DELTA FORCES
Can nature and development coexist on the Fraser River Delta, the ecological hot spot that’s home to ever-expanding Metro Vancouver?
Can nature and development coexist on the Fraser River Delta, the ecological hot spot that’s home to ever-expanding Metro Vancouver?
THOUSANDS OF SNOW GEESE rise in a swirling white cloud and a wave of guttural honking reverberates across the Alaksen National Wildlife Area, a 349-hectare patch of wetland, woods and fields on the Fraser River Delta about 35 kilometres south of downtown Vancouver. Of the 54 national wildlife areas in Canada, Alaksen is one of only 10 open to the public, making it, as the federal government says, a great place to connect with nature — and on this crisp December morning, with a breeze blowing in from the sea, it lives up to that billing. Black-crowned night herons hunch in bushes along the edge of a slough, sandhill cranes drop from the sky between fir trees and a shape-shifting cloud of dunlin streaks by in the distance. Raptors are here, too, reigning over the marsh. Four bald eagles are on patrol scaring up ducks, a pair of northern harriers floats low over a sea of bulrushes and a hawk swoops down to perch on a driftwood stump in the tall undulating grass. “It’s a rough-legged hawk hunting for Townsend voles,” says Anne Murray from her position atop a dike, binoculars up for a better look. Murray would know. For decades, the Delta, B.C., resident and member of the board of directors of Bird Studies Canada has been watching the more than 250 species of birds that can be seen here. And she is one of their fiercest defenders, a volunteer caretaker of the Fraser River Estuary Important Bird and Biodiversity Area, or IBA, one of the most important avian refuges in the Americas. It attracts up to 1.4 million birds a year — from the more than 500,000 western sandpipers that can drop onto its mudflats in a single day during spring migration to the snow geese, ducks, loons, grebes, plovers and raptors that use it as a balmy refuge when the snow falls in the rest of the country. “No other site in Canada supports such a diversity and number of birds in winter, and no comparable site exists along the Pacific coast between California and Alaska,” says the Canadian Wildlife Service. But the estuary hosts more than just birds. It also provides vital habitat to 80 species of fish and shellfish and supports some of the greatest salmon runs on Earth. Millions of salmon bound for spawning grounds swim through the estuary every year, and 600 million to a billion young salmon seek shelter in the tidal marshes, where they feed and acclimatize to salt water before heading out to sea.
Atop a two-storey bird-watching tower in the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, which is inside the IBA and overlaps the Alaksen National Wildlife Area, Murray takes in a sweeping view of the estuary that helps make Metro Vancouver a global ecological treasure. To the north, beyond the flocks of geese, the city is framed by snow-capped mountains. To the west are the mist-shrouded Gulf Islands and the deep-green waters of the Strait of Georgia, home to orcas, sea lions and dolphins. Up here, it’s possible to imagine that Vancouver can coexist with nature. In reality, threats to the estuary loom on almost every horizon.
METRO VANCOUVER, wedged between the Coast Mountains and the United States border, is one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities. The metropolis, which includes 21 municipalities, is home to close to 2.5 million people, and another million are expected by 2040. Mayor Gregor Robertson has made bike paths, recycling and energy-efficient condos priorities in his bid to make Vancouver “the greenest city in the world by 2020.” And Robin Silvester, president and CEO of the Port of Vancouver, says the city can have it all — a booming economy, a thriving community, a healthy environment and the “world’s most sustainable port.” Laudable goals, but critics find them hard to square with the dangers the ever-expanding city poses to the Fraser estuary. Huge ships loaded with jet fuel will soon start using the Fraser River to supply Vancouver International Airport’s new $110-million fuel depot, which will hold 80-million litres and connect to the airport via a 13-kilometre-long underground pipeline. And hundreds more vessels a year could soon be transiting the estuary’s increasingly busy waters to a new $400-million riverside liquefied natural gas expansion project, a proposed coal-shipping facility and, in nearby Burrard Inlet, the marine terminus for Kinder Morgan’s $7.4-billion Trans Mountain oil pipeline extension. “A spill could be disastrous,” says Murray, looking out from the viewing platform to the shipping channel as a cargo ship sails by. Then she points south to the sprawling Roberts Bank port, which is just outside the protected wildlife area and could soon be undergoing a $2-billion expansion. Trains and transport trucks stream out to an artificial island where 137-metre-high megamax cranes resembling Imperial Walkers from lift cargo on and off some of the world’s biggest ships. The Port of Vancouver has already transformed critical bird habitat into shipping and transportation facilities and has ambitious plans to industrialize a lot more. “Developers just keep nibbling away — a port facility here, a highway there, a fuel-farm there,” says Murray. Less than 30 per cent of the estuary’s historic wetlands remain and dozens of its species — from salmon to shorebirds — are under threat, making the region one of the most imperilled ecosystems on the continent, a bright red spot on Birdlife International’s global map of critically endangered sites. Robertson, who steps down this fall after 10 years as Vancouver’s mayor, says the importance of the estuary and surrounding Salish Sea cannot be overstated. “It’s been the lifeblood of the community since people first arrived here,” he says, stressing the estuary and its biodiversity must and can be protected and restored even as the city grows. He points to technologies reducing the environmental impact of sewage and transportation in Metro Vancouver and to the rewilding of small corners of the city as initiatives that can be built on, but notes that federal, provincial, local and First Nations governments and developers must work together to make protecting the estuary a priority. “We need everyone at the table to ensure things are done right and in an environmentally responsible way,” says Robertson. “Right now, we have conflicting agendas,” a reference to mega-projects such as the proposed expansions of the Roberts Bank port and the Trans Mountain pipeline. “The city has used every tool it has to stop the expansion,” says Robertson of the pipeline. “It’s a huge threat to our environment and our economy.” The project, which the federal government is buying from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion to ensure it gets built (despite fierce opposition in British Columbia), would triple the amount of oil carried by the pipeline and see a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic in the waters where the Fraser River meets the sea.
