Social, Not Ecological Factors Control Our Population
In his 2016 book The Serengeti Rules, Sean Carroll tells us Charles Elton, the 1920s pioneering ecologist, identified four factors that control animal numbers: predators, pathogens, parasites and food supply. Two weeks ago I likened these to the Bible’s four horsemen of the apocalypse.
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50-Year-Old Sci-Fi Novel Eerily Prescient
Contemplating an orange-red noon-day sun almost obscured by the smoke clouds roiling in from America, burning to the south, brought vividly to mind The Sheep Look Up by British author John Brunner, an eerily prescient science fiction novel I read almost 50 years ago.
Read moreThe Transformational Moment: What Have We Learned So Far?
Three of Canada’s foremost practitioners in reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, Merrell-Ann Phare, Michael Miltenberger, and professional planner, project manager, capacity developer and engagement…
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Highlands Community Association Loses Stop-Work Request on Contentious Strip Mine
The BC Supreme Court has denied a stay application filed last month by the Highlands District Community Association (HDCA) to prevent OK Industries Ltd. (OKI) from starting work on a rock quarry in this rural residential community before its day in court.
Read moreCanada’s First Zero Waste Plant Proposed for Esquimalt, BC
Esquimalt Council has declared a climate emergency with a target of 30% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050. These targets will require a transformation in the way the Township manages its waste. Accordingly the Council is exploring the... Read more
BC Government Fails to Defer Road Building and Logging into Fairy Creek Old Growth Watershed
The forest defenders blocking road and logging access to Fairy Creek are devastated that it was not included in the government’s announcement of deferrals of forest areas of the province.
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The Future We Want: The UN We Need
Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of The United Nations One of the goals of The Transformational Moment: Global Reset and the Future of Hope invitation is to lay the foundation for a post-pandemic world in which human self-interest aligns with planetary realities. We... Read more
Commitment to a Shift to Ecoforestry in British Columbia: Protect Fairy Creek Watershed
One of the main ways we can help create the change we want to see, is to send letters and call our elected officials. The more people who do this, the better. To simplify this process, we have drafted this letter which we invite you to cut, paste and share by email and on social media by sharing this post.
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Oneness-Home International Youth Program
Invitation to join a new International Youth Program online with a submission of an expression of art for peace in a special exchange with Japanese students. It can be drawn or painted, photography, computer designs etc. and is open to all age groups.
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Old Growth Logging Must Stop Now!
Direct action – that’s what’s happening at Fairy Creek near Port Renfrew right now as concerned citizens establish a presence to protect the last intact tributary on the San Juan River and one of the few pockets of ancient forest in the region. The Fairy Creek... Read more
Fairy Creek Update
The blockades are still up at Fairy Creek, one of the last remaining unlogged old growth valleys and watersheds in southern BC. One of our camps now has an Elder tent and Elder Bill Jones, spent the night on the blockade on his land the other night. We are meeting to... Read more
The Four Horsemen of Ecology: Regulating Population Size
According to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are conquest, war, famine and death, while in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel they are sword, famine, wild beasts and pestilence or plague. (Sometimes, apparently, conquest is interpreted as pestilence or plague.)
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Ecocide Petition Timely
Here is a petition submitted by New Brunswick Green MP, Jenica Atwin, for the federal government to declare its support for an amendment to the Rome Statute to include ecocide as a crime (alongside war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, the crime of... Read more
Making Connections
As the smoke from the fires decimating the entire west coast of the US is stinging my eyes, I am reflecting on 2020. We have learned, at the very least, that we are highly adaptable. Snow and flooding to start the year? We’ve seen that before, and we can overcome. A... Read moreSeason Two Launch: The Barn’s Burnt Down
Award-winning author and philosopher, Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore, launches Season Two of Creative Solutions for a New World – Climate and Artist Series with an inspiring and creative presentation, entitled The Barns Burnt Down…
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Celebrate With Trees – Planting Parties & Celebrations
Do celebrations such as birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries immediately turn your thoughts to the need to buy a gift or hand-out a wish list? As my 70th birthday approached in the spring of 2019, I started looking for a gift idea that would benefit our Mother... Read more
New Community Mural on Fifth Street
Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition is proud to unveil a brand new community mural at their new office on Hillside Avenue and Fifth Street! Painting the mural was a community collaboration, with mural artist Kay Gallivan timing the painting of the mural to coincide... Read more
Stop Using Taxpayers’ Money to Fund Pollution
In May, The World Health Organization released its “Manifesto for a healthy and green COVID-19 recovery.” It is in many ways an astonishing document, because it speaks briefly and plainly to the many global problems we face and how we need to respond.
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World Premiere of Awaken
Although we took a hiatus from our webinar series this summer, we didn’t take a break from standing up for our precious trees and forests. In addition to calling on our government for a New Forest Framework and reminding local governments of the importance of... Read more
Humans Are Deeply Connected With Each Other, and Other Life Forms
Following my reflections last week on Jeremy Lent’s ideas about connections, I found myself musing about beginnings and endings – my own, life on Earth and the universe – and the connections they imply. I thought about and partly wrote this column while sitting under the great trees in Heritage Grove in Francis-King Park, feeling both connected to and in awe of nature.
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Parking in Your Town: On Street Management
Learn about how your place works to keep taxes high and takes opportunities away from property owners across the Greater Victoria area. This is the first of four articles on the seemingly bland subject of parking. And yet, parking policy matters to preventing urban sprawl, and making driving not the convention.
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Making Connections, Finding Balance
In his 2017 book The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent suggests there are three forms of disconnection that lie at the heart of the global challenges we are creating and that are “inexorably leading human civilization to potential disaster.”
