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Letter: People power the only answer to save watersheds

Letters to the editor
By Letters to the editor
September 13th, 2017

To The Editor:

“Water is life” — H. McSwan Glade Watershed Protection Society editorial June 2017 Valley Voice.

Concerned about industrial logging in their source of water citizens of Glade BC filed a section 29 under the Drinking Water Protection Act (DWPA) with the BC’s Interior Health Authority. They should not have wasted their time. Instead they should organise their own watershed protection action, with peaceful resolve that forces BC Timber Sale and contractors into court pleading for BC judges to restrain folks with injunctions.

The “War in the Woods” has never been resolved.

In order to protect their watershed and the common good they will need to get serious. BC’s new Water Act and Forest Practise Board are a joke. Designed to continue militarising Canada’s forested “commons” as part of North America’s military complex. There is an international industrial military assault on planet Earth’s health. Why is hard to surmise.

In July/August 1986 a small group of citizens peacefully and successfully blockaded the BC Ministry of Forestry stopping them from an experimental aerial spraying of Agent Orange or 2-4-D on clear-cuts to release small planted conifers in Meadow Creek’s domestic watershed just above the Kokanee spawning channel at the north end of Kootenay Lake.

Our federal conservative MP Bob Brisco at the time eventually did some research into the source of this military experiment and found out that it was from a Sue Saint Marie, Ontario, Forestry University working apparently in league with Canadian/USA military that had tested Agent Purple and Orange near Gagetown, NS, in the early 1960’s. They needed to defoliate Vietnam and Laos to seek, kill and continue western dominance in Southeast Asia.

By the early 1970’s BC’s timber barons and their lackeys in the BC socialist and capitalist political realm realized they had basically clear-cut all the easy money in BC (fall down effect) and not planted many trees in the destructive clear-cuts that were and are way too big for proper stewardship of our forest commons (crown land). In a frantic effort to regenerate profitable healthy timberlands the overpaid clear-cut bureaucrats (university forestry graduates) pulled out all the stops.

Yankee military chemical defoliates needed further testing in a Canadian domestic watershed, for eventual wide spread use in most of BC’s over cut under planted super sized clear-cuts. University educated BC Forestry Kootenay Lake Six Mile staff volunteers the drinking water of the folks in Meadow Creek and the Kokanee Spawning channel, that would collect Agent Orange run off to help with the Kokanee spawn. Absolute ignorance will be ignored at humanities collective future.

Glade, Ymir, Duhmel, Argenta and all West Kootenay domestic watersheds can possibly only stop the degradation and eventual destruction our water commons with people power. Real in your face peaceful blockades. Children, parents, dogs, cat, preachers, and teachers must endure the wrath of court injunction and violent police and industrial reaction that protects this pattern of western assault on nature.

Otherwise, you are urinating into a head wind.

Tom Prior, Nelson, BC

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