The ongoing battle to save old growth on Vancouver Island is becoming a major struggle. We have clips from some of the violent arrests, and news about the conflict as well as voices from the front line, Kati Jim George, Bill Jones and Tzeporah Berman. She got arrested again on a logging blockade 27 years after she was arrested in the Clayoquot protests. We glimpse the power of the big oil lobby in Canada, and hear about blue and green hydrogen power. And at Coop Radio we’re in the annual membership drive. This community radio has been going now for 22 years and so has this show, The EcoCentric. We’ll talk to John Alton one of the folks who got this radio show going back in 1999.
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Environment News
Collated by Linn Murray
In 2020, more people were displaced by extreme climate-driven weather, than all of the world’s conflicts. This according to a new report published by the Geneva-based, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the world’s most prominent migrant monitoring body.
A record 55 million people in total had been forced to move at the end of 2020, with the number of climate migrants likely to be significantly underestimated due to incomplete data.
Densely populated countries like China, India, the Philippines and Bangladesh were hit by intense cyclones, monsoon rains and floods, while 1.7 million people were displaced within the United States in 2020 during the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record.
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A landmark report by the International Energy Agency, the world’s leading body on Energy Policy, says that the world’s governments must immediately move to block all new oil, gas, and coal projects if earth is to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown.
The IEA states there must be no new investment or expansion in fossil fuels by the end of 2021, and companies need to focus on how to reduce emissions from their existing projects.
Oil, gas and coal projects would need to be phased out as quickly as possible in order to have a chance of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and averting the worst effects of the climate catastrophe.
The report signals a definite shift in the global energy market towards rapid adoption of renewables, as the International Energy Agency calls directly on world leaders to reduce global emissions to net-zero by 2050.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/energy-climate-change-iea-1.6030771
https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/05/21/International-Energy-Agency-Annihilates-Chance-Fossil-Fuel/
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Scientists in a San Juan Island laboratory in Washington state have successfully raised sunflower sea stars in captivity.
The starfish were raised from embryo to one-year-old juveniles for the first time, in an effort to help save these charismatic ocean creatures from extinction.
Sunflower sea stars, whose colours vary widely, can grow as big as a bicycle wheel and have about 20 legs. They were once abundant in coastal waters from Alaska to Mexico, but since 2013, nearly 6 billion of these now critically endangered animals have died from a wasting disease linked to warming seas driven by climate change.
The next stage in the project is to compile an instruction manual for how to raise sea stars on a large scale. The ultimate aim is to understand if these laboratory-reared starfish can be moved back to the ocean.
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Trees cut down in British Columbia are being burned for fuel in the U.K., halfway around the world.
According to an investigation by the Narwhal, biomass power plants are using increasingly more wood pellets sourced from Canada’s west coast. Last year, 16.6 percent of biomass burned at the Drax Power Plant in north Yorkshire was sourced from Canada, much of it from BC.
Drax, which recently bought Pinnacle, a company with 10 industrial pellet Mills in western Canada, plans to increase pellet production by 2.9 million tonnes.
Over the last decade, exports of wood pellets from B.C. to the United States, Europe and Asia have grown immeasurably. Demand is soaring, at the same time that sawmills across Canada are closing.
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Australian energy giant Woodside has announced it is backing out of a second massive liquefied natural gas project in Kitimat.
The company – which owns 50 per cent of Kitimat LNG – announced earlier this week that the project, designed to send Fracked Gas to Asian markets, no longer fits into its development plans.
The cancelation of the LNG facility comes as a blow to local political leaders, who were quick to lament the loss of potential economic activity.
Despite much hype since 2014, only the Royal Dutch Shell PLC-led LNG Canada consortium is currently constructing a terminal to export Fracked Gas to Asia..
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A Nelson-based group of scientists have released detailed maps cataloguing British Columbia’s last remaining Old Growth.
The report by Veridian Ecological Consultants reveals that only 2.6% of BC’s forests remain true Old Growth, and recommends an immediate moratorium on old growth logging until the BC government finishes planning on it’s old growth strategy.
Dr. Rachel Holt, one of the authors, says that their company developed and published the maps because the province did not do so, even though its own old growth panel recommended such mapping.
The government’s old growth panel recommended that until a new old growth strategy is implemented, the province should “defer development in old forest where ecosystems are at very high and near-term risk of irreversible loss.”
“In the last year, old growth forests that should have been protected have been logged due to a lack of clarity on the data and maps,” Holt said.
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Over the past week, more than 50 people have been arrested defending the Fairy Creek watershed from logging.
According to police 53 people have been arrested so far across several camps along logging roads in the old growth forest north of Victoria. The BC Liberties Association alongside many journalists has called the RCMP’s conduct “unlawful”, after the police set up an exclusion zone barring media and legal observers from witnessing many of the arrests.
The RCMP crackdown, alongside concerns over old growth, has sparked solidarity protests across the province including demonstrations in downtown victoria were protesters stalled traffic and marched at the legislature.
In Castlegar, several similar protests have taken place outside Forest Minister Katrine Conroy’s office, including one on Tuesday May 25th, organized by Extinction Rebellion West Kootenay.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-fairy-creek-arrests-monday-1.6039003
Week of May 25th, 2021
Longest running Enviro News show on the Radio! 
I no longer read Canadian Geographic for reasons similar to those you exposed on the program. Cheers, Sandra Hartline, Nelson
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