First Nations and government came up with a plan to save dwindling caribou. The local pushback has been ferocious
When Roland Willson, the 53-year-old chief of West Moberly First Nation, needs meat for his family he heads into the bush near his home near Moberly Lake, B.C. to hunt moose, elk or deer. But unlike his Dunne-zaa ancestors, he has never killed a caribou, never tasted the meat, stripped sinew for twine or used the sharp, brittle bones to scrape a hide.
“We’re extremely worried,” resident Rhonda Pruden, was quoted as saying by CBC. Her husband retired from one of the town’s two lumber mills, and her son still works for one. While she agreed saving the caribou is important, she warned the costs will be enormous. “They’re talking about shutting one mill down and maybe both in order to do this caribou recovery. It would just be unbelievable. That would be the end of the town.
In the larger communities, the recovery plan is seen as a job killer that will erode the region’s economic base and lifestyle which revolves around backcountry access for snowmobiling, skiing and hunting. Recommended logging restrictions could force the closure of one or both of Chetwynd’s sawmills and plunge the community into recessions, says Mayor Allen Courtoreille.
The only point upon which everyone agrees is that all efforts so far have failed to solve the problem. Decreases in herd sizes, at least in the Chetwynd area, were first noted after the Williston Reservoir was filled to power the WAC Bennett Dam in 1968, Willson says. The huge lake—B.C.’s largest—severed the animals’ habitat and a subsequent mining and forestry boom further fragmented the herds and opened large tracts of clear-cut land.
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