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| Vancouver Island, Clayoquot Sound (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| A hiker looks on at a giant Thuja plicata in Meares Island, British Columbia (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: Sample of parasite infected pink salmon (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Cinema Politica Concordia last night showed two superb
documentaries about efforts necessary to save the magnificent wild regions and
wildlife of British Columbia. The first
of these, Rainforest: the Limit of Splendour
was made by a Vancouver native, Richard Boyce, who has devoted his life
to making films that pinpont the insouciant brutality of capitalism towards the
splendid natural environment of that
province. This film showed logging practices so outrageous (and yet, so much
taken for granted by the powers-that-be), that I felt sick at heart long before
it ended, not least because exactly thirty years ago I was involved in filming
something of this same story for a film I made about the history of Canada’s
National Parks.
Distressing though it was to see the same practices going
on as 30 years ago, when there was a massive mobilization of caring people
whose aim was to stop the logging of the beautiful rainforest of Clayquot
Sound, and of Meares Island, the large island within the Sound, remarkably
enough, the second film, dealing with the spread of disease among wild salmon,
was just as distressing, and even more infuriating because of what it showed
about the corruption of our federal government.
(Harper out!)
This film was called
Salmon Confidential, made by a young woman called Twyla Roscovich, who
lives on the water in British Columbia and makes no doubt of her purposes in
calling her production company Calling
From the Coast, a company specializing in marine ecology films that are directed at all of us across the
country, and elsewhere.
Each of these films exposes a shocking derogation of duty
by our governments, and the sole comfort to be drawn from them is that they
also reveal the existence of convinced, and one might almost say, fanatical
young men and women determined to expose the wrong-doing that is threatening
such precious natural inheritance as the rainforest and the wild salmon, and
who are ready to devote their lives to this cause.
For the sake of clarity, I should take these films
separately, although their combined message is devastating and coherent: they
belong together in that sense.
Let’s begin with the salmon film. Its thesis is that,
originating from fish farms in Norway that have sold their products to fish
farms in the Western Hemisphere, including to Canada’s West Coast, severe fish
diseases have taken hold in the fish farms that now line the route of most of
the best salmon runs along the BC coast. Hundreds of thousands of fish have
been found to have died before they had a chance to spawn. (It should be
explained for those who don’t know that salmon, spawned in these wild rivers,
go out to sea for two years, and return to the place they were born, there to spawn
before dying.)
The question asked in this film by biologist Alexandra
Morton, is, what is killing the salmon? She suspects, because the death
patterns follow the pasttern of fish farms established along the channels, that
the diseases occur within the fish farms and spread out into neighbouring
waters, where they infect wild salmon as they return to make their heroic
battle upstream in rivers that are running as a flood against them. I never
thought such a subject would interest me, by Ms Roscovich, with Ms Morton’s
lively help, succeeds in making it interesting. She names various diseases,
salmon leukemia, ISA (infectious salmon aenemia), and piscine reovirus. The
last of these is particularly relevant, because it results in muscle
inflammation of the heart and skeleton, in other words, it makes the heart so
weak and flabby that the fish are simply not healthy enough to win the fight
upstream to their spawning places.
Alexandra Morton was an independent biologist studying
whales in a small archipelego when the fish farmers came to her area, and she
set out, if possible, to discover the causes of the salmon deaths that
followed. What the film reveals is that three of the four laboratories
qualified to discover the pathogens the fish were suffering from, did identify
one or other of the named diseases in significant samples. The one that didn’t
was a government lab whose account of what it saw was quite unconvincing.
Meantime, the government made strenuous efforts to deny the validity of the
results obtained in the three other labs, firmly gagging the leading BC
authority, who happens to work for the federal government, Dr. Kristi Miler,
and trying to destroy a lab in Prince Edward Island that works for an
international agency.
Alex Morton was, however, determined. Fish farm operators
refused to have their fish tested, an indication that they must have known they
were diseased, as one participant in the film said. Morton even went to the almost
ludicrous length of spotting an eagle holding a fish in its claws and sitting
on the edge of a fish farm railing, following the eagle when it took off until
it dropped the fish, and then moving in and scooping up the fish, which, of
course, when tested, proved to be diseased.
Denied the cooperation of labs influenced by the
government she scured supermarkets for salmon that seemed to have been
suffering from one or other of the diseases, and had them tested. She rounded up
hundreds of dead fish from salmon runs, tested 11 of them, and found three that
were suffering from the dread diseases.