ESTUARIES ARE RICH, complex and dynamic ecosystems with far-reaching biological connections. An international research team only recently realized that an energy-rich slime known as biofilm growing on Metro Vancouver’s mudflats is a critical food source for hundreds of thousands of shorebirds migrating between their winter haunts in Latin America and their breeding grounds in the Arctic.
LESS THAN 30 PER CENT OF THE ESTUARY’S HISTORIC WETLANDS REMAIN AND DOZENS OF ITS SPECIES ARE UNDER THREAT, MAKING THE REGION ONE OF THE MOST IMPERILLED ECOSYSTEMS ON THE CONTINENT.
The Fraser estuary, the largest on Canada’s Pacific coast, formed when glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago and meltwater roared out of the mountains, washing down massive amounts of sand and gravel, creating the delta where marshes, meadows and forests took root. In 1808, explorer Simon Fraser paddled down the river into the estuary, where he met Musqueam people living surrounded by towering rainforest and wetlands alive with elk, bear, cougar, fish and birds. European settlers arrived decades later and began clearing forests, draining wetlands and harvesting fish and game that had sustained First Nations for close to 9,000 years. The transformation continues, with land in the estuary now the hot commodity. Barb Joe is an Elder and knowledge-keeper in the Tsawwassen First Nation, which traces its history on the estuary back thousands of years. Her greatgrandfather, Chief Harry Joe, was born in a longhouse in 1865, just down the road from where she lives in her people’s traditional village. Over coffee on the back porch of the First Nation’s main office on a cloudy spring morning, Joe points to her great-grandfather’s longhouse in a photograph dated 1922. It was one of seven that sat at the base of a forested bluff in a clearing looking out to sea over expansive marshes and mudflats. In spring, the Joe family feasted on eulachon, a herring-like fish so rich in oil it burns like a candle when dried, and so plentiful it spawned in the river by the millions. Joe’s ancestors hauled the fish out of the silty water, filling their cedar boats as flocks of diving ducks and gulls dived on the eulachon from above, and seals, sea lions and giant sturgeon took their fill from below. In summer, her great-grandfather canoed with the family to camps along the river to harvest all five types of salmon returning from the Pacific — chinook, coho, chum, pink and sockeye. In fall, they harvested berries and migrating ducks. Come winter, the family was back inside the longhouse, sharing the large communal space built from giant cedars. When Joe was born in 1953, much of the forest had been cleared to make way for farms, but tradition persisted. Her family still lived largely off the land — berries, ducks, geese, deer, clams, cockles, crabs, eulachon, salmon and sturgeon — and she recalls her mother boiling fresh crab for picnics as the children warmed up by the fire after splashing in tide pools. It’s a very different place today. Joe points north to where a slough, which the Tsawwassen people used as a shortcut to get to the Fraser River, was filled with soil to create farmland, forcing her ancestors to paddle a longer, more treacherous route through open water. Her great-grandfather’s longhouse is also long gone, torn down to make way for Highway 17 to the BC Ferries’ Tsawwassen terminal and a two-kilometrelong causeway that opened in 1960. A five-kilometrelong causeway opened in 1970, crossing the mudflats to a bulk coal terminal built on Roberts Bank that soon expanded to handle cargo. It is now one of the busiest ports in North America. “We’ve been hemmed in on both sides,” says Joe, the din of transport trucks and trains echoing across the water. Roberts Bank, which operates night and day 362 days a year, changed currents over the tidal flats, where coal dust and a long list of invasive species have joined the crabs in the tide pools where Joe splashed as a child.
PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN from the give a sense of the human footprint on the estuary today — a grey grid of highways, rail lines, residential areas, malls, warehouses and farms extending from the tidal flats more than 80
BARB JOE, A TSAWWASSEN FIRST NATION ELDER, RECALLS HER MOTHER BOILING FRESH CRAB FOR PICNICS AS THE CHILDREN WARMED UP BY THE FIRE AFTER SPLASHING IN TIDE POOLS. IT’S A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE TODAY.