A Coastal Village Embraced Natural Gas. Now It’s Trying to Outrace the Consequences

TO GET TO Kitamaat, I flew nearly 700 kilometres north from Vancouver, to Terrace, as the sun was setting one spring evening last year. The sky was salmon pink as we passed over the Coast Mountains, offering a commanding view of deep fjords with blue and charcoal glaciers. On our descent to YXT, I spotted the Skeena River wandering down from its headwaters in northern British Columbia and toward the Pacific Ocean. Gaps in the dense forest showed where industry churns, driving the economy of the North Coast.

In Terrace, three-quarter-ton diesel trucks were everywhere, so were bumper stickers: WTF? (“Where’s the Fish?”) and I Heart Oil and Gas. I drove my rented Toyota RAV4 across the river and onto flawless pavement, an hour past tense stands of birch, spruce, hemlock, and cedar, with lupines and ferns lining ditches. I spotted the ears of a deer just then deciding against crossing the highway before bounding back into the woods.

I was headed for the coast, for Kitamaat Village, a community of approximately 700 living on reserve land of the Haisla Nation. About fifteen kilometres northwest from Kitamaat is Kitimat, the industrial town that the global mining group Alcan (acquired by Rio Tinto in 2007) carved from the rainforest in the 1950s to house workers and support the needs of its aluminum smelter.

The smelter is still in operation, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Kitimat sits (with Kitamaat) at the head of the Douglas Channel, which, at its mouth, opens into the Hecate Strait and the wider Pacific Ocean. It is the kind of place energy companies and politicians mean when they talk about “getting our product to tidewater.” Kitimat is home to the country’s first large-scale liquid natural gas export facility, owned and operated by LNG Canada.

As I arrived in town, the facility was expecting to send off its first load of LNG any day. Though the announcement was still months away at the time of my visit, Kitimat would soon bask in international attention after Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced his government’s “Major Projects” to build a stronger Canadian economy in the face of spiking tariffs from the United States. Topping Carney’s list would be a doubling of LNG Canada’s production, positioning the Kitimat facility to become one of the largest in the world, second only to Cheniere Energy’s operation in Sabine Pass, Louisiana.

LNG has been produced in BC for domestic energy and transportation purposes since the 1970s. Most of the province’s natural gas is extracted in northeastern BC, near Dawson Creek, from the rich Montney formation. It is obtained by drilling into sedimentary rock formations, often through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves injecting a mix of water and chemicals to release trapped gases. The extracted gas is then compressed and piped to an LNG facility. In this case, natural gas bound for export at Kitimat is piped southwest along the 670 kilometres of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline, from around Groundbirch, south of Fort St. John. In Kitimat, the gas is cooled into a liquid, which occupies much less space, before being loaded onto tankers for export to markets in Asia, where more than 50 percent of electricity is currently generated through coal burning. Natural Resources Canada glowingly promotes LNG as “non-corrosive, non-toxic and, most importantly, the cleanest-burning fossil fuel in the world—and it’s more affordable than many renewables!” Burning LNG to produce electricity does result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal, though the overall impact of increasing LNG exports on emissions worldwide is a matter of some controversy.

Here, tucked in this beautiful inlet in coastal BC, is one of Canada’s most urgent issues. On one side of Douglas Channel is the LNG terminal, Canada’s epicentre of fossil fuel export, and on the other are the residents of the Haisla Nation racing to protect their homes and territory from the environmental consequences of the very industry in sight across the water.

I TURNED DOWN Kitamaat Village Road, driving through the low-hanging cloud of temperate rainforest, where I found a quiet village with just a few streets that hugged the coast. I waved to people as I drove, and people waved back. I passed a Stop sign written in X̄a’islak̓ala and parked at a public works building near the fire department.

It was where I found Dave Johnston sitting behind a cluttered desk in an otherwise serene beige office. He wore canvas work pants and a black sweatshirt and spoke quietly and deliberately. Johnston is not a nation member; raised on Vancouver Island and an electrician by trade, he was hired four years earlier by the Haisla Nation Council as the manager of capital projects and asset management. Overseeing infrastructure projects was a major part of his role. He had mapped them out on a glass white board that occupied much of the wall in his office. On his plate was everything from custodial schedules to what he considered to be one of the community’s most pressing projects: protecting the Kitamaat coastline from erosion.

