A Heritage Corridor or a Channel for Exports to Pacific Rim Countries?
by Mary Boardman
The other day a call came in from a friend in Alaska who told us that when she was in Stewart recently, she watched a Korean freighter being loaded with raw logs from BC's northernmost old-growth temperate rain forests and a Japanese freighter being loaded with gold ore likely from the Eskay Creek Mine, which is between the Iskut and Unuk rivers.
"What's happening over there?" she asked. "Are you Canadians stripping the region of its rocks and trees and risking laying waste to its sensitive fisheries, which we southeast Alaskans depend on for our livelihoods?"
A good question, I thought. Where can I find out what's going on in the Stikine? I did an internet search and found out there is a Land and Resource Management Planning (LRMP) process going on in the Cassiar-Iskut-Stikine that may soon decide the fate of a region that is known the world over for its wildlife and wilderness character – and its ability to produce fish. Unfortunately, government policy does not allow for a moratorium on development or resource extraction while an LRMP is underway … sort of like land claims negotiations going on while the land that's under discussion continues to undergo changes that oftentimes completely alter its natural characteristics.
To review the government's website on the LRMP (www.lrmp.gov.bc.ca/iskut-stikine/ISKUT-STIKINE-HOME.HTM), you'd think things were progressing relatively smoothly towards a December 1999 completion for one of the largest LRMP areas in the province. The table has been meeting since February 1997 and, according to the August 1998 Process Update, has completed two draft land use scenarios. This Update states that the LRMP here has "made significant progress" including the inclusion of First Nations in the process, consolidation of all maps and geographical information onto one computer system within government, the initiation of a local knowledge project, and economics studies "using input from local people." With characteristic divisiveness, however, if you talk to folks who live in the area, you'd likely hear one of two opinions:
"Huh? LRMP? What LRMP? What's an LRMP, anyway?" (the most common response)
"It's very frustrating because it sometimes seems government is thwarting our work because of its own agenda. I fear we'll not be able to reach consensus because of the players at the table and what seems to be the prior agenda and vested interests of some of those players." (a quote from an LRMP participant)
As with most things in life, there is a different perspective for each person you talk to. So it won't do to consider any one perspective as the gospel truth. What is clear, however, is that the Great River—known throughout various ages as a transportation corridor of one kind or another – has the very real potential to become a channel through which log exports and gold ore reaches Korea and Japan, and other countries in the Pacific Rim.
Why should we care about the Stikine?
The Stikine is remote, so some readers may appreciate a little background. The Tlingit people of the lower, coastal reaches of the river, where it is truly a wide and magnificent spectacle, named it Stikine, meaning "The Great River." The Tahl-tans of the upper river called the land and river Spatsizi, meaning "land of the red goat," referring to the mineral-rich dust caught in the otherwise snowy hair of the wily mountain goats that inhabit the crags and steep canyon walls surrounding the river.
From its headwaters in Spatsizi Plateau Provincial Wilderness Park, where it rises as trickles from a glacier over 1,830 m above headwater lakes on the plateau, to its mouth opposite Wrangell, Alaska, the mighty Stikine traverses over 640 kilometres of varied landscapes and courses through eight of BC's 14 biogeoclimatic zones, each imparting a distinctive character to the river and giving evidence of the outstanding diversity throughout the Stikine's 52,000 km2 watershed. The Stikine is BC's fifth largest river by flow volume, and the Stikine watershed is the sixth largest river basin in the province, yet it is home to fewer than 2,000 people.
Shortly down river from the international boundary in southeast Alaska, the Stikine opens its mouth to the Pacific, spilling its nutrients for miles across a tidal flat that is replete with shellfish and other wildlife. For its last 40 km, the massive estuary forms a huge wetlands complex important to millions of migratory birds and water fowl on the Pacific Flyway. In the US, it should be noted, the Stikine is protected in the Stikine-LeConte Wilderness Area.
Archaeological sites of Tlingit, Tahltan, and pre-Tahltan peoples occur in many locations in the Stikine watershed. Five species of wild Pacific salmon (sockeye, chinook, coho, chum, and pink), steelhead, rainbow, bull trout, mountain whitefish, and dolly varden are found here, and important commercial and aboriginal fisheries are carried out in the lower watershed. The Iskut River, Stikine's major tributary, is considered the spawning and rearing habitat for up to 40 percent of the wild salmonids in the system.
