Nuanced. - 99. Dr. Peter Ross: BC Floodwaters Contaminated with Cocaine & Splenda

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Peter Ross discusses with interviewer Aaron Pete the report he co-authored that exposes the discovery of an "astounding diversity" of contaminants, including cocaine and pesticides, in the Sumas Lake region following the November 2021 floods, and also shares his thoughts on the impact of the report and his Healthy Waters Program.Raincoast Conservation in partnership with other organizations conducted a seven-week study which found 177 "new and emerging contaminants" in the water, including painkillers, pesticides, and sucralose, raising concerns about the health of fish habitat and the people in the area. The study identified excessive nutrients, metals, hydrocarbons, and pesticides as the primary pollutants of concern, highlighting the impacts of domestic and agricultural practices on the fish habitat in the region.Dr. Peter S. Ross is an ocean pollution expert who has published over 160 scientific articles and book chapters on pollutants in the oceans. He discovered that the region's killer whales are the most contaminated marine mammals in the world, and recently reported on the widespread distribution of microplastics in the NE Pacific and Arctic oceans. He is the founder of the Ocean Pollution Research Program and the Plastics Lab at Ocean Wise, and has advised industry, government, the G7, the European Union, and the OECD on priority pollutants and microplastics. Dr. Ross is now Senior Scientist at Raincoast Conservation Foundation, where he is developing a new community-oriented Healthy Waters Program.Read the full report: https://www.raincoast.org/reports/flood/Send 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

This episode is sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. REFBC is a philanthropic organization that supports sustainable, equitable, and socially just relationships with land and water. Learn more about the foundation's grants and initiatives at REFBC.com. Dr. Ross, it is a pleasure to sit down again. For individuals who may be just learning about you, I think it's important. that they revisit number 58, where we did our original interview where you walked through how you got interested in this work, how you got started and your journey through academics, to start to be the prominent voice that I think you are in regards to healthy water

and maintaining our relationship with these ecosystems. But just a brief summary, would you mind reintroducing yourself for people who might not be checking out that episode today? Well, my name is Peter Ross. I'm a senior scientist at Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Sydney, and my life is all about contaminants, which is usually seen to be a bad news story, but I like to turn it into a good news story by studying it, informing people, sharing, and creating capacity for change. I think we should get started on your findings around the Sumas Lake reemerging and what

sort of took place there. Could you talk about before you started your research the understanding that we had about the Sumas Lake? Right. Well, of course, I think most people remember the catastrophic floods of late 2021 and southern British Columbia. It was a devastating time. There were lives lost. There were animals, livestock that were lost. A lot of property damage roads and railroads were washed out and lands were quote-unquote flooded. And during this time, governments were stepping in with emergency responses. The military arrived. There were a lot of construction crews that were busy. People were being evacuated. And food and water supplies became really, really important to a lot of communities that were more remote.

And so for me, watching the news, as many people were, I became troubled by what I saw to be a blending, a mixing of fish habitat and industry and agriculture. In other words, as the floodwaters rose, we saw these flooded waters pouring into people's communities, overwhelming wastewater water treatment plants, carrying away debris, plastic buckets, kerosene tanks, gasoline, dead animals, all sorts of things. I became concerned that we're spending so much time dealing with the emergency response, as seen through the eyes of humans, that we were forgetting about fish. Because ostensibly what was happening right before our eyes was that fish habitat was

being contaminated with all manner of pollution and weight. from our multiple activities in the area. So how did it come onto your radar to start to take some action? You started being interested in the research aspects. It was in consultation with the Sumas First Nation. How did it sort of come about? Well, very naturally, I might say, it was a blur. Lots of things were happening all at once.

I was trying to set up a Healthy Waters program through Raincoast, which would see us deliver Western scientific expertise in lockstep, with the community needs and indigenous knowledge that we saw at play in many nations around southern B.C. And we're trying to set up this program that would see us delivering that support and engaging with First Nations as well as other governments to really create more understanding about pollution and the way in which we're impacting on our own drinking water supplies as well as the quality of fish habitat. And in the midst of me designing such a program, being designed, I might add, to fill a perceived gap because there is a whole range of efforts that really are not conspiring to tell us a lot about what's happening to fish or fish habitat. So there was a strong need to fill that gap, to fill that void. And so when we were trying to set up healthy waters and the floodwaters arrived, I got distracted.

I got pulled away from designing this more sanguine, straight-laced initiative that would create this new model for monitoring water quality into this emergency response. That emergency response reflected what I perceive to be apprehension on the part of many organizations and individuals concerned about fish habitat. You mentioned Sumas First Nation, of course, the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance, which is a 30-Nation membership organization, and the Salt Temeck Stewardship Alliance, the STSA, which is a 15-member nation group, and others. There are other voices in the wings saying, what's happening? What are we doing? And the more I engaged with various government agencies, the more I realized that there was something that we really needed to do. And that was step in, deploy our team, work in the field with various organizations and individuals from the parties that were supporting us and concerned. And to really dive into the topic of trying to figure out whether there was any way of detecting pollutants.

of concern and fish habitat. What is the planning process like when you're getting into these rooms? What does your team sort of look like when you're trying to plan something that is hopefully going to inform so many people about such a complex issue? Great question. And again, it was a blur. Everything was happening at once. We were engaged one-on-one with different federal and provincial agencies saying,

what are you doing, anything that we can do together? Can you do more? Do you have any funding? Do you have any capacity? We set up what we called an ad hoc working group on floodwater quality, and we invited people to that online meeting once a week. So we had SUMAS represented, we had LFFA, STSA, we had the province, we had the federal government, and we had other organizations that were meeting.

