Barry Lopez’s new non-fiction book opens in Hawaii, where he is on holiday with his wife Debra and nine-year-old grandson.

In the space of a single morning Lopez stands on a Pearl Harbour memorial terrace above the sunken USS Arizona, which holds the remains of hundreds of Americans entombed when Japanese dive bombers attacked in 1941, and then he snorkels on a coral reef with schools of colourful tropical fish.

Reading by his hotel pool after lunch that day, Lopez watches a Japanese woman dive gracefully into the water. “In the beauty of this moment, I suddenly feel the question: What will happen to us?” Lopez writes.

He stands up, book in hand, and searches the breaking surf of the Pacific for his grandson, who grins at him from the slope of a wave.

“What is going to happen to all of us now, in a time of militant factions, of daily violence?” Lopez asks. “I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what’s coming.”

So begins Horizon, a 500-page autobiographical reflection on Lopez’s many years of travel and research in more than seventy countries.

The book zooms in and magnifies six regions of the globe — the High Arctic, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, the Kenyan desert, Australia’s Botany Bay and Cape Foulweather in the state of Oregon, where Lopez makes his home — probing the interactions between people and ecosystems, and exploring where we’ve come from and where humanity might be headed.

On March 25, The Narwhal will co-sponsor a Vancouver event featuring Barry Lopez in conversation with explorer, author and anthropologist Wade Davis. Lopez says he’s never met Davis before — “we’re aware of each other, of course” — although they share the same literary agent.

“The responsibility I feel is to make sure that everybody goes home with an increased sense of self-worth and a greater sense of possibility, in their own lives and in the lives of their family and their country and the world,” Lopez told The Narwhal.

Here’s our interview with him, edited for brevity.

What was the genesis for writing Horizon?

I’m 74 now. I’ve been doing this for 50-some years. I’ve seen a lot of the world. I’m very fortunate that way. The scale of what I was doing just grew over those 50 years. The first big non-fiction book I did was Of Wolves and Men and the subject matter was constrained because it all fit around one animal and perceptions of that animal. Then I wrote Arctic Dreams, which expanded to include a whole region of the earth.

With Horizon, I’m really looking at the whole world. I had big questions at the back of my mind that were generated partly by the culture I lived in but also by the world I lived in. Somewhere in the late ’80s I decided that I wanted to explore those questions. I didn’t quite know how but I chose those five places, and of course Cape Foulweather, because I thought what I was trying to find I would find there.

What are some of those questions that you wanted to explore?

They’re enormous questions … who are we, and where are we going? That’s what I was looking at. The second question more than the first one. Given political upheaval, environmental disaster, all the usual bugbears, where are we headed? It doesn’t look good, you know.

Acclaimed author Barry Lopez will appear at an event in Vancouver on March 25 in conversation with Wade Davis. Photo: David Liittschwager

You remind us that we’re just like other species, vulnerable to extinction. When you say it doesn’t look good, do you think this is where humankind is headed, to extinction?

Every species is headed toward extinction. We may be accelerating our own extinction by refusing to pay attention to things like global climate change and the finite nature of natural resources.

What would it look like to put more of a focus on conservation and less of a focus on profit, as you suggest?

Once you’re involved in government or large-scale business that’s not an area you’re going to be looking at very closely because, frankly, it will cut into your profits. Thinking about how Indigenous people look at it, the focus is on stability not profit. It’s more important to have a stable society moving through time than it is to have a group of people half-mad to make a profit.

Does that exist anywhere in the world? Yes, but on a very small scale and almost exclusively among Indigenous people. The reason it’s so hard to talk about is because the people with economic and political power are not interested in undermining a system that maintains their power and offers them yachts and international vacations, and all the rest of it.

You describe the loss of Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous languages and Indigenous cultures as the loss of an entire ‘way of knowing’ and you suggest that ‘way of knowing’ might help us out of the predicament we’ve got ourselves into. Why is that?

There are somewhere between 5,000 to 6,000 languages that are still spoken, by at least a few people. When we look closely at language we see that there are emotions and situations that we don’t have any words for in English, or in French, or in Swahili. And then we come upon languages that do have words for those feelings and emotions and events.

