Indigenous peoples of Australia, who thrived as guardians of their world for over 55,000 years. In all that time, the desire to improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, never touched them. Indigenous people accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole, the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when the primordial ancestors sang the world into existence.

The Europeans who washed ashore on the beaches of Australia in the last years of the 18th century lacked the language or imagination even to begin to understand the profound intellectual and spiritual achievements of Indigenous Australians. What they saw was a people who lived simply, people with modest technological achievements, strange faces and incomprehensible habits. To European eyes, the Indigenous people were the embodiment of savagery.

By the early years of the 20th century, a combination of disease, exploitation and murder had reduced the Indigenous population from well over a million at the time of European contact to a mere 30,000. In little over a century, a land bound together by songlines — through which the people moved effortlessly from one dimension to the next, from the future to the past and from the past to the present — was transformed from Eden to Armageddon. The manner by which the Indigenous peoples of Australia imbued the natural world with a sense of the sacred is not contrary to science but rather an acknowledgment of the complexity and wonder of ecological and biological systems that science illuminates. It suggests that our capacity to forget and adapt to successive degrees of environmental degradation is less a human trait than a consequence of culture.

***

As a young man, I was raised on the coast of British Columbia to believe that the rainforests existed to be cut. This was the ideology of scientific forestry that I studied in school and practised in the woods as a logger. This cultural perspective was profoundly different from that of the local First Nations. Whereas I was sent into the forest to cut it down, a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw youth of similar age was traditionally dispatched during his hamatsa initiation into those same forests to confront Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven, cannibal spirits living at the north end of the world. Is the forest mere cellulose and board feet? Or is the forest the domain of the spirits?

Herein, perhaps, lies the essence of the relationship between many Indigenous peoples and the natural world. The malarial swamps of New Guinea, the chill winds of Tibet and the white heat of the Sahara leave little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait commonly associated with the Inuit. Nomadic hunters and gatherers in Borneo have no conscious sense of stewardship for mountain forests that they lack the technical capacity to destroy.

What these cultures have done, however, is to forge through time and ritual a traditional mystique of the earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on far more subtle intuition — the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. They do not perceive mountains, rivers and forests as being inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination, sustained by memory.

Perhaps this explains why it is impossible for the Haida to forget the colour of the sea in the fall, and why the Lakota still hear the thunder of bison crossing the prairies, and why, in the wasted homeland of the Penan in Borneo, shadows still mark the ground where trees once stood in the forest. Just as 18th-century slavers concocted racial fantasies to mask the evil of their trade, perhaps we have learned to shed memory to avoid confronting the actual consequences of our egregious violations of the natural world. Our shifting expectations and dimming memory are less an adaptive trait than a reflexive impulse. If we are responsible for the numbing of our own senses, we can surely awaken to new possibilities as stewards of life, inspired by Indigenous peoples who have walked this path before us, guided by a conscience informed by memory.

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.

My father came of age in the 1930s, the son of a doctor in the lead-zinc mining town of Kimberley in the East Kootenays. To reach his boarding school on Vancouver Island, he would take a boat downriver to Spokane, Washington, where he could catch a train west for Seattle and the coast. Such was the state of infrastructure in British Columbia at the time — an economically debilitating void that men of my father’s generation sought avidly to fill as they came back from war in 1945.

The master architect was W.A.C. Bennett, premier from 1952 to 1972, another son of a small interior town, whose vision for the province embraced public works projects on a gargantuan scale, viewing each as an almost biblical challenge, a triumph of personal will. As his political rival and later ally “Flying Phil” Gaglardi laced the province with bridges and roads — many through lands conveniently owned by his sons — Bennett stamped his name on the largest construction project in the history of the province, one of the world’s highest earth-filled dams, a $6 billion investment (in today’s dollars) that flooded 350,000 acres of forested land, displacing, without consultation, the entire Tsay Keh Dene First Nation, a people who have yet to recover from the blow.

W.A.C. Bennett, like most of his peers, believed that any natural resource not used was wasted. Modern industrial logging took off during his tenure, driven by new machinery and technologies, and fuelled by a triumphant ideology that called for the elimination of all primary forests in the province. Science, it was said, had shown that the annual increment of cellulose in a young tree plantation was greater than that in an ancient forest. The old growth was, by definition, a forest in decline: the trees were over-mature. To see evidence of decadence, one had only to look at the deadfall, tons of rotting timber wasted on the forest floor.