And we're just brainstorming, trying to give updates to one another, but what was happening, and trying to support any and all effort to understand a protection, fish habitat. So that was, in my view, really what the planning session was all about. We took some of the advice that was occasionally very pointed to the provincial water quality task force that was set up by the BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, and we were basically pushing for more effort, more work to really understand the impacts to fish habitat of pollutants for many sources, and that was going slowly and imperfectly. The province had its own initiatives, its own planning aims, it had a very strong sense of purpose.

The problem was that strong sense of purpose was not quite meeting the needs, in my view, of the indigenous organizations, individuals, and ourselves that were clamoring for more investment, more resources to do the right kind of work, to document and document immediately the potential impacts of the pollution that was being released into fish habitat. This is a key point, right, because you need funding to be able to roll out this program, to do proper research. There is the gold standard of how you'd like to do things to get the best at data, to make sure that it's robust and reliable, and then there's the funding constraints.

Can you talk a little bit about trying to navigate those waters? Well, funding constraints is a big question because a lot of the contaminants that we were interested in having analyzed, like pharmaceuticals and personal care products, like hydrocarbons, like currently used pesticides, like wastewater tracers, like sucralose. So, so very, very expensive. In fact, we ended up spending almost $5,000 per sample to have these contaminants analyzed. So that weighed very heavily on me. But at the same time, I was convinced that not only did we have to measure these contaminants, we had to measure them using the best available protocols, hence the most expensive pathway forward. And as you can appreciate, most governments want to aim for the least expensive way forward.

So they might look at a competition and go for the lab that offers a bargain basement offer in terms of the analysis. But if you don't get that lab to produce any data, if they're producing all, hey, we didn't find any. you may be missing what we were able to find, which was the detection of hundreds of contaminants of concern in these waters. So for us, it was simple. We had a view whereby we said, we have to do it the right way. We have to do it now. We have no choice. Nobody's really offering us money. We're going to go ahead and do it. And with that attitude, we actually attracted some buy-in. We kind of, I felt a little bit badly about seemingly forcing the hands of some of the parties at the table. But we had pragmatic concerns being expressed.

We had a very distinct need for urgent sampling analysis. We knew what we wanted to do. And we had very strong support from the outset, from the Pacific Salmon Foundation, from my own team at Raincoast, from the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance, from the Soltemak Stewardship Alliance, and then eventually Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, and the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, Climate Change Strategy. And the latter two agencies do have some ability to respond to these sorts of incidents,

but both of them acknowledged that we had a distinct value add to bring to the table. Say more on that. Say more on the added value. Added value. Well, as mentioned, we chose for the most expensive lab, which not every organization is able to do. Often, governments are wed to contractual obligations dealing with a sole source relationship with a certain provider or laboratory. We said, no, in this case, we want to go to another lab because we want to look for other contaminants of concern, or we want to have a fingerprint associated with the detection of many more contaminants with,

in a given category. For example, pharmaceuticals, over 135 pharmaceuticals and personal care products, we were able to seek out, analyze, and then quantify. So it was in us having sort of that creative latitude to say, we don't want to count out a certain contractual obligation. We don't want to simply go with a certain lab because that's where we did them last year. We want to go and to explore this concept from the perspective of needing to understand what is being found in fish habitat in the Lower Fraser Valley and whether that could have been related to what the flood had been doing. So we simply said we need to go at this unfettered by previous contractual obligations, unfettered, unbound, unconstrained. We needed to go at this event recognizing it as a public emergency, recognizing it as probably partly a function of climate change, and hence not the last time this is going to happen, and recognizing it as an event that we were really well positioned to respond to. Are these standards you'd like to see rolled out with your Healthy Waters program as well?

Is this the direction you like to push government institutions, non-profit organizations to move in, this robust approach to looking at detailed analysis and not just going with the most affordable, most cost-efficient organizations to do the data analysis? Well, I think that's what any scientist would say, yes, I'd like to be able to, you know, design my project to really answer to the question I am posing to myself or somebody else is posing to me. And if you aren't opening up your toolbox to new approaches or different techniques, then you're really constraining your ability as a scientist to produce a good, robust study and or to advise others on the base of what you found. So we wanted no constraint so that we could do this and do it properly. In terms of contaminants, what we have to realize is that there are half a million chemicals

on the Canadian market, possibly more, that's 500,000, and that we have somewhere between 800 and 1,000 new chemicals on the market every single year. So if we're simply going to go at this problem using methods and viewpoints and understanding that we had developed 10 or 20 years ago, we're going to be missing some potentially important contaminants of concern. So we didn't want to be constrained. Yes, I'd love to see government step up and heighten, you know, strengthen their game. And, you know, I think there is considerable room for a number of agencies to do so. But at the same time, I think in the age that we find ourselves in, with reconciliation being important, I think we also have to look at the world through a different set of lenses or try.

