Nuanced. - 81. Dr. Marvin Rosenau: DESTRUCTION of the Fraser River

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Aaron sat down with Marvin Rosenau to learn about the current state of the Fraser River. The river has been impacted by over-fishing, larger dykes, and floods. Marvin is a biologist that has spent years studying the fish populations and habitats. In this conversation he explains the damage and risks the Fraser River faces.Marvin is an instructor in the Fish Wildlife and Recreation Program (FWR) at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT).  At BCIT he teaches Fish Ecology and Management as well as Environmental Monitoring at the second year level. Marvin has had a 35-year history of working in freshwater fisheries in the province of British Columbia.  This includes stints as a consultant, in academia, with the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission and with the provincial Ministry of Environment. Marvin worked extensively on lower Fraser River white sturgeon during the 1990s as a BC fisheries program biologist and as a Director and member of the Science Committee with the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society. He has a BSc (Honours) and an MSc from the Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, and a DPhil from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand.Learn more about the Heart of the Fraser: https://movingimages.ca/products/the-heart-of-the-fraserSend us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

My name's Marvin Rosenau, and I'm an instructor at BCIT in the Fish Wildlife and Recreation Program. And I teach in a number of other programs as well at BCIT in the Natural Resources Group. Ecological Restoration, I supervise students on certain projects in the engineering group, environmental engineering. So that's sort of a broad-based, that's my real job. I also do other side contracts. I worked for two First Nations groups up on the Natchako as an expert witness for Sturgeon in Rio Tinto Court case for Flows. So that was a major issue that I worked on. I've worked on other court cases.

I've worked with, in terms of First Nations, I've worked with Casey First Nations on Allowate Flows. I've done a lot of stewardship work, voluntary stewardship stuff, too much, really, spending a lot of my time getting no pay for it. But that's okay, that's sort of my passion, sort of my interest. So I guess you could call it my hobby. But my main job right now is BCIT in the Fish Wildlife and Recreation Program. That is really interesting to hear.

When did this become an interest of yours? When did supporting wildlife habitats, making sure that fish are studied and understood, when did this become something that you were passionate about? Well, you know, that's really hard to say, I think, because it goes back to kind of something at a very young age, a core age, I think, that comes to us and just all of a sudden expresses itself. And you don't know why a pianist, you know, concert pianist becomes a concert pianist or a football player becomes a football player or a lawyer or whatever. I think it was because I grew up in the eastern Fraser Valley in the Chilawak area. So I was born and raised in Chilwack in my earlier years and then moved into Metro Vancouver. But at a very early age, four or five years of age, we moved out onto a farm on Banford Road in East Chilawak,

south of what's now the number one highway they were just building it and um at that point uh it was still you know it only been uh oh 30 or 40 years since that whole area had been drained it was a vast sort of wetland so uh prairie central you know the talk the name prairie central is is road there and so it was a wet uh area the horses in fact had snow shoes kind of arrangements the mud was so thick and so that was there were still lots of little ponds and wetlands and streams and whatnot that had not been completely obliterated and so things like frogs and ducks and crows and sticklebacks in the stream leeches you know the cutthroat trout baby coho salmon these were all part of my growing up and so my father wasn't really an angler he wasn't really a hunter wasn't really an out outdoors person, but you were sort of overwhelmed with the outdoor sort of ambience, I guess. Right.

That seems to have like some key elements to it, right? Those type of environments, those type of ecosystems are really important. And we're just starting to kind of get that now. That's correct. And I think, you know, it was just a marvelous, you know, Chilliwack right now sort of distresses me to come and see it because it is just, you know, this urban, suburban, oppressive, you know, all the little groves of trees and culverted ditches that no longer are extant, changes to the landscape. You know, it's a very kind of a soft, easy growing up atmosphere.

And, you know, we walked to school. There were no sort of strange people around, no predators, no bad people. It seemed as a child. And that was a very naive way of looking at it. But it was also a very conservative background, very conservative upbringing, as most people in the Eastern Fraser Valley know. So it wasn't until we moved. My dad became a teacher. He worked at the ubiquitous Fraserville, frosted foods, which every kid in the valley in those days worked at as a summer job.

As a mechanic, became a teacher. We moved to Coquitlamerey where he taught in, Burnaby North. Right. Interesting. How do you feel about the... changes that are taking place. I just, maybe let's go back a little bit. The Vetter River didn't always exist.

It used to flow as the Chilliwack River. And I'm just, is that, was that a net positive? It was a huge change. And it seems fascinating to sort of look back on. Well, I actually wrote a report for the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council on agriculture and impacts to fish and fisheries in the eastern Fraser Valley. That was during a little politically implemented timeout, as the assistant deputy minister said. Because it was a bad boy, I criticized some projects that the premier was tied to.

And in any event, I reviewed a lot of the stuff. Where we are sitting right now, we were having the interview, the Chilliwack River would have flowed through this room. Okay? And so in the latter part of the 1800s, farmers were starting to settle eastern Fraser Valley. So the Vedder Crossing, Sardis area versus the Yarrow area. And the farmers were kind of battling back and forth. One group would push it to the south, and then the next group would push it to the north. So they were trying to develop these fields.

And so what ended up happening is these myriad of channels. Luka Kuck and Atcholet, Slew, Chilawak, these are tiny remnants of what have been this magical, just extraordinary fish ecosystem that, called the Chilawak River that flowed northward just west of the Squaw and Squay Reserves at the end of Wellington and was pushed into Seumass Lake and then this is the whole story. So Judge Howay sided on the folks in the Sardis area to keep the river flowing more south into Vedder Creek, which is now the better river. How do you feel about that? Do you feel like that was a step in the right direction?

Do you feel like we lost something due to that? Oh, we lost a phenomenal amount. People who drive back and forth through the Sue Mass flats area, which Mother Nature tried to take. take it back in November of 2021 with the atmospheric river and flooded that area. But that would have been a world heritage site. You know, Seumass Lake would have been just an extraordinary, well, you know, for the First Nations, what I know was the Sumas First Nations, it would have been like their breadbasket, their fridge, you know. we were some of the stuff that I read the night flights the waterfall were so thick it would blacken out the sun the mosquitoes were so thick that the first nations communities built their their villages on stilts you know this doesn't come from me having that come through first nations communication just academic reports that I've read so I sit there as a biologist wow

You know, Sumas Lake must have been something phenomenal. The network of streams flowing through this area that, Bitter Crossing, Sardis area, and through Chiluac, would have been just phenomenal. Just fish numbers, you know, I'm an angler, so I go out and try and catch a few fish. Most of them are hatchery fish, Chilwack hatchery, and it would have been so diminished compared to the extraordinary ecosystem. So that kind of makes me sad. You know what?

I'm in this business. I recognize that we're in a planetary collapse. You know, we're really in a... People don't really understand how quickly the planet is collapsing with 8 billion people, almost 8 billion people now on the planet. And, you know, things like COVID are just... And, you know, wars in Ukraine and stuff like... These are just little signs of the landscape starting to blister and sort of fall apart.

But, you know, as a biologist, as an angler, as an outdoors person, camping, hunting, hiking, natural resource instructor, it is kind of really sad. Some of my friends are skeptical of the idea of global warming or climate change. And some of them is very hard to change their perspective. But one thing that you can really see like the ozone layer years ago where you can actually see it and understand it is the collapse of different species, is the loss of biode. As it's often called, within our area, is that something you see is that we're losing biodiversity or the numbers of fish and animals and wildlife that used to be here? It's starting to diminish. Well, I think the problem in the past is that the change was relatively slow. So from generation to generation, the changes were imperceptible, more or less. So if you lived in a village in feudal England, or you lived in a village out on the banks of the Sumas Lake, or if you lived in some area in the hills and some mountain range in China, generation after generation after generation, it changed so slowly.

And I can see in my own lifetime such rapid changes. It's like, you know, I don't think people kind of. understand that. We have a term that I teach in my fisheries course called Shifting Baseline Syndrome. So a very famous scientist, but I know Daniel Pauley out at UBC. He either coined it or he promoted it. And it says from generation, from generation to generation, we don't really recognize how good it was before. So there's these intergenerational changes that are imperceptible. And we think we can kind of push it back. But as somebody once said, twice of almost nothing left is still not much left. And so the shifting baseline syndrome is so rapid now that I can see it in my own lifetime.

You know, and they say can't fight City Hall because City Hall at the core, local governments are really, you know, we have senior governments that do deal with environmental issues, fisheries issues, landscape and ecosystem issues. But when the local community wants to develop something, they do. And there's often very little resistance, even if somebody, you know, is considered a weirdo, enviro freak or whatever, tries to oppose it. There's usually very little resistance to development and loss. And most people, conceptually, verbally they agree, but most people aren't willing to fight for things often that are really, I think, keystone and critical to future generations. Interesting. So the common kind of response is, yes, we may have lost some, some great

fish, some great habitats that were naturally here, but now our agriculture industry is just killing it. The argument is often, I think we produce something like 80% of most of the agriculture for BC, and then we're exporting that. And the soil is so fertile. And, and things are, we're able to do things so quickly. What do you say to people who have that sort of position? Well, I guess I can't really say too much, you know. I wrote a major paper on it in somewhere around 2004, I guess, um, the impacts of agriculture on fisheries in eastern Fraser Valley.

And, um, it's a very detailed, a lot of stuff, historical stuff. Now, here I was born and raised. You know, I have Fraser River mud flowing through my veins kind of thing, right? So I am, you know, this is sort of my home and native land, so to speak, even though my ancestors came from far away. But in the context of the changes that I see, I almost kind of, you know, getting old and grumpy, I think, because they'll drive down the road that I haven't driven down somewhere in Eastern Fraser Valley

and all of a sudden there's a ditch that's filled in that I knew used to have coho or sticklebacks and I'll see a pond that used to have ducks in it. Now it's got a subdivision on it or, you know, there's this grand mansion in an area that was a wooded area. And so that makes me feel sad, but I'm not sure that, anything is really going to change you know the stream the steamroller of humanity keeps moving on and crushing the weak and the defenseless and face it natural resource management is about trying to protect the weak and defenseless fish and frogs and turtles and birds and mammals stuff like that but having a nice house and nice SUV in the front yard we all kind of like that and

But, you know, it's the other guy's problem. It's not my problem. It's that country's problem. It's not my problem. And so we keep deflecting till we've got nothing left. Do you feel like materialism has increased over your lifetime? Do you feel like people, it's often referred to. And again, you can be, like, challenged with, like, what things actually were.

But it sounds like after World War II, after the Great Recession, people were more frugal. They were more careful about what they bought. They tried to use things to the bitter end. My grandmother was certainly that way. Indigenous communities are often that way. It seems like conserving things, trying to use it to the end. That's not as kind of discussed. And I'm just interested to know, do you think that this growth of, well, I don't just want one car, we need an extra car just in case something comes up?

Do you think that that's increased or is it just human nature to want extra things? I think it's core human nature. I don't think it's ever changed from the beginning of time. Now, so I'm a child of children of the Depression. And my dad went back to school. He went to grade 7, I think, and decided he didn't want to be a mechanic at Fraserville for the rest of his life. He actually went back to school, and he ended up getting a university degree, a technical degree. at BCIT, because he was a mechanic, you know, heavy-duty mechanic, then went to UBC, got his

teaching degree, and then he became a teacher, actually here, Chilawak Senior Secondary, and then later on at Better Senior Secondary. And so for a time period, our family had to be very frugal, you know, so a child of children of the Depression, and then we had our own little, what we called an austerity program, I'm a little mini austerity program when my father was at school. And so, at least some of the family, me being the oldest, tend to be very conservative. I take an old pair of running shoes and I'll glue it up. And, you know, not that I can't buy, you know, a new pair of running shoes.

I got a nice truck and I got a nice house. But, you know, I'm still stitching together things from an old backpack that's got a little rip in it and batching old fishing rods. and, you know, scrounging up lawnmowers that still are perfectly good, but maybe aren't the, you know, the cleanest and sleek. So, you know, but I think at the core, I think at the core, post-World War II, I think World War II children and that generation, you know, that was the righteous generation, it knocked them back on their socks so badly

in terms of having to be careful that they did. You know, it sort of made them more careful about how they dealt with stuff. But as life got easier, yeah, people are maybe more materialistic. But I think the core, if you've got it, you're going to grab it and you're going to flaunt it. I think it's pretty core human nature. Yeah, one of my big concerns is that maybe there's small benefits, but I think we're heading back to something similar based on the inflation rates, based on kind of our economic decisions.

I think we're going to face a pretty rough recession that will give us some of those inklings again. I would sort of agree with you, but I've seen that sort of perspective, you know, so I'm maybe a little bit older than you, but I've seen this sort of woes us, things are going to go bad. And we really have a short time frame. You know, 100 years or 75 years or 50 years,

50 years or 20 years, it's not a very long time period. And we've seen economic cycles and, you know, I invest RSP's and stuff like that. And I've seen the ups and downs. And I think psychologically, if the resources are there, we will continue to try and hang on to those nice cars and, you know, televisions and nice houses and stuff like that because we've already got a taste of it. And we will sacrifice a lot of things. will sacrifice site sea on the Peace River and oil and gas exploration. And, you know, there's whole areas in Northern British Columbia. They're crisscrossed by seismic lines.

