BC: CLOSED FOR BUSINESS?

By Elizabeth Nickson

It has been four years since I drove deep into BC’s back country. I have a friend with a cattle ranch 15 hours from Vancouver, which is really only halfway into this province so vast, bountiful, and varied it deserves its own encyclopaedia of natural wonders. In fact, BC is so beautiful we have 999 parks. Makes kind of sense, then, that we all bought the myth that tourism would replace resource extraction as an economic driver. At least so it was promised up hill and down dale by the environmental movement, with its lobbyists, lawyers, and billion-dollar funders as they methodically shut down logging, mining, industrial farming, and ranching in the province. 

As a generator of jobs and tax revenue, tourism limps along at 5 per cent of the level promised by the Sierra Club. And little wonder. Because once you leave the south coast and Okanagan wine country, there you are, stuck in the middle of Nowheresville. Beautiful yes, Switzerland writ cartoon-large, but unless you are under 45, and have brought your own sports store with you – kayaks, mountain gear, horses and horse trailer, plus a huge whack of edible food  – there is nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there.

Why? Because it is undeveloped. OK, I exaggerate. There are spas and hotels for the wealthy – a handful. But essentially that’s it. Motels are either Spartan, meant for itinerant labourers, or so old they’re saggy and stinky. Or four-star and impossibly expensive for middle and working-class families. Restaurants? Bleak. Grocery stores? Only processed food. Parks? Fine if you have calves of steel and like to live rough. There are bears, lots of them. Wolves, too. They love urbanites. A lot. Yum, yum.

All of which means that BC is closed to Canadians; closed to pretty much everyone else, too. Which was, of course, the point all along. British Columbia’s interior is a key piece of the YtoY corridor. Yellowstone to Yukon, as envisioned by the Wildlands Network. The Network is a UN-mandated plan to return 50 per cent of North America to its pre-Indian state and forbid access. In every government –  junior or senior – in the U.S. and Canada, there are hundreds of Wildlands set-asides floating around every government agency, just waiting for the rubber stamp. Acre by Acre, they say, it is being built.

BC, according to these saviours, who are backed by America’s wealthiest families, is meant to be undeveloped and uninhabited. Therefore any attempt at development – a ski hill, a resort, in fact any business which has the chance of climbing out of subsistence level – is fought in the courts, prosecuted by the insanely rich environmental law firms, funded by American non-profit foundations which themselves are funded by the profits of the richest most successful US corporations in the world. You have to be impressed by the irony. 

What is happening to us? How did we get here? 

Manipulated into it, I’m afraid. Twenty years ago, the environmental movement launched the most sophisticated propaganda machine the world has ever seen. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year convincing us that our planet is at risk. Today there are no movies made, books written, or television shows produced that do not, at some stage, have some character pontificate on the virus that is the human, the bliss that is The Wild. No pop star dare express any other over-arching idea. Every corporation is held to ransom; every university department includes textbooks on its curriculum which advance the idea: Wild = Good, Human = Bad. 

I heard from my ranching pal this weekend. “Fire an hour away,” she wrote. “It’s in the next valley. Our valley is already full of smoke.” She is surrounded by dense forest, and beetle-killed pine trees. Because of the movement, there has been no mitigation in BC’s vast inland forest. Logging has been so curtailed by the movement that in the dense forests tinder builds up, just waiting for the match. A full 1.3 billion board feet of timber – beetle-killed trees – act as fire starters only waiting for a summer lightning strike. Whoosh, the whole province goes up in flames. 

A billion board feet of timber would make awesome amounts of biomass fuel. It is so famous, it has customers bidding from India already. Taking down those trees and manufacturing pellets for shipment abroad would help rescue starving BC resource communities. The fire hazard would vanish, the hills and valleys would be replanted. Money in the bank. 

Will it happen? No. Why not?  Ask the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Wilderness Society, Natural Resources Defence Council; The Ford, Rockefeller, Heinz and Packard foundations: the wealthiest families in our country and the US. All of whom are killing us softly. So go ahead, visit BC. Because in a few years, when the Wildlands Network is even further advanced, you won’t be able to get past Whistler.

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