The Conservation Director for Wildsight moved to the East Kootenay from Wisconsin, USA in 1969 with the late great mountaineer and conservationist Art Twomey in search of a wild place to live.
With patches of snow on the ground, it’s a day for jackets and hoods up to protect ears from the cold. It’s Wednesday, November 14, 2018, and a group of ninth graders is traipsing across an abandoned hay field outside Cranbrook with loppers and shovels in hand to oo and learn in wild backyards.
Our mine reclamation security system is supposed to make sure mine owners pay to clean up their mine sites and downstream pollution, but there are so many exceptions, secrets, weak policies and backroom deals, that mine owners across the province are profiting while BC taxpayers cover the long-term cleanup risk.
There is no legal requirement for logging practices on private land to be sustainable over time. This allows landowners to remove most or all of the forest cover in a short time period despite major impacts on wildlife, water and communities
Canada needs to hold fast for at least equal co-management of all treaty dams, on both sides of the border. Anything less is a continued loss of sovereignty for Canada.
Last week, the B.C. government released its review of the professional reliance system, a system that has put industry in charge of water, fish and wildlife in British Columbia.
British Columbia has vowed to stop the building a bitumen pipeline across our province, over pollution and climate concerns. But on the other side of the province, in the Kootenays, pollution of a different kind is flowing from BC into Montana.