There are some really articulate, really bright people, who have a reality or describe a reality different from the way we do in the western world in English and the Romance languages, German of course too. We in some sense are trapped by the languages we speak in a situation where we can’t articulate what we feel is wrong or we can’t devise solutions to the problems we are facing. The smart thing to do would be to ask somebody who didn’t grow up the way you did with the same system of logic.

But we’re in this age of nationalism. We have people saying that we should come first, America first, which is just ignorant. Not if you want to solve the problems we’re facing.

You write about transforming a boundary into a horizon, turning something that’s a barrier into something more infinite. What is the biggest boundary we face right now and how could that become more of a horizon or an opportunity?

The great, seemingly insurmountable problem is to get people to take climate change seriously.

I remember in 1988, drilling for ice core in Antarctica. We were at the cutting edge 30 years ago of developing a database to prove what most atmospheric scientists were saying — the planet is warming. But that was 30 years ago and nothing’s been done.

The climate accord agreement in Paris has not got quite the punch it should have because the fellow in the White House in the [United] States, for reasons that make no sense but that make sense to his political base, he decided to back out. You’re in a hopeless situation if your country is run by an ignoramus.

Do you see any hope of changing those barriers into more of a horizon, perhaps not in the United States right now but in other countries?

The decisions that have been made in Washington [mean] that the United States is no longer the leader of anything. The goal of making America great again is turning out to be making America less.

It’s a curious thing to try to address this problem because you can propose that there is not much time left, and in that emergency situation you’ve got to act decisively, quickly and boldly. When you do that, as a country or as an individual, you’re going to get a beating down from others who are comfortable with the way it is.

It will take incredible courage for any government to act on behalf of its people to preserve a future for its children.

It will take incredible courage for any government to act on behalf of its people to preserve a future for its children.

Are you hopeful that could happen?

I have a tremendous belief in the human imagination and a faith in human beings. I can go back in my memory bank and recall dozens of moments when I was travelling with people who had no standing anywhere. They weren’t part of a government. They weren’t part of any business.

They were ordinary people. And yet in conversation I could see that they were brilliant and I would always ask myself the same question: why isn’t this woman, why isn’t this guy, at the conference table? And the reason they’re not at the conference table is because they don’t speak English or their hair is too long, or their skin is too dark, or they didn’t go to school, or something like that.

This is a heart-breaking, pathetic situation we’re in. We are in an emergency situation and we believe that the same people who put us in this situation will be the ones to figure out how to turn it around. That’s a losing bet.

The only positive thing I think I see is the dependable rebelliousness of younger people. It’s easy to think that their rebellion is uninformed or naive but there is a substantial number of young people in all countries who are working through experiment after experiment trying to figure out how to get the rest of us out of the hell hole, and that I trust.

If we’re going to get out of here it’s going to be the energy and the insight and the nimbleness of young people. Every university I go to I encounter young people who I believe could rebuild the world and make it a safe place for humanity. You’d have to say that I’m hopeful.

You write that homo sapiens have built a trap for themselves by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. What are some of those orthodoxies?

More is better. That’s it in a nutshell.

I think that’s an outgrowth of privileging the individual, which has been our story in the cultural west since the scientific revolution and the Renaissance — privileging the individual to the degree that community is destroyed.

Given the dire situation that the planet — and indeed humanity, not to mention other species —  is in these days, do you see your book as bearing witness to a world that is either poised to change or to end as we know it?

Every writer that addresses this kind of question has to have a sense of social responsibility. When I am in Galapagos or when I’m in Antarctica I know that I’m there for those who didn’t get to go. And I’ve got to be responsible, as an observer or as a researcher, to inform.

I want to be able to write something that helps [people] process the difficulty from their own point of view in their own lives. I don’t think of what I do as adventure as much as part of an effort to be part of the human effort to really make this world a better world for all creatures…which is of course grandiose.

What’s your next project? Do you have more travels planned?

I don’t know what my next project is. I’ve had some health difficulties and it’s really slowed me down. I’m waiting for the book to come out and do all I can to support it. And then I’ll start thinking about where to go next, which might be nowhere but my own home.

I have shelves full of notebooks and drafts of stories and essays. I think I could do fine by just sitting here in Oregon. But I still have that drive that I describe in the book where I just want to go. I want to go and see things I haven’t seen. Maybe I’ll get to do that.

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 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.