if I as a westerner slash scientist slash colonialist or descendant of colonialists, colonialists look at water, I might look at it in a certain way, whereas a small community, Sumas First Nation, where there's been a long practice of harvesting salmon and shellfish and migratory waterfowl, they might be looking at water through different set of lenses. So for me, I think this flood provided us with an opportunity to engage more meaningfully, more openly, to better understand the viewpoints of different parties and to look at the indigenous uses and values of water so that we aren't simply going back to the, this is drinking water and this is the environments and using age-old practices that are failing to protect fish. you roll out this incredible report

and I'm curious as to some of the findings of it and I think that this is where it really starts to wake people up to what's going on would you be able to walk us through maybe not just the report but you discovering these things you getting back to the documents saying some of the things were you surprised

did it make you uncomfortable what were your thoughts while you were going through this process mixed mixed feelings mixed emotions mixed views not surprised but shocked at the same time, or not shocked but saddened at the same time. I'm a toxicologist. I'm used to bad news.

As mentioned before, I don't mind the bad news when it informs good news. In other words, solutions or mitigation or remediation or better planning or better management in the future. Clearly, our civilization is growing and expanding in complex ways. Our economy is more global. the ways in which chemicals enter the environment is becoming more intense, and we're seeing more and more contaminants entering fish habitat every single year. We cannot keep up with that. So when we sampled water in the Lower Fraser Valley around the former Sumas Lake, I was not surprised to find fertilizers, bacteria, metals at fairly high concentrations,

hydrocarbons, where we saw a number of exceedances of environmental quality guidelines, where we found pesticides, some of which were present at unacceptably high levels, where we found perflorinated compounds, these forever chemicals that don't break down, where we found sucralose, which is a wastewater treatment plant tracer or a human wastewater tracer, it's a sweetener, where we found tire chemicals from our roads. So finding all of these things tends to weigh on me, but at the same time, what gives me hope is that we can look at the numbers, look at what we're actually finding in this water and say, we're failing our fish. We're failing fish habitat. Can we do a better job? And can we use these numbers to inform how we might be able to do a better job? For example, we found a very strong signature of agricultural impacts on fish habitat. Well, there could be some simple conversations around can we apply fertilizers differently? Can we establish a better riparian zone protection, a buffer zone, a corridor alongside each waterway to better filter and retain some of these contaminants that are rinsed off into fish habitat? Can we manage this agro sector just a little bit differently? So there are conversations around that. We also found evidence of human waste. We don't know where that came from. It could be failing septic tanks or overflowing septic tanks.

It could be from sewage overflows at the level of the wastewater treatment plant or on route from home to plant. But that was very evident in the way of a number of contaminants that we detected in water, including asthma medication, diabetes medication, antibiotics, illicit drugs like cocaine, frequently found, and modest concentrations, not shockingly high concentrations, but troubling all the more, simply because we were finding these pharmaceuticals in virtually every single sample we looked at. So what we were able to show was that we as humans, with livestock, with veterinary drugs, with medications, with our own domestic uses in our homes and businesses are contaminating fish habitat.

That's all a lot to take in for people because you don't think of cocaine and stuff in your waterways. Where were some of these samples taken from to put it into context for people who might not understand where this is taking place? It sounds like it was sluos and different areas. Can you describe some of the locations you guys looked at? Well, I think a lot of the places that we sampled, Some would scratch their heads and ask, why are you sampling that water?

It's a ditch. It's a slew. It's a canal. Nobody's drinking that water and nobody's playing that water. Why are you worried about it? Well, before the Barrow Town pump stations were built next to Sumas Mountain in 1924, this was a lake, the Sumas Lake area or the Sumas Prairie, as is sometimes presented, is an area. that used to be a vibrant kitchen for indigenous nations and communities.

There were lots of migratory birds, there were elk that would come up to the lake, there were freshwater bivalves, there were whitefish, there were salmon that would migrate through there. This was a huge resource for indigenous foods before these pump stations were built. And then the pump station was constructed and drained the lake. the lake disappeared, and what we have today is a mosaic of engineered waterways with dams and dikes and flood control structures such that the water is lower than it was historically, and it is lower because of the mechanical pump station, which operates 24-7 and has since 1924. So it's an area that is known to most people in the area as an agricultural area, farms with a rich bounty of everything from blueberries to potatoes to cabbage.

But that is a sector that is only made possible through the pump station and through the engineered waterways. So it's an area that intersects with the TransCanada Highway, lots of vehicles going by, lots of farms, several communities between Abbotsford and Chiluac. And interestingly, when we're out sampling, People are running into live salmon and live sturgeon. So coho salmon pre-spawn, in other words, trying to find their natal stream to spawn in, they're out swimming over farmer's fields.