When I’d spoken to him in preparation for the trip, he’d told me about an epic king tide the year before. The area had seen heavy rainfall, and the rivers were swollen. Combine that with a higher-than-usual tide and the water in the channel very nearly breached Haisla Avenue, the town’s main drag running parallel to the waterfront, shouting distance from the beach. It’s where the marina, the wastewater treatment plant, a gas bar, a general store, and the Haisla Nation culture department are all located, not to mention a brand-new youth centre built next to a soccer pitch. Johnston showed me photos: salt water flooding vehicles up to their rims and threatening to spill into backyards. “If we were in a heavy-storm situation at that point,” Johnston had told me, “all the buildings along the front road would have been under water.”

The other thing I noticed in the photos was a giant’s game of pick-up sticks at the water’s edge: huge tree trunks and deadfall washed down from the surrounding temperate rainforest watershed. People use it for firewood and for carving, and it’s where it gets the name that the Haisla call the village: c̓imáuc̓a, or “snag beach.” I remember thinking a storm surge could easily lift up those massive logs and deposit them somewhere people prefer they weren’t. A tsunami could do it too.

About a month after my visit, on the evening of July 29, 2025, Emergency Info BC issued a tsunami watch for much of the province’s coastline. An 8.8-magnitude earthquake—one of the largest the world has ever recorded—had struck off the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and though it was thousands of kilometres away, the BC areas covered by the alert were at risk of dangerous waves and currents. In the hours following the Kamchatka quake, the tsunami alert was upgraded to an advisory, only one step below an evacuation order. A graphic from Emergency Info BC showed a thick amber outline of the area from Saanich Inlet on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island right up the coast to BC’s border with Alaska, looping around Haida Gwaii and sending dendrites into dozens of inlets and channels—including up the Douglas Channel. The agency advised residents in affected areas to stay out of the water and to avoid the shore and any low-lying coastal areas altogether. A person going down to check on their boat could easily be swept away by an advancing wall of water.

For almost a decade, the Haisla Nation has been trying to drum up funding to build protection against just this kind of thing for the community. In 2017, Skidegate First Nation on Haida Gwaii, with Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, commissioned two consulting firms “to review the vulnerability of four coastal communities in northern British Columbia (BC) to tsunamis, rising sea levels caused by climate change, and coastal flooding from storm surges.” Kitamaat was included in the study. Worst-case flooding events at water levels predicted for the year 2100 (which they assumed to be forty centimetres higher than the present-day ones) were modelled using two main scenarios: one was an earthquake-induced tsunami and the other the combined effects of storm surge, wind waves, and sea-level rise.

From a lay perspective, the language in the report sounds both hyperbolic and a little absurd: “All tsunami modelling was performed at Higher High Water Level, Mean Tide and all storm surge and wind wave simulation was performed at Higher High Water, Large Tide.” The upshot is that a large earthquake occurring in the Queen Charlotte Fault, west of Haida Gwaii, where a number of major quakes have happened over the past century, might create a seven-metre wave but would not be expected to cause major flooding in Kitamaat Village, located near the head of the Douglas Channel and mostly above eight metres in elevation.

The picture for water-level changes due to climate change is much grimmer. A major storm surge, brought on by one of the increasing number of intense winter storms, could see waves reaching ten metres high. A massive storm surge at high tide with sea levels predicted for 2100 has Kitamaat nearly wiped off the map. Coastal vulnerability study in hand, the Haisla Nation then asked Parsons Corporation to come up with engineered options for protecting the shoreline. The company proposed three. The first option was a seawall with riprap (essentially a large boulder field) and a dyke. A “greener” version was like the first but with floating and detached breakwaters that would dampen waves. The greenest one was like the second but also included a plan to expand marshland vegetation around the shoreline, which would further reduce wave energy. In its report, the company’s rendering shows an almost nine-metre-high seawall running along 565 metres of the coastline, along with a delicate arc of floating breakwaters; in front of the majority of village homes and structures, in the intertidal zone, are seven detached breakwaters that overlap like the teeth of a zipper.

The community favoured the third option. To build it, Johnston told me, the nation applied for “around $25 million” from the federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund. But they were unsuccessful. A main reason, Johnston understood, was the proposal’s reliance on hard infrastructure.

Increasingly, coastal-protection strategies are moving away from things like concrete seawall and riprap and toward so-called “nature-based solutions.” These prioritize natural features and can involve stabilizing dunes with beach vegetation, building salt marshes, and planting sea grass and mangroves to retain sediment and absorb wave energy. Proponents say nature-based solutions are cheaper to build, can evolve with the coastal dynamic (unlike seawalls that can crumble or become flooded themselves), and can provide other benefits such as nutrient cycling in water and increased biodiversity.