An ugly thread of misspent taxpayer dollars, environmental destruction and conflict-of-interest — backed by a government beholden to the mining industry — runs along the recently completed Northwest Transmission Line, charges acclaimed explorer and scholar Wade Davis.

The $716-million transmission line, budgeted in 2010 at $404-million, snakes 344 kilometres into B.C.’s wilderness, from north of Terrace to Bob Quinn Lake, and, to the alarm of downstream Southeast Alaska residents, the line is opening the area to mining in the headwaters of vital salmon-bearing rivers.

Those concerns have grown exponentially since the Mount Polley tailings dam collapsed in August 2014, sending 24-million cubic metres of toxic debris flowing into Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake, and groups in B.C. and Alaska are warning that a Mount Polley-type disaster in the area known as the Sacred Headwaters, where acidity is likely to be high, would wipe out the multi-billion dollar fishing and tourism industries on both sides of the border.

Davis, a writer, former explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, anthropology professor and B.C. Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of B.C., is appalled at the B.C. government’s decision to encourage mining in the ecologically rich northwest corner of the province and at the lack of government oversight as the pricey Northwest Transmission Line was carved through the wilderness.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

“It’s industrialization of the wilderness. It’s the story of politicians more concerned about the next election than the next generation,” he said.

Davis, who sometimes visits 30 countries a year, loves the wild beauty of B.C.’s northwest corner, which has the world’s largest population of stone sheep, grizzly bears, caribou and wolves.

“It’s not for nothing that it is called the Serengeti of Canada,” he said.

A Sweet Deal for Imperial Metals

All of which makes it inexplicable that the government would forego future high-end tourism opportunities by encouraging mining on a site such as Todagin Mountain where the Red Chris mine, owned by Imperial Metals — the same company that owns the Mount Polley mine— opened in February, he said.

An Energy and Mines Ministry spokesman, responding to questions by e-mail, said the province, Imperial Metals and Tahltan Nation — which approved a co-management agreement with the company in April — have been working to develop wildlife management strategies “to take care of this resource for future generations.”

That does not satisfy Davis, who owns the closest private property to the $650-million Red Chris copper and gold mine and believes the Liberal government has bulldozed ahead with the power line without a proper review and despite public concerns.

“The government was 100 per cent engaged in an effort to make this happen to the point of deceiving the Canadian people and certainly squandering their tax revenue,” he said, questioning the influence of party fundraisers.

Murray Edwards, controlling shareholder of Imperial Metals Corp. — a major donor to the B.C. Liberals — organized a $1-million fundraiser at the Calgary Petroleum Club for Premier Christy Clark shortly before the last election.

B.C. Government Committed to Mining Expansion

It is expected that mining companies will push for concessions, but it is also expected that the government will ask the important questions to minimize environmental damage, said Davis, who has frequently worked with industry and says he has no objection to responsible mining.

“But, here we have a government that is ideologically committed to making (Red Chris) go ahead,” said Davis, who speculates that Imperial Metals was given an easy ride to avoid the perception of a power line to nowhere.

Financial experts believe it was essential for Imperial Metals to get cash flow from Red Chris as soon as possible because Mount Polley remained closed for nearly one year and cleanup costs are estimated at between $67-million and $100-million. In May, the company reported a loss of $33.4 million during the first three months of the year.

The Northwest Transmission Line was billed by government as the engine that would drive economic development in the province’s northwest by powering up revenue-generating mining operations in the richly mineralized area.

So far, Red Chris is the only mine drawing power from the line. After a provincial review, the mine received provincial approval in June to operate the tailings storage pond, which has the same unlined earth and rock dam design as Mount Polley.

Red Chris is likely to be followed by Seabridge Gold’s Kerr-Sulpherets-Mitchell (KSM) mine, in the Unuk River headwaters, which will be one of the world’s largest open-pit copper and gold mines. KSM has received federal and provincial approval and is tying up funding for the $5.3-billion project while obtaining permits. The mine is expected to employ more than 1,000 people for 50 years.

The transmission line is also bringing power to the Tahltan community of Iskut, whose 350 residents previously relied on diesel, and to the $725-million, 195-megawatt AltaGas Forrest Kerr run-of-river independent power project.

AltaGas contributed $180-million of the cost and Imperial Metals contributed $69 million of the $209 million cost to build the Iskut extension. BC Hydro then purchased the extension for about $52 million.

