Re: letter misrepresents Suzuki Foundation

Pushers of private energy projects would have readers believe that a well-known environmental organization supports private power on our local rivers. However, the Suzuki Foundation actually reinforces concerns that Wildsight and many local residents have with indiscriminate private applications on Kootenay rivers. Here are three main points:

1. No overall land use planning process, i.e.: which areas are too environmentally sensitive, remote, expensive, etc.

2. No overall plan, 600 active applications and nobody is looking at cumulative impacts

3. Need for better environmental regulations

We share those but also add, from the perspective of the Kootenay consciousness, what about the community test? If these private power projects are so great, then let them meet the test of community approval. Instead, local governments, stakeholders and residents are completely excluded from having any influence on the process. Nowhere is this more evident than with the proposed Glacier/Howser project.

Invermere residents are aware of this project. But new applications spring up daily like mushrooms after rain. For instance, there is a 48-megawatt proposal (a substantial size but conveniently just below what would trigger an Environmental Assessment) on the Upper Wood River. This is a pristine remote wilderness where the timber licensee has voluntarily agreed to forgo logging because the ecological, wilderness and historical values are so significant.

It’s a magical, majestic mountain setting. With towering peaks, vast primeval forests, and pristine lakes, it’s a Canadian postcard come to life, a landscape unchanged by time. This is unroaded wilderness, protected from timber harvest, the only place David Thompson explored he could still recognize 200 years later. Ancient trees of a rare interior rain forest preside over critical connectivity corridors for wildlife, like the endangered mountain caribou, moose and grizzly bears. Pristine creeks and rivers teem with fish.

And the forest company recognizes all this to the point that there is a legal variance to the Kootenay Boundary Land Use Plan, but none of this has any influence on private power. What we have agreed upon in the past doesn’t matter. A private entity can push a road into this wilderness and harness a wild river that has hardly seen a canoe or kayak let alone a power plant.

In the future, if you do travel into this area or any of the many other places hosting private power projects that might also be your regular backcountry stomping grounds, you may very well be met with a fence and signs warning you, “Danger” and “No Trespassing” and security guards. Beyond the fence will be a huge excavator, ripping up the creek and riparian vegetation and leaving you wondering why private power companies don’t have the same restrictions forest companies do.

Please come out for the Public Open House on the Glacier/Howser Creek Project, Thursday, June 25, 5:30 to 9 p.m at the Invermere Community Hall.

Ellen Zimmerman, Wildsight

Golden, B.C.