Forest clearcut near Port Renfrew, British Columbia. Photo: TJ Watt

The goal of proper management was to replace these inefficient stands with fresh and productive new forests. A regime of carefully monitored clear-cut logging would eliminate the old growth, the debris would be burned and the land would be sown with uniform plantations comprised of only the most up-to-date conifer seedlings. In short, scientific forestry would clean up the mess inherited from nature. If it served the economic interests of industry by rationalizing the wholesale eradication of the old-growth forests of the province, so much the better.

Men like my father shared W.A.C. Bennett’s frontier values, honed by the Great Depression, forged years before the word “ecology,” let alone “biodiversity,” “sustainability,” “biosphere” or “climate change,” had entered our vocabulary. In the early 1960s, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was considered a great environmental victory. To look back at that era is not to judge, but merely to suggest that we now live in a completely different time and that to allow such values of the past to determine public policy today would be as inappropriate as anchoring our future in the convictions of nineteenth-century clergymen who claimed with absolute certainty that the earth was but 6,000 years old.

To look back at that era is not to judge, but merely to suggest that we now live in a completely different time and that to allow such values of the past to determine public policy today would be as inappropriate as anchoring our future in the convictions of nineteenth-century clergymen who claimed with absolute certainty that the earth was but 6,000 years old.

And yet, as the recent decision on the highly controversial Site C dam suggests, this is precisely what we’ve done and continue to do throughout the northern reaches of the province.

That federal and provincial governments have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on unrealized mega-development schemes may come as a surprise to many urban Canadians for, much as we like the idea of the North, few of us ever go there. Gordon Campbell in his decade as premier, and indeed in his entire life, never once visited the northwest quadrant of British Columbia, even as his government endorsed and funded capital-intensive initiatives that promised to fundamentally transform the region.

To appreciate the extent of these ambitions, not to mention the fiscal and environmental consequences of implementation and failure, consider the fate of just five industrial projects, all transformative in scale, that have been proposed or enacted in northwest British Columbia since the late 1960s. All of these centred in the Stikine Valley, traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nation, a vast and remote region roughly the size of Switzerland.

Five megaprojects in the Stikine Valley

The first of these projects, and the only one to come on line and reach the end of its life, is Cassiar Asbestos, which declared bankruptcy just before shutting down in 1992. For 40 years before its closure the mine had thrived as the one industrial magnet for infrastructure development and employment in a region the size of Oregon.

A company town of 1,200, Cassiar attracted workers by offering easy access to home ownership and by supporting an active civic culture along with all the facilities of a regular town, a movie theatre, two churches and two schools, a small hospital, a ski hill and curling rink, a library and a recreation centre. The Lion’s Club and PTA met regularly in a company hall where members of the handicraft, bridge, badminton and gun clubs also gathered. There were hockey teams and choirs, boy scouts and girl guides.

When the mine closed, every structure was dismantled or moved. Those who had made a home there, some for two generations, simply scattered to the winds. Today, Cassiar is a ghost town of fading memories. All that remains is a mountain of toxic tailings, 16 million tons altogether.

The 1970s brought two megaprojects to the Stikine, both of which, in the memorable words of filmmaker Monty Bassett, ultimately collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity. In 1969, BC Rail decided to extend the provincial railway in Nak’azdli Whut’en territory some 540 kilometres from Fort St. James northwest to Kaska Dena lands at Dease Lake, an arbitrary destination that consisted at the time of just a handful of broken-down structures once owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The rationale was to open up the country for resource extraction, notably the extensive anthracite deposits underlying the headwaters of the Skeena, Stikine and Nass Rivers, a region known today as the Sacred Headwaters.

Today, Cassiar is a ghost town of fading memories. All that remains is a mountain of toxic tailings, 16 million tons altogether.

Construction of the Dease Lake extension began in 1970, but costs soon soared to $360 million ($1.5 billion today), five times the original estimate. When, in 1977, amidst considerable controversy, the project was abandoned, the rail grade reached as far as Dease Lake, but only the first 84 kilometres at the southern end were operational. A Royal Commission established to review the project revealed not only massive cost overruns but also shoddy construction from one end of the line to the other, a consequence, in part, of W.A.C. Bennett’s imposed mandate to build the project at “minimum cost/maximum speed.” Today the grade, locally dubbed the “railway to nowhere,” serves as the most expensive backcountry mountain bike trail in the world.

