Disturbing the peace: Environmental change and the scales of justice on a northern river

Environmental History

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 895-919

  Loo, Tina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE; ENVIRONMENTAL DISTURBANCE; ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE; SPATIAL VARIATION; TEMPORAL VARIATION;

CANADA; NORTH AMERICA; PEACE RIVER [CANADA];

EID: 37249075925     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/12.4.895     Document Type: Article

References (129)

1. In fact, damming the Peace was illegal, a contravention of the Navigable Waters Protection Act. The government of British Columbia appears to have known this before the dam was constructed; certainly the Canadian federal government considered the structure illegal-but chose not to act. That part of the story is, however, beyond the scope of this essay. For an introduction, see James Howell, "The Portage Mountain Hydro-Electric Project [the W.A.C. Bennett Dam]," in Northern Transitions, Volume 1: Northern Resource and Land Use Policy Study, ed. Everett B. Peterson and Janet B. Wright (Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, 1978), 34-37.
2. Early key studies include Robert D. Bullard, "Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community," Sociological Inquiry 53 (1983): 273-88;
3. United States General Accounting Office, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (Washington, DC: United States General Accounting Office, 1983);
4. and United Church of Christ, Toxic Waste Sites and Race in the United States: a National Report on the Racial and Socio-economic Characteristics with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987).
5. Julian Agyeman, Robert Bullard, and Bob Evans give what they call the "traditional" definition of environmental injustice: It is a situation in which "people of color are forced, through their lack of access to decision-making and policy-making processes, to live with a disproportionate share of environmental 'bads' -and thus to suffer the related public health problems and quality of life burdens." They go on to note that "[e]nvironmental justice activists claim that the 'path-of-least-resistance' nature of locational choices within our economy functions to the detriment of people of colour, and, moreover, this disproportionate burden is an intentional result." Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans, "Exploring the Nexus: Bringing Together Sustainability, Environmental Justice and Equity," Space and Polity 6 (2002): 81-82.
6. There is a debate in the literature about whether environmental injustice is primarily an outcome of racism or poverty. For Robert D. Bullard it is "a race thing, not a poverty thing." Andrew Hurley disagrees, exploring how industrial capitalism exploited the divisions of race and class to its benefit, in the process producing different kinds of environmental inequalities. See Robert D. Bullard, "Environmental Justice for All," in his Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994), 5-6;
7. and Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
8. Laura Pulido tries to get beyond the race versus class debate, arguing for a more complex view of racism. See her essay, "A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research," Antipode 28 (1996): 142-59.
9. Patrick Novotny, Where We Live, Work and Play: The Environmental Justice Movement and the Struggle for a New Environmentalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000).
10. For a review of environmental inequality outside the United States, see Francis O. Adeola, "Cross-National Environmental Injustice and Human Rights Issues: A Review of Evidence in the Developing World," American Behavioral Scientist 43 (2000): 686-706.
11. For a discussion of how traditional environmentalism marginalized and oppressed certain groups of people, see, for instance, Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001);
12. and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
13. The "Principles of Environmental Justice" were defined at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 11991. See http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
14. On the connections between the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the environmental justice movement, see Eileen Maura McGurty, "From NIMBY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement," Environmental History 2 (1997):301-23.
15. Stephen Sandweiss, "The Social Construction of Environmental Justice," in Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles. Race, Class, and the Environment, ed. David E. Camacho (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 31-57;
16. and Robert D. Bullard and G. S. Johnson, "Environmental Justice: Grassroots Activism and its Impact on Public Policy," Journal of Social Issues 56 (2000): 555-78.
17. Other scholars make the case that what we now call "environmental justice" activism predated the Civil Rights Movement and was a part of race, gender, and class inequities in North America and elsewhere. See Dorceta E. Taylor, "American Environmentalism: the Role of Race, Class, and Gender in Shaping Activism, 1820-1995," Race, Gender, and Class 5 (1997): 16-62.
18. Laura Pulido frames her study of the southwest as an examination of subaltern struggles for environmental justice. See her Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996).
19. http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/ Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163.
20. http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/policies/ej /exec_order_12898.pdf.
