good morning welcome to change is the program on sustainability i'm susan gregory the coordinating producer of the show and our host today is ben gasol brock's who was our guest on the show in november good morning dan good morning suzanne and you have two topics today that are local and as far as i can tell under reported and you have two guests who can fill us in on the situation in both cases so tell us who you have on what there are issues are right on thank you s today for our show would be in will be investigating two controversial land manley documentary filmmaker and long time community activist will be joining us to help us understand the situation better and in the second half the show will be turning our attention to understanding the recent protest the green store and one of the founders and developers of pacific garden co housing community and a longtime activist will be joining us so start off paul of the conflict and shawn again has arisen around the permit tells island aggregate is currently operating under which allows them to bring think it's one hundred thousand tons of contaminated soil each year for fifty years and it dump it on their quarry found in the  permit it used to be one big chunk of forest land up on the south south end of shining in lake similar to our watershed that i'm all community drinking water shed and  the on this film troubled water and in him early two thousand and thirteen when i was hired release the film actually they i was contacted by sean to make our residence associations and some other folks down there about documenting the the situation with the permit that was going forward and so i did they took me up they took me for a flight over top with appeal process over a couple of years and and the shining residents association i think they spent six hundred thousand dollars on the appeal process of the ministry of the environment to prove  that they can fill site right so it's well so that when you learn about this and interviewed all these people what was that about the situation not mobilize you to take further action  organize around this issue further well i did yeah you invited me to take part and i'd already been working on this on this film cold water which looked at watershed on thank you for island there's a few situations i miss like victoria which is the model that we should be working towards which is a protected watershed where there is no industrial activity allowed within the community drinking water shed and the purpose of that watershed is to provide to provide a pristine source of drinking water for the people in the capital regional district the c r d and the city of victoria victoria you know i'd i don't work in a watershed issue since nine hundred ninety three when i exposed the  damage that logging was doing in the victoria drinking watershed and all the target of the it was causing them to boil water advisories and they haven't logged when i did a media story on not release the footage to mainstream media led to a moratorium and they haven't logged in there since one thousand nine hundred three i went back into that watershed in two thousand and eight to do educational films for the the copper regional district the water department city victoria to educate students about where their water comes from and what the value is in a having a pristine forest filter your water and retain water in the dry summer months with the root systems and everything else and having a mixed related to the spraying of fertilizer in our water should our water shed has been completely logged and in the late ninety's early two thousand service tree planters who were being poisoned by the fertilizer that was being used in the tree planting pockets they were getting rashes and nose bleeds and nausea headaches and not that fertilizer was tested and shown to help of heavy metals and dioxins  and when they did further research they found out that the fertilizer was coming partially from recycled carbon from smokestacks in steel mills and pulp mills in the united states and you know for me i  got tired of talking about this issue and decided to make a film about a troubled water which is available for free on you tube on my you tube channel manly media and with the shining in situation or the college in delhi regional district didn't really have control over how that land was used afterwards or how was parcelled up and it's important to protect these water resources our water is our most important economic data asset you know if we don't have a clean pristine source of drinking water then we're paying for it that's not good for residents it's bad for business model around because the s privately owned and then they can put a use a quarry now for the contaminated soil dump and so the initial issue is that not being publicly owned and now with it being owned and used for the purpose of soil contamination i mean there must have been some state guards in place to make sure that ok they've allowed for the soil to be contained in the site the engineering reports show that there are special liners  into the the water system will leave just even with these heavy rains that they've had in the fall in the last few months the water's been flowing out of the heart of the quarry so you know it's not over you know the history of these contaminants because of the the lifespan of the contaminants that are going in there and there are better ways to deal with this so what they are what they are seeing is the lining and the measures put in the water supply for a quarter of a million people to contaminate these you know these sites doesn't make make sense in the long term unless you've got a bottled water company that you can profit this is gone back you know into the court system you know that the their application there's was based on apparent fraud and perjury  going to give you much more