Sacred Headwaters
The Sacred Headwaters is the shared birthplace of three of B.C.’s most important wild salmon rivers: the Skeena, the Nass and the Stikine. Royal Dutch Shell plans to turn the Sacred Headwaters into a coalbed methane gas field scarred by a maze of wells, pipelines and roads.
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Sacred Headwaters
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The Sacred Headwaters is the shared birthplace of three of B.C.’s most important wild salmon rivers: the Skeena, the Nass and the Stikine. Royal Dutch Shell plans to turn the Sacred Headwaters into a coalbed methane gas field scarred by a maze of wells, pipelines and roads.
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The Sacred Headwaters is the shared birthplace of three of B.C.’s most important wild salmon rivers: the Skeena, the Nass and the Stikine. This remote alpine basin in northern B.C. is home to grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou, mountain sheep and other mammals that are part of the Spatsizi ecosystem, one of the largest intact predator-prey systems anywhere in North America. It is also home to the Tahltan First Nations, whose people have hunted and trapped in the Sacred Headwaters for millennia.
Royal Dutch Shell plans to turn the Sacred Headwaters into a coalbed methane gas field scarred by a maze of wells, pipelines and roads. In August 2007, members of the Tahltan blockaded the main access road to the Sacred Headwaters, risking arrest. Sierra Club BC and other environmental organizations have taken up the cause internationally. Learn more.
Imperial Metals has also proposed the Red Chris mine, an open-pit copper and gold mine, for the area.
In 2011, the Sacred Headwaters was named the most endangered river in B.C., for the second year in a row, by the Outdoor Recreation Council.
There is currently a moratorium in place by the B.C. government on Shell's plans for industrial development in the Sacred Headwaters, but this solution is only temporary. The International League of Conservation Photographers visited the Sacred Headwaters in August 2011 to document what is at stake. Check out their photos.
