The Dam Truth?

I'm always amazed and amused at the rubbish us poor peasants of the land will take.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to have been invited by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to hear Dr. David Suzuki; and what a chilling speech it was. He spoke of survival of man in terms of decades, not eons. He reminded us that at the turn of the 20th century, there were a billion people on the planet and now there are close to 7 billion. When you reach those sorts of numbers, they increase exponentially.

But, say the "developers", there are still lots of room. Look at the wide open spaces in Canada, the United States and Russia. No one asks why people would want to move to the tundra, the cold prairies or the unproductive land. And what would sustain them if they did? For a lot of reasons, we've become city people.

When you ask "developers" about global warming, they go to their records and haul up the names of one or two "scientists" who deny what's right before their eyes. Let me tell you what I've seen. When I first visited Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand, back in the 80s, it came within a few feet of the highway - now it's a two kilometer walk.

The evidence is overwhelming, but somehow unconvincing to most of us. We argue that we can't tackle greenhouse gases because it will hurt business!

Fish fed feathers

The ever-increasing evidence that farmed salmon are so bad to eat that they should be declared poisonous convinces no one. The industry doesn't meet evidence with evidence, but simply denies what independent science is saying around the world. They get support from the Health Protection branch of the federal government whose studies (not their own, but evaluations of industry stuff) are 20 years out of date.

Farmed salmon are fed with anchovies, smelt and herring from the seas off Chile, thus depleting the stocks and driving the fishing industry there all but out of business. Knowing that this is happening - but denying it all the time - the farmers are now concocting feed supplies from land animals like chickens, including the feathers! How long will it take for us to understand that when you feed animals that which is not normal for them, you create huge health problems both for the animal fed and the humans that eat it? And what kind of sense does it make to scoop out proteins from one part of the ocean to feed them, for profit, to fish in another part?

Farmed salmon are bombarded with antibiotics, sea lice control substances and colourants to change them from a sickly looking grey to whatever colour customers prefer. The fish farm answer is to simply deny that these things make their product unhealthy and ignore independent studies that tell the horrible truth.

Our oceans that used to teem with fish are now depleted to the extent that not only are our salmon at risk, but, for God's sake, the South Sea Islands that depend on fish for survival are coming up with empty nets where they used to have them bulging with clean sustenance for all. We catch sharks - which, unfortunately for them, have always had bad PR - so the fins can be cut off, the poor animals thrown back still alive, so that some gentlemen can be assisted (supposedly) to get an erection. Because this isn't happening around the corner from where we live, we don't give a damn.

A dam plan?

Whaling nations have agreed not to hunt whales and the ink is scarcely on the treaty before they're out killing whales for "experimental reasons".

The oceans abound in drift nets that snare everything that gets in their way, including birds. When they break away from the mothership they are abandoned to roam the seas like a modern Flying Dutchman, never seen again as they silently kill everything they come in contact with. We, the people, look at the ocean around us and, since it looks as it always did, assume that everything is OK. Denial is so much easier than facing unpleasantness.

Finally, let me make a prediction I've made before and which I repeat because the evidence keeps piling up.

As we all know, the Thompson River meets the Fraser at Lytton. The huge Adams River sockeye run turns right at Lytton, proceeds up the Thompson to Adams Lake and other places to spawn. Other very substantial sockeye runs go north at Lytton and proceed to the Stuart river system. These latter runs - like all sockeye runs in the Fraser system - are in great danger. The lowering of the Nechako by Alcan isn't the only reason. But it combines with other forces including over-fishing, especially by native bands, poaching, habitat destruction and other reasons about which we know little, to put these runs in grave danger. What does that mean?

I put it straight to you - once the northern Sockeye runs are gone, there is no reason not to have a dam on the Fraser. The pacific salmon have always been a pain in the ass to the federal government so that there is an incentive for them to ignore the northern sockeye and rub their hands in glee at having got rid of a nuisance. For the BC government and BC Hydro, the loss of these fish would be manna from heaven.

Why such apathy?

The evidence of environmental degradation is overwhelming, yet, curiously, the more the evidence piles up, the less interested the public is. In the last federal election, the environment wasn't an issue. Not one question was asked in the debates about the environment! The Green Party only got 4 percent of the vote. Clearly, the reason that the politicians aren't interested is because they detect that the people aren't.

When the environmental issues were beehive burners, spraying for Gypsy Moths and logging pristine areas, the public was angry and environmentalists were all the rage. Now that we can see the end of life itself on our planet, we're overwhelmed by indifference.

That comic strip hero of days long past, Pogo, was right when he said "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Rafe Mair writes a Monday column for The Tyee. His website is www.rafeonline.com.