Summit Meeting to Discuss the Current State of Englishman River Watershed
May 5, 2009

Arrowsmith Parks and Land Use Council Presentation

The Importance of Riparian Protection for Our Drinking Water Source
The Steelhead River - The Englishman River

Thank you for hosting and attending this historic summit. The Mount Arrowsmith Parks and Land Use Council represents a broad-based community collective and shares your concerns for the integrity of our ecosystems and the urgency in creating a more enlightened management regime to ensure its continued survival. The vast majority of our community supports our collective efforts at today’s summit on behalf of the water, fish, endangered plant and animal communities, and future generations.

Many of us live in Parksville- like you, we drink the Englishman River water - and most of us live within the region of the Arrowsmith Water Service.

We come with specific recommendations for achieving riparian protection for our watersheds. We wish to help initiate the necessary management changes; necessary to provide resilience to the stresses of climate change to our regions forests, hydrology, and biological diversity.

We invite participants to look at the big picture over time, at cumulative impacts, and what is the legacy we wish to leave to future generations.

Intact ecosystems provide services. You can think of ecosystem services as our environmental capital. Instead of living off the interest, we have in recent decades been depleting our inherited environmental capital at an alarming rate.

The only legislation that covers forestry and environmental capital in our watershed is the Private Managed Forest Land Act and various regulations associated with it, administered by the provincial Ministry of Agriculture and Lands by means of the Private Managed Forest Land Council.

Under the Private Managed Forest Land Act our drinking water source area is not protected or managed in the public interest. It is managed for the private benefit. The property right of trespass prevents third party data collection and analysis of water and riparian conditions.

The Act does impose riparian regulations. Under its criteria, no machines are allowed within 15 meters (about 50 feet) of the waters edge. (pause) Notice, it does not say, “no harvesting within 15 meters” – it says “no machines”. Tree harvesting right to the water’s edge is permitted – and we’ve seen it a few weeks ago at Whisky Creek. To describe these regulations as grossly inadequate is an understatement.

We believe that a part of the material presented today will be an Inspection report on the Englishman River which was prepared in March by Shawn Hamilton - a registered biologist. This report was prepared for and paid for by the Private Managed Forest Land Council. The PMFLC is a business association with a vested interest in the promotion of its member’s businesses rights in private property.

The terms of reference completely overlooks the cumulative impacts of repeated intrusions in the riparian zones. It does not address the endangered status of valley bottom old growth ecosystems. It does not even attempt to quantify economic and ecological costs of degrading our ecosystems. The process is heavily skewed to reflect the short-term interests of the forest corporations. It does not address the public interest, the interest of the water users, fishers, tourism, recreation, and the very survival of our unique and treasured sensitive ecosystems.

Ray Travers, Registered Professional Forester, gave a presentation to the Private Forest Landowners Association AGM June 2007 titled THE BENEFIT OF VALUE BASED SILVICULTURE where he demonstrated to the Private Forest Land Owners that a higher standard of forest stewardship would ensure that forest composition, structure and function is maintained with historical ranges of natural variability, so that all ecosystem values are sustained. Where degraded, a higher standard of stewardship would restore these ecological attributes and values.
Economic renewal is not so much about what needs to be done; it is what must be stopped from being done.

What RPF Ray Travers says we sometimes fail to consider – even in this enlightened year of 2009 is, natural capital. This capital includes not only natural resources but also a full range of ecosystem services. We agree with his conclusion that protecting the environment IS protecting the economy.

Here in the Englishman River watershed, with our drinking water intake located virtually at the mouth of the river, our entire city and upstream rural area, including Errington, contributes contamination in addition to industrial forestry. There are almost three thousand septic fields in the watershed, a portion of which are failing or not working efficiently. We have auto wreckers, a cemetery, a landfill site, many dozens of commercial and industrial operations, transportation networks, agriculture, and many different land uses. All of them are potential pollution sources to surface and groundwater which drain into the Englishman above the drinking water intake.

The effects of industrial forestry and continued riparian harvesting are in addition to these problems. One effect from forestry, is an increase in temperature of the water received from the upper watershed during the heat of summer you can see the upslope clearcuts on the flanks of Mount Arrowsmith. Warmer water is associated with excessive organic growth and related health risks.