Meanwhile, Johnston was also looking for ways to tie the design into other community infrastructure needs. Could they raise Haisla Avenue and put a walkway on top, make it a berm with a view? What about the handful of houses on the water side of the road? There are no official plans just yet to move people, but these are the difficult things the community needs to start talking about.

With each king tide and each storm, the imperative for some kind of protection grows more pressing. But all these things take years, so I asked Johnston where this massive project sits in relation to all the other things on his white board—the potholes and paving requests—which are perhaps more easily fixed. “We have to protect the foundation before we can build the shiny things,” he said.

HIGH TIDES AND storms, even tsunamis, are nothing new to coastal communities globally. What is new is the triple threat of these superimposed on sea-level rise for as many as 1 billion people globally who live in what’s known as low-elevation coastal zones, or areas near a coast and less than ten metres above sea level. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a global mean sea-level rise of up to one metre by the end of the century; with continued high greenhouse gas emissions, two metres is not impossible. This is combined with predictions of heavier precipitation and more intense storms.

Coastal communities that are predominately Indigenous face among the greatest threats given their loss of ancestral land, oftentimes against a traumatic history of forced relocation. I’ve seen this first-hand in other places I’ve reported from, such as Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, where work has just been completed on a $54 million revetment project while already a handful of houses have been moved away from a crumbling coastline. Relocation efforts in the Iñupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, just across from Russia on the other side of the Bering Strait, have been underway since 2001, though the process has faced delays.

But the story in Kitamaat is far from a simple tale of Indigenous communities suffering under the weight of Big Oil. While Haisla Nation members had earlier refused to let their territory become the terminus of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline, which would have brought bitumen to waiting tankers (plans for this were scrapped in 2016), the Haisla were among the earliest proponents of LNG export. They supported Coastal GasLink to supply LNG Canada, and in fact negotiated space on the pipeline to feed their own planned Cedar LNG project, billed as the world’s first Indigenous majority-owned LNG project. Though it hasn’t yet begun commercial operations, Cedar has long-term production agreements in place with energy companies Pembina and PETRONAS. In 2020, a series of protests took place over the construction of Coastal GasLink through 190 kilometres of neighbouring unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. Arrests and solidarity protests happened across the country, but the pipeline was eventually approved and began commercial operation at the end of 2024.

The Haisla Nation has benefited from LNG in other ways too. Tankers need tugboats, so the nation established HaiSea Marine, a majority-owned joint venture with the marine services company Seaspan, to supply the fleet of BC-designed and Turkish-built electric and low-emissions tugs that arrived in Kitimat in 2024. Last April, the tugs piloted a tanker 240 kilometres up the Douglas Channel in a dry run for the first LNG shipment.

The day I arrived in Kitamaat, GasLog Glasgow entered Canadian waters, and locals eagerly awaited its arrival. So did I. I reached out to friends in shipping in case I could find out when that might be. What a thing to see. It was, of course, a carefully guarded secret.

In the end, I had to leave before the tanker came. But standing on snag beach, watching the tugs across the water at their drills, I realized that however I might feel as a settler about the expansion of oil and gas exports, for many Haisla Nation members, the arrival of GasLog Glasgow symbolizes hope for a new time of prosperity. Efforts to protect the village from rising waters would have to keep up.

NEAR THE MARINA, I met nation member Leonard Bolton, dressed head to toe in green rubber fishing clothes. We stepped off the boardwalk and onto a trail, where we passed a totem in a clearing of cedars, a moss-covered likeness of a human face at its base.

Bolton was working as a senior resource technician and river guardian for the nation. He told me he had been noticing more king tides like the one last October: he’d seen salt water in the Minette Bay parking lot as you come into Kitamaat proper and undercutting the coastline just on the other side of the marina from where we were then. He’d seen root networks of trees and shrubs exposed and watched soil in the bank wash away. “The erosion part of rising water, I know it’s coming,” he told me. “Everybody knows it’s coming.”

For Bolton, it is clear coastal erosion is linked to climate change. But it can be hard to argue against industry when industry is, in other ways, making life a little easier—at least financially. Big money has changed hands here over the past several years. Project management giant Ledcor formed a limited partnership with the Haisla to lead construction in a tricky section of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in 2021. In 2025, LNG Canada reported it had awarded nearly $5 billion in contracts to Indigenous-owned and local businesses in BC. And Cedar LNG intends to hire 500 workers during peak construction and 100 for regular operations; they have a stated preference for Indigenous and local workers.

