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  • Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance

    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    This video documentary, by Will Koop of the BC Tap Water Alliance (www.bctwa.org), “Trashing a British Columbia Drinking Watershed Reserve: High Elevation Logging in Peachland Creek,” was filmed from late April to May 2019. It reveals how the BC government, through something called “Professional Reliance,” and under controversial legislation that allows commercial logging in community drinking watersheds, sanctioned enormous clearcuts in the Peachland Creek Community Watershed Reserve. It reveals the total disregard that both government and industry have in protecting fresh water sources, how they disregard animal habitat, and make false claims to public bodies.
    Please refer to the BC Tap Water Alliance website (www.bctwa.org) for more information and videos on the Peachland watershed, and for report information on many other community watersheds.
    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    Video and story by Will Koop
     
     
     
    THE PEACHLAND COMMUNITY WATERSHED was once protected by provincial law that prohibited logging (Timber Sales) on public or Crown lands within the watershed’s forests. The video, some 30 minutes in length, tells this history as well as the tragic tales about how government foresters broke the law that protected this community watershed, and many others that were similarly protected in British Columbia since the early 1900s. This video, narrated and produced by Will Koop, the Coordinator of the BC Tap Water Alliance, follows the release of his March 18, 2019 time-lapse video of logging in the Peachland community watershed (1984 – 2018).
    For more information, visit the BC Tap Water Alliance website, www.bctwa.org.
    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    Video and story by Will Koop:
     
     
    In 1992 logging began in earnest in the District of Peachland's Community Watershed Reserve, with a recent forest tenure license given to Riverside Forest Products (taken over in 2004 by Tolko Industries). Some of the Peachland watershed has a small forest tenure by BC Timber Sales (in the upper Greata sub-basin). Another section of the Peachland Communty watershed is under a Community Forest Tenure (granted in 2009) by the Westbank First Nation. The timelapse, 1984 - 2018, by Google Earth imagery, shows the progression of logging. In 2017, Tolko, BC Timber Sales and the Westbank FIrst Nation began a Watershed Assessment process, which was closed to the public. When the public asked for a copy in late 2018, Tolko and BC Timber Sales refused to release it. The government protected the community watershed in the 1920s with a Land Act tenure, called a Watershed Reserve. Government re-protected the watershed again in 1974 with another Watershed Reserve tenure. The protection tenure was hidden from the public, and when the Okanagan / Shuswap Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) process was underway (1996 - 2000), government hid this tenure from the public working tables. For more information, please visit the BC Tap Water Alliance website, www.bctwa.org, and the Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance website, www.peachlandwpa.org
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