Even as the provincial government struggled with the political fallout of the collapse of the Dease Lake extension, BC Hydro was gearing up to build a massive hydroelectric development in the canyons of the Iskut and Stikine Rivers. Three dams were planned for the Iskut, and two on the Stikine, including Site Z, a concrete arch dam projected to soar as high as a 75-story building. Together the Stikine dams were expected to completely inundate Canada’s largest and most dramatic canyon, destroying a stretch of wild river known throughout the world as the K2 of white water challenges. The cost of the project was a staggering $7.6 billion ($46 billion in 2017 dollars), making it the biggest capital project ever conceived by BC Hydro.

By project design the Site Zed reservoir would reach up the Stikine and drown the new railway bridge that had only just been completed at considerable expense as part of the BC Rail Dease Lake extension, an indication of just how little coordination occurred between government entities responsible for these enormous industrial projects.

Today the ‘railway to nowhere,’ serves as the most expensive backcountry mountain bike trail in the world.

Despite BC Hydro’s dire predictions that, without the Stikine/Iskut dams, the province would face severe shortages of electricity, the project stalled, though not before tens of millions of dollars had been spent. What saved the canyon was both strong local opposition from the Tahltan First Nation and a fortuitous shift in the corporate culture at BC Hydro that resulted in a new public focus on efficiency and conservation. The power shortages long anticipated by proponents of the dams never materialized.

The two final examples — Christy Clark’s dream of an LNG-driven economy and the saga of the Northwest Transmission Line (her “powerline to nowhere”) — leave little doubt that industrial folly conflated with corruption persists to this day. Indeed, one is left to wonder what, if anything, has been learned from the costly debacles of the 1970s, even as we continue to elect politicians cut from the same ethical cloth as “Flying Phil” Gaglardi.

Whatever one’s views of the virtues or challenges of the energy sector of the economy, Clark’s failure after such fanfare to bring online even a single LNG development was notable. Now that LNG Canada’s investors have decided to move forward under the Horgan government, Kitimat is in for a boom while northeastern B.C. can anticipate increased pressure to frack for gas to feed the export plant. 

Finally, we come to perhaps the most disturbing of all these megaprojects, though one that, on the face of it, ought to have been the least controversial — the extension of the provincial power grid through the construction of the 344-kilometre, 287-kilovolt Northwest Transmission Line from Terrace to Bob Quinn Lake.

In 2008, the Mining Association of BC released an industry survey estimating that $15 billion in new capital investment leading to 10,000 full-time jobs might be generated if only power on an industrial scale could be delivered to the mineral-rich northwest quadrant of the province. Premier Gordon Campbell immediately set aside $10 million to kick-start the environmental assessment.

Rationalizing the costs of the investment, initially budgeted at $400 million, were a series of large industrial projects in different stages of development, all promising and all in Tahltan territory. These included Imperial Metals’ open-pit copper and gold proposal on Todagin Mountain; two similar mines at Galore Creek and Shaft Creek, respectively; a run of the river hydro project at Forest Kerr canyon; Shell’s million-acre coalbed methane tenure in the Klappan; and Fortune Minerals’ anthracite claim, also in the Klappan.

Even as the premier launched the initiative, Byng Giraud, then vice-president of the Mining Association of BC, cautioned that all these “big-ticket items were more a wish list than anything certain,” adding that “nobody should necessarily go to the bank on this.” Unfortunately, someone did — the B.C. taxpayer, although she/he didn’t know it at the time.

Within two years the projected cost of the Northwest Transmission Line had increased by half; eventually, it would come in at $736 million. In addition, BC Hydro committed to reimburse Imperial Metals $52 million for the costs of building the company’s dedicated line from Bob Quinn to the Red Chris mine site on Todagin Mountain as well as the costs of a smaller line north to the Tahltan community of Iskut.

