By Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun
Dec 2, 2012
Tanker traffic associated with the Enbridge Northern Gateway project poses “significant, cumulative, adverse, and immitigable impacts” to the greatest coastal habitat for B.C.’s iconic white spirit bear, a research study warns.
The study expresses special concern for 20,690-hectare Gribbell Island — “the mother island of the white bear,” south of Kitimat — which would be in direct line of the tanker traffic and severely impacted by a spill.
More than 40 per cent of the “small isolated population” of between 100 and 150 Kermode bears on the island are white and the rest black, which compares with a rate of one in 10 elsewhere on the north coast where white bears live, the study found.