Davis charges that the environmental insensitivities of Imperial Metals were revealed during the extension’s construction when the company clearcut to the edge of the scenic Stewart-Cassiar Highway, instead of leaving a buffer zone of trees as shown in the original plans.

Cutting trees adjacent to the highway is allowed and the company had all necessary permits, according to the ministry.

“As much as possible, the cutting is contained within the right-of-way of the highway to reduce impact to the visual quality of the surrounding landscape. In some instances, due to geotechnical and safety concerns (i.e. slope stability,) the power lines are located away from the highway,” said the ministry spokesman.

Taxpayers on the Hook?

The Iskut project enabled the province to obtain $130 million from the federal Green Infrastructure Fund. But, according to Davis, that is something that should make taxpayers uneasy when they look at the bill of almost $400,000 per resident and he questions labelling the project as green when, during construction, the equivalent of 14,000 logging truckloads of wood were burned.

BC Hydro has said the timber was burned because it was marginal and the long distance to roads and markets made selling it uneconomical.

 A Mining Association of B.C. study estimates the transmission line will attract $15-billion in mining investment, 10,000 jobs and $300 million in annual tax revenue.

However, energy economics expert Marvin Shaffer, adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, would like British Columbians to look carefully at those figures, especially as the province decided to go ahead with the project without a B.C. Utilities Commission review.

“The rate policy in B.C. effectively subsidizes new mines and this was a line that was heavily subsidized,” he said.

Metal mines require large amounts of electricity. The standard industrial rate charged in B.C. is $40 to $50 per megawatt hour, but the draw on power means more power sources are needed and producing electricity from new sources, such as the Site C dam, will cost about $90 per megawatt hour, Shaffer said.

“An individual mine will consume up to 10 per cent of the output of Site C and the price doesn’t cover even half the cost of a new supply,” he said.

“The government argues that it is economic development, so then you have to ask: what are the benefits in subsidizing mining developments?”

Many of the jobs are likely to go to people living outside the province, Shaffer said.

“There might be some stimulus, but it’s not as if it’s going to be employing a lot of British Columbians who would otherwise be unemployed,” he said.

Image Credit: BC Hydro

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Imperial Metals is experiencing troubled times.

After the catastrophic breach of a toxic tailings pond at its Mount Polley mine on August 4th, British Columbians across the province have called into question the safety of the company’s other mega mine projects.

The Red Chris mine, located in B.C.’s northwestern corner is now under intense scrutiny by protestors from the Tahltan Nation who are blocking access to the company’s site, saying they won’t leave until independent reviewers address mine safety concerns.

On August 8th, the Klabona Keepers, headed by a group of mostly women elders, set up two camps, blocking each of the two access roads to the mine. Trucks are parked across the roads and makeshift wooden barricades have been erected to keep company vehicles from entering.

Located on Toddagin Mountain, near the Tahltan village of Iskut, the Red Chris mine is scheduled to begin operations later this year.

Like Mount Polley, Red Chris is an open pit copper and gold mine. And, like Mount Polley, the Red Chris mine is expected to produce millions of tons of toxic tailings over its projected 28-year life span.

The company has set aside a pristine mountain lake called Black Lake as a tailings holding pond. Black Lake is located above lakes and creeks which drain into the salmon bearing Iskut and Stikine Rivers – the lifelines of the Tahltan people.

For the elders, the current blockade is not only a show of solidarity with those affected by the Mount Polley disaster, but an act of self-defense.

One of two roadblocks blocking access to the Red Chris Mine. Photo by Albrecht Berg.

During initial consultations between Imperial Metals and the Tahltan, the company allayed environmental concerns by pointing to their safe track record at Mount Polley. The Red Chris mine would share the same design, the company said.

Now, in the wake of the Mount Polley spill, locals fear the Red Chris mine poses a similar danger to the environment, fish and wildlife.

Following the Mount Polley spill Imperial Metals’ President Brian Kynoch said, “If you asked me two weeks ago if that could happen, I would have said it couldn’t happen.”

During a visit to the Red Chris blockade, one of the elders at the camp, who, like her peers, prefers to be identified simply as Klabona Keeper, told me: “When you live off the land, when the land is your kitchen, the consequences of the kind of thing that happened at Mount Polley, are unimaginable.”

