by Eva van Loon 
Well, it might work as a class-action suit. One of the realisations coming out of the mediation was that neither grizzes nor black bears know diddly squat about running a lawsuit. Turns out the wolves want to be in on the action, too, and there’s a new controversy about that, the wolves pointing out that they also fatten up on salmon every fall, and the bears claiming that wolves merely steal fish from the real fishers, the bears. More work for the mediator!
It was, of course, a courier wolf who alerted the bears to the humans’ plan. Apparently some half wolf sneaked into a meeting his human attended, and was able to get hold of the details—700 coastal rivers to be dug into and re-routed, salmon-spawning beds or no salmon-spawning beds. He promptly leaked those details to the first wild cousin he met, a courier passing through the back alleys of Powell River. The bears had a lot of trouble with the concept of seven hundred. Counting is not their strong suit. The courier finally got through to them by explaining that seven hundred rivers is pretty well the same as all the rivers the bears know of. They realised this is a life-or-death issue for bears. Mama Bear wailed, “My cubs will be forced to live on garbage! We don’t want to be welfare bears!” The wolves had quickly researched riparian rights, the rights river-dwellers enjoy. Everybody was excited over the principle that people living downriver have a right to “undiminished, unaltered flow” of water, which would seem to necessitate keeping a creek or river as natural as possible, wouldn’t it? The wolves liked this idea because they live on the foreshore all salmon season. The bears liked it, too, since it seemed to put them in a priority position to manage the rivers, as they are all up and down each one. Then some smart-tail pointed out that riparian rights accrue only to owners of property. That flummoxed the bears, who kept saying, “I thought we belonged to the land, not the other way around….” They scratched their heads even more on learning that most of the land is “owned” by someone far, far away, named The Queen, who likely knows next to nothing about salmon. Or bears. Or wolves. The wolf committee, while agreeing that property ownership is a wicked crazy concept, spent hours determining whether fur people could count as owners. If not, couldn’t wolves and bears enjoy usufructuary rights? In that common-law concept, the first user of the water—the bears and wolves, who have been using these fishing grounds since humans were a mere gleam in Gaia’s eye—are “first in; first served” and can enforce those rights against later users—the humans who want to stomp up and down the salmon-spawning beds, wreck the gravel, divert the water, and return it further down the river in a lesser state. Best of all, usufructuary rights are transferable from one user to another, without involving the pesky Land Title Office. The prospect of this tort case had the wolves dancing under the moonlight until a young hybrid wolf who had once enjoyed a friendly relationship with a political family in the Big City mentioned the Water Act. Apparently the politicians in this province enacted a licensing system for water use, which cuts into the common-law rights. Where there’s a conflict, the Water Act rules. Damn! Anyway, would human courts ever allow fur people to own land, be counted as users, or become anything but a resource for humanity to exploit? Not likely. Out of the mouth of cubs cometh wisdom. In a bearish session, Baby Bear was heard to murmur, “Some humans are nice. Why don’t we make friends with one? “And let her sue for us!” The wolf committee pounced on the idea. “Where is Goldilocks when we need her?” Last we heard, the search is on for a legally blond human living next to a creek or river. Preferably First Nations, as the wolf committee thinks such a person might understand what it means to belong to the land, instead of owning it. Stay tuned to the Evening Howl. |
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