The Stikine is perhaps best-known as a heritage transportation corridor. Used for centuries by Tahltans and Tlingits, the river was a principal facilitator of trade and communication. When Robert Campbell, of the Hudson's Bay Company, arrived on the banks of the Stikine in 1838, he effectively completed the last link of a 5,000-km trade route connecting Atlantic and Pacific waters via portions of the Hudson's Bay and Arctic drainages. This transcontinental canoe route is one of the first trans-Canada highways, no less than the rivers of Mackenzie and Fraser. Thousands of gold-seekers in the Stikine, Cassiar, Atlin, and Klondike gold rushes used the Stikine as a major transportation route to the gold fields. In fact, the Stikine was considered the "all-Canadian route to the Klondike."
During World War II, builders of the Watson Lake Airport, part of the Northwest Staging Route, and of the Alaska Highway, freighted supplies up the Stikine to Telegraph Creek (where the original Hudson's Bay store now stands) and then overland to the Dease River to access construction. River boats operated between Wrangell, Alaska and Telegraph Creek for over 100 years, even into the 1970s, until the Stewart-Cassiar Highway was built. For decades, river recreationists have rafted, canoed, and kayaked the upper and lower Stikine, thrilling at the magnificent scenery and abundant wildlife. Only two spans intersect its length: one road bridge and an uncompleted railway bridge.
The 80-km-long, 330-metre-deep Grand Canyon of the Stikine is one of the most spectacular geographical features in Canada. However, in 1980, BC Hydro was actively engaged in groundwork for two very large dams in the Stikine Canyon and three more for the Iskut River. Some readers may remember a public outcry at the time, and the formation of a community-based organization called Residents for a Free-flowing Stikine to respond to the threat of flooding the Grand Canyon. By the mid-1990s, BC Hydro removed its installations on the Stikine and said it agreed with those who felt this area should remain undammed. Their flooding reserve, however, is still on the books.
In addition to tremendous hydroelectricity-generating potential, other outstanding features of the watershed include sinuous glaciers, ice fields, and volcanic landscapes. On visiting it in the late 1800s, US naturalist John Muir called the lower Stikine "a Yosemite 100 miles long." Attesting to the tremendous diversity along the Stik-ine are grizzly bears, caribou (the Stikine uplands boasts BC's largest population of woodland caribou), mountain goats, Stone's sheep, lynx, moose, amphibians (very rare in the north), bats (some of which are endangered), over 125 species of birds (representing nearly 70 percent of the bird species found in British Columbia), and rare plant communities. Not many areas in the world at this latitude have such diverse and numerous plant and animal species, some of which are on BC's lists of endangered and threatened species. While two major provincial parks – Mt. Edziza and Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness – protect some of the higher elevation habitats in the watershed, none of the lower Stikine and very little of the important valley bottoms in the entire watershed are protected, leaving critical wildlife habitat vulnerable to industrial development and road-building.
Ever since Parks Canada did its Wild River Survey in 1972, the Stikine River has been "officially" recognized as having exceptional environmental and cultural heritage significance on a national scale. In fact, the Stikine was considered by the survey team to be the prototype river system for the federal heritage rivers program. In 1986, BC's Wilderness Advisory Committee included the Stik-ine in its recommendations to government concerning wilderness policy matters for 24 separate study areas. These recommendations resulted in a March 1987 announcement of four new provincial recreation areas, including 250 km of the Stikine River corridor between and adjacent to the northern boundaries of Mt. Edziza and Spatsizi provincial parks. The announcement singled-out the Grand Canyon of the Stikine as "one of the world's most spectacular river runs."
In 1995, BC established the BC Heritage Rivers System. The Stikine was one of seven rivers in the inaugural package. In 1998, in recognition of the national heritage values in the Stikine, it became BC's second river to be nominated to the Canadian Heritage Rivers System program.
