Dear Editor,
Given that there’s so much professedly informed, yet confoundingly colliding, opinion - and consequent ambiguity - regarding the alleged benefit/benignity/detriment of the Wood Fiber LNG project, it seems perhaps important to shift the focus a notch and consider the emergent demeanor of Howe Sound in general.
With its scattering of islands and breadth of mountainscapes near and far, Howe Sound is arguably, perhaps unequivocally, the most strikingly beautiful of all the fjords on the coast. That it lies so accessibly in the backyard of one of the largest cities in the country seems all the more astonishing. (were it in any other part of the nation, it would be sacrosanct, a jewel to be guarded). Fortunately, it’s apparent that in the last few years, the Sound has begun a significant and long-awaited recovery from its protracted history as an industrial basin, as evidenced by the return of herring, salmon, cetaceans, and other whales. Apart from an exuberant expression of returning natural health and balance, this rebound has begun to significantly enrich a concordantly revitalised tourism industry, one exemplified in the much vaunted Sea to Sky experience. That we on Bowen are literally surrounded by this resurgence is indescribably reassuring – from the fire to the frying pan and perhaps, with proper care, a little further still. When did we last even imagine the possibility of such a reversal?
Port Melon remains the last major example of the past century’s industrial characterisation of the Sound - a situation that’s broadly reminiscent of False Creek/Granville Island with its similar early developmental history, rebirth as a major tourist venue, while still impressed by the lingering thumbprint of a single business devoted to the original tenor of activity in the area (the Ocean concrete works). Certainly a bemusing analog – an exemplary instance of revisioning the value of unique context and a telling, generously applicable, lesson. Would anyone in Vancouver seriously consider any manner of reversion to the uses of the past?
I hope that we won’t allow what appears to be an errant political fiat, so feebly argued in ostensible service of the public good, to return us to the compromising industrial model of Howe Sound but rather recognise and embellish an ever wider appreciation of the spectacular natural attributes it affords - to better inform and settle in our lives a fitting sense of a world comfortably beyond its frenzied exploitation.
Jeremy Howe
