Longtime Maple Ridge News columnist Jack Emberly has offered his impressions of the Fairy Creek Blockade in a video that was posted to Youtube this week.
Emberly is a well known local educator and environmentalist who has written extensively about endangered local waterways, salmon habitat and social issues in his column Along the Fraser.
In July, Emberly spent three days at the blockade on Vancouver Island, where activists are engaged in civil disobedience to stop logging of an old growth forest, and later made a video titled “Fairy Creek Blockade – As I See It.”
“People have some wrong ideas about what’s actually going on,” said Emberly. “As an educator and journalist, I’ve always felt compelled to shed any light I can on fake news – it’s a problem with kids in school and with adults if those kids grow up with the same narrow minded ignorance – we have too many examples of the problems, and violence that can lead to.”
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His collaborator Chris Clevette is also local, he said. They have worked with me on several videos including the Alouette Salmon video, and a song Emberly wrote about the agricultural drain on water in the river – Sucking the River Dry. Kat Wahamma, a former artist in residence in Maple Ridge, and Tony Rees are two other local people in the video.
Emberly also interviewed Geoff Clayton, past president of the Alouette River Management Society, for a podcast series titled 100 Years War on Alouette Salmon, which can be seen at ceedpod.buzzsprout.com
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