So this is fish habitat. And therein lies a very important legal distinction being designated or found to be fish habitat is subject to the Fisheries Act, which is a federal act that basically provides the government with the authority to enforce uncertain infringements, for example, releasing pollutants into fish habitat is troubling and is against the law. So we had a number of issues that could be brought into focus with the guidance of the Fisheries Act at a minimum. Do you feel like there's been some sort of shift over the past 100 years? You're talking about pre-pump station, post-pump station. It seems like at a certain point in time, we would have viewed all water as like valuable and drinkable. And we would have

had, and I think Dalton Silver made comments about this that we'd never looked at water as like, oh, I'd never drink out of that water. But now that's more commonplace. We look at ditches and go, oh, there's probably garbage in there. It's probably gross. And there's been like a transition in our mind where we've stopped looking at all waterways as valuable and important and something that we can rely upon. And if we're thirsty or something, we look at puddles in cities now. is like I would never put my mouth anywhere near that, let alone expect that to be drinkable. Do you think that that's a transition we've gone through? Oh, very much so.

I mean, it's maybe it's an age-old expression, but the eternal frog that is sitting in a pot of water that is where you put it on high and you watch him boil, he or she will maybe not jump out and simply bear the consequences or suffer the consequences. I think over the last hundred years, and that's what it's been, hundred years, we've forgotten that 100 plus years ago, this was not only an area for recreation, for play, for swimming, for drinking, for eating, but I mean, it was, it was an important area for a lot of people who lost access to their food supply. And so we've seen this 100-year continuum to a spot where the province was saying publicly that if the waters are degraded by the floods, we don't really care because it was already degraded before the floods. And I'm saying, well, hang on a second here.

The water is degraded and we're not really able to figure out what the floods did to it. It's simply degraded. That should signal alarm bells in many sectors. That should give us the wherewithal to say, what is it content? contaminated with? Why is it contaminated? And what can we do about that? This leads into a clear question. You're saying we don't know whether or not this is all caused by the floods or if it was occurring beforehand and perhaps the floods just increased it. We don't actually have the answer to this question clearly. We don't have the answer to that question, nor could we answer it because when the floods happened, we sampled post-hawk. We sampled after the events, after the tragedy of the floods took place. And it just, I guess, reminds me that sometimes we're in the dark with regard to what's happening in the environment.

And the only way to understand whether flood is impacting on what we're doing or whether tire chemicals are killing coal of salmon or whether roads are running, have run off of road salt that is damaging to fish habitat. The only way to know that is to actually have your radar on, to have the environment illuminated through research or monitoring. And unfortunately, governments have been whittling away at the environmental sciences budget for three decades now. And I think we're defaulting to an assumption that all chemicals are safe until proven otherwise. And our regulatory regime in Canada and elsewhere in the Western world is such that until you prove that a single chemical is harming fish or wildlife or humans, it can stay on the market. That's almost the way we are today. And then the mistakes that are detected or detected downstream often when it's too late because killer whales are the most contaminated marine mammals in the world,

because coho salmon are dying from 6 p.D quino and the tire chemical that is running off into their habitat and all manner of other impacts, most of which we don't have a clue about because we don't have that radar function on. A lot of people think of the precautionary principle, that you shouldn't do harm, that there should be some sort of rule about making sure that we have. have some sort of understanding, and when we don't, we should be cautious. As a person in our society, I often think somebody's going to figure this out. There's got to be a group of people who are sorting out these problems and making sure, like, our lights work, our electricity works. And so you kind of get this sense that things are moving in the right direction.

And what you're saying is perhaps we don't have the same level of analysis when it comes to these problems that we're not testing the water prior. And even if we were, it sounds like we're not testing it to the standards. that would be optimal to actually have the right answers. Well, the precautionary principle is an interesting one. It actually features prominently in the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which oversees the regulation of chemicals in Canada. Unfortunately, industry doesn't take kindly to the occasional times that one might want to apply the precautionary principle

to a certain chemical or product. For example, if you say, hey, I'm going to not allow this chemical onto the Canadian market, industry is going to say, why? And you're going to say, well, because we're afraid that might cause unacceptable harm, industry is probably going to succeed in taking the government to court and overturning that or pursuing us under the new NAFTA Act. So unfortunately, the precautionary principle is stated clearly and eloquently, but it is not applied in Canada. Interesting. And so when you're gathering this information, do we have any understanding of the consequences to fish? Like cocaine, what is cocaine due to fish? What does sucralose do to fish? And there's another interesting one. When we looked at the 379 contaminants that we were measuring in the samples of water from the Sumas Lake area, the first thing we did is we compared

the concentrations to established environmental quality guidelines. These environmental quality guidelines are available in British Columbia and Canada and other jurisdictions, other provinces, and they tell us at what concentration you will run into a level that is of concern to fish or invertebrates. The problem is multifold. Number one, there are only environmental quality guidelines for a small percentage of the 379 analytes that we're looking for. And environmental equality guidelines take decades generally to develop unless you have a real emergency. And so we only have environmental equality guidelines to judge whether about 26% of our 379 analytes are harmful or not. For the rest of them, we don't have a clue in terms

