Green envy: An unlikely tale of two industries
Vivian Krause went from environmental insider to outcast.
By Todd Coyne - North Shore Outlook,December 07, 2011
Deep within B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest, where the controversial Northern Gateway oil pipeline is projected to meet the pristine spawning waters of the Pacific salmon lies the intersection of a modern public opinion war.
It’s also where Vivian Krause was born.
But it took the North Vancouver writer and researcher decades of travel and work abroad with the United Nations in “some of the most corrupt countries around the world” to realize that something didn’t smell right about the push-back from environmentalists in the oil and fisheries debates happening here on the B.C. coast.
Armed with a Master’s degree in nutrition, Krause set to work ten years ago with a Dutch company farming salmon off northern Vancouver Island.
The relatively young industry was booming and so was the company. So much so that supply soon outweighed demand — the “biology side of the business got ahead of the marketing side” — and the market was soon flooded.
Krause had served as her boss’s right hand for nearly two years, liaising with other nutritional scientists and environmental watchdogs. But when he was let go, she was forced to follow suit.
“I pushed the company to trust the environmentalists,” Krause told The Outlook in the living room of her home. “Now most of those enviros think I ride around on a broom.”
That’s because three years after leaving the fish farming industry behind, Krause was busy at work for the Adoptive Families Association of B.C.
Herself an adopted child, one of Krause’s roles on the non-profit board was to scare up any funding grants potentially available to the society and apply for them.
“So right away I find this one $190-million grant program for wild salmon. And just because of my general interest in salmon I took a look, you know, because it was just a few clicks away on the mouse,” Krause said. “At first I thought this is fantastic because if they have $190 million for fish, imagine what they could do for kids.”
What they could do for kids, Krause said, was negligible.
Instead, what she believes she uncovered in that first of many grants targeting B.C. fish farms was a highly organized and well-funded American campaign to discredit and eventually sink the B.C. fish farming industry for the benefit of Alaskan wild salmon fishing.
It worked, she claimed, by funneling millions of US dollars into local environmental groups and funding studies that found increased contaminants in farmed fish.
That’s research Krause has spent five years and “the better part of my life savings” debunking. She even sold her house and moved into a rental to continue her work, unpopular as it may sometimes be in this corner of the country.
Krause now believes many of those same US foundations and lobby groups are lining up against the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline planned to span the province from the oil sands of Alberta to a tanker terminal at Kitimat.
Their plan, Krause believes, is to fund environmental groups and willing First Nations — though opposition to the Gateway project is not unanimous among First Nations — to block the pipeline connecting the Alberta sands to oil-hungry Asian markets.
The American funding of the environmental campaigns against the pipeline and against oil tanker traffic on the B.C. coast, Krause believes, is intended to land-lock Alberta oil to the North American market, protecting US energy supplies.
For some it may seem too improbable an endgame for bureaucrats and the private sector in the US to successfully coordinate, depending as it is on short-term environmental alliances that may result in future blowback.
However, it’s a view parroted just days ago by Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he told media in Vancouver he expected American interests to ramp up funding to Canadian environmental groups intent on blocking the Gateway pipeline “precisely because it’s not in the interests of the United States.”
But whether or not one agrees with Krause’s theory — and apparently, Harper’s too — of American interventionism cloaked in environmentalism, one thing can’t be denied: Krause has done her homework.
“It’s time we wake up in this country and smell the coffee,” Krause quipped, “Because it’s not Tim Hortons. It’s Starbucks.”
