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Prince Rupert Regional Information Site

NATURE

Sea, land, river

PEOPLES

Community

For earlier materials see Table of Contents

November 18^th	We See
	Eelgrass to Watson Island

Above a snow shower approaches Rupert and to the right we see a little humour from the Atlin parking lot – Freebie face see my earlier ‘Special Interests win’

WWF Near shore conference

Red dots on map left are where WWF’s ‘Citizen Science’ project found Eelgrass beds on Kaien Island – Eelgrass (Zostera) both stabilizes soft (mud, etc) intertidal substrate but more importantly provides habitat for salmon, forage fish, etc. In areas like Vancouver Island waterfront properties often destroy eelgrass beds with sea walls, boat docks etc. Realizing its important role as fish habitat DFO requires developers to provide 2 for 1 areas if they have to destroy a natural bed. To strengthen the ‘court case’ Citizen activists on South Coast have written a guide book for documenting beds before any developers get there – the idea is to make it ‘court proof’ --- able to stand up in court etc (see this site for the manual etc)

	More Citizen Science at Kitimat
	There Douglas Horwood uses the underwater video camera (shown disassembled and back in carrying case at left) to document the extent of Eelgrass in the Kitimat and Douglas Channel area Basically he finds bed at low tide – stakes it out etc – then runs video transects when tide comes back using underwater camera below a small boat

	WWF’s Mike Ambach describes the PNCIMA process (more later) Process supported by Living Oceans Society, David Suzuki Foundation and the Sierra Club of BC See their web site: http://www.pncimamatters.ca
	See my earlier on recent WWF Nearshore habitat conference Intro and Skeena Estuary/ Flora Banks presentation

This has real merit – How to both maximize ‘resource’ diversion from going into land fills (even if one just burns the organic solid waste to generate electricity a locality is getting better use of the stored energy than putting it in a land fill etc ---- but more significant for electronics etc where key metals will soon be in short supply globally etc)—More later --- source Cities Info Package 11-12-09 (large PDF)

Rethinking recycling and solid waste

Terrace looking at problem regionally – letter from recent PR ‘info package’

The City has put up the Watson Island background material on their web site – some of this is very interesting --- at right is Unions perspective on why its members were looking after the mothballed pulp mill facility – thus ‘environmental risk’ and potential liability etc	Watson Island

Plus this is only one of the numerous documents on City site	The lawyers’ brief to BC Labour Board also gives a good chronology of events as below

Created by LG on 17/11/2009

Last updated on Wednesday, November 18, 2009