of the environmental quality guidelines that are available. Of the pharmaceuticals, all but one have no environmental quality guidelines. In other words, we have no way of judging whether the concentration of cocaine found in the fish habitat that we're looking at would be harmful of fish or not. So to do that, we'd have to go to the scientific literature on every one of these other analytes or contaminants of concern to figure out, oh, is that likely to be toxic? Could that cause harm? And then you're getting out of the realm of the environmental quality guidelines that are sanctioned and overseen by governments and risk assessors. So there's a real inability or I put it that way. There's a weakness insofar as we aren't provided with tools that are recognized by governments that would allow us to judge whether water is safe for fish or not, whether it be out.

acutely toxic or cause chronic developmental problems or cause reproductive problems, we don't know for most of the analytes that we're looking for. And do you think people could end up eating these fish and consuming them? Because unfortunately, it seems like it has to impact us directly in order for people to start to take it seriously. If it's impacting, those people over there, it's a not in my backyard kind of problem. Is this something that could impact people? Absolutely.

I mean, some of the contaminants that, for example, we found in these water, could be accumulated by fish if they're eating or if they're breathing through their gills in those waters. And that's typically what fish do. And those are the two primary modes of entry for these contaminants in the fish tissues. And if they're spending a lot of times, if they're local fish, non-migratory trout or other species, they're going to accumulate over their lifetime the contaminants found in their water. The challenge overall is that a lot of the fish that are valued regionally are an address. In other words, they're migratory salmon in particular.

So of the five salmon species, they're spending time where they hatch, where they start their lives. And then as they grow up, they head out to sea. They spend some time one to six years out in the open ocean, growing, acquiring contaminants in the ocean as well. of course, and then returning through a natal stream or lake. So they've got a lifetime where they're going to be exposed to contaminants and a lifetime whereby they are basically passing by different areas, different communities, different industries, different outfall pipes, different sources of point and non-point source pollution,

and it's during that lifetime that they're going to be impacted by and or accumulating contaminants of concern. So humans, whatever fish we're eating, of course, we're going to eat whatever contaminants they've accumulated from their lifetime at sea. So there's really two concerns in terms of seafood or access to safe seafood, and that is, number one, what contaminants might I be exposed to if I eat fish or shellfish or crab? And secondly, why are there no coho returning to this stream? Well, it might be because contaminants killed them outright downstream, and I'm not seeing them.

So contaminants can affect the quality or the quantity of the fish that we're interested in consuming. And that should be a concern for all of us. And you're saying there's no check or balance to know whether or not the salmon you purchase has traces of cocaine or sucralose or these types of contaminants? Well, a lot of those types of contaminants are what we call water soluble. So cocaine is not going to be accumulating in the tissues of fish. We can detect it in water. They might be exposed to small levels, but they would be able to metabolize that. So I don't have huge concerns about some of the pharmaceuticals in something like a salmon

because they're unlikely to be retaining them. That said, I don't feel confident or comfortable knowing that we've got wild salmon returning to a natal stream and having to navigate waters that are contaminated with cocaine and other pharmaceuticals. absolutely not terribly happy about that. So in terms of seafood in Canada, Health Canada would be overseeing commercial foods. So foods that are purchased in a supermarket, Health Canada would be responsible for making sure that they're safe, doing spot checks, and looking at human health quality guidelines or human health guidelines on various contaminants of concern, such as mercury or PCBs, et cetera, et cetera.

And Health Canada is able to do so with two tools. One is understanding what the contaminants are in given products like mercury and tuna fish, for example, and being able to measure that. And number two, knowing how much tuna fish the average Canadian consumes every year, because it may not be a concern if you have half a can of tuna year, but it might be a concern if you eat 10 cans of tuna year. So Health Canada has to understand what the contaminant level is in a certain product and how much of that product we eat.

With indigenous nations, unfortunately, that formula falls apart. Because if you're relying on country foods, the question is how much do you eat of those different items? Health Canada is using the average Canadian as their benchmark, and most indigenous nations, certainly along the coast, are eating very different types of foods than the average Canadian. In fact, a work that we did in conjunction with a number of Coastal First Nations found that Coastal First Nations residents were eating about 14 times more seafood than the average Canadian. And this means that even if your fish is relatively uncontaminated, you're still

eating 14 or 15 times as much of those contaminants. So it might become more of a concern for a community or a nation whose residents are consuming much more than Health Canada would otherwise understand. And the argument some people might make is just eat less seafood, don't consume as much, but some within our community, within the Stolo territory, salmon is something that we look towards, that we have a strong relationship, that it's culturally important for salmon ceremonies and for events and for well-being and, like, taking care of our community. And so it's not as simple as just cut back on the amount of salmon you eat.

