Tom Rutherford is a self-described “fish hugger:” And by extension, if you’re a fish hugger, then you’re a water hugger. On a sweltering summer morning, the air tinged blue with wildfire smoke haze, this retired Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologist and Cowichan Watershed board member bashes through a tangle of riparian vegetation to where the Koksilah River joins one of the main stems of the Cowichan River that brackets the sprawling estuary. Nearby a great blue heron perches regally on the branch of a Cottonwood, scanning the current for a snack.
“The river identifies the Cowichan Valley, it runs through it,” Rutherford says thoughtfully, as he watches the languid, anemic-looking Koksilah River the way someone might observe an ailing grandparent.
By “runs through it,” he means both physically and metaphysically, even spiritually. For thousands of years before colonization, the ancestors of the Cowichan Tribes thrived on the seasonal abundance and return of salmon to the Koksilah, Cowichan and the many smaller watersheds that fit within the greater Cowichan Valley like Matryoshka dolls, those folkloric Russian dolls that nest one within another, and another, and another. But this salmonid abundance is increasingly a thing of the past. The Koksilah is subject to huge fluctuations in water flow and temperature, and that’s hard on fish. Flows in the Cowichan River can be regulated artificially thanks to a weir that engineers built on Cowichan Lake back in the 1950s for water storage, but it too suffers.
“This year there was a huge die-off along a six-kilometre stretch of the Cowichan River. We’re talking about tens of thousands of adult and juvenile salmon,” Rutherford says.
He adds that it’s likely the largest single salmon mortality event in the Cowichan on record, the result of low summertime flows and a heat wave. Research has shown that at water temperatures above roughly 20ºC, fish stop growing because they can’t get enough food to meet their metabolic needs.
It was yet another canary in the coal mine that says all is not well in the world of water, even in a place like British Columbia so blessed with lakes, fresh-flowing rivers and streams. Climate change is delivering a one-two punch. Rising temperatures and severe droughts are melting glaciers and triggering extreme wildfires, while at the same time starving creeks and rivers of water. In the cooler wet months, it’s delivering more intense rain events and storms.
Rutherford is not alone when he says that our relationship with water and the assumptions we make about it are long overdue for a reboot. Emerging global warming realities are shining a spotlight on human recklessness, like the decades of landscape-altering clearcut logging that have decimated watershed ecosystems and hydrology from southern Vancouver Island to the upper Fraser River Basin. Management of water withdrawal licenses for agricultural, industrial and other purposes is weak and in some places, non-existent. More precipitation falling as rain and less being stored in mountain snowpacks will have profound impacts on how we manage reservoirs and hydroelectricity operations. It’s a big topic of conversation as Canada and the United States negotiate a modern Columbia River Treaty that was first signed in 1961, when ecology was sacrificed in the name of power generation and flood control. Even the tyranny of the perfectly green suburban lawn surrounded by thirsty landscaping is up for reconsideration. It’s happening elsewhere. The desert city of Scottsdale, Arizona recently banned grass lawns on new single-family homes.
In November of 2021, British Columbians watched with a mix of disbelief and horror as rivers swollen by an intense atmospheric river overwhelmed banks and manmade dikes, flooding homes, businesses and farms from the Fraser Valley to Princeton and Merrit. Between November 13 and November 15, Hope was slammed with more than 250 mm of rain—more precipitation in 48 hours than it usually gets for the entire month of November. When this deluge fell on an early season mountain snow pack, the results were fierce and fast. In a statement the following spring, the Insurance Bureau of Canada called this storm the costliest weather event in BC history, with claims expected to top $675 million. But that number doesn’t reflect the cost to uninsured people or to the public purse. The price tag for repairing and climate-proofing the Trans Canada Highway in the Fraser Canyon, the Coquihalla and the severely damaged Highway 8—the Nicola highway between Merrit and Spences Bridge—is pegged at more than $1 billion. There was also a human cost that dollar figures don’t capture. Five people died in a landslide on the Duffey Lake Road 42 kilometres south of Lillooet. Fraser Valley farmland was destroyed, livelihoods lost and thousands of livestock perished. All told, this mid-November storm was dubbed BC’s most expensive natural disaster.
But the term “natural disaster” is misleading, says Younes Alila, a University of British Columbia scientist in the Faculty of Forestry specializing in forest hydrology. Alila also closely watched the unfolding calamity in November 2021, an experience that he says prompted him to “come out of the closet” and start calling out the elephant in the room: that is, the devastating combination of decades of industrial clearcutting and climate change. Alila doesn’t mince words.
“If you fly over BC in an airplane and throw your hat out the window, there’s a 90 percent chance it will land on a clearcut,” says Alila. “For years the public has been told that forestry in BC is science-based. In fact, it has never been, at least not in relation to hydrology and water. The so-called forest hydrology science that guided forestry for decades and counting remains a big scam.”
Alila notes that science has evolved and is portraying a much more nuanced understanding of forest hydrology and geomorphology. The problem is, he says, despite claims otherwise, that forestry in BC remains stuck in the 1960s. It all comes down to how industry looks and manages forests at the level of stands, which are essentially just a group of trees next to each other, rather than as watersheds. Left intact, forests naturally control the flow of water. They intercept rain and shelter snow, meaning it melts slower and moderates spring run-off, which helps to prevent erosion and floods—doing for free what human-made dikes and reservoirs attempt to do at great public cost.