21. Evan J. Ringquist, "Environmental Justice: Normative Concerns and Empirical Evidence, in Environmental Policy in the 1990s: Reform or Reaction?, 3rd ed., ed. Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997), 247-48.
22. Anastasia M. Shkilnyk, A Poison Stronger than Love: the Destruction of an Ojibwa Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
23. In addition, the toxic effects of the tar ponds on the residents of Sydney, Nova Scotia, also have attracted attention. See Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May, Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2000).
24. The term is Ryan Holifield's and it describes the situation in the United States: "Defining Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism," Urban Geography 22 (2001): 79.
25. See, for example, Hurley, Environmental Inequalities; Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; and Laura Pulido, "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000): 12-40;
26. and David N. Pellow, "Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Justice," American Behavioral Scientist 43 (2000): 581-601.
27. On various explanations for environmental inequity in the global context, see Adeola, "Cross-National Environmental Injustice and Human Rights Issues," 69off. For the United States, see Robert W. Williams, "Environmental Injustice in America and its Politics of Scale," Political Geography 18 (1999): 49-73.
28. For a critique of the central argument of environmental justice -namely that environmental harms are distributed unequally and that those on the social margins bear the burden of them - see William Bowen, "An Analytical Review of Environmental Justice Research: What Do We Really Know?" Environmental Management 29 (2002): 3-15.
29. George Towers, "Applying the Political Geography of Scale: Grassroots Strategies and Environmental Justice," Professional Geographer 52 (2000): 25. He notes that the work of Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre was particularly important in shaping inquiry into the social construction of space.
30. For an overview, see Williams, "Environmental Injustice in America and its Politics of Scale." On scale and capitalism, see Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
31. Andrew Herod and MelissaW. Wright, "Placing Scale: An Introduction, in Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, ed. Andrew Herod and Melissa W. Wright (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 2ff.
32. For an overview and a specific example, see Hilda E. Kurtz, "The Politics of Environmental Justice as the Politics of Scale: St James Parish, Louisiana, and the Shintech Siting Controversy," in Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, ed. Herod and Wright, 249-73.
33. "Scale-jumping" is discussed in Herod and Wright, "Placing Scale: An Introduction," 4, 10-11;
34. and Towers, "Applying the Political Geography of Scale," 27.
35. On high modernity, see James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
36. Cited in David J. Mitchell, W.A.C. Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1983), 255.
37. John Diefenbaker was Prime Minister between 1957 and 1963. In the election campaigns of 1957 and 1958 he articulated his "northern vision," a plan for national economic development based on exploiting the resources of Canada's north.
38. Jack Scott, "Jack Scott Visits Wenner-Grenland," Vancouver Sun, 1957,1, VPL Clippings File: "Dams-BC-Peace River to 1957";
39. and "A Great Project for the North," Province, October 10, 1957, 6.
40. Memorandum for the Deputy Custodian Re: Mr. Castleden's question with respect to the placing of Mr. Axel Wenner-Gren's name on the list of specified persons, April 3, 1957. Canada, Custodian of Enemy Property, "Wenner-Gren, Axel." Library and Archives Canada [LAC], RG 117, Series A-3, volume 2060, file 6251.
41. "Here is the text on Wenner-Gren," Vancouver Sun, 1957. VPL Clippings file Dams-BC-Peace River to 1957. Stuart Keate, "Axel in Wonderland," Saturday Night, 13 April 1957, 50, in Canada, Canadian National Railways. "British Columbia-Wenner-Gren Development." LAC, RG 30, Series V-A-9-j, volume 14440.
42. "Peace Project Gears Up for Spring Thaw," Vancouver Times, March 15, 1965, in VPL Clippings File, "Dams-BC-Peace River-1964-1967;
43. and Gordon M. Shrum, "Foreword," to Bruce Ramsay and Dan Murray, Big Dam Country: a Pictorial Record of the Development of Peace River Country (Fort St John: Dan Murray, Ltd., 1969), np.
44. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
45. The Peace was dammed to promote the exploitation of forestry and mining resources. But it was also dammed because it was not a salmon river; its waters were impounded so that those of the Fraser, which supported another valuable resource (salmon), would not be. As Matthew D. Evenden argues, the government of British Columbia made choices between fish and power. See his Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
46. Greg Halseth and Lana Sullivan, Building Community in an Instant Town: Geography of Mackenzie and Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia (Prince George, BC: University of Northern British Columbia Press, 2002), 30-34
47. and Patricia Marchak, Green Gold: The Forest Industry in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983), 306-11.
48. The connections between the Columbia River Treaty negotiations and the shift in policy regarding electricity exports was complex and are spelled out in Earle Gray, Forty Years in the Public Interest: A History of the National Energy Board (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, in cooperation with the National Energy Board and Canadian Government Publications, 2000), 108-11.
49. The figure for acres flooded is from Douglas Baker, Jane Young, and J.M. Arocena, "An Integrated Approach to Reservoir Management: The Williston Reservoir Case Study," Environmental Management 25 (2000): 567.
50. There is no count of how many animals were drowned. However, there are anecdotal accounts, like that of bush pilot Pen Powell. "The things I saw I wish I could forget," he recalled. "I and a friend were flying one day around the highth [sic] of the disaster ...and saw a large herd of moose that were trapped on a piece of high ground by floating debris and pulled over trees. We counted well over one hundred moose in about a ten acre area, the next day we came back over the same area and it was completely covered with water and lots of dead moose floating among the debris." See Powell to Matheson, May 30, 1989, 3. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, University of Calgary Archives [UCA] Acc. 685/00.16, box 43, file 4. The reservoir's impact on mountain caribou is from Scott Simpson, "A Dam Never Forgotten: Trouble on the Peace," Vancouver Sun, July 8, 2004, F3.
51. While forty to fifty families were moved to new reserves, all of the approximately two hundred members of the band were affected by the flooding. See Mary Christina Koyl, "Cultural Chasm: a 1960s Hydro Development and the Tsay Keh Dene Community of Northern British Columbia," (MA Thesis, University of Victoria, 1993), 69.
52. Boatman to Matheson, May 15, 1989, 4. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCAAcc. 685/00.16, box 43, file 4. Boatman noted there were five expropriations related to the project, "most of them necessary to overcome problems transferring title."
53. See, for example, interview with Jean Issac, Ingenika Point, 16 April 1989, 5. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3. Scientific research corroborates this observation. See D. G. Schaefer, Climatological Impacts of Peace River Regulation and a Review of the Possible Effects of Climatic Change on Agriculture in the Area (Victoria: BC Hydro and Power Authority, 1976), 51.
54. John Sawatsky, "Explainers Meet Opposition," Vancouver Sun, February 14, 1974. VPL Clippings File- "Dams-BC-Peace River-1970-74-"
55. Nat Cole, "'You Hate to See the Beauty of Peace River Disturbed'," Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1970, 12. VPL Clippings File-"Dams-BC-Peace River-1970-74."
56. A study done for BC Hydro noted that the effects of the reservoir were limited to the area immediately surrounding it. While temperatures fell by a few degrees, no discernable difference in humidity was detected. However, studies did indicate an increase in fog in the fall months. See Schaefer, Climatological Impacts of Peace River Regulation, 50-54.
57. The general pattern was as follows: tremendous increases in fish populations in first few years after the flood, followed by decline, and then stabilization. The shift in species composition is due to fluctuating water levels which destroy shorelines that had supported aquatic plants and insect populations important to riverine species. The average annual draw-down in the Williston reservoir between 1972 and 1987 was 16.8 meters, more than enough to create "a basically abiotic littoral zone." Brian G. Blackman, Fisheries Resources of the Williston Reservoir Twenty Years after Impoundment (Prince George, BC: BC Hydro Peace/Williston Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program, 1992), vi, 1.
58. Ibid., 19ff.
59. Boatman to Matheson, May 15, 1989, 3. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCAAcc. 685/00.16, box 43, file 4.