In the mid-1990s, when government was honing its Protected Areas Strategy (PAS), the Prince Rupert Regional Protected Areas Team (RPAT) identified a number of small and large study areas to the west of Hwy 37 for possible inclusion into the province's provincial parks and ecological reserves system. At about the same time, the Chief Forester of BC announced an increase in the Annual Allowable Cut for the Cassiar Forest District that nearly quadrupled the planned harvest for the region, with much of the pro-posed increase projected to come from the old-growth temperate rain-forests of the lower Stikine-Iskut. Also at the same time, two con-current environmental assessments were in progress for the Bronson Slope gold mine on the middle Iskut and the Red Chris copper/gold mine above the Iskut headwaters on the To-dagin Plateau. Both these mine projects demanded road-building projects and the Bronson Slope project included a hydroelectricity-generating facility on the lower Iskut canyon. It wasn't long before the RPAT removed PAS Study Area status from all the areas around the Stikine and Iskut rivers. While the RPAT's report recognized the "high to very high" recreational, scenic, and conservation values along the lower Stik-ine and Iskut, it nonetheless recommended removal of study area status citing "mineral access concerns" as the primary reason.
Local Economic Sustainability Depends on Wilderness
Those who care about conservation should care about the Iskut River, Stikine's largest tributary. Because of the Iskut's unique hydrological and riparian characteristics, it has tremendous potential for producing wild salmonids; this makes it one of the most valuable rivers in the northwest. The entire Iskut, including hot springs and the sensitive wetlands and riparian areas of the lower Stikine are highly vulnerable to impacts from mining, logging, and road-building activities. Any development here must be done in an extremely careful and sensitive manner that is probably beyond our current level of knowledge or technical capability. There are many who don't want to see it become an industrial corridor and who feel that it should not be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency in the name of "economics."
Economics is, of course, a key consideration to the people of the Stikine. Unemployment among the Tahltans and non-First Nations people living in the watershed is very high. While there are some skilled workers for mining and road-building, there are not nearly enough, and most development imports workers from other parts of BC. This kind of employment, however, usually only fuels the boom-and-bust problems experienced by resource-development towns throughout the province. With some vision, one could see a local economy that depends on the characteristics for which the watershed is famous: heritage, wilderness, pristine rivers, and abundant wildlife populations. This is the legacy of the Stikine and this is the legacy that needs to be understood and form the basis for future economic development here. With protection of the entire river and special, sensitive management through-out the region, sustainable economics and employment opportunities could be developed for the watershed's residents using ecosystem planning methods and labour-intensive, value-added forestry and fisheries in conjunction with appropriate cultural and ecotourism. But this vision depends on wilderness, and the very reason wilderness has economic potential lies in its ability to renew and enrich the land and its people.
A short-sighted, self-centred version of economics is the skyhook upon which government and industry hang their agendas. Economics is at best a social science, and social means people. What are people if not intimately connected to and evolved from – culturally and biologically – the landscapes they inhabit? The landscapes for which the Stikine is renowned are largely wilderness landscapes. This is the wilderness out of which the Tahltan people created a nation and a way of life. But things change, and to an extent that is right and good. The problem in today's society is the scale of change and the abrupt shrink-age of time over which changes occur. Changes are often huge and happen in a span of time that is often far too short for the land, not to mention the people, to acclimatize or regain a dynamic equilibrium. Is it not the mark of a progressive society that human-caused changes to the evolution of a landscape are beneficial? The loss of wilderness characteristics in the Sti-kine can only ultimately cause the loss of benefits to the people who live in the watershed. In 50 or 100 years, what do you think will be one of the most valuable "commodities" on the planet? Gold? A coal mine on the Klappan? A road? Try wilderness.
What good is wilderness? Aldo Leopold, in an essay in A Sand County Almanac (1949) said:
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was … very diverse, and the resulting artifacts are very diverse. These differences in the end product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
Wilderness has the power to console, and there's a lot of consolation needed in this world. Another of the principal values of wilderness, both as a concept and as a real place, is its ability to in-spire. Inspiration ramifies as philosophy, poetry, ethics, know-ledge, understanding, love–a host of concepts crucial to our experience as people on this planet. Wilderness must be as varied as the inspirations arising from it.
Vast wetland complexes visited by millions of migratory water fowl, glaciers calving with tumultuous crashes into great rivers, dense forests exhaling oxygen into our now-polluted atmosphere, a herd of caribou thundering across the landscape, a group of wild sheep on a mountain ridge etched against the clear blue sky – all of these visions describe wilderness in the watershed of the Great River. Whose vision shall emerge from the LRMP pro-cess? I don't know what to tell my friend in Alaska, other than to get involved and encourage people on both sides of the border to check out that website and pay attention to what's happening in the Stikine.
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[From WS April/May 1999]