Sacred Headwaters Project

From Shannon McPhail, Executive Director of the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition:

After communities and residents stood united for nearly a decade in defence of the Sacred Headwaters, the BC government, Royal Dutch Shell and the Tahltan Central Council announced there will be no coalbed methane drilling in the Sacred Headwaters…EVER! Not only was coal bed methane outlawed, all petroleum or natural gas activities have been permanently banned.

To all of you who stood up and spoke out, THANK YOU! HIGH FIVES ALL AROUND! We GOT THE SHELL OUT of our Sacred Headwaters. By "we" I mean the entire northwest of British Columbia, our supporters from the south and from all around the globe!

We are so grateful...we still can't put it into words. When we heard the announcement there were tears, high-fives, screams of total elation and big hugs happening as I typed out our email update to our membership. The whole crew was in my office yelling at me all the things they wanted to have written in that update and type I did through the midst of that chaotic, joyful pandemonium.

We partied the same way we campaigned - TOGETHER! On February 2nd we celebrated northern style and I can't even begin to tell you how epic it was. The ceremonies throughout the day were powerful as several First Nations brought their traditional dance groups, drums, regalia and water from each of their watersheds to be mixed in a cedar bent box as a pledge of solidarity. For the first time in history, non-First Nations were invited to mix their water as well and truly symbolized the unity of northwestern British Columbia.

The crowning moment happened right before the feast of wild Skeena salmon and local beef when our House Leader of the Official Opposition and our Member of Parliament, Nathan Cullen stood up and said that the Sacred Headwaters victory is a model for Canada and took some of the mixed water back to the House of Commons to tell the Prime Minister there is a better way to govern and it's exemplified here. “The fight to defend our rivers is a model for the entire country on how to find common ground,” he told the roaring crowd. “We’ll never give up our headwaters.

There’s still a lot of work to do. Fortune Minerals wants to build a coal mine on Mt. Klappan which is right, smack dab in the middle of the Sacred Headwaters. They are also advocating that CN Rail build a railroad all the way up the pristine upper Skeena River into the Sacred Headwaters which would open up the upper Skeena to development.

Spectra pipeline wants to build BC’s BIGGEST pipeline (48” in diameter!) down the Babine River, across the Skeena and Kispiox Rivers over to the Cranberry River, down the Nass River to the ocean where it will be an ocean line to a proposed terminal in Prince Rupert.

Shell was a pretty big victory and we’ve still got a ways to go for full protection. In the words of the Tahltan, Nathan Cullen and the rest of northwestern BC, “We’ll never give up the Headwaters!”

Please help us raise the funds we need and be a part of permanently protecting the birthplace of the Skeena, Stikine and Nass watersheds.