RIVERS WITHOUT BORDERS

Whitehorse office - upward and onward

Rivers Without Borders’ (RWB) Whitehorse office has changed locations… South-facing, Grey Mountain viewing, a skyscraping second storey location (two storeys short of the maximum in Whitehorse). After many years of being the fortunate tenants of the generous and loving Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) staffers, RWB has made a difficult decision to spread its wings, and put itself into position for some passive Vitamin D exposure.

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Happy New Year from Rivers Without Borders!

All of us at Rivers Without Borders hope that everyone out there had an excellent holiday season, no matter how or when you celebrate it. Living north of 60, Solstice is a big celebration for my family and many of our friends. We hanker for that longest night that symbolizes the eventual return of the sun, synthesis of vitamin D, … and a little later even outdoor warmth, bears and plants with leaves.

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Trout Unlimited: Fish in a dangerous time

Trout Unlimited (TU) recently completed a comprehensive study assessing threats to the long-term well being of trout and salmon in the United States.  Their findings are somewhat grim, but TU proposes a number of practical solutions to slow the impact of rising water temperatures and human encroachment upon trout and salmon habitat.  Healing Troubled Waters: Preparing Trout and Salmon Habitat For A Changing Climate is download-able in pdf format from the TU website. 

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Balance

Generous friends made their small Yukon cabin available to my girlfriend and I this weekend. I live in the north in large part because of the incredible wild country up here, so it was quite jarring to travel just those few miles from town and have it dawn on me how disconnected from place I have become in the past few months. Too many miles on the road and in the air. Furtive channel surfing in the austere uniformity of hotel rooms while sleep eludes me. Chasing wireless in cafes, airports and lobbies. Ignoring my fellow travelers in favour of my laptop on planes, trains and taxi rides.

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Rivers Without Borders now on Facebook

One high point of a recent rich but far-too-long road trip was traveling to Hollyhock on Cortes Island for the annual Web of Change conference. Web of Change is an amazing gathering of activists and technology workers focused on effecting social change on-line and otherwise using technology. If you work in social change or technology with social change application, I really recommend that you look into Web of Change. Even (especially?) a luddite like me got a tremendous amount from attending.

Many things came out of the rich sessions I participated in and the networking I did while there, perhaps most tangible of which is that Rivers Without Borders is now on Facebook. If you are too, please consider joining our Group (eventually we will also be listed as a Cause), and I implore all readers of Blog Without Borders to assist by steering friends to both this site and our Facebook group. We need to engage as many people as possible if we are going to save the biggest wilderness left on North America’s wet west coast. In my next blog I will talk about some recent announcements and developments that add new urgency to our work.

Ground Truth Trekkers

Some people simply have more ambition than I do. I’ve gone on a couple canoe trips - a few multi-day and one multi-week… but what Erin and Hig are up to shows a degree of commitment to outdoor adventure that I’m not sure I’ve encountered before.  To travel from Puget Sound to the Bering Sea by foot, packraft and skis? That is what they are in the midst of at this time.  That is indeed impressive, and they’re not doing it just to test their own tenacity.  Their mission is to "explore, study, and communicate the key environmental issues facing this coast…"  Browse their site (click here), and after you click on the ‘donate’ icon to help them out with costs both present and future, read their blog to see: what they’ve been up to, what they’ve found out, and their last known location.

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Goodbye to a Friend

Rivers Without Borders lost a good friend on September 10th with the passing of Dame Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop. Dame Anita had a tremendous passion and energy to make progressive change on the planet, and we at Rivers Without Borders benefited from that in our efforts to defend the incredible Taku watershed from damaging development. Even as her passion continues to inspire us, she will be missed in the many corners of the world where her generous spirit was felt, and ours is no exception. Our thoughts are with her family.

“Life is never incomplete if it is an honorable one. At whatever point you leave life, if you leave it in the right way, it is whole.” - Seneca

North American Indigenous Peoples Mining Summit, Anchorage, AK.

What a brilliant conference!  Robert Shimek, Mining Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network emceed the Aug 15-18th event and invited a range of presenters to take to the podium to speak about mining and oil & gas issues - past, present and strategies for the future.  The three main areas of focus for the conference were: cultural resource protection, water quality and empowering the voice of indigenous people.  My head was spinning at the end of the conference.  The 1135 km scenic journey back to Whitehorse was a blur.   

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Access to Information?

For the past four years I have been using our Canadian federal Access to Information and Privacy legislation to try to find out information about the Tulsequah Chief mine project in the Taku watershed, as well as about the Galore Creek mine in the Stikine watershed and other projects in the BC-Alaska transboundary region.

With whichever federal Ministry I have requested information from - Environment, Fisheries and Oceans, Foreign Affairs – I’ve always had to go through the same time-consuming dance: request information, they reply saying they need more time, wait months for information, they finally send some small pile of papers – often letters our own organization had written to the agency – with much of it blackened out. I would then issue a formal complaint to the overworked Access to Information and Privacy Commission who in almost every case found the Ministry in question had not released all information they could or that the delays were not called for, and I would then receive more documentation.

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Mom Says Clean Up Your Mess!

Most people learn the lesson of having to clean up one mess before making another from their mothers at a young age.  Redcorp apparently still hasn’t taken this one to heart. 

They say that they can’t (or won’t) clean up the ongoing acid mine drainage pollution from the Tulsequah Chief and Big Bull mines until they re-open the Tulsequah Chief.  Given their lack of financing, continued delays and the skeptical reception their barging plan is getting from the people of Juneau and US and Alaska agencies, mine development is certainly in doubt. 

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