Like when I, back in the 1970s, when I'm still a young student, I was just shocked at the devastation of this wilderness because these guys were cutting these lines and then doing the blasting to figure out seismically where the gas, wasn't, or oil was. And I think, you know, as Mr. Gecko said in the movie Wall Street, which sort of dates me a little bit, greed is good, you know, we are a pretty greedy species and we will, you know, when you look at Jared Diamond's collapse and you see the collapse of, you know, the

Mayan, you know, Easter Island, various communities around the world, societies around the world. And I suspect they weren't dumb people. You know, they built magnificent cultures and buildings and palaces and stuff like that. But greed still ended up pushing, tipping them over the edge. And while in his book he tries to be optimistic, I'm not nearly as optimistic in respect to planetary and people it's not to say we're going to go extinct we're probably not going to go extinct but there may be vast changes you know COVID COVID was just shut the planet down to the point where we had clean air clean water you know Venice selves said oh look at those you can see

the bottom of the canals and you know dolphins are coming to swim in the in the canals in Venice and you go like okay well we had a little blip in time you know COVID around the world i don't know what it killed five million people out of eight billion people you know nothing a war a war in ukraine now killed you know front news everybody's upset about it but um you know in terms of the mortality both citizen and uh the military mortalities or casualties it's a tiny tiny tiny blip and so um there would have to be a mass uh catastrophe i think to really change change our mindsets, these little mindsets are, and you can see if you use the stock market, you know, who it dropped, oh, all of a sudden is back up, you know, you know, it's, we're very,

we're a very resilient, invasive species and perhaps a meteor crashing onto the planet or maybe a nuclear war, even if a nuclear war, you know, or a meteor killed, 3 billion people. It would still not be, the number of people on the planet, which, you know, 5 billion left, would still be only a few decades going back. So we have this geometric progression. So when you loop it back to, you know, southwestern British Columbia, the Vedder River, the Chilawak River, the richness, we're always willing to compromise, it seems. I definitely agree, particularly like Ukraine seems to be a good example, because while it seems like everybody's, heart is in it. At the end of each day, it feels like what people care more about is what their gas prices are more than what's going on there. And when you look at how much Canada, like a lot of the US, the money they're sending is more like debt than it is real, just free flowing financial support. And I think a lot of people kind of get that confused that there is a repayment plan

sort of in place with the Ukraine that isn't like, oh, we're just 100% invested in that. And we're we're going to go all out and I was just listening to a CIA analyst kind of break down how to look at this and he was like if you look at it more objectively Russia is starting to win which is the European countries are starting to go okay we need oil like we cannot survive a winter without oil our like houses are going to freeze people are going to die so how do we it's time to resolve like people are getting kind of this can't continue for economic prosperity, not for what's right, what's just analysis like that. How do you feel then when you're talking about the growth of humans, this concern around Japan?

Japan seems to be an example of their oldest populations, they're largest, they don't have a growing population, so they're trying to start to look at immigration to bring people in because they don't have enough people, and their country is starting to decrease in size. and people are starting to float the idea of like civilization collapse in terms of us dropping from that $8 billion number downwards. I've seen a few different posts about that. And I'm just, do you think that that's all bunkum like it's all silliness or is there any weight to that? I think Japan's the main example right now. Well, our ecological footprint, so there's some well-known UBC researchers who have talked about the ecological footprint.

I think we've, you know, a question on one of my exams from my students where I teach at BCIT. We passed the ecological footprint. Boy, I'm going to get heck from this from my students because I can't remember offhand. I think it was 1984 is when we, you know, to be able to have a sustainable impact on the planet was something like 1984, I think. So this includes water, sewage, food, air, recycling, you know, the natural recycling of, things like CO2 into the atmosphere. And so the question I have is like, okay, I don't know how many people are in Japan. I think Germany is 80 million.

The United States is 300 million plus. What was wrong with 100 million? Why can't we shrink the population size? Population size and resource extraction, including the world that I work in, fisheries, is tied to numbers of people, okay? And so we had a little incident here, a little issue last year and a half, which was a really gorgeous piece of Fraser River ecosystem

just outside of Chilliwack called Gill Bar, Gill Island, Gil Road, and the mud boggers and four-wheel drivers just came in over the last several years. didn't help matters any because people were staying home and they just thrash the thrash that whole ecosystem and it's basically a series of wetlands and channels and uh wooded islands and stuff like that within what we call the heart of the fraser a myriad of islands wetlands and channels between hope and mission here in the fraser in uh virginia and we fought the battle you know

talking to the ministers and resource enforcement guys um i used to go on that bar in my four-wheel drive. We used to walk on it. We used to pick agates. We used to fish on it. We used to all sorts of things. But the intensity of our use was literally a tiny, tiny fraction of what it ended up becoming in 2020, 2021, 2022. A lot of people really angry about the shutdown of the gill bar ecosystem to mud boggers and campers and, you know, just terrorizing the landscape by burning pallets and cars and stuff like that. But I think, you know, it had to be done. And it really has to, that area between Mission and Hope, which is called the Heart of the Fraser,

a bunch of really extraordinary islands that are fish habitat, wildlife habitat, plant habitat. If we want to save the Fraser River, it's an integral part of the Fraser. Why hasn't, why haven't people figured that out already? Okay. We've squeezed the Fraser wetland, channel, stream, ecosystem to a tiny sliver of what it was in pre-European settlement, you know, 1800. And now we're destroying the last little bit. And so this, this massive population squeeze is just basically tearing the landscape apart. And we'll win a few battles, but I'm not.

sure that we're going to win the war if children and future generations want to see something that's at least even remotely intact to what it was pre-European and even probably some aspects of pre-First Nation settlement going back hundreds of years or maybe even thousands of years. Can you tell us what it is that makes it beautiful, important for people who are riding their ATVs who don't understand, who don't have the context of what they're impacting when they're driving along there. My partner and I, when we were walking, we saw somebody land a plane on that kind of rockbed spot.

And it was just like, is this the place for that? Is this what's appropriate? Like, it doesn't seem like that one specifically took a lot of critical thinking to go. Maybe we shouldn't write along here. But can you just help people understand what they're impacting? Well, essentially, the utilization of motorized vehicles is just chewing the landscape up. You can see it, you know, and quite frankly, the enforcement staff, DFO and the province, so fisheries officers, conservation officers, have never been educated to see what constitutes an intact ecosystem

and what constitutes basically a broken ecosystem. And I have no problem with a four-wheel drive. down that bar. I have no problem with two four-wheel drives going down that bar. But when we have 10,000, and I think we had something like 10,000 or between 10 and 20,000 in our measurement, we see cameras up there to actually do a measurement. It chews the landscape to bits.

And the fish, the wildlife, the sturgeon incubation, so sturgeon spawn in the springtime when freshet is high and the whole river is covered over. well in the wintertime when that same river bottom where sturgeon lay their eggs on is chewed up by four-wheel drives and bedboggers and quads at some point the whole system unravels so an intact physical sometimes you just have to draw boundaries around areas okay so from hope to mission I think you have to draw a red line around it yeah there are some activities

First Nations are going to continue to fish it. Sport angers are going to continue to fish it. You know, there's people that are going to camp. You can have restricted areas. You say, okay, we're going to sacrifice this area so people can enjoy it. But when you have this sort of mass, it's kind of like Mad Max, it's literally like Mad Max. And we pointed out to the mayor, again, Popov, what it was like. And people are just kind of sitting there aghast at some of the videos.

how things are being destroyed. So somebody at some level in government kind of said, yeah, you know, a small group that I work with called the Gravel Stewardship Group, and we lobbied and lobbied hard, had some good media attention. But this mass of humanity coming down and just basically chewing a landscape up, landscape can't survive that. Wow. So do you feel like it was a municipal move that really showed support?

When you think of what makes, and effort successful because people do protest various issues and fail regularly. Do you have any thoughts on what leads a successful campaign to try and protect something like the heart of the Fraser? Well, at a superficial level, I can say yes, because DFO was the agency that shut it down. Now, the number one damage to the public viewscape, as it were, is fish and fisheries. but you know the mayor might have been calling up the

Minister of Fisheries the guys in Region 2 in the Forestlands and Natural Resource Operations might have been sending memos to their minister or ADMs or whatever

and so at a visual perspective it was DFO that put the signs up in the block you know the blockade the big lock block concrete barriers but at the end of the day there's probably a pile of

agency, different political influences, phone calls and stuff like that and of course the media helped a lot the media was really important in influencing it and so it's tough to say when a decision is made

and I'm pretty tied into you know at the ministerial level was out and on the river with a senior federal minister a few weeks ago, you know, and chat with members of parliament, MLAs and stuff like that. I've done that over the years. You can see where the final decision does come down.

And I'm not sure that DFO was the right agencies to shut it down. I'm glad that they did. But maybe it should have been the city of Chilwaukee. Maybe it should have been the Ministry of Environment or whatever it's called, now, BC Environment. land wars in the province. But everybody kind of has a role to play. So it's tough to say who really triggered it. But it's certainly at the sort of open visual perspective was DFO, which was good.

Yeah, because I think of like what makes development successful. Like I'm trying to, it seems like some people who care about the environment, they don't have the resources, the expertise, the collaboration. that like say a big development company has when they're like okay we're going to go lobby this person then we're going to go lobby this person we're going to have dinner with that person and it's all very business professional kind of energy when you hear environmentalists stopping vans or trucks in the middle of a bridge it's like who is going to want to sit down with that person after an incident like that and i think there is a role to play with that using your voice

strongly but business seems to win and there's beyond just economic success it seems like there's something in their recipe that's effective in communicating and being someone like yourself which is just reasonable hey these are the things that are going to happen as a consequence if we do this if we don't do this this this is going to be some of the consequences we're going to have to look at well I'm a little bit different than most advocates environmental advocates in that I have 10 years of academic training

and I grew up in the Fraser Valley so this is my territorial imperative okay this is the landscape that I feel most attached to most protective of most I'll say glued to and so there's a guy by the name of Robert Ardry who wrote a book

called the territorial imperative it says where you were born and raised that's the area that you will fight for. So I go to New Zealand, which I have spent time in New Zealand, and I see the same sort of damage that occurs in New Zealand watersheds. And I go, oh, I really don't like this. And I'm very attached to New Zealand. I spent probably five years of my life close to in New Zealand.

But when I cycle back, this is the one area that I really fight for. And so this territorial imperative. And I got the academic back. around. I've got, and I've never, I guess I kind of ascribed, I once told an old girlfriend trying to impress her that I was going to be an assistant deputy minister one day. And I probably had the qualifications to, but I didn't have the, I didn't have the hardwaring, you didn't have the sort of mental, I guess I always kind of felt that when you were climbed up the ladder within government or industry or business, you had to compromise a lot. And there's a lot of, you know,

do have to compromise. You know, it's not that, you know, I can't spend all my whole life fighting every, every little creek and every little pond. But at some point in government, and in 2003, I actually basically got pushed out of government. I was told by the premier at the time. And, um, sorry, that was Gordon Campbell? Campbell, yeah, that was told it was, he was, he, he, that's what I was told. Anyways, I had a very, uh, how did I put it, uh, uh, uh,

what was at that time sort of catastrophic removal on a government into a secondment, still paid by the government, but I was interfering with some of the local MLAs and business here in Chilliwack on gravel removal on the Fraser River, plus a big development out at Mission at Silvermore Lake. And so my ability to compromise on some of these issues is probably not very good much to my sort of social and intellectual detriment, perhaps. But, you know, so became very clear quite early on in my, well, middle part of my career,

I wasn't going to go too far up the sort of the ladder in government. Because you had a limit, because you saw that you had to take a stand at a certain point and you couldn't continue any further down that rabbit hole? Well, pretty well, you know, one of the issues was a development at Silvermere Lake and one of the sort of junior techs, I saw, I reviewed a development there. And years later, he said, you know, Marvin, if you would have just written what I told you, you wouldn't have got kicked out of government. Now, I didn't get kicked out of government per se because I just got reshifted out to UBC, which was a, it was actually a wonderful experience, got to work under Daniel Pauley. Basically what I did was just hid in a corner and finished up a pile of reports and things that were outstanding in my work in Region 2 with the Ministry of Environment, which at that time was waterland and air protection. And then BCIT came calling, and I've had a wonderful 20-year experience at BCIT over that time frame.

This really, it all comes together. First, I interviewed Lee Harding, who is focused on wolf culling and caribou populations, and he very much described something similar to what you said, which is they formed like a commission on what causes caribou populations to decline, and they determined that it was more about the ecosystems around it than it was wolves. They didn't like that. So they said, out with this committee, we're going to bring in a new committee, reform it. They need to come to the conclusion that it's wolves. That committee did not come to the conclusion that it was wolves.