Our need for good riparian zone standards is greater than it has ever been.
The big picture is much different now than it was even 15 or 20 years ago.
In earlier days, there was less point-source pollution from various residential activity and there was a great deal of mature forest still standing.

In 2009, however, our meagre riparian forest strips are often surrounded by clearcuts. There will be more of the same to come, and more and more of it will be on steeper slopes where rapid runoff carries a lot of material and results in less infiltration and failure to recharge groundwater. In addition, there are materials from road building and chemical contamination from pesticides and from fertilizing, both in the forested areas and in the residential watershed.

A high-functioning, broad riparian strip is the last defence for our water supply. Harvesting from it is the wrong thing to do.

We believe it is much too late in the history of resource use in this area to make a change for the worse the forestry practices on the ground. When original harvesting plans for a cut block near the Englishman and other rivers were developed; foresters used guidelines widely applied on both Crown land and private land by both McMillan Bloedel and Weyerhaeuser. Riparian strips were left intact as part of an integrated harvesting strategy which took the environment into account. When even earlier corporate biologists acknowledged that too much of the original ecosystem had been lost, and new old-growth characteristic ecosystems needed to be recruited, for a company to argue their right to come back and take more, seems unconscionable.
Today the need for protection is greater not less?

The onset of climate change is now part of planning the world over and must be part of planning for forest companies and communities, especially when we can make significant contributions with our forest growing land base.

British Columbia’s Forestry/land-use management especially for private lands appears to be vastly inconsistent with climate change goals.

That brings us to the question: What would good riparian area regulations look like?

The David Suzuki Foundation in its publication, A Cut Above, recommends a “no touch”, 100 % retention zone for all fish bearing streams. Called a riparian reserve, it comprises the stream, all islands within the stream, and the area on each side of the stream. Their recommendation goes on to set the width of the riparian reserve on each side of the watercourse at two times the length of the tallest site-potential trees. In recent harvesting by Island Timberlands on the island in the Englishman River, the tallest tree felled to the ground was about 240 feet long. Such a tree height would have yielded a protected “no go” zone of about 450-500 feet on both sides of the watercourse

The precautionary principle is widely used today as a guideline for environmental decision-making. When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not yet fully established scientifically. The precautionary principle tells us to shift the burden of proof when consequences are uncertain, give the benefit of the doubt to nature, public health and community well being. Expect the responsible parties (not governments or the public) to bear the burden of producing needed information.

Throughout the decision-making process, honour the knowledge of those who will be affected by the decisions, and give them a real "say" in the outcome. This approach naturally allows issues of ethics, right-and-wrong, history, cultural appropriateness, and justice to become important in the decision.
Monitor results, heed early warnings, and make mid-course corrections as needed;
Instead of asking the basic risk-assessment question "How much harm is allowable?" -- the precautionary approach asks, "How little harm is possible?"

Faced with reasonable suspicion of harm, the precautionary approach urges a full evaluation of available alternatives for the purpose of preventing or minimizing harm - and select the alternative with the least risk until such time as science proves that a less conservative alternative may be adopted.

You don’t get change by continuing to do things the same old way.
Available resources change the activity on the landscape changes - therefore changes in legislation and regulations need to occur.

To attain sustainable, healthy community, we need more than lofty goals. We need sustained action, effort, and determination to insist that as a community we will accept no less than the precautionary approach in all commercial and industrial activities, including forestry, that have the potential - if not managed carefully to threaten a natural resource upon which all of us depend.

We predict that Island Timberlands will not be willing to permanently terminate its harvesting in historically untouched, highly sensitive areas. We believe they and others will use the global recession as an excuse to seek out resources in these places and will demand that the environment and the public interest should in effect absorb the cost. This behaviour, once begun and found to be profitable in the short term, will, we predict, continue into the foreseeable future unless local governments join with their citizens and resist vigorously.

We citizens can’t do it without you, and you in our local governments can’t succeed without us. In order to achieve change, you will need to prove to regional, provincial and federal governments that your citizens do not accept the present situation. And we as citizens must give you all the evidence and support you need.