It's terrible news. You can't just turn a culture on its head and say, don't eat the salmon or don't eat the fish. Absolutely not. I agree with you. And it's a travesty of our chemical history that really began in 1945 that the world has seen this explosion in contaminants and all the wonder products associated with them, the miracle products that were able to produce in society. But at the same time, what we often forget is that there are unintended consequences. The big chemical giants don't want to contaminate fish and seabirds and killer whales. But maybe the they are because at the end of the life of that product or during the life of that product,

we're seeing that chemical seep into the environment and get into food chains. And it's really as simple as that. I think that based on what we've seen in Canada, we've learned a lot about indigenous foods. It was Canada's science to policy work together with the Inuit in the Far North that first of all discovered the Inuit were the most contaminated people on the planet. planet. In around 1979, 1980, 1981, the study started coming out. That was a shocker. Remote

from industry, thousands of kilometers from industry, why were the Inuit more, 10 times more contaminated than southern Canadians? Well, the point was that they were eating 25 times as much. Seafood, 25 times. And the contaminants were entering

the Arctic through long-range transport of atmospheric pollutants, getting it to food webs. And that led Canada to work very hard on developing the science and working lockstep with indigenous knowledge in the north to deliver those findings and spearhead the Stockholm Convention. The Stockholm Convention became the international treaty that became law, international law, in the year 2004. And it was Canada that led on that. So we've learned some hard lessons about contaminants in country foods or indigenous foods. The problem is that we don't have an easy formula for understanding

what the risks are associated with country foods because every nation is different, every community is different across Canada in terms of what is eaten, how frequently, how much, how it's prepared, it makes for a very difficult risk assessment portfolio for those that are tasked with that. And it just goes to my point. It's really unfair that industry, government, and the general public, we as a society or as a world, if we're simply allowed to contaminate fish habitat in ways that we don't fully understand. We don't have the tools to judge the safety of those fish necessarily. And we've got no ability to turn off the tap because we don't have the data telling us which tap to turn off.

That is very well said. How do we think about the report? When you released it, do you feel like it got a good reception? What was your sense? What was your hope for some of the outcomes when you've released it? Well, our aim was to be transparent and to do something where we felt we could step up and help out. Everybody had their own approach to dealing with the floods.

Those that were impacted had the immediacy of having to evacuate or deal with property damage or individual safety of their families. And we stepped in because we felt compelled to work with our partners

and friends to understand and what was going on in terms of fish habitat, because we acknowledged that fish habitat was a question of food security and healthy environments for a number of people. And in crafting the approach that we did, we were very sensitive to community needs or the needs and aspirations of the First Nations of the Lower Fraser Valley in particular. And we knew that we needed Western science and technology

to detect the industrial chemicals that the Western world has created in the first place. So we had something we could bring to the table. And at the end of the day, I looked at the problem from the perspective of a toxicologist who's worked on environmental pollution for decades now. And I looked at the numbers, the data, the signatures, the profiles, the exceedances of environmental quality guidelines. And we did our best to do a fairly thorough, risk-based assessment, but then we also use the signature of what we're finding to point some gentle fingers at some of the sectors that were probably contaminating these waters, and floods

may or may not have made it worse. We can't really weigh in on that because we were not around before the floods. But the end of the day, what I kind of feel as though I learn more than anybody because, you know, in talking to Dalton Silver and Troy Gansfeld and and Marie Ned and many of the other figures that are prominent in discussions around the health of the Lower Fraser Valley, I feel as though I walked out of the floods understanding more about the cultural and geographical and biological history of the last 100 to 150 years in British Columbia than I had anticipated. And when we look at the Siomass Prairie and we look at the floods, I almost stepped forward and say it wasn't a flood. It was simply Mother Nature re-emerging

with the Sumas Lake re-emerging in ways that closely resembled the profile of the lake before 1924. And we've had five such floods since 1924. So Mother Nature is simply, reminding us that we can't always control her. And we had basically Sumas Lake that reemerged. So for me, it was a very humbling journey, but a very, very informative one. And it's our hope that the report is useful. And it's our hope that the report helps in a win-win situation for those wanting healthy fish habitat to work hand-in-hand with farmers, to work hand-at-hand with the governments that want to protect property and public safety, et cetera. And we think that there is a better way than where we are right now.

What are some of the takeaways you had mentioned, the idea of having more of a separation, taking care of those riparian zones, and making sure that we take steps to prevent these pollutants from getting in in the first place? What were some of the recommendations that you had? Well, we shied away from issuing recommendations, but rather we put forward conclusions that would allow people to say, okay, if that's a conclusion, then maybe a solution or a recommendation would be this. We really wanted to step back and allow those who live here, who harvest food here, who play here, who work here. We wanted those people to look at the numbers,

to look at our conclusions, and then to try to figure out, okay, if we roll up our sleeves together with the provincial and federal governments, and we want to work out what the future of salmon looks like, for example, in the area around the Lower Fraser Valley, what would the conversation look like, and how can we do a better job to prevent the release of pharmaceuticals, bacteria, nutrients that deplete oxygen and other harmful products into fish habitat?

