PEOPLE POWER is a six-chaper 50 minute DVD designed to help activists launch grassroots community-based campaigns to protect public power and the environment.
The value of a watershed
Posted May 15th, 2010
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The Liberal government’s BC Energy Plan wants it all: The Site C dam, offshore drilling, pipelines and tankers for Alberta crude oil, and every last, remaining wild watershed for hydro-electricity.
The Energy Plan is a scheme to remove BC’s natural assets from public oversight and hand those assets to the most powerful and predatory corporations on the planet. There are good reasons that the public should retain their natural assets, overseen and regulated by public institutions such as BC Hydro, the BC Utilities Commission, and the BC Environment Ministry, all of which have been undermined and marginalized by our current government.
In contrast to private corporations, these public institutions were mandated to protect a range of values far beyond mere profits for shareholders. BC Hydro, for example, provides electric power; generates revenue to support public services; keeps energy rates affordable for BC citizens; protects local community interests; and safeguards natural values. Corporations have no motivation or mandate to achieve any of this. Corporations exist to grow the private wealth of their shareholders. Public utilities and regulatory institutions, on the other hand, are designed to provide public and natural benefits.
Watershed values
The greatest ecological tragedy of the government’s energy plan is that it proposes to sacrifice some 700 BC rivers and watersheds to produce energy destined for private export. These watersheds represent our natural heritage, the ecological engines that allow life to flourish in British Columbia. Rivers are living elements of a living system, not simply a “resource” lying around waiting to be properly exploited.
The falling, splashing, churning rivers create productive riparian zones, cradles of life that link aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The rivers cool the forest, provide transportation highways for wildlife, and circulate nutrients.
A BC bush-pilot once told me that he could identify the best salmon streams from the air because of the dark green ribbons weaving through the forest. He didn’t have to be a biologist to notice the effect of nutrient circulation by a river. When a salmon or trout swims upstream, it carries a lifetime of nutrients with it. Bears and racoons carry the fish carcasses into the forests, leaving a trail of nutrients. When a single leaf falls into a stream, it is broken down by microorganisms and distributed downstream, providing food for insect larvae. Small fish, crayfish, and amphibians eat the larvae and insects. These fish are, in turn, eaten by larger fish, birds, and mammals. The nutrients are deposited and absorbed into the forest soil and taken back up by the trees to fall and cycle again. Rivers facilitate all of this, but there is more to the story.
The riparian zones provide moist soil habitats, a critical niche for rushes, sedges, cattails, pond lilies, willows, Red-osier Dogwood, Hardhack, and Salmonberry. Certain trees—Western Red cedar and Black Cottonwood, for example—thrive in these moist habitats. Trees and shrubs overhang the rivers and streams, cooling water, soil, and air, benefiting fish and invertebrates, while limiting algae growth. Tree roots provide structure, collect sediment, and strengthen river banks. Fallen trees create pools and special habitat for aquatic life.
About 80 percent of our BC wildlife depends on rivers and riparian habitats for all or part of their life cycles. This rich animal life starts with the mayflies, stonefly nymphs, beetles, whirligigs, and water striders, moves up through the food chain with the copepods and amphipods to both the freshwater and anadromous fish. These rivers provide spawning and nursery habitat for Chum, Pink, Coho, Sockeye, and Chinook salmon and for Steelhead, Rainbow and Cutthroat Trout. These fish require flowing water to spawn, certain water temperatures, stable oxygen content, and flow levels to survive, grow and migrate.
The rivers provide habitat and nutrients for the rare and vulnerable Red-legged Frog, the Pacific treefrog, and the Northwestern Salamander. Each of these species plays a vital role in helping stitch together our precious forest ecosystems. The rivers support our Great Blue Heron, Bitterns, Pintail, the Northern Harrier, Short-eared and Western Screech Owls, Mallards, Canada Geese, Red-tailed Hawk, Pileated Woodpecker, and the Belted Kingfisher.
