Fight to Stop Oil Spoiling BC’s Coast Is 50 Years Old

[Oscar]

Fight to Stop Oil Spoiling BC’s Coast Is 50 Years Old

[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/23/F ... -BC-Coast/ ]

Visionary Roderick Haig-Brown led it early. Last in a series.

By Andrew Nikiforuk | TheTyee.ca December 23, 2016

Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the energy industry for two decades and is a contributing editor to The Tyee. Find his previous stories here: [ https://thetyee.ca/Bios/Andrew_Nikiforuk/ ]

[Editor's note: This series is drawn from Andrew Nikiforuk’s talk “Why Haig-Brown Matters More than Ever,” given last month in Campbell River as the Seventh Annual Haig Brown Memorial Lecture. A PDF is available here:
[ https://thetyee.ca/Documents/2016/12/15 ... jJ76aW.pdf ]

Also in this series:

The Prophetic Roderick Haig-Brown
[ https://thetyee.ca/Series/2016/12/19/Pr ... aig-Brown/ ]

BC’s Prophet: The Ghost of Roderick Haig-Brown Speaks
[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/19/R ... st-Speaks/ ]

Says No to BC’s ‘Avaricious’ Boom and Bust Rulers
[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/20/S ... st-Rulers/ ]

Fish Hatcheries Are No Fix and He Tried to Warn Us
[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/21/F ... s-Warning/ ]

Hovering over Site C, a Ghost with a Warning
[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/22/H ... C-Warning/ ]

Fight to Stop Oil Spoiling BC’s Coast Is 50 Years Old
[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/23/F ... -BC-Coast/ ]

“No intelligent person can doubt that if the present misuse of so-called fossil fuels and assorted broad spectrum poisons” continues, a whole range of irreversible ecological changes will undo the natural world. The renowned British Columbian philosopher and naturalist Roderick Haig-Brown made that warning in 1970 and now we are living the emergency.

Two years later he gave a speech to small fleet fishermen in English Bay about the Moran Dam then proposed for the Fraser River. That great and long river, he said, determined and sustained the whole abundance and character of Georgia Strait. It must never be dammed. Nor should it ever be poisoned by fossil fuels.

B.C.’s wilderness father then talked about a 2,000-gallon spill of crude oil from BP’s Cherry Point refinery that had moved up into Canadian waters. He noted that “the miserably inept company responsible had, in the words of Mayor Vander Zalm of Surrey: ‘no experience, no knowledge, no plan’ for dealing with even this small spill.”

Well, that admission sounds distressingly familiar.

MORE:

[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/23/F ... -BC-Coast/ ]