A tale of three rivers

Today's Telegram editorial raises — finally — an enduring mystery.

Where are all the local environmentalists?

The editorial discusses the Quebec plan to go ahead with the damming of the Rupert River, discussing the controversy and voices of dissent, concluding:

...it was poignant because it’s a voice we don’t often hear, certainly not in this province.

Hydro in Newfoundland and Labrador means the Upper and Lower Churchill, and is often discussed solely in terms of power and politics.

There are people there, too — people to whom dams and turbines spell not progress and power, but destruction and death. You have to listen carefully to hear them, but when you do, their story is powerful and troubling.

And eye-opening.

It wasn't until this past week that Grand Riverkeeper, one of the few voices in this vein that there even are to be listened to, managed to get any significant pan-provincial media attention. After years of being (literally) a voice in the wilderness, they could only get their message across, despite all the modern technology, by taking it directly to the media capital of the universe, St. John's.

Local attitudes towards environmental stewardship leave much to be desired. Wildlife management, for example, is centred around protecting the edible species from the inedible (or less edible), the commercially-valuable from the market-less (or less commercially-valuable). If a species is in decline, the four-legged predators are too often the fall guy even when there is probably a goodly share of moral culpability that could be assigned to the two-legged ones.

(It's surprising that a four-legged scapegoat, scapemoose, scapebeaver, or scapesomething hasn't yet been found for over-cutting of pulp logs, or the ATV scarring of marshlands that's so evident as you fly over Newfoundland.)

To the extent that there is a local environmental movement, too often it is focussed on international issues rather than local ones. It's easy enough to get 12,000 signatures on a petition to stop a hydro project in Central America. Or 30,000 protest letters. Or to call it "the BRINCO of Belize".

How many of them, though, would dare publicly question the environmental impact of the so-called "Lower Churchill" project?

Yo, Greg Malone... where are you? What about the "BRINCO of Labrador"?

Macal, Rupert, Grand.

You have to listen carefully, indeed.