View north across Todagin Plateau and the pit of the Red Chris mine. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

Of this $736 million, Alta Gas, owner of the Forrest Kerr project, would by agreement pay $180 million. In Ottawa, the Harper government agreed to invest $130 million from the Green Infrastructure Fund, money set aside, according to the government website, to support “projects that will improve the quality of the environment and … that promote cleaner air, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and cleaner water.” The official rationale for the inclusion of the $130 million was Ottawa’s desire to get 350 Tahltan at the small community of Iskut off of diesel generation to reduce their carbon footprint, albeit at a per-resident cost of close to $400,000. Even with this questionable federal subsidy, B.C. taxpayers remained on the hook for at least $478 million.

For the provincial government things began to unravel just as construction of the transmission line was coming to an end. In 2012, Shell withdrew from its coalbed methane development in the Klappan. The promising and highly promoted Galore Creek copper and gold project imploded due to fiscal challenges and uncertainties. Fortune Minerals remained committed to its anthracite play in the Klappan, but, given Tahltan opposition, it had very weak legs, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Tsilqot’in decision.

Alta Gas’s hydro project at Forrest Kerr was a going concern. But the public was going to be hard pressed to understand why well over $700 million of public funds were spent to extend the provincial grid to facilitate a private power company’s efforts to sell back electricity to the state. By 2012, of the five other speculative industrial projects that had rationalized the construction of the transmission line back in 2008, only one remained viable — Imperial’s Red Chris mine on Todagin Mountain.

The powerline to nowhere

There is most assuredly nothing wrong with governments creating infrastructure that will promote economic growth or bring benefits to a wide range of citizens and diverse business interests. But things get a bit murkier when the benefits accrue exclusively to one sector of the economy. And they become downright muddy when they effectively benefit a single company, especially one owned by an individual who has heavily bankrolled the political campaigns of the government authorizing the massive public expenditure. 

Here was another challenge for the provincial government. Imperial’s Red Chris project had been kept afloat by the personal investment and loan guarantees of Murray Edwards, owner of the Calgary Flames. His infusion of some $200 million had effectively bought him ownership of Imperial.

On the eve of the 2013 provincial election, with the Liberals behind in the polls, at the Calgary Petroleum Club Edwards hosted a private dinner for Premier Christy Clark that raised $1 million for her campaign. Nothing illegal in this, but it was hardly something to reassure the B.C. public, given that Red Chris was the only industrial project aside from Forrest Kerr to benefit from construction of the Northwest Transmission Line.

Yet even here the optics for the government were problematic. Todagin is home to the largest concentration of Stone sheep in the world, a resident population that attracts remarkable numbers of predators. A wildlife sanctuary in the sky, the massif looks west to Edziza, sacred mountain of the Tahltan; north to the Grand Canyon of the Stikine; and east to the Sacred Headwaters, birthplace of the Stikine, Skeena and Nass Rivers; and beyond to the Spatsizi, widely recognized as the Serengeti of Canada.

There are more than 4,000 copper properties in the world. To build an open-pit mine on Todagin was as audacious an undertaking as drilling for oil in the Sistine Chapel.

But consider the provincial government’s dilemma. Some $800 million had been spent to build what was effectively a subsidized line for a single mine. At the same time the government had to have a successful mine at Red Chris to avoid accusations of having built a “powerline to nowhere.” In the 1970s, the collapse of the Dease Lake extension of BC Rail, the so-called “railway to nowhere,” had brought down a government.

To build an open-pit mine on Todagin was as audacious an undertaking as drilling for oil in the Sistine Chapel.

If the optics of Red Chris were already poor, public perception became truly dreadful in the wake of the Mount Polley disaster in August 2014 — a catastrophic failure of the tailings dam at Imperial’s other major holding, an open-pit copper and gold mine near Quesnel Lake that had been promoted by the company as the design prototype for the Red Chris development. Altogether, 10 million cubic metres of industrial water and 4.5 million cubic metres of slurry tainted with heavy metals surged into one of the most celebrated salmon lakes in the world, the place of origin of fully one-quarter of the Fraser River run.

In the wake of the Mount Polley disaster there was a strong sense in Iskut and, indeed, throughout British Columbia that Red Chris would be put on hold at least until the cause of the failure at Mount Polley was fully determined and corrective measures established and implemented. In fact, quite the opposite occurred. Just six months after the disaster, and within days of the release of a report that was, by every measure, damning, the Red Chris mine received an interim permit to begin processing copper and gold ore using the same wet tailings design that had failed at Mount Polley.

