Water

by Catherine Stewart

I have a t-shirt that reads "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." It's broadly applicable to the state of our world and particularly relevant following the revelations at the recent federal Cohen Inquiry hearings on the topic of Infectious Salmon Anaemia virus (ISAv).

Those of us attending the hearings in Vancouver were more outraged than we anticipated. All Canadians - all citizens of the planet - should be outraged by the behaviour of our federal government agencies in the face of this potentially disastrous virus.

by Joyce Nelson

Investment banker Goldman Sachs has famously been described by the Rolling Stone's business writer Matt Taibbi (July 2009) as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." So it's a good idea to take notice whenever that Vampire Squid moves its blood funnel towards something. Having profited handsomely from the Wall Street bailouts, the Squid has smelled money in a new direction: water privatization.

by Doug George

Drop a dirty penny into a glass of Coke. If you examine the penny after a week, it will be gleaming. The carbonic acid in the cola has dissolved the organic grime on the copper-plated coin. It's a science-class experiment many of us will remember from childhood. Now consider that the ocean is becoming corrosive, like Coke.

by Arthur Calidicott

The bottled water industry enjoyed impressive growth until 2007, the result of relentless advertising, ubiquitous availability, and a propaganda assault on public water systems. 2.36 billion litres of water were sold in Canada in 2006, worth an estimated $708 million. In the US in 2007, 33.3 billion litres were sold for $11.5 billion.

In 2008, growth turned negative. Recession squeezed shoppers' wallets, and bottled water fell off their shopping lists. It wasn't just recession, though. People weren't buying the lie about unsafe tap water. And mountains of bottles in blue boxes and landfills were evidence that there were more consequences to bottled water than just water.

"Tap water" campaigns started to show some real successes, led in Canada by the Council of Canadians, and given a boost in 2009 by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). FCM urged municipalities to phase out the sale and purchase of bottled water, and to develop awareness campaigns about the positive benefits and quality of municipal water supplies. It has found real traction in municipal governments.

by Delores Broten

They came, singing and chanting, drumming and dancing. First they came as a trickle, then a flood, and still they came, in a multitude of generations and races, from towns and First Nations across the Island. They came with costumes, they wore their button blankets, they came with colourful salmon people signs. There were native singers, there was a samba band, there was a marching band, and they flowed onto the lawn of the BC Legislature in their joyous thousands.

How many thousands may be a point of debate for years, since the Canwest papers, based apparently on the official police estimate, published a number five times lower than the unoffical police estimate at the time, cited by other media, of four to five thousand.

by Joyce Nelson

In our phone interview, Jessica Ernst says she's "still getting used to" being compared to Erin Brockovich (the environmental activist made famous by Julia Robert's film portrayal ten years ago). The comparison comes easy because the outspoken Ernst, a landowner in the town of Rosebud, Alberta, is one of the few Albertans who have publicly criticized hydraulic fracturing (called "fracking," in the trade). This is a technology used by the oil and gas industry to access "unconventional" natural gas deposits trapped in shale, coalbed, and tight-sand formations - potentially at the expense of underground water supplies.

by Clara Broten

Some History

In the 1990s, concern about ground level ozone and carbon monoxide from vehicles was increasing, along with the rising levels of air pollution in large cities. Additives were found to oxygenate gasoline to make it burn better and reduce both the smog forming pollutants (e.g. nitrous oxide) and the toxics (e.g. benzene) in car exhaust. The US Clean Air Act of 1990 required the use of oxygenated gasoline, called reformulated gasoline, in areas with air pollution problems.

One of the additives was methyl tertiary-butyl ether, MTBE. MTBE was initially used to increase the octane of gasoline in the 1980s, and after the Clean Air Act, higher amounts were used to oxygenate gasoline. By 2000 MTBE was the leading gasoline additive in the States.

Water Contamination

MTBE dissolves easily in water and leakage from gasoline storage facilities is common. Since MTBE is a suspected carcinogen, its presence in ground water was worrying. In 1996 MTBE was found in two wellfields that supplied drinking water to Santa Monica California at 618 and 86 ppb. The wellfields were shut down, cutting 50% of the city's water supply and forcing it to purchase water. By 2000, the EPA was sounding alarms about MTBE in ground water, and attempting to have it replaced with ethanol in gasoline.

by Jack Minard

On April 28th, 2009 as I sat in a Tsolum River Partnership meeting at the Ministry of Environment offices in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, I let my mind wander back to the beginnings of how we got here.

In 1967, a copper mine on Mt. Washington on Vancouver Island, BC went bankrupt after only four years of operation. The site was abandoned, leaving an open scar on the hillside above the Comox Valley and the Tsolum River.

Through the 1980s, fish stocks declined in the river.  The abandoned mine site was generating toxic copper leachate. In 1988, a partial cap was placed over a consolidated pile of volatile rock, at a cost of $1.5 million. Still the river declined in health. The partial cap was declared a failure, and the Tsolum slipped into oblivion.By 1993, the river was barely able to support any fish or other aquatic life. After several years of half-hearted talk and studies, our community rallied around emerging organizations such as Project Watershed and the Watershed Assembly. Community awareness was raised about watershed issues, and in 1997 the Tsolum River Task Force (TRTF) was formed.

by Morgan Hite and Dave Stevens

Lessons Learned

*      Develop a brilliant website and update it regularly - : it makes your group's information accessible, and is a great recruiting and organizing tool.

*      Organize townhall meetings, however quickly, as a great way of generating participation.

*      Film public meetings: the footage can be used later in short videos and posted on YouTube.

*      Keep all levels of government up to speed about community concerns: municipal; provincial (including MLA, ministers and premier); federal and local First Nations .

*      Take breaks, but don't give up.

*      All efforts seem to pay off: even small delays in a project could lead to important unforeseen opportunities for a project to change.

by David Williams

In 2002 the federal government, in virtual lockstep with the Bush regime, created a special exemption to federal environmental rules that would turn many of Canada's lakes into toxic waste dumps for mines. At least sixteen lakes across the country are slated to become repositories for waste rock laced with heavy metals like arsenic and mercury. Six of these lakes are in British Columbia.

Tsilhqot'in Rights and Title

One of these lakes is Teztan Biny (Fish Lake) in the Nemiah Valley in the Chilcotin (Tsilhqot'in), 200 km southwest of Williams Lake. The location is of great significance because it is in an area where the Xeni Gwet'in people of the Tsilhqot'in First Nation have proven aboriginal rights "to hunt and trap birds and animals" and "to trade in skins and pelts."