Elders sit around the fire at one of two blockades. Photo by Albrecht Berg.

The main demand of the protestors is a reliable guarantee that the kind of catastrophe seen at Mount Polley will never happen at Red Chris.

“We want an independent review of the tailings pond system by a third party independent of both the government and Imperial Metals,” the elder said.

The current standoff has brought into focus a whole range of issues around the Red Chris project. Mistrust is growing around the promised benefits of the Red Chris project.

Author and anthropologist Wade Davis, who has called the area home for the last 40 years, said the Red Chris project is a massive threat to the local landscape.

Standing in front of his home on the shores of stunning Ealue Lake, which is part of the watershed threatened by the mine, he explained that Todaggin Mountain is home to the world’s largest population of enigmatic stone sheep.

Anthropologist Wade Davis at his home on Ealue Lake. Photo by Albrecht Berg.

“This project, a hundred years hence, will be seen as one of the greatest acts of folly in history of Canadian public policy,” Davis said.

Concerns over the future of the mine have also brought new emphasis to working conditions at the mine which one Tahltan employee described as problematic.

“They can fire us without prior notice, while we have to hand a two-week notice in order to quit,” he said.

Complaints of racism against Tahltan workers have also surfaced. According to Imperial metals, 18 per cent of workers at the site are Tahltan.

“Why not 50 per cent?” one of the elders at the blockade responded when questioned on the issue.

“After all, this is Tahltan country,” she said.

Many of the locals view the Red Chris project as a showcase for how the extractive sector functions in the province.

A Red Chris Mine sign with blockaders in the background. Photo by Albrecht Berg.

B.C. subsidized the construction of a 300 kilometre-long power line to Iskut for the mine, using $750 million taxpayers dollars.

The official rationale for the North West Transmission Line was to break the reliance of 300 Iskut residents on diesel-generated power. Yet critics see the project as nothing more than a gift to Imperial Metals.

Provincial support for the Red Chris project is also seen in a new light, after significant campaign contributions for the B.C. Liberals from Imperial Metals came to light. Murray Edwards, the largest stakeholder of Imperial Metals and Calgary Flames owner, hosted a private fundraising dinner for Christy Clark’s campaign in Calgary ahead of B.C.’s May election. 

Since the events at Mount Polley, Imperial Metals and the B.C. government have engaged in significant damage control, with Minister of Mines Bill Bennett likened the spill to an avalanche.

Edwards pledged $100 million to the Mount Polley cleanup to keep a reeling Imperial Metals from going bankrupt.

Company President Brian Kynoch and Minister Bennett paid a joint visit to the Red Chris blockade on Wednesday. Both promised to halt construction until concerns were met.

But so far, the elders remain skeptical. Until they see written commitments to safety standards set by the Tahltan, they are determined to stay.

The mood at the camp is cheerful, yet forceful. Campfire conversation drifts from hunting stories and cookie recipes to political tactic.

One elder joked, “We can always go Mohawk style.” The others chuckled, but agreed they prefer to avoid unnecessary escalation.

The Tahltan have a long history of blockading.

In 2005, during a standoff between Fortune Minerals and Tahltan elders over a proposed open pit coalmine, 15 Klabona Keepers were arrested for defying an injunction to clear the very same access road now blocked by many of the same veteran blockaders.

While the battle over Fortune’s coalmine continues, the Klabona Keepers succeeded in stopping Royal Dutch Shell from going ahead with plans to extract coalbed methane in the same region. Shell withdrew from the region in 2012.

When asked how long they were willing to keep up the current blockade, all the elders answered simply, “For as long as it takes.”

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On December 18, 2012, Shell Canada, along with the British Columbia government and the Tahltan First Nation announced an agreement to impose a permanent oil and gas development moratorium in the Sacred Headwaters, a vast networked watershed giving rise to three of British Columbia’s salmon rivers, the Stikine, the Skeena and the Nass.

After nearly a decade of opposition, local residents, First Nations, conservationists and scientists breathed a sigh of relief. One of the province’s, and for that matter, the world’s last remaining wilderness areas would be spared the industrial incursion associated with unconventional gas development and fracking.

Sacred Headwater images used with permission of Carr Clifton Photography.

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