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.
The controversial Canada-U.S. oil and gas conduit known as Line 5 could be facing its toughest challenger yet: the very watershed the pipeline's detractors are trying to protect. Spring flooding has washed away significant portions of the riverbank where Line 5 intersects Wisconsin's Bad River, a meandering, 120-kilometre course through Indigenous territory that feeds Lake Superior and a complex network of ecologically delicate wetlands.
The Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation (LSCFN) claims that remediation work at an abandoned mine site in its traditional territory is only making things worse and so they are asking the Yukon Water Board to step in and change things. The subject of LSCFN’s complaint is the Mount Nansen mine site, a former gold and silver project located west of Carmacks that was heralded as an environmental disaster and an embarrassment to Canada, the Yukon and the mining firm involved when it was abandoned in 1999.
The Simpcw First Nation has become the latest community to declare a part of its traditional territory near the B.C.-Alberta border to be protected from logging and other extractive activities. On Monday, the First Nation announced it had declared the Raush Valley watershed — home to rare temperate rainforests located in the Rocky Mountains, halfway between Valemount and McBride — as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA), based on what it says is the community's inherent right over its unceded territory.
The Canadian province of British Columbia (B.C.) announced a land, water and resource management agreement with the Blueberry River First Nations Indigenous group on Wednesday that will restart development in the vast Montney shale play, but also limit new oil and gas activity. New well licenses in B.C.'s Montney have been frozen since June 2021, when a landmark B.C. Supreme Court decision ruled in favour of a Blueberry River claim that decades of industrial development had damaged their traditional territory.
Across the Old Crow Flats in the northern Yukon, lakes are telling a story of climate-driven change. The traditional territory of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN), the Old Crow Flats is recognized as a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance thanks to its more than 8,000 thermokarst lakes (up to 15 square kilometres) and ponds. Thermokarst lakes are formed by thawed permafrost and can be prone to drainage if they expand into low-lying areas. Kevin Turner, an Associate Professor in Brock’s Department of Geography and Tourism Studies and Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arctic Studies at the University of Washington, has studied the area since 2007, and he says that warmer temperatures, longer summers and more rain are “priming this important landscape for continued climate-driven landscape change.”
In its June 17 decision, the joint review panel said the mine’s likely selenium impacts posed too great a risk to southern Alberta’s water supply. It specifically cited the headwaters of the Oldman River in southern Alberta, which flows east from the Rocky Mountains and eventually joins up with the Bow River to form the South Saskatchewan River.
An independent panel is urging the Yukon government to develop a wetlands policy to protect unique streams, bogs, fens and peatland from mining because there are no known ways to fully restore these sensitive ecosystems once disturbed. Wetlands filter water, provide habitat to species and sequester carbon but are quickly being lost to development worldwide — an issue drawing attention on World Wetlands Day Feb. 2.
