RIVERS WITHOUT BORDERS

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Taku River Rafting Reflections

Back in July, I rafted the Nakina and then the mainstem Taku, but I haven’t had time to post a blog since then. My time on the river was a powerful reminder of what motivates me to work to keep the Taku River watershed from becoming just another fragmented, diminished industrial landscape. There are so few places where you can take to the air in a helicopter or float plane and fly for half an hour or more without ever seeing a road or a clearcut in any direction. Closer in at river level, you actually see many signs of human presence in the watershed, but they tend to be subtle and not in conflict with the essence of the place. There are grave houses, fishing camps and trappers cabins. They suggest that people and the land can and have co-existed without either being diminished.

And of course the Taku is dense with other forms of life as well. In a few short days on-river, we saw at least 10 grizzly bears, as well as moose, mountain goats, arctic terns, countless eagles and the tracks of wolves and many other birds and beasts.

It is only when you get into the more heavily mineralized areas of the lower river that the tenor of the place changes. The buzz of helicopters becomes almost constant, shuttling men and supplies to this exploration camp or that. Times are good for the mineral exploration industry, and as a result the Taku could suffer the same fate as so many other coastal watersheds further south. The dense forest could become crisscrossed with roads, and the landscape pitted and transformed by underground and open pit mines. Industrial forestry could then enter the Taku using the roads made by miners, denuding the land and sullying the water. Hunters and fishers on ATVs could then pursue their insatiable quest for access into the last remote lakes, creeks and valleys of a land that has, for millenia, been free from such intrusions.

Before any of that is allowed to happen, I hope our organization can assist in at least having people better understand what would be lost if that scenario were to play out. There are no other Taku watersheds left on the Pacific Coast of North America. It is the last, great, intact coastal watershed. It provides us with an opportunity to understand what other coastal watersheds were like before we meddled with them. Perhaps it can act as a sanctuary for the five species of wild Pacific salmon that run there as global warming melts glaciars and permanent snowpack and raises the temperature of coastal rivers. With its mouth in Southeast Alaska, the Taku is free from the direct impacts of salmon aquaculture that afflict coastal rivers in British Columbia. It is one less thing for them to cope with at a time of growing stress and challenges for many species. The Taku could also provide some degree of baseline for what happens in a large watershed when it is left to its own devices. For all of those reasons we need it more than we need the copper, zinc, gold, silver and lead that may sit beneath it or the boardfeet of timber that could be harvested from its valley bottoms. I hope you will join us in saying that business as usual is not good enough for the amazing Taku.