60. Brian G. Blackman, Peace-Williston Compensation Program Summary of Activities, 19188-1997 (Prince George, BC: Peace-Williston Compensation Program, 2001), 5;
61. Mary Ellen Wood and Luke Trip, Examining Fish Consumption Advisories Related to Mercury Contamination in Canada (Hull, Quebec: Environment Canada, nd), 7 at http://www.ec.gc.ca/MERCURY/EN/efca.cfm.
62. British Columbia. Ministry of Environment, State of Environment Reporting at http://ww-w.env.gov.bc.ca/soerpt/993contaminants/ trout.html.
63. "Submission to the ICC In quiry-Specific Claim-Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation by D. W. Schindler (summary expert opinion), November 1996." Canada. Indian Claims Commission, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Inquiry-W.A.C. Bennett Dam and Damage to IR 201, ICC Exhibit 17, 2.
64. http://www.mb.ec.gc.ca/nature/whp/ramsar/df02s06.en.html.
65. Also see Peace-Athabasca Delta Project Group, The Peace-Athabasca Delta: A Canadian Resource, (Edmonton: Peace-Athabasca Delta Project Group, 1972), 24-36.
66. Northern River Basins Study Board, Northern River Basins Study Report to the Ministers (Edmonton, Alberta: Northern River Basins Study, 1996), 62-63.
67. While the reservoir filled, mean peak summerwater levels in Lake Athabasca fell from a pre-dam level of 209.95 meters to 209.10 meters. After 1972, the mean peak summer water level in the lake was somewhat higher, but still well below the pre-dam level, at 209.55 meters. See D. R. Jaques, Vegetation Habitat Types of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, 1976-1989 (North Vancouver: Ecosat Geobotanical Surveys, Inc., 1990), 7 and 14.
68. David Schindler, "The Effects of Climate Warming and Cumulative Human Activity on Canada's Freshwater in the 21st Century," in Water and the Future of Life on Earth, ed. Patricia Gallaugher and Laurie Wood (Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies in Science, 2002), 2-6. http://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/science/water/pdf /Water.pdf.
69. Ibid., Major Findings, Section 3.5 Flow Regulation-Effects on the Peace-Athabasca Delta;
70. and Submission to the ICC Inquiry-Specific Claim-Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation by D. W. Schindler (summary expert opinion), November 1996, 2.
71. Canada. Indian Claims Commission, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation-W.A.C. Bennett Dam and Damage to I.R. 201, Exhibit 17.
72. By early in the twenty-first century, Schindler estimated that 78 to 85 percent of wetlands and wet marshes would be lost. On the loss of food for fish and wildlife, see Jeffrey E. Green, A Preliminary Assessment of the Effects of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Athabasca River Delta and the Athabasca Chipewyan Band, An Information Document by the Athabasca Chipewyan Band to the Department of Justice and the Office of Native Claims (Vancouver: The Delta Management Group, Ltd., 1992), 23.
73. Canada. Indian Claims Commission, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation-W.A.C. Bennett Dam and Damage to I.R. 201, ICC Exhibit 1A, tab 1.
74. Green, A Preliminary Assessment of the Effects of the WA.C. Bennett Dam, 23. Canada. Indian Claims Commission, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation-W.A.C. Bennett Dam and Damage to I.R. 2oi, ICC Exhibit 1A, tab 1.
75. Submission to the ICC Inquiry-Specific Claim-Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation by D. W. Schindler, 3.
76. Interview with A.C. Geddes, Calgary, 14 May 1989, 14-15. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3.
77. Baker, Young, and Rocena, "An Integrated Approach to Reservoir Management," 571.
78. Earl K. Pollon and Shirlee Smith Matheson, This Was Our Valley (Calgary, AB: Detselig, 1989), 212-13.
79. Canada. Indian Claims Commission. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Inquiry: W.A.C. Bennett Dam and Damage to Indian Reserve 201 (Ottawa: Indian Claims Commission, March 1998), 24.
80. Note that the average yearly per capita income in Alberta in 1970 was $2,400. Montcrieff, Montgomery & Associates, Ltd., Draft Report to the Socio-Economic Sub Committee of the Peace-Athabasca Project (Edmonton, Alberta: Montcrieff, Montgomery & Associates, Ltd., 13 December 1971), 53-54. Alberta. Department of Environment, Peace-Athabasca Delta Study Task Force. Provincial Archives of Alberta [PAA], GR 1988.0422, box 1, file "Socio-Economic Sub-Committee."
