Vancouver lost an important cultural treasure on Sunday (October 24), when videographer, environmentalist, and provocateur Lenore Herb died of pancreatic cancer at St. Paul’s Hospital. Herb, 63, had been diagnosed with the illness in early September.

“It was really, really fast,” said her daughter Saphira Coutts in a telephone interview. “I don’t think she had a chance to process everything. But she gave me a list of who she wanted to do certain things and what stuff she wanted given to certain people, to continue that work.”

Emily Carr University instructor Jaime Clay and AKA/Rhythm Mission singer Dennis Mills have been entrusted with digitally preserving Herb’s comprehensive footage of the early Vancouver punk scene, some of which found its way into Susanne Tabata’s recent documentary Bloodied But Unbowed. Herb also maintained an equally extensive archive of poetry activity in Vancouver, as her former partner Dermot Foley revealed. “Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Margaret Atwood, bill bissett—she videotaped all of them,” he said. “A lot of people know about the punk archive, but the poetry archive is equally valuable.”

Foley, a former Vancouver park board commissioner, also credited Herb with helping to push through Vancouver’s curbside recycling program. “She just would not take no for an answer,” he recalled. “We need more people like that.”