Then they formed a third committee and they ended up determining that it was wolves that were the problem. And now they wolf call, which I still when I say that you have to go in a helicopter with a gun and shoot them from the sky, just seems like BC would be so far past something like that. Like it still just doesn't seem even possible that we do something like that. then I sit down with Daryl Plekis, who was an MLA in Abbotsford, and he talks about trying to just stop grizzly bear hunting and how all the research, all the information says that we need to reduce this approach as soon as possible. And he's a BC liberal, so he's sitting in the room with other BC liberals, hoping they will agree. And he, in the first interview and the second interview, says they never made a decision that he saw that ever was based on what the public interest was, was. always in the interest of who's going to vote for them and what benefits their donors and

that kind of mindset. And that is absolutely terrifying to think that like we many people have their kind of suspicions about government. Are they good? Are they bad? What's going on behind the scenes? But for him to just sit down and say that it was not based on what's for the good of the public is very alarming because we vote these people in. Now to his credit, he's been very pleased with the direction the NDP has chosen to go in recent years. And he, in our recent conversation, talked about how we need to understand that they have years that they're going to need in order to undo some of the terrible decisions. But I'm interested in your thoughts on specifically Site C, because the NDP fiercely against it, and now I just heard

from David Eby, and this is great power for our community. This is going to be a good investment for British Columbians and we can be confident in our power use. But you mentioned that is something that was maybe bad for the habitat. Can you elaborate on that? Okay. I don't know the specifics of Site C per se. I've been up to the Peace River back in my graduate school days. And, you know, I know it at a superficial level, but I was working before Site C came online.

I was the BC hydrofish or the hydrofish person out of Victoria for several years. So I was reporting to the assistant deputy minister at the time, John O'Reardon, and a few others. And so I had a familiarity, particularly with the Lower Mainland Project. So Wallach, Stave, Ruskin, Chequimus. Chequimis was a big battle. BC Hydro was stealing water. They were not licensed to take the water that they were taking. And so I went and applied for the water.

I applied for $10 million worth of water per year that they weren't licensed for. Oh, did the crop ever hit the fan on that one? And this was a career limiting move, right? And one of the senior vice presidents of BC Hydro wrote a note to the assistant deputy minister. I don't know how we're going to get along here when you have these really environmental biologists, you know, trying to be environmental around our BC hydro projects. Okay, so I knew the details of hydro issues and, you know, the extraordinary importance of the piece flowing northward, you know, in through northern BC and, you know, into the McKenzie

water system is just, you know, and intuitively, when you you're screwing up that much of the landscape, you know, when you're affecting large scales of benchland and wetland and changing flow regimes, the impacts are going to be, you know, phenomenal. And this idea, you know, in the old days it used to just build it, I worked on the Rebel Stoke Dam project back in the 1970s on the Columbia, you know, and they open the water up in the morning and then at night they shut it down. And, you know, rivers don't work that way.

You know, we're on a 24-hour cycle. You don't have water pulsing down during the daytime when people at home are turning on their TVs and plug in their toasters and stuff like that. And then the night you shut off when the power is not needed. And so, you know, intuitively, the, I'm going to guess the P, site C is a really devastating. What do we need the power for? Okay, well, you know what? It's an economic generator. You know, we, you know, I was really tied into how much the power was worth, how much we were needing in British Columbia.

I'm going to guess that it's well in excess of what we need when you have all the independent power projects around British Columbia, then loop on top of that site C. And so it's for sale. We can now, we are now linked into the North American grid. We were not historically linked into the North American grid. And we can now wheel power to back in the day when I was working down to Texas. We can wheel it down to California. We can trade power. You know, power can be traded on an instantaneous basis between Alberta and British Columbia.

So the big power plants that are coal-fired in Alberta, they can't ramp up and down with the power regime the way we can. Canterbury. So they can hold its, you know, I had a cousin who was a power engineer in one of the big facilities in Alberta. So my understanding is that coal fire plants have to remain stable. So BC Hydro buys and sells power depending on the time of day for things like the piece. It can wheel it back and forth. We can use the power to, I don't know, compress gas in the northeastern part of the province. So, you know, um, The idea that somebody would say, well, you know, this is a great thing for the province. Well, it might be, you know, in terms of our economic rent and revenue,

hey, I can have two four-wheel drives in my front yard rather than just one because we're so rich. But in terms of the ecosystem, sustainability, future generations, EB might be wrong. I would just throw that out there. So the assumption right now is that we need to go to natural ways, solar, energy, hydro, so do you think that we're focusing too much on hydro? Do you think we could do this better? What is kind of the big argument right now is like we saw the steepest increase in electric cars in the Fraser Valley recently. And so the argument is, well, now the car is

electric, the hydroelectric dam is natural. It's not harmful to the same extent that coal or gas or stuff like that is. So now you have like a green ecosystem. It seems like when I spoke to, I don't know if you know Peter Ross. He's an ocean pollution expert. And he's been doing some research along the Fraser as well and the damage to the ecosystems after the floods.

And one of his comments was like, we love our blue bins. We feel good about ourselves with our blue bins. It was invented in Canada. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy that we're doing the right thing. and he was like they almost do nothing they have very small impact in comparison to the amount of like it basically made us feel okay using plastics because we were like well it's being recycled and it's like well a very small amount actually gets effectively recycled and then you have to use a lot of power in order to break that down and reuse it and so it isn't an untrammeled good it didn't fix the problem with plastics but that's what we want we want this easy fix oh now we've got hydro we're good to go so what are we missing when we're thinking about hydro it sounds like ecosystems are really impacted well hydro does a lot of things it changes flow regimes which are fish are adapted to in streams uh it floods uh terrestrial ecosystems

uh it releases greenhouse gas of the methane coming out of the uh landscape that's flooded all the vegetation that's left uh in some cases we log the daylights out of that vegetation before the area is flooded but it's still um basically disrupts vast areas of ecosystem and essentially it's not green you know dams may be less CO2 intensive and in terms of their production so in other words the greenhouse gases that come out of the flooded landscapes but you know I'm not into it at that detail so I can't tell what the trade-offs are, say, compared to a, you know, do we want an impacted salmon river? The Coquitlam River was, you know, Alouette River, Stave Rivers of lower mainland streams,

even to an extent the Wallych Jones facility up the valley near Hope. So the flow regimes were changed, ramping, flows go up and down on a daily basis. you know, is that ecosystem worth trading off versus maybe a natural gas co-gen plant that produces electricity? You know, so I don't know the numbers, but I think really there's a couple of things that are important. One is population control. So that's getting outside of my sphere of sort of expertise. But I do talk a little bit about it in my environmental monitoring course. that you know that curve that goes like that and in terms of our ability to control

trash you know the blue bins the green bins you know we we get better but then the population continues to increase lower mainland is going to explode continue to explode and every time i go to a you know take a wrong turn and it'll end up in a subdivision or an area that uh i hadn't been for three or four years oh there's a huge subdivision you know i met somebody up at a golf course and mission last week. And I got lost. So I ended up got lost because there was roads that were blockaded because there's some construction going on.

So I didn't make a big loop around. Holy crap. This is a huge sub. You know, there's a whole mountainside, you know. And so the concrete trucks and the, you know, the construction, you know, the wood, piles of wood and asphalt and soil and stuff like this, like, you know, just, just, ex nihilo just out of nothing

all of a sudden there was a community you know in the western part of mission that would have been probably the size of town in northern BC just boom just and you know the construction was still going on and so until we find a way

to control population growth which isn't going to happen so I'm distressed to hear that Japan might be trying to bring people in like wasn't when I was kid, you know, wasn't the Fraser Valley of, you know, a few tens of thousands of people in Chilliwack a great life, it was a great life. Like, why do I need an extra four-wheel drive in my front yard when I could go back to my childhood ecosystem and catch frogs in the backyard and have crows cawing on the fence posts and stuff like that? You know, the, you know, the human mind is

a strange and terrible thing. So my other understanding is that we're looking at bringing even in more people to address the nursing shortage and the doctor shortage, that we are going to start increasing and pitching if Mr. Eby is elected as the leader of the NDP,

he'd like to push the federal government to bring in even more people to the B.C. To fill those gaps in service. And that would increase our immigration numbers, increase the amount of people. As you've already described, we're increasing a lot.

So do you think that we just don't understand the importance of these ecosystems, the impacts that it has? I had an individual Chris Koo on, who's a really passionate birder. And he was explaining, like a pond in Delta creates this very specific, like, amino acid

that's incredibly important for birds that fly in from, like, the U.S. or something. And they eat there, and then they go all the way to, like, Alaska or something. Like we don't, normal people, they go, that's a pond. That's a pond like every other pond. But it does something unique. Do you think we struggle to understand the nuances of the different ecosystems and how they play a role?

No, I don't think we struggle. I don't think, and I'm talking about we as a society, we just don't care. We're not interested, okay? There's a few, I'll call them weirdos like myself, that, you know, we're lifting up a rock. We're looking at a worm under it. We're looking at, you know, picking up a stick and looking at the squirrel that's trying to hide from you. We're snorkeying down the stream, counting fish and that sort of stuff. But the general public is not really interested in these nuanced aspects of ecosystems.

You know, this was an extraordinary ecosystem, the eastern Fraser Valley of Chiloh, there's a vast myriad of wetlands and channels. and now we've got a cranberry farm being built on one of the large islands out in the Nekomen Island area, Nekoman Slew area, Cranberry farm, you know? Like this area is flooded every springtime, sometimes right over the top. There's Harrison River Sockye rearing there, Chinook, Chum Salmon,

and I think it's around 240 acres. We're obliterating it. We're allowing it to be obliterated. Like, you know, we're going to build a hatchery. We're going to build a $20 million hatchery down the road. And our operation maintenance is going to be $2 or $3 million a year. But we couldn't have. And it was for sale.

Five years ago, it was for sale for $3 million. And we can't buy and protect us $3 million. It's going to be a lot more now because it's now owned by somebody who's developing it. uh we can't do that like how insane is that like um we just we kind of think we're rational here in british clumbia uh government you talk to people in government right you know worked in government for for a decade and a half almost two decades government is not rational in terms of sustainability uh it runs on levels of uh insanity on mistruths and um basically out and out and out lies But, you know, individuals within government and myself too when I was in government, even now, you know, it's easy to, well, okay, we can compromise on this.

We can, we can shade that, and we can kind of look the other way for that. And it'll probably be okay. But at the end of the day, you know, our shifting baseline, the next generation, next generation won't have anything that even comes close to being intact. was there a point in time where was it when you were like pushed out from the the inner sphere of government that you were involved in where you started to go we're not on the right track and it doesn't seem like there's much of a push to be on the right track because personally i want to see all of these things protected and improved and made better but it seems like it's not easy to go step one step two step three with with the general public uh like we don't, I didn't know about that complex ecosystem there. I would have called it a pond prior. And so it seems like the public is really, to a certain extent, ignorant about the finer details of the consequences of these things.

And then to a certain extent that ignorance impact our ability to stand up for things. Well, even the, even with the resource managers, don't understand it very well. So I had an interview the other day about fish farms. So with Fraser, Sokai, I'll call it population. It's a myriad of populations, but has done very poorly this year, relatively poorly this year, compared to Alaska, Bristol Bay, push an 80 million fish, record run. Columbia River, Socki run, mostly Canadian in the Okanagan system. They've had a little bit of help.

but a phenomenal run this year record run. It's a small run. I'll call it again, this complex of runs, but the Columbia Salki run was, I think close to 700,000 fish. Man, little old Okanagan and Wenatchi, the two main systems in the Columbia that produce Salki,

had more Salki coming back in 2020. I think the whole Fraser system had 350,000. and roughly fish and change. The whole Fraser ecosystem could only produce a third of a million sock eye. And little old Skaha Lake,

Osaias Lake, Winnachi Lake, can produce twice that amount? Okay. And why aren't all the 92 plus or minus First Nations bands up and down the Fraser? Why isn't every commercial fishing

entity why isn't every sport fishing entity why isn't just people that like

to know that there's intact um salki runs and the other salmon populations

are in the same boat really you know we have a few little bright spots here and

there but for the most part Fraser River salmon ecosystems have collapsed in my view

strong view is it's tied to fish farms okay But there's a whole body of information that I've looked at that leads me to that conclusion. Why aren't these groups all just going to Ottawa and basically, I don't want to sound like I'm fostering a revolution, but basically burning the place down saying you have to do something. Okay?

The salmon and steelhead collapses within the Fraser and Greater Georgia Basin. ecosystem and Puget Sound's affected as well, the Sailor Sea ecosystem, from a salmon perspective, has absolutely collapsed. And why aren't people just going crazy telling government and whomever that this has to be fixed? This is like the dodo going extinct.

It's like passenger pigeons. Yet in 2022, you know, we had right now, it's just under six million coming back. So we went in 2010, around 28 million, Sakai coming back, 2014-20, 2018, it was 10,

and it was five and change. I think the in-season estimate is up to six now. But, and again, Coho, Fraser Coho basically collapsed, Fraser Steelhead, including winter runs, summer and winter runs, Fraser Chinooks,

You know, even, you know, and we have these little bumps and we go, oh, well, everything's going back. But in reality, if you look at the long-term trends since the 1980s and early 90s, for the most part, everything is gone in a downward direction. But, hey, you know, can't be fish farms because, oh, it's the seals, seals and sealine. No, it's climate change. No, it's urbanization. No, you know. And so you have even the scientists, the biologists, and the resource managers are at a, odds with one another.

