Meet the diver who's pulled 269 lbs of garbage out of Cat Lake

Aug 15 2022, 4:30 pm

While the pandemic came with its various issues, one of the positive and unexpected outcomes was that, if we had to be stuck somewhere, Vancouver was a pretty unreal place to be.

The city itself is stunning, but what truly makes Vancouver such a magical place to live is all that surrounds it — especially the North Shore mountains and the Sea to Sky Corridor, where diver Henry Wang (founder of Divers for Cleaner Lakes and Oceans) spends his free time pulling garbage out of these waters.

Over the past couple of years, while we’ve been enjoying our backyard more than ever before, the level of traffic on the Sea to Sky Highway has continued to climb by 5% every year since 2006, according to Miller Capilano Highway Services. And so too has the amount of litter we’re carelessly dumping in our beautiful lakes and waterways.

Add to that the human-caused wildlife conflicts, environmental degradation, and illegal land use which are all detracting from the area’s natural beauty. Irresponsible use of the outdoors is leading to an elevated threat to wildlife, the environment, and to people (as shown by increased calls to search and rescue).

Put simply, we are, quite literally, loving this area to death.

So, what can we do about it? Ultimately, it’s all about being mindful of the impact that our behaviour has on the area’s delicate ecosystems, and following best practices and resources to minimize your footprint and enjoy the outdoors in a responsible and sustainable way — provided by groups like BC Parks, WildSafeBC, and others. Or, as Wang says, “If you have the means, you have the responsibility.”

Garbage and litter retrieved from a dive by Henry Wang and his team along the Sea to Sky Corridor

Garbage and litter retrieved from a dive by Henry Wang and his team (Tourism Whistler)

After selling his dive shop in 2013 followed by his climbing centre in North Vancouver in 2018, Wang wasn’t too sure what to do with his newfound free time. “Scuba, as a hobby, had kind of run its course at that time, and I was like, ‘What else can I do?'” he tells Daily Hive.

When he went diving in Buntzen Lake just outside of Port Moody with a friend and happened upon mounds of trash on its floor, Wang had an idea. “It’s like, ‘Oh look, this thing’s got a lot of garbage in it.’ And then, of course, you get curious about other lakes,” he said.

Next thing you know, Wang and his buddy, Jonathan Martin, have founded an organization that has performed 200 dives and removed over 48,365 lbs of garbage. Now that’s a hobby — one that wouldn’t be necessary if we were more careful about how we treat recreational areas.

The question he gets asked the most when it comes to his dives is, “What cool stuff have you found?” But, for Wang, it’s not about what he finds — it’s about getting garbage out of the places in which we swim and stopping it from disintegrating into the waters that precipitate up into the atmosphere and rain down on us (anyone remember that term “acid rain” from the 80s?).

“At some point, you’re consuming all of the contaminants that we’ve put into the environment,” says Wang. Big yuck.

And while some waters are more littered with the likes of beer cans, bottles, and sunglasses than others, in all of those 200 dives across BC, Wang has never once dove and not found any garbage.

But the more frequented and popular party spots, such as Cat Lake along the Sea to Sky Corridor, are seeing the worst of the garbage, he points out.

Henry Wang diving for garbage and litter in Cat Lake along the Sea to Sky Corridor

Henry Wang diving to retrieve litter and garbage (Tourism Whistler)

“Cat Lake lends itself to littering by the virtue of how the enjoyment of the lake happens,” Wang says. “There are 50-odd campsites at Cat Lake, and none of them has a peekaboo view of the lake. So everyone goes down to the lake to enjoy it, and [then] drop their beer cans, speakers, and whatever into it.”

According to Wang, some of the littering is accidental. You go to take a selfie while floating and your hands are covered in sunscreen and oops, your phone’s gone. But we can still be more careful about the way we enjoy these spaces. Then there are those who simply can’t be bothered with this responsibility, and that needs to change.

“Someone commented on one of my videos once, and said, ‘I was actually there camping and I just watched someone finish a beer, put it in the lake, and let it fill up with water so it sank to the bottom,'” says Wang. Now that’s loving the place to death.

“Cat Lake is also very easy for us to see how much litter is being put into it because we dive it so often,” says Wang, who cleans out the lake annually with his team. “It’s easy for us to have a visual image of how much is accumulating in the lake each year.” In all his dives cleaning out Cat Lake, Wang has pulled out 269.6 lbs of garbage. In one dive in 2019 alone, he pulled out 102 lbs.

And here, you can check out all the trash divers are pulling out of waters across the world. It’s pretty cool that they’re doing all of this work, but not so cool that our actions have made it a necessity.

Wang works with Parks Canada and all levels of government in different areas of the province to perform dives and clean up the waters. And whether it was the complicated dive of Joffre Lakes where Wang was helicoptered in to pull out equipment that an avalanche sent into the waters, or a run-of-the-mill dive into North Vancouver’s Rice Lake to retrieve nets that sunk after an ice hockey rink melted in 2021, he’s still having fun with it — but wishes he didn’t have to do it.

Garbage and litter retrieved from a lake dive by Henry Wang and his team along the Sea to Sky Corridor

Garbage retrieved from a dive by Henry Wang and his team (Tourism Whistler)

“I enjoy camping with my friends up where we do the dives, going for food and beers after the dives, and that social element of the activity,” he explains.

The rewarding feeling that comes with, you know, cleaning up the environment and generally making the world a better place doesn’t hurt either. But while Wang has received plenty of comments and messages from viewers saying that they want to get into diving for trash too, he says that’s not really what it’s all about.

“I have a very unique skill set, and not everyone has to do what I do,” says Wang. “What I do is nasty and potentially dangerous. But when you have the means, you have the responsibility to act.”

“If you’re taking your dog for a walk and see a discarded coffee cup on the ground, just pick it up. You’ll feel good about it, you’ll have contributed to your society and your neighbourhood, and there’s a sense of pride that comes with that,” says Wang. “The guy across the street will see you doing it, and think, ‘Wow, that’s great,’ and the next thing, he’s doing it too.”

So while we don’t all have to be like Wang and dive into the depths of the waters along the Sea to Sky Corridor to keep them clean, we can certainly hold on tight to our beer cans, take our garbage back home with us, and do our part wherever possible.

To learn more about the campaign to protect the Sea to Sky Corridor, check out @dontloveittodeath on Facebook and Instagram, and visit dontloveittodeath.com.

Daily Hive

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