“All drains lead to fish”: the story behind Fish on Fences

In a video clip from 2000, nine-year-old Lapierre says: “Hi, my name is Chanel. This is the Stream of Dreams project and I’m the inventor.” She had recently glimpsed a gate covered in community art and was inspired to create her own.

At the time, Lapierre’s family lived in the Edmonds neighbourhood in southeast Burnaby where, two years earlier, someone had poured toxic substances in a storm drain. This killed most aquatic life in Byrne Creek, including several thousand coho and chum salmon. Meanwhile, buildings were demolished to make way for construction, leaving rubble and chain link fences behind on Edmonds and Kingsway St.

Lapierre and her mother Louise Towell saw an opportunity to create positive change in their neighbourhood. Together with the Byrne Creek Streamkeepers and their chair Joan Carne as co-founder, they decided to create a mural of wooden fish that would beautify the area and raise awareness for salmon.

“Nobody knew Byrne Creek was there. People thought of it as a ditch. They didn’t know it was a salmon stream, or that there’d been all these fish killed the year before. So, I thought, why don’t we put a few thousand fish on the fence up the street,” says Louise Towell, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Stream of Dreams.

To obtain permits and donations, Towell rallied critical support from the City of Burnaby and spoke to property owners and elementary schools. By B.C. Rivers Day a few months later, the team had strung up 1,300 wooden fish on the chain link fences of Edmonds and Kingsway – engaging hundreds of children and their families in the process.

After their inaugural Fish on Fences campaign, Stream of Dreams snowballed from a side-of-the-desk project to a meaningful non-profit endeavour. Today, Fish on Fences is recognized as much more than an art workshop; it’s a rigorous environmental education program.