How is the general public going to figure that out? So it makes it easy for a monolithic block like the fish farming industry. You know, we've got the science that says it's not an issue, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it's a multi-billion dollar. I forget what the gate receipts are for, you know, it's several billion dollars in British Columbia. It's the biggest agricultural product in British Columbia. And the Cohen Commission said, hey, take them out of there by 2025.

Well, took a few out of Broughton archipelago, and there's now fish farms taking out a discovery passage, which is that Fraser River, Fraser River pathway for the little babies to go out, disease, sea lice attached to the sides of the bodies of the fish and kind of chew them up and make them less viable for survival. But, hey, you know. and so the big run 220, 218, 214, 210, 206 that sort of cycle of runs, which is mostly the big Shuswap, Southern, South Thompson Watershed, you know, the runs into

the subdominant and non-dominant your classes or cycles because Salki have mostly a four-year cycle, not always but mostly have mostly collapse as well like this is insane but we're willing to kind of look sideways we're not willing you know like again in the fish farm Cohen Commission mostly you know I actually testified on at least one on habitat issues mostly Fraser River gravel

and I did three reports for the Cohen Commission And it was mostly just lawyers making lots of money in my view at the end of the day. And I was interviewed prior to the Coen Commission getting started when they first announced it. And I said, well, I guess we'll see at the end of the day. And some fairly prominent members of parliament, you know, in environmental critics or fisheries critics came and talked to me. I said, gave him my presentation. I said, wow, what can we do? And I said, well, you guys, I didn't say it exactly.

You know, you guys kind of were probably the issue for it happening. I said, you can get some information doing trial removals. Nukka Sound, steelhead, the Gold River basically collapsed. It flows into Nuttka Sound. Just plugged with fish farms. You do some experimental stuff. But I don't think governments are willing to really do the hardcore experimental stuff that is required to get an answer.

Can you explain what a fish run is, like the process, because you hear, oh, this is a big run this year, it's going to be huge. How does this function? What is the, like, how do you understand the migration of fish? Because as I spoke to Dean about, they move so many different spots. We can't, we can't just go, oh, they're going to go here, they're here, then here, they're fish. They go where they like, and they'll stop in different spots. So how do we think about just the migration of fish? Well, I guess in terms of migration, and I'll stick to Salmonids, salmon and trout, and they have relatively similar life history patterns.

Salmon are mostly anatomists. In other words, they go born in freshwater, might rear a little bit, go to sea, get most of their body mass in the ocean and come back and spawn and die. And trout, steelhead, the inadermis version, does sort of the same thing. Um, in terms of, uh, what we would consider the keystone or capstone species in British Columbia, um, Pacific salmon, there's five species and, um, probably the most high profile one in British Columbia is sock. I, so I'll kind of concentrate on sock eye, but, uh, Chinook have a very widely ranging, um, life history pattern. I think there's, uh, Chinook, a number of Chinook runs in the Fraser watershed is huge.

in terms of the number of runs, but in terms of the population numbers, there's only several hundred thousand fish coming back to the phrasia. Whereas Salki, even up until 2010, there was close to 30 million fish coming back. And so they, I'll stick to that life history. So Salki, very prized, First Nations,

up and down the coast, not so much in the Columbia, south, except for that couple of little runs in Okanagan, and Wenatchie, so Oregon and British Central, South, British Columbia. But Fraser Watershed in British Columbia was really subject to a lot of intense glaciation. So we've got these great, big, long trough lakes, so we've got Shuswap Lake, we've got Chilko Lake, we've got Quinell Lake, we've got up in the Stewart Tack. We've got all these long, skinny, deep, cold, probably usually nutrient poor.

oligotrophic, call it oligotrophic lakes, so low nutrients, low productivity. That sockeye, when they come back to streams, most sockeye spawn in streams, although for salmon, they sometimes spawn in lakes, life history variation. The little babies incubate over the wintertime. So sockeye salmon spawn in the fall, we'll take Adams Rivers an example

The embryos so just basically an egg that's starting to go through cell division basically develops inside the egg shell like a chicken for about three months hatches somewhere around

Christmas time then the little wiggler which is a larva called an elven sits there using up the oak sack and becoming a little fish baby fish comes out of the gravel and sock I go to a big lake So they were in a lake for about a year.

So they get to be about that big. We call them they turn silvery. They become a smolt and they whistle out through the Fraser. They might come down, the Adams, South Thompson, Thompson, into the Fraser, down into the estuary and out to sea. Sok I probably don't like estuaries that much. They're big enough to go out to sea. So Chum and Chinook really like estuaries and to a lesser extent, pink salmon that have a shorter life history. So they go out to sea, so they're migrating.

River, sockeye smolts, as do most salmon smolts, not all, but many of them go northward once they hit salt water just past the ferry slip, north arm, point gray, and they go up, essentially go up through the myriad of islands and channels between main body, northern Vancouver Island and the mainland. And so the rich feeding ground, they go through all these islands, which, of course, are protected from big storms and waves and stuff like that, which is why the fish farmers like to cite their facilities in these protected bays where the little sockeye and other species are kind of wandering along the edge. Oh, there's a big net there.

Oh, there's nice food. I just got a sea louse attached to me because these fish farms are concentrators. They're biomagnification of sea lice. And then if they survive it, they go up passport, Hardy, Queen Charlotte Sound, and then boom out in the open ocean. So four-year cycle mostly for Fraser Sokye. And so we have six months in the gravel as an embryo, fertilized egg, or as an elven, as a larva. Then we have one full year in fresh water rearing in a lake, so that's a year and a half.

So then you take four years, subtract a year and a half from it. So that's essentially two and a half years out in the marine environment. So they're going around and around and around in the open Pacific, feeding in these very rich areas offshore. So as sport anglers like to catch Chinook and Kohol, that often will stay close to the inland waters, inland marine waters but Sokai Pinks and chums go offshore and that's how come

Alaskans get a hold of them because some of them come out through Alaska down back to British Columbia. We don't like that. And so they spend basically close a little bit more than two years and then they come back they'll do landfall for Fraser Sokai

they'll either come to northern Vancouver Island come around the top and then down through Johnson Strait, Discovery Channel, the various seamer narrows. And that's where some of the big sane and gillnet fisheries are, and then down through to the mouth of Fraser. Or they will, some years, they will landfall closer to the southern end of Vancouver Island. And then in those years, the diversion rate. So this was a high, generally a higher diversion rate south through Wanda Fuca.

And so when they, in the old days, bad old days, Americans used to really pound them before they got into Canadian waters because they went through their national waters. We now have the Pacific Salmon Treaty and the Pacific Salmon Commission allows for sort of a negotiated, safe and mostly harvested by Canada agreements. So we catch American fish off a tofino or Euclid. because their Chinooks are going by. So we do these trade-offs. Anyway, so early Stuart Fish are the nicest of the fish. I once caught one, probably illegally, a sport when I was a kid. Took it home.

Oh, this is a Chinook. It's a, no, it's talking. Anyway, that was a bad thing I did back in 1973. And we put it on the barbecue, and my goodness, it just melted on the barbecue. The fat and the juices. It was just one of the most scrumptious fish that I'd ever, salmon that I'd ever eaten. So First Nations really, really, really like those early Stewart fish because the first big, some Chinooks had come earlier, some steelhead, a few odds and ends. But early Stuart Sawkeye and that one fish that I caught when I was 17 years old really impressed me at how fat and how rich and how silvery it was.

was, and I can understand why those early fish in June are so prized, you know, historically by First Nations communities. And then they, you know, we got these other runs further north or usually earlier, although we've got some odd balls like Chilliwack River Sockye that go actually go through better Chilliwack, Chilowack Lake and then up into, well, it's actually down if you look in north-south, but cross the border down into the states. So some of the Sokai spawned on the Canadian side of the border, but the rest of the watershed, which is intact.

Americans haven't really logged it, the Upper Chilwaukee watershed. And so they, in effect, spawn up there. And so over June, July, August, and into September, we have these later and later runs that come through. And do they're spotting, and then the whole cycle starts again. Yeah, because this year we did our salmon ceremony only like a little over a month ago in our community because it was our first catch. It was our first ability to kind of bring that home to the community because everything was happening so late. Do you, Dean talked about how he loves these fish, how he cares about them, how he sees the value they bring.

But like for people, it's easy to look at dogs, like a friend, something to admire. they might look at bears or other wildlife like it's living. But we seem to struggle with trees, with bugs, with fish as like what is there to love about them and what is there to admire? And it seems like that is the drop-off point for some people when we're talking about fish farms is my fish comes in a can. Like I buy it at the grocery store. There isn't when you hold it, it's slimy to people. like they don't have maybe a memory that connects them the way Dean had talked about, the way you sort of talk about that relationship with the fish.

Can you just describe your relationship, why you admire what you see in these animals that so many might miss out on? Oh boy. You're parsing into the deep psychological depths of my personality here. Doing my best. This is dangerous territory, I think. you know, I don't know. I just always fascinated by them. They were just creatures that they were just different. You know, in the Eastern Fraser Valley, I think one of the first

sort of things that really struck me was in our ditch on Banford Road, again, south of the highway. So those ditches have been, have changed over the years. You know, the city of Chilwak digs them deeper and deeper, and there's more manure coming into them, less riparian buffer zones. You know, in the old days with barbed wire fences, you didn't cut the grass right to the edge of the ditches. You actually left a little natural buffer zone. And so those ditches had cutthroat trout, they had coho in them, and I remember skating on the ditch. and there were sticklebacks

frozen into the ice I looked down of it wow look at that the three spine sticklebacks and they're frozen like you know

you go to the gift shop and you've got like a little snowman frozen into a glass ball and you hang it on your tree and this is what it was like and I have no idea

I know that my dad had a fishing rod in our old shed it was a steel rod rod. So this was 1950s, 1960s, and this fishing rod, it was useless, and it was a piece of junk, but I was just fascinated by it. And I think that kind of thing just basically took me into a different sort of psychological level, right? You know, why is a, you know, why is a professional tennis player, you know, as good as he or she is, because they are just, there's some

psychological hardwiring that occurs at a very young age, and they become good at it. And so, mostly I think one of the reasons that I was not interested in climbing the corporate ladder in government was I wanted to be outfishing, but I knew how to get an education if I wanted to do well in this particular profession. and so my friends around on the Fraser River catching Harrison Jackson on 1973 they're out there having these great days and I'm sitting in math in my first year university calculus and I'm going like my friends are catching fish

I'm sitting here those fish might disappear one of these days I already kind of had a premonition that you know many of the runs that I knew when I was a young man or child would essentially be gone by the time I got into my house adulthood. And so closer to retirement, I'm a little bit choked because a lot of the runs of salmon that I used to fish have basically been shut down. Not just me. First Nations are severely curtailed. Commercial fisheries are curtailed. Marine sport, you know, we've just had this just basically shut down of these ecosystems. So anyways, I think somewhere in my

youth, I think it was because it was such a terrible angler. Not a good angler. I catch a lot of fish now because I can do it but that's not because I'm particularly skilled I'm just persistent about it and so it irritated the daylights out of me that I wasn't good at it so it's kind of like the tenant tries harder and the golfer tries

the hockey player tries harder and harder to get good at it and so that kind of looped back to me I would be just happy to be on the bank catching fish I like killing fish, too, which is a bad thing. I like taking home salmon. I like eating them.

I like smoking them. I like canning them, turning them into sushi, whatever. I'm going to have a barbecue this afternoon with some friends. A hatchery-produced better chelawak hatchery Chinook salmon. Okay? I just like it. I just love it. So my interest would rather have been out there in the water,

but I knew I had to have this. educational background to be able to help make decisions to protect my ability to go out there with the fish and pole sitting on the edge of the Fraser River. So I guess when you, you know, why, you know, what is that core? Why do I like fish? They just seem like a fascinating group of animals, you know. I just, I tell it to my students, you know, you know, okay, Marvin, you take your sort of idiosyncrasy and you know we'll listen to you for a while we'll get educated on a topic

a b or c but then uh you know we're gonna go have the rest of our life and i recognize that i recognize that people you know not everybody can be passionate or interested in one or another thing um is there a favorite fish for you uh dean talked a lot about i think it's steelhead that are like prehist like they're they're like dinosaurs um i might have sturgeon sturgeon Sturgeon, yeah. Yeah, Chinook salmon, great big Chinook, you know, that rod bent over and, you know, packing it back to the boat and taking it home and carefully filling it and then putting it on the barbecue or smoking it or canning it. These great big monsters that, you know, make your, now, notwithstanding that, sturgeon get to be a lot bigger. and Dean, work, who's a fishing guide, very well-known fishing guide in the Fraser Valley,

got me into an eight-footer in a very heavy current the other day. My shoulder, I think, is still sore from that, fighting that big fish. But for whatever reason, Chinook salmon is great big silver, gorgeous, the early runs, which we can't fish anymore, they've basically fall into bits in terms of their population numbers. That would be my favorite. But any carp, you know, I'd be interested holding a carp, catching. And I don't really care, you know, I like angling, but I would just be as happy to gill net them.

