Views of the Salish Sea: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Change around the Strait of Georgia by Howard Macdonald Stewart

Author:Howard Macdonald Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Historical geography, Salish Sea, First Nations, History, Geography
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2017-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

Other challenges: forestry, dams, ports, anglers

Many industries had a variety of destructive effects on the Strait’s salmon. It had become recognised globally, for example, that logging damage to streams was among the most important causes of declining fish stocks. Logging had deforested virtually every watershed on the Strait at least once by the 1950s, leaving behind thousands of streams blocked by debris. As a result, countless smaller waterways dried up in summer and became torrents that destroyed spawning beds in winter. In larger streams, too, smaller summer flows had a reduced capacity to sustain juvenile salmon that had adapted to reproducing and spending their early lives in cool, oxygenated, sediment-free streams. By stripping away the vegetation, clogging streams and increasing sedimentation, logging greatly diminished the ability of adult salmon to spawn successfully and juveniles to survive at all.

Roderick Haig-Brown’s work with the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission focused on the Fraser, but he had spent decades watching the Strait’s smaller streams be ravaged by mining, road building, logging and forest fires fuelled by logging waste. Having been a logger himself as a young man, Haig-Brown decried the “fifty years of notoriously destructive logging methods” that had eliminated thousands of salmon spawning runs. Yet he expressed optimism for the future. Logging methods, he said, were “not quite as destructive” as they had been before 1950, and many forests were regenerating. Where necessary, fisheries authorities could stimulate spawning on damaged streams with various grooming techniques and selective artificial regeneration. But he had no faith in authorities’ “pious references…to multiple use” of forests.24

Haig-Brown’s skepticism was well-founded; requests from federal fisheries author-ities that Victoria properly manage the riparian forests surrounding salmon streams were almost never heeded. Following decades of damage, a report to the province’s Marine Resources Branch in 1969 stated: “[The] relationship between streamside vegetation and salmonid stream ecology has been one of the most badly neglected areas of fisheries research in BC.”25 A note to the file in 1970 reported “precious few foresters” recognised that harmful effects of logging on fish could be mitigated by leaving bands of trees around streams undisturbed. Its author, R.G. McMynn, knew the forest industry of which he spoke, and it was a stunning observation a quarter-century after the Sloan Commission had recommended that foresters “leave strips” of intact forest around streams. McMynn, echoing Haig-Brown, hoped that BC’s policies would begin to recognise the effects of logging. Two years later, the Fisheries Research Board noted that although almost no studies had looked at the impact of BC’s logging practices on salmon, such studies were being launched.

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