But I think first and foremost is acknowledging that where we are sampling is fish habitat. And I think that has been ignored in practical ways for decades because we've simply said, well, we've given this area over to agricultural purposes largely or urban or industry. And therefore, of course, it's going to be degraded. This is not where fish would want to live and feed and reproduce. But the point is, they're trying. The salmon are trying to navigate these waters.

The salmon are trying to find their way back home. salmon are trying to reproduce so that more salmon will go out to see and come back for our fishers. Do you think there's any risk at all to not providing those recommendations? It seems like this is such an, as you said, there's a gap here, and did you see that is at all a risk? Not yet. I mean, if people feel comfortable in leaving the status quo as the status quo, so be it.

That's our choice as a collective society. At the same time, we did offer up the idea of working with the SUMAS First Nation, LFFA and STSA, on a forward-looking brainstorming, if you will, that would in some ways mature our report from one that is much more data-driven to one which is more forward-looking and will allow for many more stakeholders and parties to come to the table and say, look, we're concerned about X, Y, and Z in this report. what can we do about it? And allow the different experts, engineers, agricultural scientists, urban planners, green infrastructure authorities,

you know, the various types of people that we really need to have at the table, if we're going to help us to better navigate the path ahead where Mother Nature keeps reminding us that we're not quite fully understanding her power and the way in which she works. Coupled with climate change and the need for resiliency in the face of what is likely to be a future with more storms, more floods, more droughts, more intensity around all of those.

And water. Water, the most precious possible thing we have going without water. A human being only lasts three or four days. it's the most precious thing that we could have. And it just strikes me as bizarre that I have to plead with people to understand that, you know, in government and those with a mandate to do X or Y and having to be convinced of the value for water. I think that that's really important because we so often take things for granted. We look at the next thing, the next item, the next iPhone, and we start to forget about these fundamental things.

take care of us. And I think you provide such insights, but you also do it in such a balanced way where I think you bring an idea that things can be better if we are willing to pull up our bootstraps and take steps. And I think that this whole experience has shown what grass root endeavors can look like and how we can't just look to government to do all of it. You can set the example with your research on the best practice for government to follow in the future. And I think that that balance is so important for people to understand because there is a feeling that government isn't doing enough. Well, we are part of the government. We help elect people. We help give voice to them. We help prop them up. And so we as individuals have a responsibility to take care

of things. Can you tell people how they can find the report? Yes, they can find the report on our website. So raincoast.org, raincoast.org, and look under healthy waters. You might even be able to Google, Sumas, flood, water quality, raincoast, but it's on our website. It's free of charge. There's an executive summary or synthesis document that is about 16 pages, nice, easy to read, easy to follow narrative around what we found and why. And then the longer report, which is 75 plus pages, the full report with nine chapters, nine different contaminant categories available for anyone and everyone. And of course, hoping that it shed some light. and shed some light not only on the findings that are meaningful from the perspective of the Lower Fraser Valley,

but to many other watersheds where we have equal absence of monitoring or understanding, but potentially some of the same threats that salmon face in terms of environmental quality and the sort of healthy habitat that they require to live. It isn't my favorite question, but I think it's important to summarize this. Are you able to give three lessons that you've taken away from this research, from this experience, from the floods, for people who may just be listening to a short clip of this, who might not be able to listen to the full episode? What three pieces do you think is important for people to take away? Well, you've really put me on the spot there. Three, I think we came up with eight conclusions, but if I had to think of three off the top of my head, I would say, number one, we compartmentalize water in terms of understanding, in terms of monitoring, in terms of management.

And as water flows from mountaintop to the ocean, it's going through multiple jurisdictions across multiple boundaries and is overseen by multiple different agencies. That makes it very, very difficult to manage our approach to using or getting rid of contaminants in water. That's a complexity that we're trying to overcome with healthy waters in trying to generate data that is comparable, whether it's source water, drinking water, street runoff, streams, rivers, lakes, or the ocean. We want to look at contaminants in all its forms as found in water. That would be one thing. The other one is that we have a very limited toolbox to understand water quality when it comes to fish. And even though we have environmental quality guidelines available for some contaminants, we don't for most. And this makes it very, very difficult to understand how we should manage pollution or pollution discharges.

And probably the third one I would put out there is that, you know, when we look at water quality, we're often thinking about a concentration or amount that is being released from an end of pipe or from a certain use in an area. The problem is that we don't know how to put together all of those different parts into a cumulative of effects rendition. In other words, if we've got 100 homes along a stretch of river, you might say that the septic release from one or the herbicide used to get rid of dandelions and one is not going to be harmful to that stretch of river, but if you've got 100 people doing the same thing, what are the impacts? So the way in which we put things together to understand

our ultimate impact to fish and fish habitat we're really lacking in. So that's would probably be, you know, and that's what we're trying to do with our study and our report is to try to look at the sum total of all of our activities and impacts. And that turned out to be a not very pretty story. Yeah, I think cumulative impact is really difficult for people to want to get on board with because you have people who are like, I only contributed this much, though. I'm not doing that much harm. And it's comparable to cars. Everybody drives one. And we go, well, I don't drive that often. But when you have everybody driving a car, what is the long-term impacts of the oil on the road, the tires, as you've described, what is that