detail on on all of this i've got pages and pages of stuff that they've sent me but you know it's like an ongoing multi year fighting this and then you know there was a another agreement with the first nation the former chief there michael harry to who was taking commissions you know under the table or is accused of taking commission under the table and and it's you know in return for support of a permit and now this so now the new chief of the mouse first nations is saying of governments permitting process in the ministry of environment for land use decisions he points zero the government uses what's called the professional reliance model for project permanent and this model from what i understand was brought in by the b c liberals in two thousand and one to reduce government costs by eliminating in house technical review on projects and basing the decision on the professional technical advice of a third party person this models and inherently flawed and does not protect the public interest so how do you how do you believe that this model has has laid the conditions for this this conflict around the dumping of the contaminated they're relying on on a third party that's hired by the you know the interested parties as a proponent and in this case you know there was a car sharing agreement between those two organizations to try between those two companies so some filing aggregate inactive earth you know active earth is supposed to be doing an impartial study of whether this oil site this process makes sense but there that they've caught they have a an interest in it a financial interest to seriously for a flawed process to have so you know allowing the government to just say they're going to save money and back off out of this process when they should what they should be doing is charging the companies the money that it takes to do a proper independent assessment of these proposals you know rather than having another party that's the that could be in conflict of interest and in this case there is a conflict that's been shown through leaked documents so yeah that's the flaw does that's the floor right there what's what the people in charge again are dealing with is a government that doesn't care you know the provincial government doesn't or just allowing this to happen and the ministry of the environment is supposed to be protecting the environment and taking taken care to make sure that the citizens aren't going to be dealing with contaminated waste in the future leeching into their water supply and that's not being properly taken care of and there isn't a novel connection to all of this as well and that is that the soil that that's being d there currently is is being loaded on barges from port moody and brought to disappointment imo and in being trucked down to trying to get lake and i've done access to information requests to find out you know what the port knows about the soil what they know but the contaminants and not soil because i was talking to the harbor master he told me that it was capping soil and that it was benign and it wasn't going to be a problem and it wasn't a problem to have it sitting on barges inner harbor with no tarps on it during heavy rainfall so i want to see what the what documents they have t up because what i've heard from folks and shouting in lake is that that's not the case that the soil is being dumped directly into the landfill and treated as part of that contaminated harbor to create that the talking facility in the night hundred fifty s and so stuff a gets dumped in the one nine hundred fifty s we we knew enough a lot less then about contaminants and how to deal with them in the long term effects of things that we do know so there's heavy metal of our dioxins and for arms or other things in the soil that should be treated properly when it's  cleaning up of coal gasification sites all kinds of different things and putting them you know getting rid of them in a slam so there are other ways of dealing with the stuff because it's more expensive but it's less dangerous less harmful for the environment you know rather than just bring them in landfills and that is that there's mushrooms or fungus that can be used to pull the toxins out of the soil services been scientifically proven is being used in europe and other places and that's what should be done i mean they should be we have a number of them around than i'm all that are just sitting there and the reason why those you know high value trucks or real estate are just sitting there is because they're contaminated the brownfield sites that have over years and years of diesel and gasoline that's been spilled into the soil unfortunately it is a reality that we do have a large amount of contaminated soil in the province and there is a need to find ways to decontaminate it and i have it contained in certain areas and i'm curious if you know of how or if there's any other site that the stuff can be potentially brought in the vancouver area or  the island where maybe better facilities exist or a better site properly engineer could could handle something like this i don't know of any size like i think that that's the problem is that there aren't  facilities to deal with it in the way you know we should before we would be europeans are doing this you know this is just another reason why we need to be getting off of fossil fuels because it's not just this not just the carbon that we're dealing with the aftermath of it all of rest of the contamination that we're dealing with it's all the stuff that comes out of the tailpipe it's all the stuff that's when it's spilled my gosh station fights in him these processes we end up having to clean the stuff up late and then imo around the situation by the community on on how somebody is interested in becoming involved how could they become involved well tomorrow there is a peaceful protest down  action