Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Decades of logging activities near rivers in B.C.'s Interior are driving up the temperatures of coho salmon habitats and threatening the species' survival, according to a new study. The study by Simon Fraser University and Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), published last month in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, looked into 28 tributaries of the North Thompson River watershed from Kamloops to Valemount.
There is a complex, counterintuitive relationship between rising global temperatures and the likelihood of increasingly intense snowstorms across Canada. Winters are becoming on average milder and warmer than they used to be, but there has also been a noted rise across the country in extreme weather events, such as intense snowstorms, said John Clague, a professor of geosciences at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, B.C.People might think it illogical that parts of the country are seeing more snowstorms as the climate warms, he said. “What climate modelers are finding is that climate change involves more frequent extremes.”
More than 65,000 salmon have died before they could spawn in just one Canadian stream. The die-off of two species, mostly pink and some chum salmon, hints at a potentially devastating season for the fish, local people, and the wider ecosystem throughout the region. Researchers from Simon Fraser University came upon the mass fish calamity in the Neekas river in British Columbia’s remote Central Coast on September 29. The waterway is near the community of Bella Bella, within Indigenous Heiltsuk Nation Territory. The full video shows a 360 degree view of the carnage.
A group of federal Liberal MPs are asking their government to invest up to $400 million to combat the “health crisis” of lead-contaminated drinking water which was exposed in communities across the country by a national investigation by 10 media outlets, including Global News and the Toronto Star. An open letter written by Hamilton MP Bob Bratina says the government “can and must” direct a portion of infrastructure spending designed to revitalize the post-COVID-19 economy into the “national public health crisis we face in the form of lead-contaminated drinking water.”
Gwenn Flowers, a glaciologist, trudges back and forth across a vast glacier in southwest Yukon, pulling a radar device mounted on skis behind her. "We as Canadians are stewards of about a third of the world's mountain glaciers and ice caps, so this is our responsibility," Flowers says. The dramatic changes to the glaciers in the Yukon are an early warning of what climate change could mean for the rest of the planet, researchers say. And Flowers sees lots of reason for concern reflected in the state of the ice.
