A River Runs Through Him
Mark Angelo’s career as a river ecologist began with him rescuing the creek in his backyard. For the nearly 50 years since, he has helped save rivers all over the world
Mark Angelo’s career as a river ecologist began with him rescuing the creek in his backyard. For nearly 50 years since, he has helped save rivers all over the world
WATER HAS BEEN A CONSTANT IN MARK
Angelo’s life since childhood. “I’ve had a passion for rivers since I was a little boy,” he says. “There is something about running water that I find captivating. I would explore creeks for hours, splashing around, turning over rocks, looking for critters.”
That early fascination has never wavered. The Canadian conservationist, writer, educator, paddler, fly fisherman and world traveller has traversed a thousand waterways during his 69 years, including the Nile, Yangtze, Zambezi and Amazon, and such Canadian icons as the Fraser, Nahanni and Mackenzie. “I believe that rivers rejuvenate the spirit. I view them as ribbons of life, the arteries of the planet,” he says.
But Angelo’s connection with water goes beyond mere admiration. He is known as a global advocate of rivers, a distinction that has earned him the Queen’s Golden and Diamond
Jubilee medals, the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada, along with numerous other awards.
For someone whose life mission has been propelled by far-reaching dreams on a global scale, his career as a river conservationist began modestly in 1974 with a creek that winds through the woods near his home in Burnaby, B.C.
“Guichon Creek was badly degraded and strewn with garbage. It had really become little more than a drainage ditch,” recalls Angelo. But the creek hadn’t always been like this, a point made clear to him when he had a chance encounter with an old-timer who described how the waterway use to be a treasured local sanctuary, filled with trout and salmon, and with various animals living along its banks.
The man’s reminiscing got Angelo thinking. “I wondered if we could bring it back to what it once was.” By coincidence, the creek cut through the main campus of the British Columbia Institute of Technology, where Angelo had just been hired as a teacher in a newly created fish, wildlife and recreation program. The program was fieldfocused, and so he decided to enlist his students in a cleanup effort. Gradually, the creek began to revive. It took a number of years, but today cutthroat trout, chum salmon and an array of animals have returned to their old haunts.
Angelo went on to focus his attention on other damaged B.C. waterways. Still Creek, a polluted urban waterway that cuts through Burnaby and Vancouver, was rejuvenated with the aid of volunteers, the city governments of Burnaby and Vancouver and local streamkeepers. Miraculously, chum salmon returned to Still Creek in 2012 for the first time in 100 years.
Angelo was also instrumental in the resurrection of Britannia Creek, which flows into Howe Sound 55 kilometres north of Vancouver. Regarded as one of Canada’s most polluted waterways, the creek was contaminated by run-off from what was once the largest copper mine in the British Commonwealth. Although the mine closed in 1974, snowmelt and rainwater continued to flow through abandoned tunnels, carrying a toxic load of dissolved copper, iron, cadmium and zinc directly into Howe Sound.
Detoxifying Britannia was a daunting prospect, but Angelo helped push a major public awareness campaign that eventually produced action. In 2006, the provincial government built a treatment plant to neutralize the run-off from the old mine site, while engineers from the University of British Columbia installed a concrete plug that diverted acid drainage away from the creek and into a deep outfall pipe into Howe Sound. The efforts paid off. In
Mark Angelo has travelled the Nile, Yangtze, Zambezi and Amazon, and such Canadian icons as the Fraser, Nahanni and Mackenzie. Rivers, he says, are “ribbons of life, the arteries of the planet”
2011, pink salmon returned to the creek for the first time in over a century. Much of Howe Sound has also been revived, with killer whales and white-sided dolphins now regularly seen near the creek’s outlet. Shellfish have also recolonized much of the nearby seabed.
Another Angelo scheme in 1980 — a cleanup of a section of B.C.’S Thompson River — paid even bigger dividends. “A flotilla of paddlers and rafters collected tons of debris, even hauling car wrecks off the rocks,” he recalls. Buoyed by the enthusiasm of the volunteers, Angelo partnered with the Outdoor Recreation Council to help organize a broader array of events the next year.
When the project snowballed, Angelo convinced the province to name the last Sunday in September B.C. Rivers Day. Thousands of British Columbians were soon participating in river cleanups, school projects and festivals, all intended to highlight the recreational, environmental and economic importance of B.C.’S rivers, and the need for better river management.
In 2005, Angelo successfully pitched the event’s global expansion to the United Nations in partnership with its Water for Life Decade initiative. World Rivers Day has become one of the largest conservation events on the planet, says Angelo. In 2020, “close to 100 countries participated, which is remarkable in this troubled time of COVID.”
Angelo expanded his international impact in 2003, when his Riverworld presentation was launched on National Geographic online. Described as a personal journey to the world’s wildest rivers, the 90-minute slide show attracted 40 million website visits. In 2008, he launched his multimedia follow-up Wild Water, Wild Earth, with presentations across North America.
In 2009, Angelo was appointed as the inaugural chair of the Rivers Institute at BCIT, an educational body focused on river conservation and management that provides expertise for community-based restoration projects. He has continued his association with the group to this day.
Angelo retired from teaching at BCIT in 2011, but he hasn’t curtailed his ecological efforts. In 2016, he starred in the documentary Riverblue, which detailed the fashion industry’s destructive impact on global rivers. The film won eight major international awards. Angelo’s latest documentary film, Last Paddle? 1000 Rivers, 1 Life, which chronicles his lifelong commitment to river conservation, will be released widely in 2021.
Looking back, Angelo says the long odds he faced and overcame in reviving creeks that were given up for dead taught an important lesson. “It shows that no matter how severely damaged a waterway may be, if you put a sound plan in place and stick with it, you can turn things around. I don’t think you can ever give up on any waterway.”1
Thanks to Mark Angelo, World Rivers Day has become one of the largest conservation events on the planet. In 2020, “close to 100 countries participated,” he says, “which is remarkable in this troubled time”