and so they're asking people to go to the stebbins road site for a peaceful protest and they are going to have a helicopter this flying media up over the corrie site and over the protests and  you know during the day and then they're going to have to or is to hike up in behind the quarry is a college a value regional district owns parkland or owns the land just above the quarry it's actually an  park and they're going to be touring people up there to go and have a look and you can see over you know get over view of the quarry a little bit higher land that orange shot footage from for troubled day just five of us so the four people from till i arrived the block ten trucks from leaving the deep point facility they leave every ten or fifteen to twenty minutes to explode a truck and so that's illegal to block the trucks going to the site is so if people go down to the protest tomorrow they're being told it don't you know listen to what the police tell you that you don't block those trucks unless you want to be arrested and on december twenty second the night people were arrested and charged in late just before christmas there is you know so are people who are willing to go to the extreme of so they're you know they're coming down with a pretty heavy handed fist on people that are that are protesting this but the hope is that you know clearer heads will prevail and the government will start to listen or the courts will start to listen to the ticklish on again and stop this process because you know it's nobody wants a daughter but the people that are making money off of it well it sounds neighbors to the south we want them to be standing with us here facing the same thing thank you paul for the switch or focus now to the issue valley a little bit of background in nov twenty fifth dean till jones a long time logging company in the province began logging old growth forest in the upper wall brown valley which is an area right adjacent to the come out of all brown provincial park south western coast of the island this logging has led to the mobilization of community members and groups like the wilderness committee an ancient force alliance to oppose the logging and some of her observers have gone as far as saying that this logging could ignite another mass protest such as the one nine hundred ninety s war of the woods making a very important for the government to intervene now and change its policy on allowing old growth logging to avoid such a conflict  so with me is chad henderson and before we go any further the waldron valleys had quite a history in the movement for more sustainable management of the forest down the province chuck you tell us a bit about this area and  promoting the car man and letting people know about it and getting people out to protect that area and in order to do that with the car manner they had to literally get thirty thousand people out there in one year to to get that awareness  and of wood from him and bring it into the car man and they built the first boardwalks and allowed thirty thousand people to actually get into the car manage through using wood from here and i'm from cocos mill so it was quite an interesting connection to the crime and i had a great amount of interest behind it and it ended up getting protected and the follow up to that was that the wall brand values the value next door and when you look at south bank or island there's really very little left in the way of local forests and certainly intact old growth forests and so the walls around with the as being very instrumental we need to keep as much of it together as possible to create more value for for the for the for the natural values there  and so the wall brinkema's as an issue there and the wall branded resulted in a lot more activism in the sense of civil disobedience and blocking logging because i think the provincial government at the felt they've done what they need to do you know we protected the crime and why you guys complaining why you want to protect the next value so there wasn't as much willingness to move to the next to protect more than just the c s and so the result was too for civil disobedience to take place over several years and to get the message show that we weren't done to take care of a bit more space than that slick wall brand was involved then this sound activities and most people are a war aware of that area and i think it was almost a thousand people getting arrested there looting spend robinson an m p at the time you know some very well known activists and things like that so  it certainly grew to that point and there hasn't been a whole lot in the way of you know protecting forest activism since then and in a sense there's been other strategies more  areas to encourage companies here to take action on the on their own from a self interest perspective things like the great bear rain forest and collect sound as well back in the ninety's how did you get involved in this what drew you to  these issues and to go and support the opposition well i was a university student you victor at the time i was taking biology environmental studies which i did complete there became a biologist after university and so  i was very active in certainly in forestry issues at the time while endangered species that type of thing and being very well aware that that these are really the last intact old growth forest areas on the whole southern bank around and to give massive you know that we're talking several metres in diameter and here in i'm one on the east coast of think around we had trees like that to hear stories you hear stories that university vote and on the river for example having just huge was a lot of tree climbing and living in trees and things like that so that's where i started sure carol sounds you have quite a history with this movement and now what what is currently happening in the wall bran begin