Tsunami of Industrial Development Threatens B.C.’s Sacred Headwaters

Tsunami of Industrial Development Threatens B.C.’s Sacred Headwaters by Wade Davis, September 29, 2012, Huffingtonpost.ca
In Tahltan territory alone there are 41 major projects, some with considerable promise, some of great concern. On Todagin Mountain, a wildlife sanctuary in the sky, revered by the Tahltan as the home of the largest population of Stone sheep in the world, Imperial Metals intends to build a massive open pit copper and gold mine processing 30,000 tons of rock a day for 30 years. The project design calls for hundreds of millions of tons of toxic tailings to be dumped into the lakes of the headwaters, poisoning the source of the Iskut, the main tributary of the Stikine. In the very meadows of the Sacred Headwaters, Shell seeks to extract methane gas by fracking coal seams that underlie a million acre tenure, drilling as many as 6,000 wells and injecting into the ground millions of gallons of toxic chemicals.

With the support of every municipality downstream, of every locally elected politician in every party, the Tahltan to date have blunted these efforts to violate their homeland. But now everything hangs in the balance. The fate of the country will be decided in the coming year. … The Tahltan have called for the creation of a Tribal Heritage Reserve that will protect the Sacred Headwaters, and in doing so create the greatest protected area in British Columbia, a vast and pristine wilderness that will reach all the way to the protected areas of Alaska. The voices of all people deserve to be heard. Surely no amount of methane gas, coal, copper or gold can compensate for the sacrifice of a place that can be the Sacred Headwaters for all citizens of the world. [Emphasis added]

[Refer also to: Presentation by Wade Davis, ethnographer, author, Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic 70 Min. by Will Koop B.C. Tap Water Alliance Coordinator, affiliated with Stop Fracking British Columbia, October 27, 2012

SALMON WATERS AT ISSUE Protest against Shell takes campaign to British media

Don’t sacrifice the Sacred Headwaters ]

This entry was posted in Global Frac News. Bookmark the permalink.