Conservation Updates

The Three Rivers Journey: A Vision of Hope in the Canadian North

From the Wind, Snake, or Bonnet Plume Rivers, if you could gaze east as far as Hudson Bay, not a single road would interrupt your view. These three rivers all flow through the vast Peel River watershed along the Yukon's northeastern border, an area about the size of New Brunswick that accounts for 14 percent of the Yukon. The watershed lies mainly in the traditional lands of the Nacho Nyak Dun and Tetlit Gwich'in First Nations, to whom it is home, providing a means of sustaining ancestral ways of life.

Grass-of-parnassus is a prolific wildflower in the Yukon’s boreal landscape Photo by Marten Berkman

The Peel is also one of the finest wild mountain river systems in the world, a premier destination for backcountry travel, recreation, photography, art, and nature appreciation. Endless and colourful mountain ranges frame pristine taiga forests and sub-Arctic watersheds. Robust populations of woodland caribou, free-ranging carnivores such as wolverine and grizzly bear, uncommon raptors such as the peregrine falcon, unspoiled aquatic habitat, and hundreds of thousands of migratory waterfowl occupy an ancient and unfettered landscape that is the essence of wildness. Gwen Curry, a B.C. artist on the Three Rivers trip, calls it “everyone’s dream landscape.”

Today, however, the Peel basin is vulnerable to frontier oil and gas exploration and development in order to satisfy the North American demand for hydrocarbon energy. Other development schemes – to extract coal-bed methane, exploit coal and iron ore deposits, and build steel mills – are also being proposed. Although these schemes seem far-fetched, any single development (perhaps made easier with government largesse) would have a devastating impact on the Peel watershed and the ecological health of the Three Rivers: the Wind, the Snake, and the Bonnet Plume.

Canadians are rooted in the idea of untamed nature. Wilderness is part of the Canadian psyche, an integral aspect of the Canadian landscape and our cultural heritage. Yet most wilderness areas have no legal protection in Canada, even though they have been recognized worldwide as an essential and dwindling reservoir of biodiversity. Canada has about 20 percent of the world’s remaining intact landscapes, a sizeable portion of that in the Yukon, which contains some of the most expansive, and impressive, unbroken boreal ecosystems on the continent. Across Canada, only about 6% of our lands and waters have been set aside in parks and protected areas and many of these areas are too small to sustain healthy ecosystems. The Peel River watershed offers one of Canada’s best remaining opportunities for a mosaic of conservation lands, worthy of international recognition for its mountain boreal forests, wilderness, and cultural values.

Rocks in the Peel River canyon, important habitat for Peregrine Falcon Photo by Juri Peepre

For the First Nations people who live in these wild lands, their value is not in question. After the Gwich'in elders' gathering at the end of the Three Rivers trip, Robert Alexie Sr. explained his own passionate commitment as he loaded his wooden riverboat on the banks of the Peel, preparing for the long journey home to Fort McPherson. “I care about my country,” he said. “I was brought up here and I want to drink that water until the day ends with me. I care about this river more than any place in the world.”

For many years, First Nations and conservation organizations have called for the completion of a land use plan prior to industrial development in the Peel basin. The affected communities, and Yukon people as a whole, need a chance to decide the best future for the region – for its wildlife, for the inherent value of an unspoiled wilderness, and for the well-being of local inhabitants. A formal regional planning commission – a forum where a visionary conservation blueprint could be crafted – began its work in 2004. CPAWS-Yukon is proposing a conservation-oriented land use approach for the entire Peel watershed. This approach would include roadless wilderness areas in the watersheds of the Wind and Bonnet Plume (a Canadian Heritage river), and full park protection for the Snake River.

Liz Hansen, a Gwich'in paddler who participated in the Snake River journey, sees the answer to the future of the Peel watershed with clear eyes. She told Frank Clifford, a journalist from the Los Angeles Times who also made the trip, “I’ll tell you what wilderness is. Wilderness is our store. These days, you might say it’s our boutique since it appears to be getting smaller. Everything in it is premium quality – the game, the fish, the water, the air. And it’s free. That’s why we don’t want people coming in here and messing it up the way they have down south, where you come from. How many places like this do you have left?”*

Juri Peepre
CPAWS-Yukon
2004

* Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2003