I hope some remembers to say "I'm sorry!"

I remember in the summer of 1991, being a student minister on the West Coast at the very Northern tip of Vancouver Island ... it was there that I was able to fully appreciate the power of story.

Sitting with fishermen and hearing their "fish tales" was always an interesting experience. You could learn quite a lot about the coast, the seas and the inhabitants therein. The west coast is simply a vast interconnected web that includes land, sea and air ... what effects one participant effects others - sometimes thousands of kilometres away ...

Over the last decade or so the woman pictured below has listened carefully and thoughtfully to the fishermen who have long plied the waters near her Echo Bay home in the Broughton Archipelago on the Central Coast of BC.

A photographer, an author and an acute observer of the world around her Ms. Alexandra Morton long ago said that the sea lice that infest the salmon penned in floating fish farms throughout BC waters was having an effect on the runs of wild salmon that pass by these vast enclosures.

Today, the scientists who have long balked at her "non-scientific" findings have backed her words up. It was reported that an article appearing in the journal Science CONFIRMS what Alexandra Morton and others have been saying for YEARS!!! CTV reports on the findings of a study by University of Alberta researchers who fear we may be facing the COMPLETE collapse of the Pink Salmon runs ALL over the west coast. (Click here to read the news story)

Much of Alexandra Morton's work was based off conversations with men like Billy Proctor who has spent his lifetime working on fishing boats on the West Coast pursuing and harvesting the very salmon that may now be in danger. The west coast fishermen (and there are female fishers too !!!) have watched the changes from the vantage point of their boats on the very waters that are being adversely affected by decisions like building fish farms and importing ATLANTIC salmon to populate them.

To the fisherman the evidence has been clear and compelling and BLATANTLY OBVIOUS ... Morton and Proctor highlighted some of the changes in a powerful book entitled "Heart of the Raincoast" Since it's publication Morton turned her sights on the crisis of sea lice and fish farms.

Until today her's was a lone voice in the wilderness calling ...

Tomorrow, the very least the scientists who trashed her findings and her reputation and who dismissed her as a "left wing whacko" should simply offer her the simple words: "I'm sorry"

Sometimes the so called experts are simply and utterly wrong, and the story you hear around the fishing dock, the coffee shop and in day to day conversations in small towns can tell us what's really going on long before the scientists, researchers and POLITICIANS have figured it out ...


I just hope the Pacific Salmon don't go the way of the Atlantic Cod ...


Maybe one day we'll really learn to listen and stop being so stubbornly reactive ...