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Valleys of the Dammed:
The Cost of Radical Environmental Change Versus Conservation
Ehor Boyanowsky
Presentation to Hearing of Commission
Examining Marketing of BC Hydro.
The Puntledge River, to the casual visitor,
appears paradisiacal: a luminescent green bower shelters
a crystal clear mountain stream that suggests steelhead,
trout and chinook in every pool. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Whereas the Puntledge once provided
estuarial angling for tyee larger than Campbell River's,
this world-renowned fishery has long vanished. Where
a highly prized summerrun steelhead fishery was the
pride of the local citizenry, fewer than a dozen fish
now return, despite ideal spawning and rearing habitat
upstream.
Years ago Lee Straight led an international
group of anglers on a steelhead expedition to the Campbell
River, perhaps our best known sporting river. In 1994,
on the banks of the Varzina River in the Russian Arctic
one of its members, Jack Hemingway, described to me
how, when they got there, they found little more than
an empty river bed. He never returned, but like hundreds
of thousands of others, travels to the ends of the earth
and spends tens of thousands of dollars each year to
find good fishing even without contributing to the depletion
of fish stocks.
The tyee of Campbell River have dramatically
declined in size and number since, though the number
of anglers rowing in the estuary has exploded. The wild
summer steelheads of the Campbell have vanished. Hatchery
stock originally from the nearby Tsitika temporarily
provided exciting fishing and temporary euphoria, but
like all artificial plants, after a few years went into
a sleep decline.
Perhaps the greatest wilderness treasure
of the lower mainland, if not all of British Columbia,
is the Squamish River Valley. Ice clad massifs that
soar to 8000 feet harbour mountain goats, grizzly bears
and the world's largest gathering of bald eagles, less
than an hour away from Vancouver and, amazingly, accessible
to all, even the wheelchair confined. Returning to spawn
in the watershed are some of the largest wild chinook,
steelhead and coho to be found anywhere. But they too
are in steep decline, even in the major nursery tributary,
the Cheakamus.
On a hot, sunny day a few years ago,
we took the Hurley Overpass back to Vancouver. We drove
many miles through a dead world along the long lifeless
sliver that is Carpenter Lake, a corpus of water, punctuated
here and there by the skeletal remains of trees. Finally,
at Gold Bridge we left the doomsday landscape and pulled
into a pub. While our eyes adjusted to the gloom I noticed
a photo over the bar of a cowboy in full regalia. He
was gazing over a bucolic valley almost impossibly lush
and green with a trout stream meandering through it
and charming ranch houses surrounded by herds of cows
and horses. "My God," I exclaimed. "How
beautiful! Where's that? Somewhere in California?"
"You just drove through it,"
the bartender retorted laconically. How was the fishing
then? Apparently wonderful. When had it happened? In
the twenties? No, in the sixties. How could anyone have
let it happen?
Progress? Benefits to BC?
The histories of these rivers have a
common theme. A hydro dam was built for the "net
benefit" of BC. Sometimes hatcheries, the alleged
panacea of the first 75 years of the century - and part
of our engineers' "edifice complex" - were
put in - never successfully compensating for the loss
of natural habitat or wild stocks. Hatchery stocks become
increasingly less robust and cost the public more and
more to produce less and less. In the most extreme case,
the Bonneville Power Commission, according to Randall
Hardie, is now spending $450 million a year, trying
to restore fish stocks, in the Columbia River, to no
avail. Amortize that over fifty years. Sport and commercial
fisheries on the US Pacific coast are largely closed
as they are in many parts of BC.
In some cases, gone forever are the
great diversity of natural river valley with their wildlife,
wilderness, farms, and biological and social mosaics.
Gone forever are future options we haven't even thought
of. All reduced to a single purpose.
Modern insurance underwriters base true
value on replacement cost rather than alternate use.
That must be the method of assessing all future radical
changes in the environment. What would be the real cost
of creating a river, developing myriad species of fish
specifically adapted to that river over eons, along
with the plants, trees, wildlife, and human life styles
possible. No country much less corporation can afford
many such undertakings. They contemplate them at their
peril, for intact ecosystems are becoming increasingly
shorter in supply. Energy is not.
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