I haven’t been spending a lot of time on Permies in the last few years. It’s been an interesting time and I’m sure that I’ve missed plenty of interesting, valuable, and entertaining subjects. I’m looking forward to some time in my future when I can learn and share here more again. But that time may not come as quickly as I’d like. There is much work to do outside of this realm to halt the madness.
Unlike my time at Permies, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time being angry at bad guys. But I’ve also been very productive by focusing most of that anger toward manifesting what I want rather than what I don’t want. What I want is to help with what I view as
Bill Mollison’s dream, that we leave the wilderness alone, that we rehabilitate what was damaged, and that we build better and better so that we don’t do any further damage. In regards to the first, I have devoted a few years of my time.
In that regard, and with a great deal of effort by a small dedicated team, we have been massively successful in having a
local Indigenous Nation declare a large mostly intact valley to be off limits to industrial exploitation.
This announcement came at a critically important time considering the local, provincial, national, and global environmental situation.
It was timely that the political situation was ripe for this as well. It was hardly ‘low hanging fruit’, but it was very worth the effort to reach for this goal. Most of my permies projects had to take a back burner to this.
...But in putting this focus on, I was able to help preserve more than 250,000 acres of mostly intact wilderness that have been in a state of increasing complexity for more than 8000 years (since it was last glaciated). The many overlapping ecosystems contain some of the largest unprotected
carbon reserves in the southern half of British Columbia. Until this announcement, it was the largest predominantly intact unprotected watershed in Southern British Columbia (it is pretty much in the middle of the Province North to South). The valley contains endangered habitats, forest types, and species including Chinook Salmon, Grizzly bears, Wolverines, Fishers, Mountain Goats, Cougars, Wolves, Mt Caribou, Moose, Bull Trout, and likely a few hundred others, including many that have never been cataloged.
With a combination of media blitzes, rallies, scientific analysis, and education, meetings with forest companies, private funders, indigenous leaders, and settler community leaders, and countless hours of Zoom calls, text messages, emails, phone calls, one on one meetings, we were able to help save it.
The pristine upper waters flow clear and clean year-round, while glacial snowmelt colours it turquoise further down and sometimes it goes brown with silt and organics if a big avalanche plowed across the river. One of the tallest mountains in the entire Columbia Ranges annually feeds its glacier and snow melt down its Northern and Western flanks into this beautiful valley, and the ancient interior snow-forest contains some of the largest and oldest cedar, hemlock, fir, and spruce
trees in the region. Some people call this area a rainforest, but it gets most of its sustaining moisture from snowmelt; and the snow stays in most of the valley for half of the year. The variety of terrains and ecotypes is pretty amazing. There are drier areas with fire prone systems in various stages of seral regrowth and vulnerability, wet fire-resistant/suppressive systems that dynamically only accumulate biomass and which have survived and piled upon one another for millennia, many avalanche slopes which keep their paths in a perpetually youthful coppice/hedgerow system of alders, birches, and devils club so dense they are practically unwalkable, and an ancient trade trail that winds its way through it all. The watershed contains such variety that it is hard to describe: There are springs, lakes, ponds, waterfalls, swamps, canyons, and wetlands. It trickles and gurgles, and splashes, and it pounds and roars and froths.
The following couple posts are links to some articles that were written about this great news.
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