Or pitchfork them or gaff them or snorkel and just look at them or catch and really, you know, I'm not a resource user wantonly. You know, I'm very careful about when I handle fish, but I do like fish in my freezer. I enjoy eating them, notwithstanding that I've had so many salmon in my life. I'm a little bit tired. I like hell a bit better now, I think. But, you know, I just, I don't know, they're just interesting animals. They just, and there's no explanation for it.

It's just maybe it's a bit of a mental illness or something. No, it sounds like a really good thing that other people are missing out on, which is causing some sort of mental illness. But what is the relationship between killer whales? there's that pod, I want to say, that are really interested in only eating Chinook salmon. I think it's a southern resident killer whales in Salish Sea, Gulf of Georgia, Puget Sound area. How does that happen? I don't know.

Somehow or other, they were adapted, you know, over the last probably 10,000 or 100,000 years to eat Chinook salmon. So, Puget Sound, lower and upper Georgia Bay. and, you know, had always pre-European settlement and industrial fishing had had large numbers of Chinook salmon, in addition to all the other species. And I think the pod or pods of whales, because Chinook, somebody asked me about that the other day, you know, I've heard stories of killer whales up in Vancouver Island, the Eve River where I fly fish for pinks, pushing pinks right up against the shore. and eating them, okay? And I've heard other folks talk about sockeye. Chum, I think, are also, you know, chum can be big-bodied. They're the second largest of the five Pacific salmon.

But Chinook salmon historically were in the Gulf of Georgia, basically 365 days of the year. So pink, sockeye, chum, gone. A cohort of smaller species, the only kind of end up, their smaller body species, they only end up being a reasonable size after about June of their last year. They grow very quickly. But Chinook, you know, historically you had big Chinook swimming around the Gulf of George. Very nutritious package of food, you know, like me.

I like these great big, silver, beautiful, you know, muscular animals. And so in that context, I think that's why you had this particular group of killer. whales and killer whales are ubiquitous around the planet you know some of them eat mammals you know they'll chop on a on a seal or something right but um for whatever reason it is in southern gulf of georgia sailor sea puget Sound area these guys seem to have caught onto Chinook salmon right fish farms what do we do about them how did they come about do you think that fish farms are um all bad is there place for them. How do they function? I just, there seems to be real concerns. I've spoken to

Eddie Gardner, Dean Work, Kerry Lynn Victor, they've all talked about the problems with fish farms. How did we get here? Well, that's interesting because this is a lecture that I'm going to give this week about fish production worldwide. So fish production worldwide post-World War II started to build up and then hit about 80, 90 million tons. Okay. And the world populate so that's about the cap in rural production bit under 100 million depending on who you talk some say there's underreporting by China but somewhere around 80 million tons but we worldwide produce I'm going to say somewhere around 160 million tons and that gap is taken up by aquaculture both marine and freshwater so China China has a large

aquaculture, fresh water is the biggest. And so we almost can't live without fish farms generically, okay? But if we drill down to British Columbia and it's salmon fish farms in southern British Columbia, so Kloiquit Sound and Upper Gulf of Georgia and Nukka Sound and all of these Georgia basin between the northern east coast of Vancouver Island and in the mainland, the inlets and little bays and stuff like that channels very protected. And so from about the early 1990s, we went up sort of like that. And it kind of is sort of leveled off now.

And if you look at the number of Kohoe, Chinook, Steelhead, Sokye, the relationship is fish farms this way, and the salmon and steelhead populations going in the sort of opposite direction. And the correlation is pretty tight. There's some natural experiments that are pretty, you know, again, the multiple lines of evidence in my view. And my analytics are very different than most people's assessments. So basically they exploded. They exploded in British Columbia because offshore money, a lot of Norwegian funding coming in. And so it became big business.

I know people who I would consider to be friends, because you have absolutely no problem with fish farms. They have no influence on natural native populations. I don't believe that. And again, you know, this isn't the forum to really talk about it because I've gone through a lot of detail in terms of my analytics, correlative detail. And essentially, you know, I'm convinced.

But it's such a large business sector for a certain group of, the economy of rich Columbia that once they're in there it's hard to wedge out that's kind of that's kind of uh sort of uh i would see an example of how if you're going to do something you know it's bad you've got a pretty good idea that it's bad right from beginning um we always talk sustainable development and precautionary principle most of that is crap you know it sounds good on paper it sounds good when you're talking uh to the members of uh you know the u. end you know but reality is is that you know bruntland commission and things like that sustainable development development is probably negative and and the really bad ones i think include

fish farms and so uh that's where we're at and so there's a some intense pressure uh some by first nations now the first nations communities support it because provides employment up and down the coast, into some communities that don't have a lot of economic opportunities. So you understand the pain that they may feel by having fish farms removed. But, you know, again, I believe that it is cultural genocide. I think that fish farms have basically obliterated, and yeah, First Nations communities still get fish under Section 35, you know, rights and titles, food, social, ceremonial under the Constitution. But when there's nothing left of something, you know, people change and they forget and they forget these, you know, at a family perspective, me, my own family, spend an enormous amount of time on the

Fraser River, catching Sokai and Chinook, just wonderful times, wonderful family times. And I feel for First Nations communities, particularly some of the ones in the northern, you know, Chaco. So I worked on the court case with two First Nations to Latin Skyouts on flows for Sturgeon. And so the generations, and I had a student from the Fort Fraser area, one of the First Nations last year, When it's gone, then that continuity that occurred since First Nations colonized the coast of British Columbia, after the last ice age, 10,000 years. And the continuity of European communities that, you know, lived and breathed and survived on the economics or the food provided, the recreational stuff by me. I think fish farms have essentially been the result of a component of cultural genocide within these various communities,

sport, recreational, First Nations commercial up and down the coast of British Columbia, because so many of these groups were tied to Fraser River salmon runs. So I think it's a terrible thing. I think we do not understand 100 years from now when maybe we figured out what the damage was by fish farms to a family living on the Skeetson Reserve, you know, on the Thompson River, or somebody who lives in the Chilko area. You know, this is fish farms are a horrible, horrible thing. to the social network of indigenous and non-indigenous communities in British Columbia, I believe. Wow, that is very well articulated. What are the effects for fish?

You mentioned fish lice. What problems do they create? It sounds like there's these locations where they're breeding fish and trying to grow them, but they're not well. Kirillin, Victor, described some that swim into the same thing again and again and again. And they're not, like, intelligent to the way you expect other fish to behave. You're referring to the fish inside the pens? Yeah. Well, British Columbia has pretty well adopted, the fish farming industry has adopted

Atlantic salmon as its main species of culture. And I know a bit about fish culture because at one point, I was connected to the freshwater fisher society and the hatchery system at a personal level. And so, you know, I know the fish cultures, I know the DFO hatchery guys. A lot of my students work in hatcheries. So I know a little bit about sort of the genetics and behavior and stuff like that. You know, there were these real fears early on in the 1990s and I heard the stories. You know, there was some fight put up by provincial in particular, not so much.

federal, but provincial fisheries managers, so mostly sport fishing, that Atlantic salmon were going to escape, they were going to colonize streams, they were going to out-compete the native stocks, and then there was the issue of disease, both, you know, things like viral bacterial, but the one that I think, okay, and when I say fish farms, I think are deleterious, I'm looking at sort of the macro level, the correlative level, not down, even though I did, review one of the papers, one of my reviews for the Cohen Commission was on disease and fish farms. I kind of get a sense that the collapse is tied to sea lice. It just seems to me sea lice makes the most sense. And I'm really careful, very cautious, very conservative about

my statements. But, you know, over the last 10 or so years, 15 years that I've been working on this issue. I'm absolutely convinced that fish farms are the most deleterious. Since the Hellsgate disaster in around 1913, that basically when the railroad construction blasted a bunch of rock at Hellsgate, more or less blocked salmon runs in the upper freezer, I think fish farms have been the biggest catastrophic collapse. Notwithstanding, you know, the development, Robert Bank and the estuary, you know, a bunch of other things. I think that, you know, there's the sort of death by a thousand cuts, more people putting inputs into our Fraser River sewage-wise,

young and forest practices, which are more or less figured out. I still believe, and it is my opinion, that fish farms have been by far the most catastrophic effect. Two British Columbia's salmotted ecosystems, heck, you know, Port Albarnie and the Socki runs, the Coho runs, the Chinook runs, some of them hatchery, some of them wild, Barkley Sound has almost no fish farms. Boom. Those runs have maintained, but they vary. You know, what people don't seem to understand is natural semi-decadal or decadal oscillations. there's Al-Nino, Leninia effects, and all sorts of open ocean effects that are natural, that are large cycles over time, big variations between the peaks and the bottoms of the troughs, notwithstanding that, Berkeley Sound runs as an example,

have maintained relatively stable. Steelhead has been a bit of a problem in the last few years in the Barclay Sound Run, River, but for the most part, it stayed very stable. Things like Dean River Steelhead as an example. You can see even the Skeena that has had some problems the last few years. For the most part, if you look at the trajectory of most runs in the Fraser versus Skeena, Skeena is more or less state relatively stable. And it's easy for people to, oh, climate change.

You know, I really don't like, you know, climate change, climate change. Yeah, climate change has almost. certainty, deleterious impacts, we don't understand that we haven't even scrapped my life, I'll be long gone before we understand the issues of climate change. Some of the big runs in Alaska are being touted as being beneficiaries of climate change, warmer waters, more productivity. But hey, little old runs in Columbia River at the very south end of the range, you know, exploded this year, way higher than, so we had Alaska this year at 90 million, or 80 million. Columbia River Socki runs at 700,000, unprecedented in modern times, 935, and Fraser River watershed

is boom, you know, the most iconic piece of British Columbia, landscape and water, ecosystem and human, you know, First Nations communities. commercial fishermen, sport fishing, all the whole gamut and the ecosystem features, you know, bears eat salmon, seagulls eat salmon, bears crap in the bush after they've eaten salmon, that fertilizes riparian areas. You know, the marine derived nutrients, the nitrogen and phosphorus that historically, particularly pre-European, had been brought back onto the landscape and essentially fertilized. the landscape around these huge salmon rivers it's gone it's just disappeared

it's just like it's phenomenal and then we say well oh well we can develop these islands in and on the Fraser River heart of the Fraser between hope and mission you know it's just a bunch of islands wait a sec here 99.999% of the salmon

runs go through there a lot of the runs are beneficially affected when the water comes up and floods the big islands they're positively affected oh we're going to develop them no problem we'll get a

we'll get a environmental biology oh well we'll put a circle around this little patch of water and okay it'll be okay it's not you know but overarching all of these other impacts in my view the salmon farming industry

in British Columbia is by far the most deleterious what are like the things that cause harm to them what do sea lice do to these salmon that cause such problems well sea lice are essentially an ectoparasite and they attach so pink salmon might be that big the sea lice might be that long and it attaches to the side of the body of the fish basically boars a hole into the side of the fish and sucks the juices out right

so it's like a leech it's almost like a leet it's not it's not in the same taxonomic category but yeah it's like a leech it just attaches and sucks the juices out of out of the baby salmon and so you know these fish are going through osmo regulatory transformations so what is that essentially fish in freshwater um because um because the cells within the body of the fish tissues the muscles have more salt water tries to go in in fresh water because they're trying to create an osmotic balance. So the kidneys are working overtime to push fresh water out of a fish. When they go into marine environments backwards because the marine environment is so salty.

In effect, the fish has to conserve water and it has to push salt out because it's constantly, it's got salt cells and that actually takes salt out of the water that fish are being, is being absorbed through the god or through the skin and it has to push salt out and it has to conserve water so you bore a great big hole in the side of a little baby salmon because your your parasite is parasite's that long and your salmon's that long and you poke a bunch of holes in it essentially it's like a like taking a pin to a water balloon and you're pricking it and all of a sudden you know essentially um you got all that leakage and so that that's that's kind of a layperson's uh or a late person type of description of what happens is.

Physiologically, I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's my sort of layperson explanation. Brilliant. The Cohen Commission, we've talked about it briefly here and there. When did this come about? And what was it like to be involved? Do you have hope that commissions like this push us slowly in a better direction? Well, I was part of the Cohen Commission on a number of different levels.