After two years in operation, with the eastern plateau of Todagin and the entire upper Todagin River drainage transformed into an industrial zone, the fate of the Red Chris mine remains uncertain. In December 2017, a leading credit rating agency, Moody’s Investor Service, assessed Imperial Metals’ “probability of default” and concluded that the company was “judged to be speculative, of poor standing, subject to very high default risk and may be in default on some, but not all, of their long-term debt obligations.” According to the latest report of British Columbia’s chief minister of mines, Imperial Metals has but $73 million set aside in bonds against estimated reclamation costs for its mines of $103 million.

Should Imperial fail to cover its debt obligations and be forced to default, the costs of reclamation and clean-up of all of its projects will fall to the people of British Columbia.

Site C dam a new chapter in B.C. white elephants

In the end, we are surely left overwhelmed by the scale of the corruption, the extent of the folly and the aggregate waste of taxpayers’ wealth. And yet it all continues. Consider the ill-fated Site C dam on the Peace River. Conceived by the Liberal government, the pharaonic, partially built hydroelectric project had already cost more than $2 billion when inherited by the NDP upon its election in May 2017.

Politically it presented a true challenge of leadership. Premier John Horgan had to decide whether to spend $2 billion to clean up a $2 billion mess inherited from the previous government or go ahead with the project, mortgaging the province’s future for a white elephant that few wanted and, according to many technical reports, nobody needed.

In the end, succumbing to pressure from the NDP base, including powerful unions, Horgan took the politically expedient decision to proceed with Site C, despite anticipated costs well in excess of $10 billion, all for a project that, on the campaign trail only months before, he had vociferously rejected for sound economic, technical and environmental reasons.

If many British Columbians were disappointed by his decision, many more were stunned to learn that the Liberal government of Christy Clark had committed the province to such industrial folly in the first place.

Silenced in the shuffle were any number of authorities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike — engineers, technicians, hunters and trappers, economists, farmers, ranchers, guides, environmentalists, lawyers and owners of small businesses — who had argued persuasively that the dam was both unnecessary and certain, over time, to be a drain on the provincial economy. The voices that were heard differed little, both in their values and priorities, from those of all these long-forgotten men who, in their enterprise and unshakeable confidence, left as their legacy the many industrial fiascos that litter the landscape and taint the history of the North.

Site C construction, July 2018. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

For too many years politicians in all parties in British Columbia have told the people of the province that the only way we can generate an economy is to tear open our land, tear down our forests and empty our seas. Such tired and threadbare thinking both denies our potential and betrays our destiny. We are so few and we live in a place that is so vast. We are civil, decent and among the most educated citizenries in the world. Our intellectual and entrepreneurial capacity is limitless. When politicians suggest that the only way we can make a living is to compromise our natural heritage, what is revealed is not a lack of economic options but, rather, a dearth of imagination and moral character on the part of those we elect to office.

When politicians suggest that the only way we can make a living is to compromise our natural heritage, what is revealed is not a lack of economic options but, rather, a dearth of imagination and moral character on the part of those we elect to office.

Political leaders thinking not of the next election but of the next generations know that true and lasting prosperity in British Columbia will only come as we transform our economy from one dependent on natural resource extraction to one based on knowledge, technology and innovation.

Market forces are already driving us in the right direction. Information technology and biotech, together with media and film, are now dominant elements in the economy of the Lower Mainland, home to the great majority of British Columbians. Tourism throughout the province employs more workers than mining, industrial forestry and commercial fishing combined. Government can play a significant role with wise and cost-effective investments in education, infrastructure, affordable housing and virtually anything that will enhance quality of life, making the province ever more desirable for individuals and businesses aspiring to occupy the heights of the new knowledge-based economy.

What we don’t need are governments beholden to individuals and enterprises entrenched in the past and blind to the world coming at them from tomorrow. With the extension of the Northwest Transmission Line the Liberal government spent $750 million of public funds on a powerline that has largely benefitted a single mine employing but 300 people, an industrial project that, by design, implied the violation of perhaps the richest wildlife sanctuary in the province. That same level of investment would have allowed Vancouver to extend the SkyTrain from Burnaby to Point Grey, enhancing the well-being of millions of British Columbians, and the prosperity of hundreds of independent and self-sufficient businesses, not one of which would even imagine seeking or receiving government subsidies comparable to Christy Clark’s singular gift to Imperial Metals. 

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.