“We’ve got youth programs, drug and alcohol recovery programs, and stuff,” Bolton said. “Our Elders are getting money—and quicker and better. We don’t have to kneel to industry. Economically, we can start looking at making changes the way we feel they should be.” And First Nations need to regain control over economic activity on their traditional territories and to benefit from them. It’s number ninety-two of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. (In 2016, Johnston started a lobby group called the North Matters, which, in his words, was a response to “outsiders from industry and [environmental non-governmental groups] causing all this friction and chaos in our communities.”)

But while Bolton was pragmatic, he was also concerned about the future. Erosion of the banks around the marina makes them unstable for kids who play there, but he also thought it might be affecting salmon fry and smolt. As a lifelong angler, he was worried about that in particular because he knew his beloved salmon were already under threat from erosion upstream. The river cuts through a steep watershed, and Bolton pointed to landslides from poor land management (logging, road building) that plug area rivers with sediment. “Sometimes the water is so dirty that you can’t see,” Bolton told me. He called it “a double-double”—the colour of Tim Hortons creamy coffee.

The sediment blankets salmon eggs in the spawning grounds, which affects the number that hatch, and, Bolton told me, it was affecting the population. He remembered pulling forty-pounders out of the Kitimat River when he was younger, but no longer, and now the commercial salmon fishery here was “pretty much dead,” he said. Bolton told me sedimentation also hurts the spawning grounds of oolichan (alternatively spelled ooligan and eulachon), another anadromous fish the Haisla traditionally fished for meat and grease. Numbers of that culturally critical fish have plummeted to a point where they are listed as threatened.

In the same way that coastal erosion in the North is exacerbated by permafrost collapse, here along the West Coast, whatever happens on the watershed’s steep slopes—road building and commercial logging—also affects coastal livelihoods and independence. For people living in the village, it all folds together in a way that makes it hard to tease out the effects of sea-level rise versus logging versus pollution. But the root cause of much of it is apparent to many. Earlier in the day, I had seen a sticker on someone’s office door: Oolichan Oil, not Alberta Oil.

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WHEN I STEPPED into Candice Wilson’s office last spring, it was a place that suggested many open files. On her shelves and walls were books and reports and framed university diplomas and travel mugs. She was soft spoken and patient—also direct. At the time, she was working as the Haisla Nation’s environment manager.

“My role is to essentially work with industry to ensure that our culture and traditions aren’t impacted by their operations,” she said. An example dates back to 2020. LNG Canada wanted to dredge the channel for the tankers it expected—170 annually if all goes to plan. To offset the effects of the disruption, Fisheries and Oceans Canada insisted the company establish new fish habitat elsewhere. Contractors preparing to do the work began discovering old pieces of wood buried in the mud. Work was stopped and an archaeology firm called to investigate. It turned out that the wood pieces were part of ancient fish weirs, fence-like structures used to funnel fish into a trap. Radiocarbon dating eventually showed the weirs were 1,800 years old. The find carried huge significance for the Haisla: it not only gave them the opportunity to preserve early material culture, they celebrated it as physical evidence of First Nations presence here for at least that long—which, incidentally, is also important for ongoing treaty negotiations.

This is the scope of what’s at stake for Haisla Nation members. Territory their ancestors have occupied since at least the time of the Roman Empire is now in the strike zone of climate change. Haisla people are coastal, and coastal people know that borders between land and sea are never truly fixed. But the difference now is twofold: sea-level rise and storm surges have the channel roiling, and colonial settlement practices have trapped them in place. “Our traditional territory is vast,” Wilson said. “It’s unceded, but the Indian Act placed us on these reserves. Usually, this would be a seasonal village, and we would be moving around to different areas during different times of the season for different resources. But now this is it.”

Wilson told me that when she moved back home after university, she strategically chose a house uphill, knowing that the lower levels of the community would eventually face coastal flooding. When she sold that place and moved into Kitimat, she again chose something uptown. She recognizes the need for a coastal-protection project. “We can design it and make it look pretty, but is it actually gonna work?” Wilson asked. She said if she were designing it, she’d include pathways for people to access the water. Much of the shoreline is tangled with huge silvering driftwood no person could ever hope to move; “walking” on the beach feels closer to parkour, jumping from log to log and trying not to fall in the water. Wilson told me that because people couldn’t get to the water to dispose of salmon guts after cleaning their fish, the offal was going into the garbage and attracting bears; they’d rather return it to the water where it came from. She also wouldn’t mind seeing some kind of tourist attraction built into it to bring more people into the community, or maybe even a smokehouse.