Finally, discouraged by the blackout from both industry
and government --- these two agencies had proven to be great pals, the
government paying $100 million in compensation to fish farmers for the losses
they suffered through diseases, diseases which, incidentally, the government
refused its scientists pemission to test, ---- Morton, with the support of
Roscovich, has established what she calls the Department of Wild Salmon, her
colorful way of suggesting that all citizens have to consider themselves allies
in the fight to save wild salmon, taking over the job from the having sold out
to private interests. This new Department, so-called, will engage in the fight
to free the issue from government gagging, and to persuade the provincial gvoernment
to exercise its powers to close down the fish farms.
The Department of Wild Salmon can be found on the Web site
at
The reasons I found myself sick at heart as I watched the
second of these two wonderful documentaries, the one about the Rainforest:Limit of Splendour, is probably because I remembered only too vividly
the shooting we did in 1984 when we managed to persuade the bureaucrats
overseeing the centenary of the National Parks the following year, that the
movement to create a national park in the Queen Charlotte Islands was
sufficiently relevant to the subject as
to be included in a filmed history of the National Parks. Since the area was
not yet a national park, I hope readers can understand how difficult it must
have been for these bureaucrats to make such an unusual concession.
Anyway, we flew out to BC, and on the way to the Queen Charlottes
we stopped off at a demonstraton being held to protest against the proposal to
clear-cut the glorious Clayquot Sound, and Meares Island that stands in the
sound. I will never forget flying in a
bumpy little single-engine plane on a day of boisterous weather, over the
Sound, and coming upon clear-cuts already done --- massive, mountainside-wide
clearcuts which left only the huge detritus customary in such clearcutting, and
the crumbling logging roads snaking hither and yon across the mountainside. How
depressing, I thought.
Later we embarked on a sailing schooner operated by a
young couple through the Queen Charlottes, and filmed the glorious places
revealed to us for several days. There we had an opportunity to walk in one of
these BC rainforests, a bewildering, awe-inspiring collage of fallen trees,
organisms that had built on them and around them, and towering monsters that
had withstood the vagaries of nature for hundreds of years. Logging was going on there, too, and more was
planned, which gave the decision about whether or not to create a park added
urgency.
The film I saw last night shows such a forest in its full
glory. Richard Boyce has lived with such forests since he was a child, and his
love of them resulted in this beautiful film in their honour. One could not
help feeling, by the film’s end, that it proved one thing above all else: this capitalist
economic system with its insistence in devouring the finest products of nature, simply
cannot last. Eventually we as a species
will run up against the law of diminishing returns, and when that happens
radical changes in our style of life must follow.
Richard Boyce pays tribute to the relationship with the
forest maintained by the First Nations people, and uses as an interlocutor
Chief Adam Dick, an old man from the Kwagiulth people, who told of how his
father, when taking down a tree, would first talk to it and make his peace with
it.
But in another part of the film, he, too, admitted to
having killed many, many trees when he took a job as a logger, something he did
just to earn money, to feed his family.
This shows how it is not simply a question of our having lost a real
feel for nature, of the kind that Richard Boyce so clearly has, for even a
population with such tenacious roots and beliefs as the indigenous people can
be persuaded to violate what they know to be best for the forest and therefore
for themseles.
I remember with gratitude the struggle asgainst the
logging of Clayquot Sound thirty years ago, the selflessness of the hundreds of
people who put themselves on the line for their cause, who got arrested for
their devotion, and many of whom suffered harsh penalties. And how could I watch
such a picture without thinking of my old friend, the late Coleen McCrory, a
fanatic defender of the BC forest, and a persistent pain in the ass to
goverments, who succeeded in having a number of provincial parks established,
so turning back the horde of loggers and their custmers.
As we saw again in this film, when it comes to the point,
the government, backed by its armed forces, its armed police and even if
neessary its army, always supports the power of the money that has placed them
in power.
So the struggle for the rainforest, just like the struggle
for the wild salmon, is left to individuals who are, it is to be hoped,
committed, enough.
Since the film was made Prime Minister Harper has invited
Norwegian fish farms to expand on BC’s coast, a decision against the advice
given him by his own federal commission of inquiry (set up as a result of the
public pressure in BC), and against the advice of his own officials (Harper
out!)
Richard Boyce’s movie can be acessed at the Web site http://rainforestmovie.ca/
And he himself can be contacted at info@RainforestMovie.ca
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