cumulative impact sort of look like? What else do you have going on? It sounds like you've got some amazing projects on the way as well. Since this one has sort of wrapped up in the short term, what else do you have going on? Well, I'd like to be a little bit more together when I approach problems in the future rather than responding to an emergency, which I wasn't really designed for, but as we go ahead with healthy waters, we're aiming to have 10 to 12 partnerships with different watersheds around southern British Columbia, from sort of the Whistler to Squamish Corridor, the Sunshine Coast, Salt Spring Island, the Couchon River, the Falls Creek area of Vancouver, Quibble Creek and Surrey, hopefully working with Sumas First Nation on a

watershed, hopefully working up in the Upper Thompson. So we hope to have 10 or 12 good partnerships whereby we can generate this high-resolution data that is so powerful, having a wide range of contaminants, and then to understanding what the pattern is of those contaminants within a given watershed, i.e. from mountaintop down to freshwater down into the ocean, but also among or across watersheds. And I think at that point, when we have 10, 12 communities coming together are 10 or 12 watersheds for which we have data, we're going to be able to generate not only in understanding what's happening to fish habitat within a watershed, but how the lessons learned across watersheds informs something like source control or best practices

or regulations. Is there a chemical that we're detecting in every single watershed that we didn't know about previously? Is there a chemical that we only find in certain types of watersheds, for example, the ones that are intensively agroforestry or the ones that are more urbanized? Are there some fundamental basic features of fish habitat that we should be worried about that we could fairly easily and cheaply resolve, such as too much in the way of nutrients, you know, protecting the riparian zone? So I think with healthy waters, we will be in good shape in 2024 to have a one-year retrospective analysis of what's happening in British Columbia watershed. So I'm really excited about that. And part of what we're going to be able to do

along that path is get out and work more with those partners in community. In other words, go out, engage with staff, with elders, with youth, with schools, with workshops, with festivals, with municipalities, and to show them what we're doing to start engaging in a way that I hope will be capacity building, because we can't do this alone. We don't want to do this alone. We want communities to seize the opportunity to learn about the performance. problems within their watershed and to be able act on them. So

this time next year, I hope to come back and tell you about our mobile laboratory called Tracker. We are building a mobile laboratory. It'll be a sprinter van equipped to the gills so that we can go out and actually sample and analyze in the field alongside friends, colleagues, co-workers. You better

put the sign on there, equipped to the gills because that is brilliant. There you go. The first step to solving a problem is admitting that there is one and I don't think us as British Columbians right now are the stewards that we could be. Yet you are, you and your team are working to inform us on where we could be doing better as British Columbians. And I think that that's a huge responsibility. It's something I know you're passionate about.

But can you highlight some of the people in your team that are also working on this, that deserve some recognition for the work that went into developing this report, making sure that they did it thoughtfully and carefully? Can you shine some light on them? Absolutely. Many people at Raincoast were very, very helpful. Kristen Walters was really absolutely stellar in terms of supporting us in the field and in doing the research with the data. We had people like Misty McDuffey and Dave Scott, biologists who have been working in the Laura Fraser and working on salmon, helping with just that reminder of what salmon need in terms of habitat and habitat quality.

We had a number of people from fisheries and oceans helping out in terms of providing support in the field, so that was super important. And then countless people in the field and with the report from the LFFA and the SDSA helping us out in terms of, and I could name Ian Hamilton, Murray, Ned, and many others, but we were delighted to have probably 20 people that were just stepping in along the way, helping us to navigate what we had to do and move the dial on this important conversation. I really think that you are such an incredible voice for this work because you get people interested, but then you give some sort of light.

And I think with topics like this, when we start hearing about sugar and water, you start to get discouraged and think, what are we as people? Like, you start to see people, start to get really pessimistic about what people can be. and you don't seem to lose that hope that we can steer this ship in a new direction. Would you mind telling people how they can connect with you and Raincoast online? Well, raincoast.org, Healthy Waters, we have a program, a description of the program. Our reports are on our website. There are various blogs and web articles about what we've been up to.

We've been doing everything from work up in the Central Coast area on grizzly bears and wolves. We've been working on protecting them for future generations. We've been working on southern resident killer whales and salmon. We've been acquiring land to protect it in the coastal Douglas fir zone on Pender Island. We've been working to restore fish habitat in breaches in the jetties of the lower Fraser at the mouth of the Fraser in the Strait of Georgia. So lots of interesting stuff. The wonderful thing about Raincoast, it is really a conservation science powerhouse. And by that, I mean science that informs conservation and provides us with that outside the box look to remind us about.

ecosystems, habitat, population, species, and to develop tools, they're practical and usable by many and all. Brilliant. I really appreciate you being willing to come out today. I've learned so much again. I always enjoy sitting down with you and hearing your perspectives, because as I said, I think you offer that inspiration that we have a responsibility as people. We have a responsibility to be good stewards, to take care of this land, and to be proud of

the nature and the environment that we get to live in every single day. So I appreciate you being willing to come on today and share such insights. Thanks so much, Aaron.