Intuitively, most people wouldn’t be surprised to learn that intense logging impacts the flow of water. Anyone with a keen eye and willingness to venture into a heavily logged valley will inevitably see landslides triggered where a logging road slashes across a steep clearcut, or sediment-choked streams that once teemed with fish. That in itself can be sobering. However, Alilia applies the rigour of scientific research to portray with hard numbers what this looks like on the ground. A paper published last spring in the Journal of Hydrology, in which Alila and a colleague studied the impact of clearcut logging in a 900 square kilometre watershed on the Thompson Plateau, received widespread media coverage. Their research showed that clearcutting 1/5th of the trees resulted in a 38 percent jump in flood size in the Deadman River watershed, and an 84 percent jump in the Joe Ross Creek watershed, which is nested within the Deadman region.
“The point is we need to look at cumulative effects of logging, not just individual stands of trees,” Alila says. “I see this as a now or never opportunity.”
This is not just a rural, hinterland concern. Clearcuts high up in remote, sub-watersheds within an area as vast as the Fraser River Basin can have cumulative effects hundreds of kilometres downstream. For decades, destabilization of watersheds due to logging has caused erosion and run-off with a heavy load of sediment, some of which eventually settles to the river bottom where the mighty Fraser meanders through the densely populated Lower Mainland.
A recent study by the Fraser Basin Council predicted that more than half of the river’s dikes would be over-topped in a repeat of the 1894 spring flood, a one in 500-year event and the largest Fraser River flood on record. Back then, less than 20,000 people lived on Fraser River flood plain. Today, there are more than 320,000 citizens at risk.
“In effect, the elevation of the river bottom is rising and this could choke the capacity of the dikes,” Alila says.
Watersheds—and water—are certainly on the provincial agenda. In 2016, the provincial government passed the Water Sustainability Act, that was meant to bring unlicensed groundwater users into compliance, and promote watershed sustainability plans, among other initiatives.
So far the ground water plan has been an abject failure. Well users dating back decades prior to 2016 had until a 2019 deadline to apply, later extended to March 1, 2022. However, thousands remain out of compliance with new groundwater management rules.
Last March, Nathan Cullen, BC’s Minister Of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, announced $100 million for a new watershed security fund co-managed by the BC-First Nations Water Table, which includes members from the government and BC First Nations. The fund is set up as a trust, meaning only funds earned from interest goes toward watershed planning.
Aaron Hill, executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, calls it a good first step but says the fund needs to be “at least $1 billion.” Despite the Water Sustainability Act being seven years old, just one community, the Cowichan Valley, has made any significant progress toward developing a watershed sustainability plan. Government’s sluggishness on this file is the reason last July’s exhortation from Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Minister Bowinn Ma for people to take shorter showers and only do full laundry loads, in response to the third consecutive summer of drought conditions, was met with ridicule from the conservation community.
“Yes, we must all do what we can to conserve. But earnest appeals to “take shorter showers” during severe drought conditions is simply too little, too late,” wrote Oliver Brandes, Rosie Simms and Tim Morris of the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project, in a Vancouver Sun Op-Ed that also chastised provincial heal-dragging on water conservation.
Hill agrees.
“The province has been way too slow in implementing water sustainability measures. So far, we have no plans approved and only one in development,” Hill says.
On the bright side, he says the Cowichan Valley is leading the way and blazing a path that others should follow. Last May, the Cowichan Tribes signed a first of its kind agreement with the Government of British Columbia that commits both parties to developing a long term plan for the Xwulqw’selu (Koksilah) Watershed.
“This watershed is integral to the identity of our nation and our ongoing relationship with these lands and waters we call home,” said Larry George, the director of Lulumexun Lands and Self-Governance with Cowichan Tribes, at an information night in May around the time of the signing.
Tom Rutherford says the agreement follows three years of government-to-government discussions.
“This will be the first crack at developing a watershed sustainability plan,” says Rutherford, who will serve an advisory role in the planning process. “Everybody in the Cowichan Valley can see that we’re not in a good place right now. This process binds us all together, government, farmers, citizens, First Nations. But it’s one thing to make a plan, and another thing to implement it.”
In the big picture and in watershed terms, the Koksilah is small. Fed by five small creeks, the Fellows, Kelvin, Patrolas, Howie and Glenora, the watershed is roughly 300 square kilometres in size, barely larger than the City of Kamloops. And it is just one of thousands of watersheds in the province. In a perfect world, the Cowichan Valley will set a template for how we live, work and do business in a watershed. The status quo is a recipe for failure, but Rutherford believes people are ready to reexamine their relationship with water. Sometimes it takes an event that strikes viscerally to the heart of what it means to be a British Columbian to instigate change, like the sad sight of dead salmon floating to the surface of a river cooked by yet another heat wave.
Learn more: here
“I think we can learn from the Cowichan Tribes who have lived here for thousands of years. They don’t look at water as a resource. They look at it as a member of the family. That might sound weird to some people, but I believe there’s something in that sensibility,” Rutherford says.
There’s one inescapable fact that binds us all—everyone and everything lives in a watershed—and with that comes a shared responsibility. If we fail in that responsibility, it will be at our peril.