with but and so a fair bit of it did get protected but not all of it and that's the that's the problem is it was kind of an incomplete from the ninety's and honestly when you're working on these movements if you make a if you get a success and you kind of burn out a little bit at the end of it and so to get that last little ten percent or whatever was was too much for people to keep to keep fighting for and actually what is interesting we happened a few years ago as there was a reunion of the people that were involved in the ninet and they got together just to see each other again it was twenty years later and then somebody brought up the point they said you know they didn't protect all the intact forest down there there's some of it still available for logging and that's the key part is the intact nature we need to protect as much that's connected to other intact forest is possible and so it never quite got done and so people started to talk about it again as they will you know we should really look at that again and we've got energy again to do this so you know  that since then it's built back up again into the into looking at the at the valley so what's happening in there right now we've killed jones is is in there they're there logging in a couple of areas  that were supposed to be called special management zones these were designed back in the ninety's when the area was protected to let people know by the way we're going to create this buffer around the protected area of the wall brand and the command and you know we're going to create a special management zones and it's going to be a nice protected area where the animals get to continue to thrive and we won't do very much logging in there the local special logging all the stuff well all it takes is the liberal government to come in and a couple swipes of a pen to change what happens in a special management zone basically it's just like whatever help happens everywhere else though there hasn't been logging occurring in those little edge buffers around the protected areas of the wall brants until now so now they're they're moving in and saying ok we're going to start logging those areas and so the concern is to stop that and there are it's occurring in a few spots there's a some of them are less critical than others they're kind of targeting those higher elevations thoughts and parts that are kind of out of the way a little bit those are still important  but where they're also going to be heading to fairly soon is the lower elevation water valley bottom right next to the river area which is the most critical and most endangered part of you know the landscape for sure that's coming off and that's the that's the part that is certainly a great concern that that should never have been touched snuffy a lot of tall that's the part that we need to stop for sure we need to stop it all but do you know if there's looks like there's  cut blocks that are slated that permits have been put in through and one of those cup locks is that allowed to go ahead those two those other a couple ox some of them exist in more sensitive them but there are certainly the low low elevation ones were ones that they put applications in to get get going on basically and and certainly those are the most sensitive for sure and do you know if the professional reliance model has played a role in in how when a permit is being put into place for a couple off if the scientific inquiry and looking at the impact of the logging and how it's done in that area is put to a third party that is contracted by the logging company to bill jones you know if that is the method is being used in the situation to some extent yes and actually i was as a biologist when i came out of university that some of the work that i was doing as the goat and and i was involved with i work for a company that did go out and do surveys for forest companies and gave me good exposure to what that experience was like and in fact i quit i don't work as a biologist anymore and there's a reason for it and it's kind of connected to what you're talking about you know what typically happens is the government will set up some standards that we go out and do these like i was doing wildlife service endangered species surveys in old growth areas and you know we'll go out and do those surveys for the government we collect a bunch of information that is ok you know or it can go from saying we're going to protect this species one year to five years later saying well you know what we're running out of wood i think we need to keep logging you know let's let's accept a ninety percent loss of this endangered species so for me come along and change things and the other part too is when you're bringing in professionals you know i was trained as a scientist but i know that you know physics to me is a really strong science biology is not really solid science in the sense of it's much more subjective so if i'm really interested in supporting the corporation that i'm working for whatever i can definitely go out and find the information that supports my position so if i believe that you know clear cut logging doesn't affect woodpeckers and if i put up you know cut some trees and stick them in the middle of the clearcut and stick them upright create these kind of pretend snags and you know i can go up there with my log book you know and record hey look there's woodpeckers using these snags that they put up in the middle of this clearcut clearchus must be fine for woodpeckers if you host though there definitely is that opportunity to to find the information that supports your view and certainly my view is about you know looking at nature and looking at what you know what's happening there but not not all biologists come from that perspective and you know it depends on where you're coming from so there's just a lot of manipulation in that process it's you know