Goddamn the Pusher Man....

by Alan Fossen
 

After graduating from UBC with a BA I got a job at Mac& Blo as a cost accountant. A year there convinced me that capitalism was harming the environment. I met some people at SPEC, quit Mac& Blo and started at SPEC in June of 1970. I was 25 years old.

My first job at SPEC was coordinating the Mission to Dewdney section of the Fraser River study. There were about 20 of us, including Dave Boehm, and we got $400 a month from an OFY  or LIP grant. It was great. $400 clams went a long way then, and we’d get UIC the rest of the year. Ken Pattern used to break us up with a song based on the Mickey Mouse club tune:
 

U-I-C	See ya real soon,
O-F-Y	Why, because we like you,
L-I-P	That’s for me!

On the Fraser project I used this little chicken-shit test kit to measure pH content of the water. We then publicized the results. The overall study was published with a big toilet on the front cover and is still, I believe, a landmark study of its kind.  I talked to Haney Socred MLA George Mussallem. He was a local car- dealer, but looked more like an old undertaker. Anyway, he was very civil with me assuring me his government had everything under control and that the Fraser was being cleaned up. Then he goes on some local Valley radio station and calls me a communist and tries  to smear SPEC in true McCarthyist fashion.     

Over the summer of ‘71 we did field work on pesticide use in the Fraser Valley. I used to go out and talk to the farmers about the heavy duty chemicals they were spraying on their fields. A lot of them could barely speak or read English, yet they were handling these incredibly toxic materials.
 
The next campaign I was on was trying to stop DDT spraying along the Canada-US Border. Steve Boyce had mapped out where they would spray every day so we’d go out in teams of five and stand in front of the guys with spray tanks on their backs. The RCMP used to show up and threaten us but we’d stay until the sprayers would give up for the day. Then we’d go
back to SPEC House, it was in an old house on East 6 Ave near Main St., then, smoke dope and wait till they started spraying again. In the end they stopped using pesticides along the border.

Working with some of the people at SPEC was a real trip. I particularly remember Allison Applebe and Gary Gallon. Allison was into media and is now a reporter for the Courier. Gary was SPEC’s mouthpiece. Originally from Toronto, he “tuned in and dropped out” of a Howe St. stock broker job  and came to work at SPEC. Gary was  good at press conferences and
speaking to politicians. He  was very believable - very cool.  Terry Chantler was an artist from England who lived in the West End.He did the graphics and cartoons in the SPECTRUM. One of his posters on the nitrogen cycle was particularly well done and quite beautiful. Then there was Lindsay Bickford. He was a civil engineer who used to work for BC Hydro. He was very straight and stuck out among all the heads and hippies at SPEC. At some point in his career a bridge or some other structure he was working on at Hydro failed. Hydro fingered Lindsay and he was unfairly fired. So Lindsay came to work at SPEC and applied his technical expertise to our studies. It mace a huge difference and contributed to the effectiveness of much of that early work.

The SPEC House moved to an old house on West 7 th. in Fairview Slopes. It had a great roof view of False Creek where we’d go and smoke dope. There were neighbourhood kids who used to hang around SPEC House: real urchins. One little guy Rhett, about six, used to come in and eat chocolate which he smeared all over his face. So Ken Pattern and I took his picture
and put it in the Perspective, as the newsletter was then called, and captioned it “our new president.” Well all the straight people at SPEC were outraged over that one.  In one issue of the newsletter I wrote an article calling the BC Dept. of Agriculture biggest pusher of dangerous drugs in the province. I titled  it Godamnn the Pusher Man after the Steppenwolf song popular at the time. I used a pen name “ Dr. Alien Gossett.”

Well the people at the Dept. of Agriculture freaked out when and demanded to know where this Dr. Gossett earned his Ph.D. We replied the “University of Alienation.”

Alan  Fossen is a menber of the La Quena Collective,  editor of Class Antagonist and a fixture on Commercial Drive.