81. Interview with Albert Poole, April 16, 1989, 3. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3.
82. Interview with Albert Poole, April 16, 1989, 3. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3. Also see Green, A Preliminary Assessment of the Effects of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam, 30.
83. On the failure to clear the Williston Reservoir of timber, see Marchak, Green Gold, 308-09. The sight of the Ingenika trying to travel the lake haunted A. C. Geddes of Hudson's Hope, who worked for a time clearing debris. "They would try to go across the lake in their old riverboat[s], ... the debris ... knocking the props off...[.] They're stranded out there on the water and trying to build a little fire on those mats [of timber]" while they waited for the logs to shift and give them a way out. Interview with A. C. Geddes, May 14, 1989, 7. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3.
84. Veit-Draft Report, 22 March 1977, 2, 5. Canada. Department of Indian Affairs, LAC RG 10, file 985/19-4-609.
85. Montcrieff, Montgomery & Associates, Ltd., Draft Report, 26. Alberta. Department of Environment, Peace-Athabasca Delta Study Task Force. PAA, GR 1988-0422, box 1, file "Socio-Economic Sub-Committee."
86. Stuart Adams and Associates, Fort Chipewyan Way of Life Study: an Assessment of Impacts of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the People of Fort Chipewyan and the Peace-Athabasca Delta andSuggestions for Action (Vancouver: Stuart Adams and Associates, 1998), 161.
87. This theme is pursued in a different context in Cole Harris, "Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak," Canadian Historical Review 66 (1985): 315-43.
88. On this approach, see Joy Parr, "Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth-Century Canada: the Timely, the Tacit, and the Material Body," Canadian Historical Review 82 (2001): 720-45;
89. Linda Nash, "The Changing Experience of Nature: Encounters with a Northwest River," Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1600-1629;
90. and Christopher Sellers, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 486-515.
91. Pollen expressed himself in verse: "God! How I hate it! Yes, hate it! / I wish this dam project in hell! / With all this rumble and racket / I'd sooner hear harness and bell." Pollen and Matheson, This Was Our Valley, 183.
92. Canada. Indian Claims Commission. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Inquiry, 75.
93. Northern River Basins Study, Final Report, Major Findings, Section 3.5 Flow Regulation-Ice Formation..
94. Testimony of Margaret Marcel, ICC Transcript, October 10, 1996,60-61. Canada. Indian Claims Commission. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Inquiry, ICC Exhibit 15.
95. Northern River Basins Study. Final Report(Ottawa: Northern River Basins Study, 1996), Section 3.5. http://www3.gov.ab.ca/env/water/nrbs/ index.html.
96. Testimony of Josephine Mercredi, ICC Transcript, October 10, 1996, 53. Canada. Indian Claims Commission. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Inquiry, ICC Exhibit 15.
97. Ibid., 74.
98. Interview with A. C. Geddes, May 14, 1989,8. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3.
99. Ibid.;
100. and Pollon and Matheson, This Was Our Valley, chap. 17.
101. Pollon and Matheson, This Was Our Valley, chaps. 14,16, and 17.
102. Patrick Brethour, "Why is Cancer Sweeping Tiny Fort Chipewyan?" Globe and Mail, May 23, 2006.
103. Baker, Young, and Arocena, "An Integrated Approach to Reservoir Management," 573.
104. Interview with Jean Issac, Ingenika Point, April 16, 1989, 5. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3.
105. Veit-Draft Report, March 22, 1977, 4. Canada, Department of Indian Affairs, Relocation of Indians-Ingenika Band, LAC RG 10, Acc. V-1994-95/ 559, Box 1, File 985/19-4-609.
106. Report on Ingenika Band of Indians in Occupation of Crown Lands at Ingenika River, February 19, 1974, 2, ibid.
107. Interview with Jean Issac, Ingenika Point, April 16, 1989, 5. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 3.
