Crude Truth: The silent invasion of the Salish Sea

The Salish Sea is a place of contrast. It’s where urban life meets ancient forests, where bald eagles share the sky with shipping cranes. Where orcas slip beneath ferry boats and salmon struggle their way back upstream. It’s also a place where silence is often mistaken for safety.

That’s the tension at the heart of Beyond the Salish Sea: Crude Truth—a new, more investigative direction for a documentary that began as a meditation on place and evolved into a confrontation with industry.

When I started filming, the story was about belonging and ecological collapse. But as I explored deeper, I pivoted when I uncovered something bigger: a major industrial transformation unfolding right under our noses. The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, a pipeline that carries Alberta tar sands to the Pacific, is poised to increase oil tanker traffic in the Salish Sea from approximately 60 to over 400 vessels annually.

Let that sink in.

These tankers carry diluted bitumen, a thick crude oil known to sink in seawater, making conventional spill responses ineffective. There is no reliable way to clean it up once it’s in the water—and in these narrow, biodiverse marine corridors, a spill could devastate entire ecosystems and coastal economies.

We have no shared transboundary spill response agreement. No robust emergency plan between Canada and the U.S. No margin for error.

So we pivoted.

Crude Truth still explores the emotional landscapes of water and a sense of place, but now it is propelled by a growing danger. Few people outside government and industry even know what is happening. This isn’t just an environmental story. It’s a policy story. A safety story. A justice story.

What makes the Salish Sea special is not just its biodiversity but the way it reflects who we are: our values, our blind spots, and our choices. If we allow it to become a silent casualty of fossil fuel expansion, we are telling future generations that profit mattered more than protection.

This film now serves a different purpose. It asks different questions. And it invites different kinds of viewers—policymakers, investigative journalists, regulators, tribal councils, and citizens who understand that beauty is not immunity.

Because in the absence of resistance, silence can look like permission.

Beyond the Salish Sea: Crude Truth is my attempt to break that silence.