But Wilson was also thinking bigger. The Haisla Nation is part of the First Nations Climate Initiative, and they had been working with the provincial government on the Forest Carbon Offset Protocol and the Atmospheric Benefit Sharing Agreements to get their share of offsets. She said if they played their cards right and if Cedar LNG went ahead as planned, maybe that project could buy its carbon offsets from the coastline-protection project and keep the money within the nation. While the company received its positive final investment decision, essentially a green light to begin construction, in June 2024, when I visited a year later it looked like little more than a scar in the forest across the water.

The question remains if all this work with LNG will result in a net benefit to the nation environmentally and culturally. Without the company’s work in the channel, Wilson pointed out, those weirs would still be buried in the mud, perhaps never to be found. The company has also, through Fisheries Act regulations, provided millions of dollars for oolichan research.

Throughout our conversation, I was wondering, with all the local excitement about LNG Canada and the recent overtures I’d heard from Alberta premier Danielle Smith about reviving a bitumen pipeline, whether Wilson could see a time when the Haisla Nation might reconsider its stance on receiving bitumen in the Douglas Channel. Before I could even finish my question, she began to smile and slowly shook her head.

THE CENTRAL IRONY here is that while Kitamaat has been working to come up with solutions to protect its coastline against the effects of sea-level rise and worsening storms which have been linked with climate change, it has also been benefiting from new partnerships in the fossil fuel industry. When I asked people around Kitamaat about the role of climate change—an uncomfortable question that opens up conversations about whether exporting LNG will lead to worse environmental problems for the Haisla down the road—I got mixed responses. Johnston said that environmental changes were happening and he wanted to protect people from them. “Obviously there are studies showing sea-level rise,” he told me. “There is going to be an impact. So what do we do now to prepare for that and make sure that the community is safe?” But he didn’t make a broader connection between cause and effect. “I think the argument whether we as humans can control the planet is a foolish topic to get caught up on. Because we’re not that special,” he said. “Things are always going to be changing.”

Bolton acknowledged anthropogenic climate change. “Industry twists it and turns it and tries to tell people, ‘Oh, it’s all good,’” he said. But he was also pragmatic, still driving a vehicle with an internal combustion engine because, like many people in rural Canada, he didn’t have a decent alternative.

Wilson seemed neutral. Exporting LNG to countries that might use it instead of coal—China, for example—could be a good idea. But she wondered about the big picture. “Displacing coal over there with [lower-emission fuels from] here, is it balancing out?” she asked. “I don’t know.” She had recently, however, cut off the natural gas to her home and bought a heat pump.

GasLog Glasgow arrived on June 28, two days after I left, and sailed away to South Korea with its cargo of Canadian LNG. Then in the fall, two major federal energy announcements drew the Douglas Channel back into the national conversation—the massive expansion of LNG exports and a bitumen barnburner: Mark Carney and Danielle Smith shaking hands in November over a deal to facilitate piping a million barrels of Alberta oil per day to Pacific tidewater. In response to questions about First Nations opposition, Smith told the CBC, “I can tell you I’ve got a very skilled Indigenous relations minister.”

The story of defending and protecting the coastline here is complicated by how colonization created financial dependence among First Nations. Without business income to pay for community services, Indigenous communities have had to rely on federal programming, which doesn’t always meet their needs. Turning away fossil fuel interests with bags of money—and the potential for co-management—means continuing to look for other ways to manage the life-and-death needs of community members. As then chief councillor Crystal Smith told an energy podcast, “We’ve supported these projects because of having no other avenue. . . . I’ve witnessed what managing poverty does. Suicide. Alcoholism. We’ve never had any other solution. And through these projects, it means hope, it means a different outlook in terms of what you’re providing generations of today and future generations.”

In a sense, Kitamaat is a nuanced case study for the rest of the world. Even proponents of a rapid energy transition know it’s unrealistic to believe we can end our reliance on greenhouse gas–emitting fuels tomorrow. Meanwhile, the people living in affected towns—often small and remote—are left trying to make choices to immediately benefit the community while preparing for the very real environmental consequences tomorrow.