108. Isaac to Rhymer, September 18, 1975, 1. LAC RG 10, File 985/19-4-609.
109. Interview with Jim Beattie (with input from Al Hamilton), nd, 26. Shirlee Smith Matheson Fonds, UCA Acc. 685/00.16, box 44, file 2.
110. Williams, "Environmental Injustice in America and its Politics of Scale," 49.
111. Peace-Athabasca Delta Project Group, The Peace-Athabasca Delta. The title page has the inscription: "This is remote country. This is beautiful country. This is rich country. This is what Canada is all about."
112. Peace-Athabasca Delta Technical Studies, Peace-Athabasca Delta Technical Studies-Final Report 1996 (Fort Chipewyan: Peace-Athabasca Delta Technical Studies, 1996), 1-2.
113. The other reports are: Peace-Athabasca Project Group, The Peace-Athabasca Delta Project Technical Report: A Report on Low Water Levels and their Effects on the Peace-Athabasca Delta (Edmonton: Peace-Athabasca Delta Project Group, 1973)
114. and Peace-Athabasca Delta Implementation Committee, Peace-Athabasca Delta Water Management Works Evaluation: Final Report (Governments of Canada, Alberta, and Saskatchewan: Peace-Athabasca Delta Implementation Committee, April, 1987). At the same time the Technical Studies were underway, there was also a larger intergovernmental research initiative which investigated the Peace River.
115. See Northern River Basins Study, Final Report.
116. Peace-Athabasca Delta Implementation Committee, Peace-Athabasca Delta Water Management Works Evaluation Final Report, v.
117. Submission to the Environment Conservation Authority by the Athabasca Cree and Chipewyan Bands, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 3. Alberta. Department of Environment, Peace-Athabasca Delta Study Task Force Files. PAA, GR 1988.0422, box 2, file: Peace Athabasca Hearings 1973.
118. Their perspective is shared by indigenous peoples in the United States and around the world. In Defending Mother Earth, Jack Weaver argues that "Natives view the environmental depredations being visited upon them as merely one more manifestation of colonialism that has attacked their lives for over five hundred years. Ecojustice, therefore, cannot be discussed apart from that racism and colonialism."
119. Cited in Paul C. Rosier, "Fond Memories and Bitter Struggles: Concerted Resistance to Environmental Injustices in Postwar Native America," in Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice, ed. Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier, and Heather Goodall (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 36.
120. Writing about the situation of indigenous peoples around the world, Heather Goodall argues that "[h]istory is central to questions of how those indigenous people have understood environmental injustice because ... [p]ower in colonies has been exercised through control over space and environment." See her "Indigenous Peoples, Colonialism, and Memories of Environmental Injustice," in ibid., 74.
121. Brent B. Wolfe et al., "Impacts of Climate and River Flooding on the Hydro-ecology of a Floodplain Basin, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Canada since A.D. 1700," Quaternary Research 64 (2005): 148.
122. Kevin Timoney, "Landscape Cover Change in the Peace-Athabasca Delta, 1927-2001," Wetlands 26 (2006): 777.
123. Kevin Timoney, "A Dying Delta? A Case Study of a Wetland Paradigm," Wetlands 22 (2002): 296.
124. Timoney, "Landscape Cover Change," 776.
125. Also see Wolfe et. al., "Impacts of Climate and River Flooding on the Hydro-ecology of a Floodplain Basin;
126. and Brent B. Wolfe et al., "Reconstruction of Multi-century Flood Histories from Ox-bow Lake Sediments, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Canada," Hydrological Processes 20 (2006): 4131-53.
127. According to Wolfe et. al., "[t]he "hydro-ecological conditions after regulation of the Peace River began in 1968 are well within the broad range of natural variability observed over the past 300 years." See "Impacts of Climate and River Flooding," 160.
128. Brent B. Wolfe, Roland I. Hall and Thomas W. D. Edwards, "Assessing the Status of the Peace-Athabasca Delta Ecosystem: Challenging the Paradigm from a Paleoenvironmental Perspective," Meridian Fall/Winter 2006, 9.
129. Timoney, "A Dying Delta?" 282.