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Early Days at SPEC

by Will Paulik
 

I recall a recycling meeting held in the early 1970s at the SPEC office on West 7 Avenue chaired by Gwen Mallard. In attendance were reps. from Richmond Anti-Pollution Assoc., Powell River and Hendrik De Wilde from Nanaimo.  We got involved in recycling by commissioning Refuse Bins to be placed at specific mall locations so people could recycle newspapers and cardboard.  Each day would be allocated to a different SPEC or related group and funds  from paper sales would go to that group.

SPEC’s Linda Bundrant set up a neat collecting system with a storage building and used old post office delivery trucks for pick-up. Unfortunately they broke down all too often.

1974  stands in my memory. We met with Liberal Mininster Jack Davis on airport development as part of a committee chaired by UBC’s Dr. James Tyhurst. Other activities  touched on waterfowl ponds at Richmond Nature Park, setting up Bowen Island’s Crippen Park, field trips to Pitt Polder, attending a  wildlife conference in Victoria, and working closely with the Fraser River Coalition on wetlands.  We worked with UBC’s Dr. Michael Feller on  forestry issues. His wife Evelyn  was executive director at SPEC. Of those  issues many resulted in success. SPEC was instrumental in protecting Surrey’s Green Timbers Nature Preserve, the Stein Valley, the Skagit Valley, the HBC Brigade Trail in northern BC, Surrey Bend, Serpentine Fen, and Caren Range on the Sunshine Coast.

In 1976 SPEC director Gary Gallon came to Richmond Council and supported my brief to protect Steveston Island from development. Councilor Harold Steeves, a long-time SPEC supporter, spoke for preservation on this and many other issues.
 
We need  to thank the volunteers  at SPEC branches in West Van., Nanaimo, Powell River, Kelowna as well as groups like the Heritage Forest Society, Greenpeace and WCWC.  And thank you Raging Grannies for your humor and spirit.

We should remember those no longer with us. Randy Stoltmann, founder of the Heritage Forest Soc., Curly Chittenton, Save the Skagit pioneer, Doug Manley, Hydro engineer who worked on Fraser study, Dr. Philip Haddock, a forestry Prof. who studied Cypress Creek, Steven Zablosky, a fish technician active on Burns Bog,  Dr. Barry Leach who initiated Serpentine Fen, Henry Pranto, outspoken critic on  Coquitlam River, Linda White, of the Natural History Soc. who worked on Richmond Nature Park, Lille d’Easum, SPEC’s nuclear issues campaigner, and June Black who worked to make streets safe for cyclists and pedestrians.

Will Paulik is  a director of SPEC and the Heritage Forests Society.  Will’s father, Dr. Max Paulik, was an outspoken critic of BC forest policy who set up the Lynn Valley Demonstration Forest.

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SPEC's Struggle to Save Vancouver's Water Quality

by Paul Hundal

 Since joining SPEC’s Board in 1991 I  headed a campaign to stop logging in the watershed that supplies drinking water to almost two million people in Greater Vancouver.  Since  1991 SPEC has sent  a steady stream of correspondence to  GVRD
politicians who should be  accountable to the public for water quality. Clearcut logging of old growth was stopped in  1995 as a result of SPEC’s efforts.  However,  this  unofficial “moratorium” is temporary and the fight to permanently stop logging in our watershed will be  coming to a head this  year.
 
As past president of SPEC, I am proud of how we worked within the system to fight  this battle. We  educated the public on what is really happening  in our watersheds and have gone  to  decisionmakers  to bring about change. It is tedious  attending every Water Committee meeting and monthly GVWD Board meeting. But it keeps us up to speed with the politicians and helps them face the facts.  The pro-logging bureaucrats within the GVWD  try to  “handle” the politicians by controlling  information they receive.  SPEC informs GVRD politicians on facts that Water District  bureaucrats leave out and by doing so we keep the system honest by putting  all the facts before the public. The Water District  bureaucracy  fought SPEC all the way and obstructed access to Water District information.  SPEC’s  diligence, however,  has overcome these obstructions in the ongoing struggle so that  giant old growth trees continue to provide  Vancouver with  high quality water 100 years from now.

Environmental lawyer Paul Hundal was SPEC president from 1994 to 1997.

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