Like all good origin stories ours starts in a conventional way:
It was a dark and stormy evening in December 2018 when the Area E Director Ramona Faust pulled together representatives from seven creeks along with the local science knowledge keepers: Herb Hammond, Martin Carver and Greg Utzig. The evening was filled with tears and frustration; a blockade at Balfour Face earlier in the year resulted in the arrest of local activists and the people of Bird Creek were dealing with a loss of water. It was no small matter to see so many who have devoted their activism and care for the community so completely frustrated by the continued soft wall of denial and displacement all authorities presented to the community as a whole. It was during these early exchanges that the first Nature Directed Planning initiatives were formed to use lidar in the mapping of some watersheds with a view towards more sustainable practices for the future.
During this process of funding and forming the early iteration of our group worked with Neighbours United in filling out our local contribution to the Healthy Watershed Initiative. A project meant in part to employ underemployed segments of the science community post Covid. This work provided an outline of losses and gains that are represented by our unique diversity on our slopes. We were guided further in what would become the present iteration of the West Kootenay Watershed Collaborative by Avery Deboer Smith, Cathrine Leighland, Hugh Jones, Nicole Charlwood and Rene Hayes.
Our present Board and direction reexamines and updates understandings of Nature Based Planning; namely a focus on the real hydrology and geomorphology impacted by all landscape operations through the use of the new tools of Attribution Science. This shift in focus and understanding is more dynamic and rests on the literature of probability and causality. We have established a close collaboration with Dr. Younes Alila’s UBC Hydrology Lab and have been awarded 100,000 dollar grant to pursue this work along with the education of our community to the new realities of climate change. Dr. Alila made an initial visit to the area, visiting the slopes along Laird Creek and offering a talk in Nelson during the summer of 2022.
This past year of 2023 saw our formation as a Society, the acceptance and housing of a Sitka Foundation Grant by Wildsight, our participation in the Nelson Museum’s Exhibit “Elevation” shepherded by our former Board member Lesley Garlow. We have launched our website westkootenaywater.ca; created and designed by Grace Garvey, a Facebook Group Page and shortly an Instagram account. In our initial meetings with our MLA Brittny Anderson facilitated by Board Member Korina Langevin, we strategized on how to work with the forestry companies in our immediate area and the best of year to visit our Government in Victoria. Through it all Ramona Faust has acted as both institutional memory and through her long involvement in Community Forestry, a trail of crumbs to follow toward more collective form of decision making on our sensitive biologically diverse slopes.
Our program going forward is to continue seeking more funds to underwrite our research and to support the UBC masters and post doc students who will be tasked to our project as cooperatively developed with Dr Alila’s UBC Hydrology Lab. We intend to inform our larger community about both the terms and outcomes of this work in Attribution Science focusing on the temporal/spacial dimensions of our watersheds in the evolving environment inclusive of a complete assessment of impacts associated with clear cut logging, road cutting on sensitive steep slopes and the resulting timelines of when, how, and where the greatest risk for slide and flood are to be anticipated given present conditions.
We are always reaching out to and alerting our resident First Nations in continuing to work toward a melding of process and actions on the ground. In addition we are working to engage the Youth Climate Corps in performing both observation tasks and on the ground water quality testing to augment our collected data.
As this is the first year of the three year science project we are initially building capacity and scientific understanding of what we all are confronting here along Kootenay Lake. While the initial study is focused on Redfish and Laird Creek due to the volumes of historical data already available our intention is to work from these initial results to consider a wider reorientation of management and watershed resilience along the length of Kootenay Lake.
While the scientific investigation moves forward we are diligently engaged in a discussion about alternative practices, from selective harvesting, low impact equipment logging, plantage studies as a pre-cut regime, and an understanding the replanting efforts need to be reoriented on many of the South South/East facing slopes where the trees are not thriving and in fact dying.
Lastly we hope to offer to all watersheds a clearing house for documenting observed damage and letters of community and individual concern directed at both Ministries and those responsible for allowing cut permits on our slopes. This will educate all of us to the extent of our mutual needs and alarm. Going full circle to that dark and stormy night of tears and frustration toward a morning of real change both in policy and practice to ensure that all of us dependent on consumptive watersheds in the Kootenays get a real vote, not a cynical consultation meant to cover the requirement.
To this end we ask that among yourselves and your many relations to join us in whatever capacity you can, as a prospective Board Member, an Advisory Committee, a contributing member or volunteer to this our West Kootenay Watershed Collaborative…for the 7 generations to follow and our earth bound home; there is no planet B.
For the love of water and all the life it sustains;
Thank-you.