Big Oil Threatens the Spirit Bear Coast
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Save the Spirit Bear Coast! : Take Action!: Save BioGems
The Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, proposed by energy giant Enbridge, would transport the world’s dirtiest oil from the Alberta tar sands to British Columbia’s Spirit Bear Coast. Just one pipeline or supertanker spill could devastate this spectacular coastal rainforest and doom its last Spirit Bears to oblivion. Tell Enbridge to respect the wishes of the First Nations who oppose the pipeline and to withdraw its application for this destructive project.
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It's hard to overstate the wild splendor of Canada's Spirit Bear Coast, the rugged stretch of shoreline in British Columbia that boasts the largest temperate rainforest remaining in North America. Here, ocean and land meet with the intricacy of lace: Brackish channels weave and wend among mist-shrouded islands covered in stands of ancient forest that include thousand-year-old hemlocks, cedars and Sitka spruce. Nearly a dozen marine mammal species -- including fin whales, humpbacks and threatened orcas -- thrive in these rich coastal waters, while the annual runs of wild salmon attract wolves and a flourishing population of grizzly bears, some from as far as a hundred miles away.
One animal, though, has come to symbolize the singular mystery of the place: what some of the native First Nations peoples call mooksgm'ol, or Spirit Bear. A glimpse of its luminous white fur amid the shadows of the forest is the stuff of local legend. Neither a polar bear nor an albino, the Spirit Bear is a genetic wonder: a black bear that has inherited a pair of recessive genes that give its fur the color of moonlight. Approximately one out of every ten black bears along the coast inherits the trait, but on particular islands the ratio can be as high as one in three. Still, only an estimated 400 Spirit Bears still exist on this wild coast, the animal's only habitat in the world.
more > NRDC: Nature's Voice - Tar Sands Oil Project Threatens Canada's Spirit Bear Coast
NRDC: Nature's Voice
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