it's tough to see a huge amount of value in that we really need to look at these things a lot simpler i think you know you look at the land and you see how much of it's been logged and how very little of it is huge like you anybody that drives out  grove towards port over any i mean that's just a small little tiny space but everything has to look like that we're going to go there and we think wow this is a unique giant forest here this fifty to regrow but i'm really glad they protected it everything looks like that during world war two for example you can still see the stumps and things from that era they're just massive massive trees so you know we really really could be looking at this in a fairly simple way and saying there's just almost nothing left and we need to really say ok been you know taken there are you know there's a bit of protection around some streams and stuff we should be having a lot more protection around the streams a lot of that was clawed back the low when when you hear the quotes from the the provincial government the liberal the information they're putting out is very supportive of the corporate side of things the forest industry though they'll say that you know so much has been protected or even there's so much old growth left the these massive numbers like twenty five percent which to me is a massive number that remains on logs they're quoting you know alpine areas like mountain hemlock high elevation old growth things like that areas that they may or may not even have access to it's not reasonable we need to look at this from what i would call biological or biological matic perspective biological atic zones are well known in b c it breaks down all of all of the fees broken down every little forest is broken down by the type of ecology it occurs in that area the geology of the area the wildlife that lives in that so we know we know there are figures there would be figures of both that about how much is available in the the  the lower elevation of growth for example it's got to be well below five percent so i think that you know we we need to move on and like we need to be moving on to the second growth logging that needs to be the focus the focus needs to be focusing the industry and on developing what it can around second growth those forests are starting to come back slowly and available for harvesting and you know we don't do enough there for sure and keeping people employed so so with stopping the old growth logging and you've got a background in biology and have a good understanding of the assets of these forests understanding and sometimes the benefits of these these forests that some of us may not even get to visit aren't directly apparent we are a small community and some of our family members and friends even depend on the logging for their livelihood what would you say to them if protests that the wall brown valley led to days sent home from work that they were depending on to meet their monthly expenses well jobs in the forest industry impacts on jobs the forests have never had anything to do with environmental protection it's an assumption it's a misnomer it's used by the forest industry all the time the kind of say you know your dogs are at risk because of this and that it's backed each other up the forest union was like totally keen on logging as quickly as we could all the last remaining forest old growth forests keeping jobs at a maximum and that's what the industry wanted to do they're very much working hand in hand which is really unfortunate because  what happened in the ninety's is this thing called the fall down effect and it was a planned known reality with forest employment in the provinces that we were harvesting all the old growth as quickly as possible and the minute that that was all done there would be this lag before the second growth forests which take eighty to one hundred hundred twenty five years to grow back there would be a lag before that was available to keep people employed and so is a planned dramatic drop in employment in the ninety's but nobody told the four forest workers that you know there was a lot of denial in that in that industry for sure i wrote a letter to the chief forester v c at one point asking about then he wrote me a letter a back and showed me a little diagram it showed me the job and the amount of logging that would occur in the cuts cuts from year to year in the job losses and stuff it was all well known but it was complete denial and it was you know the direction was being the  flame was certainly heading towards the environmental aspects any time anybody tried to protect anything so the problem is we're we're dealing with this little tiny crumb you think of reality and this is what's going to happen when you end up you know at the last crumb it's like ok you know if you don't let me harvest that crumb i'm going to i'm going to lose my job well ok but if i lay harvest that crumb you going to lose your job right after you harvested so it gives you a couple more years people need to look at their where they're working they need to look at you know is there is there a long term job prospect in that area we need to support people to merge off of those economies and that happened in the ninety's tons and tons of forestry workers had a very very tough time when they suddenly realized there wouldn't be all these jobs available their jobs are being cut and they had to go on and find other work they had to retrain it was tough i know the young young forestry worker that was impacted by an event that we did a few weeks ago and oh he's like a green party member too which is interesting but he said no he lost his his work that day and you know it's it's the reality of what what's going to happen that these last little bits we these are thousand year old forests providing somebody with employment for an extra year to you know versus