Ground Swell
This past October, after a year and a half of preparations, I left on a boat trip with Dean Azim, Peter Devries, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and a crew from Patagonia that included Chris and Dan Malloy, Trevor Gordon and Scott Soens. For ten days we sailed through the Great Bear Rainforest in search of good waves, and had the opportunity to surround ourselves with the wildlife of the Great Bear. I was amazed by the amount of life we saw there in such a short period of time—from sailing with a pod of orcas to sharing a river full of salmon with a mother grizzly and her two cubs, each day presented something special.
The purpose of the trip was to raise awareness of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, a project that would see tar sands oil pumped to the coast from Alberta and then shipped across the Pacific to Asia. I personally am against the pipeline—I don't believe that Canada should risk its coastline, wildlife and ocean for the sake of oil. I'm not going to kid myself by thinking we can live without oil, but we need to start looking at alternatives. On the Great Bear trip, I realized that even though I've spent most of my life on the coast, I've explored very little of it. I'd like to see so much more with having to worry about a major oil spill ruining this beautiful place.
Here's a link to the trailer for Groundswell, a film that Chris Malloy and Patagonia are producing for release this fall. Please check it out and see how you can get involved.
http://video.patagonia.com/video/Ground-Swell-Trailer
And for more about Raincoast, click here.