In addition to the bear and raccoons, the rivers provide habitat and food supply for shrews, mice, otters, the Red squirrel, and Black-tailed Deer. Nowhere in the BC Energy Plan do we see any of this mentioned, much less protected. And still, rivers provide even more benefits.
People and Rivers
People and communities depend on our rivers. Human settlements traditionally flourished along rivers for very good reasons: abundant food, clean water, material resources, and transportation corridors. Even in our modern world, rivers provide ecosystem services that may not appear obvious. Rivers filter and purify water for human use. Rich riparian soils store water during high rainfall and prevent floods. Riparian vegetation controls erosion and sequesters carbon, while soil microorganisms break down contaminants and release nutrients.
The hydroelectric private power developments proposed by General Electric, Plutonic Power, and other companies are not small micro-hydro or “green” projects. They are large-scale industrial occupations of these watersheds that are backed by our provincial government (and, in turn, these corporations have made more than $1.5 million in Liberal party campaign contributions since the assuming leadership in BC in 2001.
Genuine community-scale micro-hydro projects do exist, for example in remote Asian villages. These projects divert a small fraction of a stream flow through a village-scale turbine to produce localized electricity and avoid cutting long transmission lines through forests.
BC’s proposed private power projects are the opposite: massive construction projects that require roads, bulldozers, massive construction camps, excavation of river banks, clear-cutting, destruction of riparian habitats, and the diversion of rivers into huge pipelines that destroy the watersheds and reduce once-bountiful rivers to sad, dry trickles.
As vegetation is removed, erosion and sedimentation increases, streams become muddy, and river banks unstable. Water levels drop, temperature rises, and oxygen balances upset. Habitat shelter and shade is lost, fish die, and toxic algae blooms. Bears retreat. Forests are logged for transmission lines, carrying the electricity to foreign markets. The construction of these massive industrial projects smothers spawning beds and spreads toxic chemicals. Invasive plant species reduce native plants, wildlife habitat, and food.
Our BC watersheds are corridors of life and assets for community resilience in BC. The government’s Energy Plan tosses away all these values for large-scale industrial developments that benefit a few corporate owners. The privatization of our rivers has undermined BC Hydro, ignored the BC Utilities Commission, and gutted our BC Environment Ministry, the very institutions we established to protect our cultural and natural heritage.
The river privatization scheme—hyped as a “green energy plan”—is an outright theft of BC’s natural heritage and a desecration of our life-giving watersheds. The only thing “green” about this privatization swindle is the money that the company owners expect to be stuffing into their pockets.
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Rex Weyler
May 15, 2010
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The Liberal government’s BC Energy Plan wants it all: The Site C dam, offshore drilling, pipelines and tankers for Alberta crude oil, and every last, remaining wild watershed for hydro-electricity.
The Energy Plan is a scheme to remove BC’s natural assets from public oversight and hand those assets to the most powerful and predatory corporations on the planet. There are good reasons that the public should retain their natural assets, overseen and regulated by public institutions such as BC Hydro, the BC Utilities Commission, and the BC Environment Ministry, all of which have been undermined and marginalized by our current government.
In contrast to private corporations, these public institutions were mandated to protect a range of values far beyond mere profits for shareholders. BC Hydro, for example, provides electric power; generates revenue to support public services; keeps energy rates affordable for BC citizens; protects local community interests; and safeguards natural values. Corporations have no motivation or mandate to achieve any of this. Corporations exist to grow the private wealth of their shareholders. Public utilities and regulatory institutions, on the other hand, are designed to provide public and natural benefits.
Watershed values
The greatest ecological tragedy of the government’s energy plan is that it proposes to sacrifice some 700 BC rivers and watersheds to produce energy destined for private export. These watersheds represent our natural heritage, the ecological engines that allow life to flourish in British Columbia. Rivers are living elements of a living system, not simply a “resource” lying around waiting to be properly exploited.
May 15, 2010