Save the Ogopogo! 🫈

How I became an environmentalist and a journalist

Most environmentalists have heroic origin stories. I’ve interviewed hundreds of them, and hung out with hundreds more, and their introductions to activism all start with falling in love with a specific animal, tree or place. My introduction to a life of fighting for forests, whales and a natural environment that still has some connection to nature is more like the eco-version of The X-Files.

I was sprouted in Vangroovy - “greenest city in the world” (TM). Also, greenest city in the universe, galaxy and United Federation of Planets. This is the place where kids grow up hugging trees instead of teddy bears and, when they’re a few years older, form lobby groups to set teddy bears free from their oppressors.

I was in elementary school when Greenpeacers first risked their lives to try to stop a nuclear test in Alaska and then switched gears to shine a spotlight on Russian whaling. So everyone I knew wanted to save the whales.

I wanted to save the Ogopogo.

You know the Ogopogo, right? Canada’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster hangs out in Okanagan Lake a few hours outside of Vancouver - which is where my mom used to take my brother, David, and I on summer vacations when we were kids.

When I was in grade eight there was a story in the newspaper about milfoil weed in Okanagan Lake. Government officials decided the way to stop the weed was to use a pesticide called 2-4-D.

The Society Promoting Environmental Conservation (SPEC) - BC’s original eco-advocates - warned that 2-4-D was toxic and wouldn’t just kill the weed, it could kill everything in the lake.

Even though no one from SPEC publicly said so, I knew what that meant. 2-4-D could kill the Ogopogo!

I decided to do a science project about the evil 2-4-D, but wasn’t sure how or where to start. My mom suggested that I call someone from SPEC. If anyone else had suggested this, I’m sure I would have assumed that randomly reaching out to an expert was impossible for someone my age. But this was my mom. So I flipped through the phonebook, found the number and dialled.

The poor woman on the other end of the phone line was happy to talk to me. That was when I first discovered one of the few unbreakable laws of environmentalism. You may never meet an environmentalist who won’t talk to you, even if you are thirteen and clueless. The catch… they may never stop talking.

I heard all about the dangers of 2-4-D, wrote my paper, received an A+ - because my teacher was floored that I’d done an actual interview as research - and discovered that interviewing people was the magic ticket to killer grades.

A career in journalism was born.

Meanwhile, SPEC lost their fight. The milfoil weed was sprayed with 2-4-D and while we don’t know if the pesticide killed the Ogopogo, I haven’t seen one since they poisoned the lake.

That’s when I started turning green.

My next big school project was about the Sasquatch or, if you speak American, Bigfoot. I used a payphone in the high school office to interview Canada’s top Sasquatch expert. Payphones… these were telephones attached to a wall that required a form of currency known as coins.

I asked John Green (not the one on YouTube, this was 1977), the author of almost all the Sasquatch books I owned, how we could prove these beings existed without catching or killing them.

Green shocked me by saying he was fine with shooting one to shut up the skeptics.

The only way to save the Sasquatch was to shoot one?

Another A+.

And even more environmental outrage.

And if you want to save the whales…

How do we save the "inconvenient" whales?