Home » Posts tagged 'skeena river'
Tag Archives: skeena river
LNG Project Would Affect ‘Grand Central Station’ for Salmon, Researchers Say
LNG Project Would Affect ‘Grand Central Station’ for Salmon, Researchers Say
Science letter asks gov, industry to acknowledge ‘full impacts’ of BC project.
The proposed Pacific Northwest LNG project and related pipelines located at the mouth of the Skeena River in northern British Columbia would affect more than 40 different salmon populations harvested in at least 10 First Nation territories, according to a letter published in Science.
That is twice the number of First Nations groups that industry proponents identified as needing to be consulted about the impacts of the project, add the researchers who signed the letter.
Pacific Northwest LNG is an international consortium led by Malaysia oil giant Petronas. If approved by an ongoing federal environment assessment, its $11-billion liquefied natural gas terminal would be built on Lelu Island near Prince Rupert.
The waters surrounding the proposed project are critical for the rearing of millions of wild B.C. salmon — an estuary that Allen Gottesfeld of the Skeena Fisheries Commission calls “the Grand Central Station for salmon.”
The letter, penned by fisheries biologists, First Nations leaders from throughout the Skeena River watershed, and Simon Fraser University professor Jonathan Moore, cites research that shows “industrialized estuaries depress salmon survival.”
Moore, an aquatic ecologist, explained that the purpose of the letter was to get the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) to properly consider the new data on the importance of the estuary for one of the world’s great salmon watersheds.
“This little local spot supports all of these fish from all around,” said Moore. As a consequence, he said, the LNG terminal could “affect populations of salmon 10 kilometres away or 400 km away in the headwaters. What happens in the ‘Central Station’ affects the whole transportation system for salmon.”
In addition to presenting new biological data, the letter asks that government and industry acknowledge the full impacts of the project on salmon, the watershed, and aboriginal communities that depend on both.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
No Wealth, No Justice in $1 Billion LNG Offer to First Nation Band
No Wealth, No Justice in $1 Billion LNG Offer to First Nation Band
Here’s why Lax Kw’alaams still side with the salmon.
Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian and writer known for his work among the poor and the excluded, is credited with coining a phrase that is as true as any you’ll ever hear: ”The opposite of poverty is not wealth — it is justice.”
It is a phrase that has also been attributed to Bryan Stevenson, founder of America’s Equal Justice Initiative and a man Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called, without qualification, ”America’s Nelson Mandela.”
Regardless of the provenance of the expression, it is the potency of the underlying idea that should be freighted into the unseemly scramble to unlock northern British Columbia’s dangerously exaggerated liquefied natural gas (LNG) bonanza, especially now that some coastal First Nations are bellying up to the pipe to get their overdue share of Canada’s resource riches.
To read reports emanating from the mouth of the Skeena River, the energy sector thinks it has finally cracked the nut on how to successfully partner with First Nations people who, inconveniently, stand afore a variety of proposed LNG plants and pipeline deals. These aboriginal people have rights along the planned pipeline routes, and also at tidewater, where Canada is trying to unstopper our oil and gas supplies so the Chinese can drain off our energy sovereignty like so much bilge water.
Industry’s latest poster child is the Lax Kw’alaams Band, whose main village at Port Simpson is situated on the coast north of Prince Rupert, where the waters of the Skeena and the Nass rivers mingle and nurse some of the finest wild salmon populations left on the planet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