protecting a thousand year old forest in the very last little spaces that we can provide the old growth depend species you know these are going to go extinct i mean they're already are going to go extinct the question is how many and protecting you know a little bit more has a way more value to us as a human species over time and that the focus really needs to be on employment strategies you know i a few years ago when i lived downtown and imo i would look out my window and see the giant cargo ship being filled up every week every month with raw logs you know in the in the eighty's and ninety's there wasn't there was a little bit of wrong log stuff going on but you know it was a concern and it was a lot of protests around it but we just have huge ships of purely raw logs leaving the novel harvard all the time heading to china and it's a complete loss of jobs and environmental activist of always been supportive of forestry workers around that issue for sure if there's a raw log protests were there you know we show up because we totally get it we told the understand that it's not it's not about us and it's about the industry and about you know making these industries interested in making as much money as it can of the shortest period of time it's liquidating that will grow forest assets we call those assets liquidating them and we know that there's definitely ways strategizing creating employment over a longer term you know keeping the wood in in fifty if the first step like how can you possibly create very much employment by cutting a tree down throwing it on a truck driving it down to a harbor and throwing it on a ship to china just like where's the rest of the jobs in that you know we don't use very good strategies when money is the primary focus for big industry you know it is the taking the question to a higher level what's driving this liquidation as quick as possible you see is that it is the shareholders that own these companies that are driving it or what exactly would you say well sure yeah definitely it's the typical  corporate model which is you know the shareholders want to see a return on their bottom line and the way you show a return is by you know using the assets you have as quickly as you possibly can that shows up everywhere where there's fishing or logging or whatever do it just quickly as you can as long as the government allows you to do it that way and get out you know and there's the reality is that for us companies are down to their you know their last kind of you know this is their this is their valuable timber here so they're getting down to the last of it they want to keep harvesting it to live very last minute till they have to switch over to the second growth which is not going to be as is maybe as profitable for them so the just continuing to push along that agenda for sure so with this current situation down the wall brown what type of opposition actually you came out and saw the the action that we're having so i understand we're twenty first there was a it was great to have an intimate connection to all of this all of the the cedar a lot of the wood from the water in valley actually comes to do  it was a great opportunity on the on december twenty first we all got together and did a joint sold very action it was very successful we stopped the logging trucks from accessing the port for the day so that felt really good for sure to be to the other activists if you want to get a ride into the wall around or whatever connector participate for myself at the green store like i don't find i can get out of town a lot i need to have access to the internet communicate with my staff and things but we've then food down we'll just you know if anybody's driving towards well ship we don't there for sure right now it's a bit of a quieter time out there it's very very very tough to to live in the snow rain darkness you know sixteen hours of darkness  day out there right now pretty tough but i really really encourage people to get out there that that would be the first thing if you really want to understand it connect and feel the value in being involved go to go out there i mean if you can't get out there go to c guest but you know as soon as you can get a truck because it's no way out there joins some other body else that's going out connect with other people that are going up from victoria or something get out there and actually see these these areas and go to safer but if you want people are out there they're building trails that are rebuilding boardwalks these areas take a lot of work to maintain there's a lot of kind of witness thing going on out there right now for sure and there is also civil to fiesta occurring as well and  people you know if they're if they're wanting to get involved in that sense there is a lot of it going on right now a lot of it's more that on the witnessing side that's important we need to tell the forest company we're here we're not going anywhere and the public about as well and people need to keep hearing about the issues such as we're doing right now people know there's no food and you know we need to start putting our bodies on the line again even with the climate change issue which is where i put most of my focus actually is you know bill mckibben from three create well child thank you so much for your time and paulo paul and chad are very grateful that you're able to join us on the show today and thank you for your time you bet thanks thanks both and thank you ben guess librax for being here today and all the best to those who are going to shine again late tomorrow that's our show next week margery will be here with the executive director of the b c council for international co operation about what to expect in the wake of canada's commitments at the climate change talks last month in paris meanwhile on behalf of our production team thank you so much for joining us