So, for example, I was hired to review habitat issues, disease issues. There was another report, another subject that I reviewed. And I was also asked by the Beast Wildlife Federation to talk about what I thought was a really critical. issue just talk and I felt fish farms. So I went to put together this sort of prototype analytics and for some reason rather the mentor that I'm by the name of Bill Otway who was quite a strong personality passed away about that time. And so my presentation never made the on what I felt in the correlative analysis never made the picture. And I testified, testified actually in 2011 and i know it's 2011 because that was the that was during the stanley cup riots so uh my last

day testifying in in court uh in front of uh judge cohen uh you could hear the guys uh with their drums and you know prior to the hockey game uh making a noise and so we're sitting there testifying and down on georgian granville street the crowds were coming in for the game So that really impressed me, and that's why I can remember that was the date. So there was a lot of preparation up to that point, and I had reviewed a number of different topics. But we had had a number of collapses of Sok, like what's new in the Fraser River, right? And so it was weird that in 2010 we had this massive run, you know, sort of a modern record. I have my sort of suspicions about that, why it happened.

But in any event, the Cohen Commission, I think, was sort of well-meaning, but I don't know that it necessarily really, it seemed to be run more by lawyers and it was run by hardcore scientists, notwithstanding the fact that there were some really good scientists that provided input. But the core question, I think the core question in everybody's mind was, is it fish farms? And that was never answered. And in fact, you know, there's no smoking gun was the statement, I think that the Cohen Commission failed to really address the question that was in everybody's mind, you know, is it fish farms or not?

And so I don't want to step on too many feet because some of the scientists involved, I know, you know, at a personal level, but if I was running it, which there's no chance that I would have, I would have, I would have, wanted to put a lot more effort into asking and trying to answer that question. And so following from that, there were a bunch of recommendations and, you know, probably some of the stuff that I worked on, you know, there's a whole list of them. I forget what the number, you know, fish farms out by 2025. Well, we're just about at 2025. Joyce Marie, who was a minister up until last week, fisheries minister up until last week, when she stepped down due to health reasons.

was that a loss I think it was a loss but there's a whole back history Joyce Murray is a British Colombian she's a natural resource person her background is in forestry tree planting

and I think she was actually the minister when I was removed from government in 2003 I think she was my boss actually in any event I had been asked by the federal government to give presentations.

It actually goes back to the days of the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council in the late 90s. And I think that John Fraser was the chair of that. He was administer of fisheries and he was Speaker of the House at one point. And I think that was another collapse in Sock. We were 24 hours or 48 hours from losing because there was some screw up in. assessment of socine numbers. So I wrote a bunch of habitat reports for the Pacific Fisher's Resource Conservation Council. So I've been advising DFO and the senior fisheries folks

for quite a few years. And then, so I think it had eight reports, eight habitat reports. And then moving forward to standing committee, Fisheries and Oceans, Ottawa, flew to Ottawa once on Fraser River Gravel removal. And then another time, 2021 on Habitat generally, to the standing committee. And then Joyce Murray's folks called me up in January. So I talked to her face-to-face over the internet in January 17th. And then again, took her out on the Fraser River in July of this year, 2022. And I think, you know, the one thing about Joyce is that she told us she wanted to be effective. She wanted to be effective. And I got a sense that she was really being honest with me.

And, you know, I've talked to MLAs and members of parliament and city council over the, you know. Some of them, you can tell their eyes glaze over very quickly. And I got a sense that Joyce was a stage of her life and her career where she wasn't prepared to stand down on things that she thought she could be effective at. It was time to spend the political capital. Yep. Yep. Yep. So she didn't have a 20-year political career ahead of her at 68.

I think she was 68 when she stepped down. Well, you know, Donald Trump will go till the end of time, I guess, and Joe Biden will go to the end of time. and Putin, you know, all these guys, you know, they should have, you know, and I have a, my brother-in-law says, you know, we need to turn these decisions over to the younger generation. And I agree with that, although I think, you know, in my career, I think the wisdom, like certain cultures, maybe the Japanese culture or Chinese culture value the wisdom of older people. I think some of the First Nations communities value the wisdom of older people a lot more than, say, modern European and North American societies. And so I think Joyce, Mary had a level of wisdom or has a level of wisdom that was sort of uncommon amongst a lot of members of parliament and MLAs. maybe local council members. And so I was basically shocked.

I was shocked when she, now we have to train up a new minister again, explain it all to them why this is important, why that is important. So going back to your question about Joyce, I think that was really kind of disappointing to see her have to step down. Yeah.

There's a theme arising from my understanding outside of government, never having worked with them, because Lee Harding described something very similar to you, which was around ATVs in the north. Apparently, they will clear out a bunch of trees so people can go ATVing. And then the smoothing of the snow due to the ATVs makes it very easy for wolves to get around even faster. And his argument is if we reduced this or if we limited their ability to roam free, then Caribou would be able to get around and not have to stress about being cut off by.

wolves who can now move at a faster pace because of what we're doing and the BC government at the time basically said we're not interested in that because it's such a good business they're bringing in such revenue and it sort of overlaps with your finding of these fish farms they're bringing in revenue creating jobs and so it's like we're a little bit addicted to the opportunities economically and employment wise that they bring in for our community members that it's hard to get off of it it's hard to say okay we're going to invest in this because there's consequences long-term for our society? Yeah, well, ask the Soda Creek band, whether they like being constrained from the early

Syrackeye, or the Stilatin band, or a commercial gillnettor in the lower Fraser River that's been fishing for three or four generations, or a sport marina in Pender Harbor that had, you know, docks and boats, rentals and motels and, you know, and it's easy to see this concentrated value, you know, fish farm A, fish farm B, making, you know, $10 million per farm or 10, you know, I don't know the economics of it, the large amount of money, but when you see the cultural and social diversity, being lost from, you know, Stuart Lake and up at McBride and through the, you know, my friends in the Shuswap drainage, my First Nations friends that live, you know, at Adams Lake and stuff

like that. And all of a sudden, what happened for 10,000 years is gone. you know, the negative externalities from an economic perspective, I'm not an economist, but the negative externalities seem to me intuitively, when you take all these little spots of social and social capital and economic capital, you know, First Nations communities, you know, derived, food sources they derived income they direct you know over the last 10 000 years from these these runs of fish and then all of a sudden that money is concentrated in a few little fish farms

scattered on vancouver island and it's being piped to norway because these are these companies are owned by the norwegians you know and yeah there's there's local um local uh businesses and uh employment um i just think it's a tragedy i think it's i think it's an absolute tragedy to the 92 plus or minus First Nations communities up and down the Fraser, the First Nations communities from Port Hardy right down to, you know, down in the nooksack that would have gone into marine waters, the folks around the Orcas Islands, both First Nations and otherwise, they can't do it anymore. You know, as a kid, you'd go out on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island,

the fleet of little boats fishing Coho and Chinook, you know, like the Vancouver Sun Fishing Derby, you know, every summer, you know, whatever it was, August 1st or it was, or Sun Salmon Derby, and, you know, the same guys would win every year. And, you know, the whole golf, it's all disappeared. It's just gone. It's just absolutely, oh, no, it's, you know, it's logging, it's urbanization, oh, it's climate, you know, it's all crap, you know, the one defining feature that really, I believe, really, and yeah, maybe seals are an issue with, with regards to predation of Chinook and Co or some of the other species, large bodies, but we've had species after species, population after population. and I just can't get my head around it being anything other than that one hot spot. Do we have to fix urban stream issues, you know, riparian error protection regulation, all that kinds of?

Yeah, force practices code, you know, FERPA, it's now called FERPA. There's probably some glitches. Yeah, I can show you some bad logging practices. But the number one issue to me keeps coming back to this really, bad hotspot that occurs in sensitive areas of smold out migration. So would you get rid of all of them? What is, if you had a magic wand and we could bypass the bureaucracy, we could accomplish something in regards to fish farms, what would that look like?

Well, you know, I was, again, tightly linked into the fish culture industry for about 16 years in my life it helped pay off part of my mortgage so to speak and so I know the economics are not it's not easy for example to do land-based fish farming

if it was that easy in British Columbia it would be a fish farm on every you know we would convert our fields out here in East Chilowac or out on the Siomass Lakebed into fish farms you know and in some cases we are turning

those agricultural lands into greenhouses. You know, we're growing tomatoes, we're growing peppers and all, marijuana even. You know, we can adapt. But this idea intuitively to me that we just take these fish farms out of the water and put them on to land-based areas, the economics don't seem to me. It seems to me very rarely do you find an area where there's enough fresh water, I think in Florida of all places,

There's fish farms, I think salmon or sturgeon fish farms, because the whole under the ground is a huge aquifer. So it's a lot of cheap, a lot of cheap, easy water to grow fish. But you've got to get rid of waste. You know, when you have a hatchery, you can only put so many fish in. Oxygen's an issue. Getting rid of waste. So having a big net, kind of like a drawstring purse, suspended by floats, currents wash away, all the delicates, all the delicate. Um, you know, the, um, ammonia waste, um, fish poop, um, brings in fresh water, uh, for

oxygenation. So, um, when you have large numbers of fish concentrated in an area, uh, the biological oxygen man is pretty high. Yeah, I think that one of the big challenges we're in right now is we don't know what to do. And it feels like people are going to be, you, unable to act if they don't have that context and it's tough to get that social community, that team together to really explain that to the general public. It seems like the average person doesn't know and so they get part information and we just want things to be better for us and so it's hard for us to kind of understand and be sympathetic to the challenges of other ecosystems going on around us. But you're also making a really good point about climate

change. One of the challenges around the recent floods that we had, the atmospheric river, was we immediately blamed it on climate change. And there was an incentive for politicians to blame it on that, rather than the level one out of a level four or five dike, that all of them were not maintained. But of course, it's climate change. And as much as there's no disagreement for me that we are changing the climate, it seems like it's become just a tool, just a lip service thing, to offset.

set any accountability for how to approach things and improve things. And I'm just interested in your thoughts on that. Well, I'd just like to tie up the ends, though, on the fish farming. There are ways. You can have offshore take great big, massive, basically, oil rig type structures go offshore where the juveniles aren't migrating and have your farms out there very costly, but the Scandinavian seem to be doing okay on trying that. And then I've got a student in the engineering section of our resource section at BCIT who's doing a capstone study on basically enclosed within the marine environment fishpans.

So it doesn't just have straight flow through. So you would condition water, you basically, I guess, kill. And I'm interested in reading what you yesterday, but you kill all the bad bugs that are coming out of the effluent. You're capturing the sewage. essentially the fish poop and nitrates, ammonia, before it gets out. So there are some technologies that might be available to mitigate some of this stuff. But, you know, we're still, it's not going to, you know, doesn't help somebody who's, somebody who is a commercial fisherman who took out a mortgage on his house to buy a bunch of nets for 2022,

thinking there was going to be 10 million fish on the Fraser River, maybe he's bankrupt now. There's a First Nations community somewhere up by Yale that didn't get as many fish as they thought they were because all of a sudden, you know, the dry rack, I think there's a little dry rack fishery which is really important to certain Fraser Canyon fishing First Nations. But, you know, and actually those early runs did come back stronger than, but it was early Stewart's much smaller run than, then the rest of the Fraser but yeah you know you loop

you loop out of things like atmosphere rivers in and the damage that caused well you know I sat on some of the well I was on the Better River

floodway committee when I was with the mystery environment back in the day so all the dyking arrangement I was looking at it from a fish perspective, our little group in Chilliwack, the gravel sewer chip group, dealt with freight.

We actually helped shut down gravel removal for two cycles. So they're out there right today as we talk, pull a bunch of gravel out because when you get a great big flood, you end up pushing a lot of gravel from the upper part of the watershed into the dikes. We've constrained it. We're all protected here where we're sitting right now by these massive dikes on the better and better canal. And so these atmospheric rivers and climate change are looping into the decisions that we make here in our development, okay? And you're right, because when I was sitting there back in the 1990s and the dike engineers are, you know, that Seumass River Dyke, oh, that's very good. Oh, that's, you know, this is, this goes back 25 years now, you know, that's Seumass River, one of these days, you know, and all these things are statistical probabilities.

So the hydrologists have these sort of fancy curves where they predict how often a flood of this magnitude will occur it's a one in 100 or one in 200 or one in five year flood and climate change seems to have been flipping

this thing around but yeah I'm not going to name names but certain mayors and their administration should have said hey that's Sumas Dyke there you know by number number three roads should have been upgraded and all of a sudden

these farmers are being wiped out. So climate change I think in the context of fish and ecosystems are an easy punching bag because nobody, everybody on the planet is tied to the resolution of that or everybody on the planet is tied to the increase of climate change. And so it's easy to point to you know, the other guy. And it's very difficult to say, well, you know, I'm the culprit.

You know, I am the culprit. But what are you going to do about it? What am I going to do? Oh, it's too overwhelming for me. I'll buy another four-wheel drive because I got enough money to do that. Okay. Oh, but I'll buy an electric one. Notwithstanding the fact that the electricity might have actually been produced by a co-gen plant that burns gas or coil or oil or what? whatever to produce that electricity. You know, simply because you plug a Tesla into the wall doesn't mean that the electricity that you're putting into your battery wasn't produced by a carbon-based fuel. You know, Europe's, China, you know, these guys don't have these steep, large mountain streams

that we have here in Bruce Columbia or in Scandinavia, you know, the central part of Europe. So they're running on nuclear and they're running on coal and they're running on gas. Yeah. You know, when I travel through Western Europe in 2017, I was shocked by the number of windmills, shocked by the numbers. You know, guys got a little patch of little triangle of land between the road and the highway. and there's a whole series of solar panels and then the anti-solar panel guys are but look at how much earth you had to rip up

to get the elemental materials to build you know so it's this argument that goes beyond beyond us and so I think I think you have to have it at a mega political level and certain political trends right now want government to stay away. You know, they're small government, no government interference. You know, I'm some hillbilly in the backwoods of Idaho.

I don't want anybody telling me that I can't use a gas gullular. I don't want anybody to tell me that I got to use a solar panel, you know. And so I really don't know what the answer is. You know, at a smaller level, you know, we in British Columbia can say at a political level, shut down the fish farms. Okay. And so part of the, part of the Cohen Commission, I put together a presentation, very correlative analysis. And I said, look at these are the relationships. Wherever fish are passing through fish farms, you're getting these collapses.

I'm not sure exactly what it is, but this body of evidence. Oh, yeah, that's right. Okay, patch on the head, go away. So in about 2016, I was asked by somebody at the David Sizuki Foundation, John Waring's, used to be a biologist. I want you to give this presentation to the provincial minister of fisheries panel on fishermen. Go away. Nobody listened to the... No, no, no, no, we'll pay you.

I said, we've got a lot of upgrading to do. We'll pay you. So I got a little bit of money, so it was nice. Put it up. Gave it to a whole room, First Nations, government bureaucrats, scientists, you know, inside, not academia and government. Oh, that's really, wow, that's interesting. Wow, yeah. Wow, I think you've got a point there.

Pat you on the head, go away. So I gave it to a few public groups. Oh, that's terrible. That's terrible. Yeah, we've got to do something about that. Pat you on the head, go away. And so I've given it. to a few members of parliament and a few MLAs and stuff.

Oh, we've got to do something about this. Patch on the head, go away. So, you know, that's a small issue. Climate change. Now, I saw something the other day that said the ozone layer. You can see the ozone, you know, the hole in the ozone layer, the whatever, the thickness, however they measure, is actually recovering from, you know, the CFCs or whatever they were called.

and all this other stuff and so we're actually getting some recovery you know all the aerosols that we used to spray with the hair spray and so you know

at a macro level we can resolve some of these issues I think the other thing is technology technology is bad because we use it to destroy things we use it to create wars

we've got missiles in Ukraine that are dropping on people's heads, but it can also be used for good. But the question is, this is kind of like an arms race, you know, is technology, you know, is fusion going to come along? We're going to figure it out, so we'll have unlimited cheap, clean, or efficient going to be the, you know, we're still going to be basically polluting the world with nuclear waste. You know, I don't know.

I don't have a crystal ball to be able to say, but, you know, I've got friends and relatives, climate change, just a hoax, you know, and all this guy. In my own world, at relatively short data sets, you know, under 150 years, I can see change. Like in my world of hydrology and things that have changed. So, you know, I have no issues with accepting climate. climate change. You know, and when you hear, you know, chunks of Greenland floating off and increasing the ocean levels by, you know, 10 inches or a foot or whatever, whatever the number was. And I just read an article yesterday, I think, on some community in Louisiana that had been around since the French, it was First Nations. French community off the mouth of Mississippi.

I think that, you know, they had this big set of islands or wetlands, you know, farming community and there's just a tiny little strip left because ocean levels have come up. New Zealand. You know, I spent time on a spatical in 2019 in New Zealand and climate change is a real big deal to these guys because, you know, they have so much coastline and they're seeing their coastline wash away, you know. And they're going like, holy crap, you know, this, we're going to have, so First Nations community down in New Zealand and Maori people

and Pacific Islanders, largest Pacific Island community in the South Pacific, not including Māori, Paso-Mauri community is very strongly, economically, politically part of the New Zealand community. And some of their, you know, their historic lands are being basically, and it's not every day. It's just that when you get an above-average flood or a big storm, all of a sudden that had been dry for, you know, since time immemorial, all of a sudden it has water lapping into it. So, you know, and again, it goes back to, you know, 8 billion people in place. If we lost two or three billion because of a meteor or a nuclear war or whatever, it only sets us back, you know, a generation or so. You know, when you look at the, I think it was 1800s, we had our first billion in the 1800s to the, you know, this geometric progression of numbers of people. So I'm not sure, really not sure how that one's going to be grappled with.

I'm too much of a small spec on the spectrum of natural resource management and resource education, natural resource education to come to groups with that one. Yeah, I guess I come down on a different side. I hope that the expansion, if we're at $8 billion, it means more, and people don't always agree with him, but more Elon Musk's, more people. who are able to think, what if we were to extract resources on a media writer? That all seems so beyond comprehension, but so did having a phone in your pocket 50 years ago and having it do all the things it does today. I remember, I don't know if you ever saw Spy Kids, but the idea of the watch that the thing that they have on their watch now our watches do far more than even that show

could have comprehended. And I hope that our, like, that is something, and you kind of talked about it. The idea that technology can be a bad, which is nuclear war, but then it can be the potential of good, which is like nuclear energy and fission and these paths that are potentials that were not there yet. But the hope is that we, as a collective, 8 billion of us can figure out the solution to that. And the challenge we always seem to have is you look at something like World War II, World War I, dark periods in the 20th century.

yet a time where a lot of innovation took place. Innovation that you see on smaller scales when you're not being tested when there isn't an investment in R&D on how to figure out how problems kind of get solved. But I want to ask specifically about gravel in water. Dean talked about, a lot of people talk about how dirty the Fraser looks

and he talks about how a lot of that is a misunderstanding of how that river functions. But there are concerns around the amount of gravel we put in there. I had Carrie Lynn Victoron. She's one of the people near Cheam that was working to restore natural ecosystems to that area

because we just pour in more gravel than it disintegrates into sand and then it gets darker and harder to breathe. Can you explain how gravel impacts the Fraser River? Oh, the Fraser River is a sediment-laden river. Its ecosystem is adapted to being a dirty river,

to being a muddy river, and to being a sediment-laden river. Sediment is an absolutely critical. The fine sediments and the coarser sediments are absolutely critical to the functioning of that river. People should not be touching gravel, they should not be removing gravel, they should not be letting the river undergo its normal fluvial processes. By having the river do its own thing. The largest salmon run in British Columbia is actually between Hope and Mission.

And that's the pink salmon run. Back in the late 90s, it was probably around 10 million fish. It's declined precipitously since then. But it's a big gravel-bedded river, mostly, from Hope going down to Mission, and then it turns into a sand-bedded river. And so, I got to get my numbers straight here because I work very much on gravel issues and sediment issues, both in the lower river. So I was part of the Dredge Management Advisory Committee, which has been disbanded, was under the Fraser River Estuary Management Plan, Frimp. And the gravel issues, I was basically the biologist for British Columbia on gravel removal issues.

There was a sort of big thing, well, we got to get gravel. out we've got rivers flooding we're going to overtop the dikes there's vast amounts there's not vast amounts of grass we know that from very detailed assessments okay so I think

there's something around 20 million tons of fine sediment that mostly goes so these are coming off of glaciers in Mount Robson the Chaco system

the Chilko system, you name it, you know, some of them have lakes intercepting fine sediments, but a lot of that fine material, about 20 million tons of it comes down every year. It's more in some years, less than other years. And so that mostly goes out straight to Georgia. There's nutrients and minerals and all sorts of really important stuff that are sort of associated with that sediment pulse.

And then there's a smaller amount that basically hops along the bottom. Sometimes it's sediment. So that's coarse or sand up to two millimeters. So the numbers. 1.1 or 2-2 millimeters to 2 millers. I forget what exactly. But anyways, there's that second layer of sediment grouping that mostly doesn't stay in these.

Fraser Valley. Now that doesn't mean like the top of these islands, you know, out here in East Chilawak where the Fraser used to flood in and bring all these rich nutrients and sediments to create that beautiful soil out at Rosedale, Seabird Island, all that rich agricultural land. So the fine stuff, the really finest stuff would deposit, but mostly go out to the Gulf of Georgia, Sailor Sea. The rest of it would, from mission down to Richmond, essentially basically and that's how that was how the delta was formed uh in the lower part around the richmond area this coarser sand and then the really coarser material the gravel the gravel and cobbles uh of which people seem to think there's just unlimited amount there's

not the fluvial geomorphic uh measurements of the change and sediment between between hope and mission is relatively tiny. So in other words, in terms of changing dike profiles, so the water during flood period is relatively small. We know that from very, very explicit and very detailed modeling exercises, which, you know, was done about, I'll say, a little bit more than 15 years ago, but I don't think it's changed much since things don't change that much. But pink salmon spawn in the Fraser as a function of every year spring freshet revitalizing that gravel. It kind of moves it around a bit, washes out material. And so that by the end of the summer, there's these big huge beds of gravel that pink salmon

just absolutely love. And so pinks love these more or less unstable gravel habitat feature. like the area between hope and mission because every year the Fraser kind of washes it clean and a bunch of material comes in later on in the early spring but then the big floods kind of wash it out again so that that really these dynamic changes the islands that are eroding away the new islands that form the big back channels that Fraser River Sturgeon spawn in Most of the straining between Mission and Hope by sturgeon. So, 1999, I had a company called Limnotech that did a bunch of work and found sturgeon eggs.

First time we'd ever found sturgeon eggs, and they were pretty well always in back channels. Main stem, I think the gravel was moving around too much. So that was good for pink salmon, but the big back channels that is more stable, clean gravel. And so the big flood frichettes would wash that gravel clean by the end of the frisette. Sturgeon spawn in springtime. The eggs are negatively buoyant. They go to the bottom. They stick.

Unlike salmon who dig their eggs into gravel, sturgeon stick on top. So they need these great big, broad swaths of gravel that are clean, fairly coarse. So, you know, us interfering with the, um, with, the shape and morphology. My personal view, leave it alone. Let the river is powerful enough, stay as far away from it as you can, maintain the vegetation, the big islands like Hurling Island, Carrier Gill Island, Straubbery Island, Minto Island, all of those. We need to draw a red circle around, and we need to more or less stay away from them, let them do their own thing because a Fraser recreates habitat every year. And when we start putting berms and

dikes and rip-wrap banks, it basically disrupts those processes. You were a part of a documentary called The Heart of the Fraser. It starts to land on exactly what you're talking about. Can you tell us about that documentary, how it came about, what it's about? Well, the heart of the Fraser is a term that was coined somewhere, I think, in the late 1990s, and it was to kind of describe this unique. I don't know if there's any other gravel-bedded stream that of Salmonids that is not in an estuary. Columbia has a little bit of that and probably the Skeena, but there's probably parts of the Amur River or some of the big Russian rivers, but, you know, up for the size of it, this little chunk that's kind of stuck up, you know, it's stuck about 100 kilometers from

salt water. And has all this myriad of broken up channels and islands. And so that heart of the Fraser was a term that was created to kind of describe it. You know, the Stalo people maybe have a different term for it. I think Eddie Gardner has another name for it in the Stalo, one of the Stalo languages. So people started to recognize, hey, this is something different, something unique. This is something pretty special. So downtown Chilliwack used to flood many years before all the dikes went in. So that would have been part of that heart of the Fraser ecosystem. But of course, we've got the big dikes, you know, on out by Island 22, down by Cartmel Road.

We've got, you know, big dikes up at Rosedale. And so that those areas that would have, you know, all bell slew and camp slew and hope slew, all those areas would have been, Hopesloo is probably a big sturgeon spawning habitat. You know, when you look at the more cross-sectional morphology of it, you know, it was a big channel. Apparently First Nations used to use it. Don't have to go up in the main channel.

You use it as a highway to canoe up and down, so it's a good transportation route. So I kind of understand that. So people started to figure out, hey, this is something special. I don't think they've really figured out how special it is. A colleague of mine, my name of Mark Angelo, started to promote it, and he and I wrote a report for the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council on the heart of the Fraser.

And there was sort of a sister report on the impact of the impact of farming community, farming on Eastern Fraser Valley, which is basically, you know, much of it is heart of the Fraser. And then over time, it got a more and more kind of, profile media started to take up on it and then um so mark was the director of the fisheries or of the rivers institute at bcit and then a colleague but then with dr ken ashley became the became the director and he was able to get some funding to be able to essentially um do a documentary on it and so you know i helped the

filmmakers. I guess I was sort of on the ground person who told him about this and told him about that. Dean work was involved in as well because he's very much a Fraser River person. We're up in the eastern Fraser Valley just out on the Vedder River. So I was East Chilliwack Automatbury Road. Dean was Vedder River. And so a bunch of people collaborated together to get this documentary together. I think it's a really good documentary. and it's one of three documentaries. There's the soul of the Fraser, which is the estuary. Heart of the Fraser is our area up here in the Chiluac Agassi Mission Area.

And then there's another documentary that's going to be put together further than a Chaco as well. Interesting. So it's available now, if I'm not mistaken, right? They did their premiere? The Heart of the Fraser? Yeah. Yeah, it's up and running. In fact, anybody who talks to Dr. Ashley at the Rose Institute,

can probably get a viewing. And there have been quite a few viewings around. So 2019, when I was down in New Zealand, it was first viewed. And I've given it to my students, I think, once or twice. Why isn't it more readily available? You'll have to ask Dr. Ashley about that. We did give it just over here in the high school in Vitter Crossing. So I was involved in that.

And I think he has a number of showings around Lower Mainland over the next several months. Yeah, I just hope that it gets out to everybody so that our city council has access to it. I would like to obviously watch it and learn more and understand in a more meaningful way and make sure that it can be played to my community. And we do a few hostings to make sure that everybody gets the chance to see it. Yeah, yeah. So I'm running for chief of Chihuahawathal, which is, within what you've described as this heart of the phraser.

If I was to succeed, what advice would you have for me on what I can do to make sure that that heart is protected, is understood better? What can an actual person from a First Nations community do if they're a leader to play a role? Well, there's a few things. I think one is lobby your fellow colleagues. at the political level within the Stala community to have those islands that were sold by Kruger, pulp and paper. So there was a huge body of islands from essentially from Sebert Island down to the lower end of Chiluac

that were basically cut up and sold to private interests. And so they were sold very cheaply, I think $10 million for the whole set of islands, maybe a little bit more. And they're undevelopable unless you dike them, really. You know, we lobbied against two bridges, one at Kerry Island, one at Hurling. Big Berm went in at Strawberry. Strawberry, the devastation at Strawberry Island is just make, should make everybody want to weep because the Strawberry Island is a phenomenal fish-rearing habitat on its surface during Springfreshette.

and the landowner built I think without authorization of big berm out to the island one or more of the channels was cut off so I think First Nations community style of community should hopefully really lobby governments

who are lobbying Joyce Murray is an example and some of the provincial guys to purchase these islands and set them upside as a reserve they need to be set aside as an ecological reserve 99% of all salmon in the Fraser watershed go through the heart of the Fraser, whether it's upstream as adults or downstream as

fry or smolds or whatever. Or spawn right in that area. Okay, it needs to be protected. You know, there's nothing like it on planet Earth. It's just nothing like it. We also have, I'm working with a group that Watershed watched a number of different Stalo community people, Staza. Maybe you can help me with, it's the environmental, group that deals with referrals are trying to come to grips with restoring some of these destroyed, like Gil Road or Kerry Island, that area that was destroyed by mudboggers and, you know, Mad Max Road Raiders and stuff like that. So that I would say.

Riperian area, Siebert Island, lobby your... friends at Seabird Island to restore a buffer. So Seabird, big agricultural area, but all the riparian area was cut right down to the water's edge. Lobby some of your communities that live within the river. I know flooding is a really important part of community protection within the Stolo peoples of the heart of the Fraser. But if you can lobby to have some of these edge habits,

Edge habitats are so important to maintaining ecosystems within Tuothel, you know, by the river. Make sure that there's a good swath vegetation along. I know, you know, non-First Nation lands. I see, you know, another patch of vegetation cut down right to the river, like in the Laid lair. Like, it's just like, for me, it's biologically criminal to see that. Riperian areas, those bands of vegetation along River Edge, it helps with ecosystems It helps to prevent erosion. It helps a whole pile of things, okay?

So those are a couple of things that really come off to the top of my mind. I'd encourage the Stalo community to get education as to how marvelous this ecosystem is. I think at Peters Island there's a bunch of work going on in the wetted floodplain. Like, you know, tell people don't go in that area, you know, stay away from that area, restore that area, educate your youth into what, you know, and quite frankly, there's not a lot of people that work on the heart of the Fraser at a scientific level. I know that because I'm one of the few people that's actually ever had reports written about it or had students go out and assess or, you know, gone out there with nets and. sampling gear, rod and reel, whatever, trying to figure out minotraps, trying to figure what's going on there. So I would really encourage the First Nations communities between Mission and Hope to recognize

what I think is an extraordinary piece of First Nations ecosystem in all Canada, you know? And there's tons of stuff. stuff from, you know, Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island to, you know, up into the, you know, the northern Mackenzie Delta and stuff like that. But because Fraser River used to have such an extraordinary salmon run and the heart of the Fraser, those wetlands and islands and channels between hope and mission are just so, in my view, so critical to really understand and to protect and lobby and develop legislation within your own political framework to protect these ecosystems.

How do we get educated? Sitting down with you, it's very humbling because it shows me how much I don't know, how much there is to learn about these systems. But how do we give and make sure people have access to the education of sort of what you're describing, but even on a deeper level of exactly what fish, where, how long, when to do this? How do we get all of those tools? How do I make sure the youth of my community are able to understand these things at a deeper level than even I have? Well, I'm faced with that same issue, and I've worked on the heart of the Fraser for

25 or 30 years, you know, going back to my childhood, really. Like, I think the stuff that I've done, and I think I've probably done more than pretty well anybody, sturgeon research, off-channel research, gravel stuff, you know, supervised Dr. Laura Rampel on her assessment, a big fish utilizing. Between Mission and Hope is probably the biggest Chinook-rearing habitat in all versus Columbia. Juvenileal Chinook love those great big gravel bars, okay? And so, like, I feel like I know so little about it. I think that First Nations community want to find a way to actually understand it.

And maybe First Nations community knows a lot about that part of the river that I don't. Traditional ecological knowledge is something that we talk about, I think, at BCIT quite glibly. And I probably worked on First Nations issues from a fisheries perspective more than, you know, Natchako, worked with the ONA, connected with the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council. The First Nations communities in Katsi dealt with Quantlin a bit, you know, and connect. Sometimes I'm on court cases against First Nations. So the Chiam Gravel removal case, I was actually against First Nations in the court case around 1990. and then

you know the next thing you know I'm working with jam band on something or at least sitting in meetings with them you know so so it's a tough thing because there's all these moving targets and it's not it's not specific to First Nations

it's you know it's the community British Columbia Canada and the world in general is that things you know political sort of viewpoints and understandings and education and values of what something is important, what isn't important, you know, we used to go without any authorization

and mine gravel bars. You know, when I was a kid, there was an island, a bar out by the catamol, I think we'd call it Catamol bar. The log sort area, which is long gone, people didn't even know about it. It was mine. It was very stable. It would have been very stable.

based on era of photographs, nobody knew, you know, one of the most exceptional fishing, angling spots in the gravel reach, the Fraser River, and it's gone, right? People just mind it. You know, and so the incremental understanding, education, and knowledge, I think has to be pushed hard to the political level. Chilawak, you know, the tribal councils, you know, that we need to understand these areas at a scientific level or a traditional ecological knowledge level more than we have, because if we don't, we will have the strawberry islands where a whole, whole macro habitat. You know, I would hate to think how many fish are going to be obliterated production-wise if that island gets turned into a cranberry field. It's just mind-boggling. It's a macro habitat that far and away,

so the British Columbia and federal governments have put large money, PSSI, Pacific Salmon, Sustainable Initiative, or something like that, put lots of money into, or it's called something a little bit different. BC shrift or something like that prior to that more habitat lost in Strawberry Island than has been restored

by this funding this partial billion dollar hundreds of million dollar funding entity in all the works that's been done around British Columbia like mind-boggling okay and so

because Stolo and the communities Shihilis and, you know, the lower part around Hope are basically, I'll call them the historical stewards of the landscape. It seems to me that they have special rights and coming with that special obligations

to their subsequent generations. And I'm not in the community, I'm speaking from outside of the community. I have no right to tell a community how they should deal with it. But I'm hopeful that the First Nations communities within the eastern Fraser Valley would recognize what an extraordinary treasure, what an extraordinary special thing, this chunk of river between hope and mission,

represents going back 10,000 years since the last Ice Age and we talk about time of memorial for me as a biologist 10,000 years isn't very long okay so 10,000 years is only

kind of a sort of a and I talk about the epochs and the various ages and stuff to my students in class evolutionary but having said that I think First Nations communities have a special right and a special responsibility to something that's so extraordinary, so unique, and so vibrant that I would hope that, you know, people could get together and somehow come up with an arrangement to protect this area.

I agree. That is one of the reasons I wanted to sit down with you is because your passion, your interest, Dean's interest in the area in which my community is from puts it on a special radar for me. And I think that it's only through conversations like this. We start to understand the problem and start to look at steps on how we can start to improve things. Do you have any advice for people on what organizations they should be a part of? There's so many different ones. There's the Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance. There's just so many different types. Do you have any advice on how people can start to learn and get involved in positive projects to try and support these ecosystems?

I would almost say not. okay and the reason for that is I've almost always tried to stay non-aligned okay if a if say the BC Wildlife Federation comes to me and says can you help us on this you know the northern gateway pipeline you know help him on it can you give us a presentation on sturgeon I'll do that if you know Katie C come by and say can you help us I you know I'm happy to do that watershed watch you know they've asked me to help them i'll do that um the aloet river management society works in kati territory and had been very tied to katsy uh and flow issues on

the aloe river and i you know help help them uh occasionally it's you know on a contractual basis mostly mostly pro bono mostly volunteer uh i think you have to find what you're most comfortable in and the reason I say that is BC Wildlife Federation as an example has some extraordinary people that work do fabulous things on the other hand they sometimes have been considered to be more of a good old boys hunting and fishing group and look at me I'm a you know I'll call myself a late middle-aged hunter and fisherman you know I'm at that at some level I'm part of that, okay? There's folks watershed watch, younger, very vibrant folks that are sort of out of my sort of age bracket, more into the folks that I will be educating. But I'm happy to

help them as well. And First Nations community, you know, when I was asked, and this was, you know, I was acting as an expert witness. So I was hired by the Stalatin, First Nations up in Natchako on sturgeon flows. I was happy to do that. Okay, so I guess I'm, and so something like the Salmon River Enhancement Society, I did a lot of work on the Trans Mountain impacts associated with stream crossings. And when you figure out all the hours of work that you do, you know, I got paid a little bit of money for the contract out of, out of the intervener status of that.

But I'm still delighted to work with, you know, the folks that were part of that. You know, the executive Larry and there's Doug and Annabelle and folks like that, just passionate in their own right. So I think you kind of have to find your own comfort zone with regards to communities or ecosystem groups or fisheries groups or environmental groups. Don't you think we're like you've kind of described? we're at a stage where we don't have a lot of time left for people to choose whatever floats their boat

it seems like you're saying fish farms are really dangerous if we keep having this decline in salmon we just won't have any left and then we might as well just develop the Fraser to have houses and just forget about the fish in there if we continue down this path

so don't you think maybe having specific ones that are going to fight fish farms or something is a worthwhile investment. Well, you know, I think groups like Rain Coast. Raincoast. Okay. I think groups like Watershed Watch. I think there's elements of, you know,

BC Wildlife Federation is mostly hunting and fishing, but there's elements of it that are really strong environmental stress. You know, Salmon River Enhancement Society, really strong. And they go outside of their sort of watershed geographic boundaries.

The local group in Maple Ridge, the All right River Management Society. You know, these are good groups, or they have over time, David Suzuki Foundation. You know, I've worked both little contracts and pro bono for David Suzuki Foundation, our little gravel stewardship group, which is just, you know, some quirky little good old boys in Chilawak that hated to see an ecosystem that they grew up and fall apart. So those are names that I can put on the table that I've had personal familiarity with. And tonight I'll be laying in bed and go, I should have mentioned.

I should have mentioned, you know, the Boundary Bay Bird Association or the Fraser Valley, you know the Fraser Valley Natural Dennis Knopf is doing great work so you know there'll be tons of groups that'll come flashing

in my mind and say well okay but I think you kind of have to do a little bit of research on your own I like the people in Watershed Watch

you know Lena Zee's just wonderful person and she's just so passionate you know Indo-Canadian from Dubai you know and she was in the heart

of the Fraser or why is she working with First Nations communities here? So, you know, continental India, ethnic, working with local First Nations ethnic and, you know, European, you know, it's this mixture that is becoming so, it's kind of like a washing machine. And everybody is tumbling around and trying to find, I think you, I think your bearings. You have to have a moral bearing. And by moral, I don't, not talking about religious or anything, but you're sort of environmental ethos. And then you're going to find your little group that you're comfortable with.

I kind of think. That is brilliant. Marvin, it has been such a pleasure. I've learned so much about how fish migrate, about the importance of ethics in this regard, the challenges that government present us, and the importance of understanding the issues at a deeper level so we don't get kind of convinced that everything is going to be okay and don't worry about

anything because we've got economic growth. I think a lot of the issues you face within your field others have faced. And so I'm glad to be able to hear from voices like yours, like Lee Harding, to see a pattern, to understand how the system sort of works. And hopefully we can start to take steps to address it so that we do have the heart of the fraser beating in a healthy way in the future. and so it seems like that's your passion and I'm so grateful to have been able to hear that

and experience that today. Sure. Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed the chat and I'm sure we will connect in the future. Absolutely. I really hope so because you're a wealth of knowledge and I think it's important that we hear from people like yourself. Okay.

Pleasure to do it.