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Grassroots Action to Save BC Forests From Extinction
Join communities across BC as we march for the forests on Friday, September 18, 2020. Its time to build a new forest framework that respects nature and gives power back to communities. There is no time to waste and the BC government must be pressed into taking... Read more
Road Crews on Edinburgh Mountain Snarled in Old-Growth Forest Pop-up Blockade
With two camp strongholds maintained into the third week of direct action blockades preventing road incursions into the headwaters of the the unlogged Fairy Creek, the frontline battle to protect what remains of the internationally-significant old-growth temperate... Read more
Bike to Work Week is now Go By Bike Week!
Greater Victoria’s Bike to Work Week is returning September 28th-October 4th, 2020 with a new name “Go By Bike Week” and a brand new website! The new name, Go By Bike Week, is intended to add a new level of inclusivity to Greater Victoria’s largest, free,... Read more
Solutions Guide
For every problem there is a solution. That is why, instead of focusing on the bad news that seems to be everywhere, we have taken a positive approach to showcase what is possible. Welcome to the premiere edition of Solutions where you can quickly and easily find ... Read more
Conversations about values for a One Planet Region
Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in the 1980s, famously remarked “all politics is local.” Significant change rarely starts at the top and moves down, mainly because the powerful do very well out of the current situation and seldom have any incentive to change it.
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30+ ways you can stand up for old-growth forests today!
There are so many unique and nourishing ways you can use your personal gifts to stand up for forests. Over the next few crucial weeks, it’s going to take as many of us as possible to shine a light on the danger these ancient trees are in.
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Wildflowers of Yellow Point
A wildflower may be defined as a flower that grows in the wild, not intentionally planted by humans. Included on this page are native, introduced and invasive species of wildflowers that are found throughout the Yellow Point area. Please note that this is an ongoing... Read more
Governments ignore urgent issues – Shouldn’t we be talking about this?
hile there is some evidence that we are slowly coming to grips with the reality of climate change, there are large and powerful pockets of resistance everywhere. Largely that resistance is rooted in and propagated by the fossil fuel industry and its ancillary industries, such as the automobile industry.
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A New Ecological Civilization: How Do We Get There?
Some of the key proposals are focused on significant reforms to the present financial system. B.C. should establish a Green Investment Bank of B.C. that would “be used to finance recovery investments that support B.C.’s climate action targets and other goals”.
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The Trees of Yellow Point
Yellow Point/Cedar area on Vancouver Island is a beautiful and diverse area within the Coastal Douglas‐Fir (CDF) ecosystem. It lies between Nanaimo and Ladysmith, with Highway 1 forming a logical boundary to the west and the coast to the east.. Click here to visit... Read more
A Call for Streamkeeper Volunteers Bringing Salmon Back to Bowker Creek
Bowker Creek Chum Salmon Recovery begins our Streamkeepers survey of habitat and water quality in August. Please come out and join us. We are forming as a new streamkeeper group with one clear focus – restore a population of salmon in Bowker Creek. Bowker Creek... Read more
Stories and Music Combine to Bring Climate Solutions to Forefront
Gail O’Riordan, Jon’s long-time wife and life partner, passed away in 2018, and the Climate and the Arts Legacy Series was established to honour her memory. “Gail was passionate about the arts and felt that combining climate stories about how humanity can change course with music and the performing arts would enrich the discussion and motivate people to act differently,”
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Guy Dauncey and the Economics of Kindness
et me turn to Guy Dauncey for an alternative that is neither communism nor medieval. Dauncey has been an interesting, thoughtful and — in the best sense — provocative thinker, writer and activist on ecological and social issues in this region for years.
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Building a Stronger, One Planet Regional Economy
Last week, I stressed the importance of a stronger regional economy as a means of increasing local self-reliance, given that we live on an Island and that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability that comes from being very reliant on others — be they food or energy producers or tourists.
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Esquimalt’s Climate Emergency Response Plan Survey
The world’s scientists confirmed in the 2018 IPCC report that at the current rate, the world could become 1.5˚C hotter as soon as 2030. That’s less than a decade from now and well within the lifespan of most people alive today. 1.5˚C might not sound like a big... Read more
We Need to Build Our Island Self-Reliance
Last week I discussed Prof. Rick Kool’s point that we live on an island — but we don’t act as if we do. Almost all our food, all of our fossil fuels, much of our electricity and much else is imported. The implication is that we should think about how to be more self-reliant.
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Let’s Govern as if We Live On an Island
One of the many things the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed is the extent to which we have become dependent on all sorts of products — from face masks to food — that come from away, as Newfoundlanders would put it.
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The World in 2040 – A Film
The 2040 documentary film was produced by Australian Damon Gameau as a letter to his 4-year-old daughter in 2019 to imagine what the world could look like in 2040 if current innovative technologies in energy, agriculture, transportation and urban planning were fully... Read more
Neoliberalism is a Major Threat to Well-Being
One of the beneficial side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it might spur us to rethink the fundamental systems that constitute our society, and the deep values that underpin them. One of those systems is neoliberal economics, which has become the predominant,... Read moreThe Doughnut and the New Forest Framework: The Wildwood Model
Wildwood is a 77-acre forest nestled on the shores of Quennell Lake in the Ladysmith area of Vancouver Island. The Ecoforestry Institute Society (EIS) is a registered charitable society and the owners and trustees of…
Read moreClimate Change & Canada’s Water Future – Part 2
Find out why science is more important now than ever and water is the nexus of climate with two of the world’s leading scientists, Dr. John Pomeroy and Dr. Trevor Davies. Joining them is award-winning author, Bob Sandford…
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Who Are We? Where are we Going? Some Reflections in this COVID-19 Time
Who are we? And where are we going on this tiny planet of ours, this bright sparkle of life in a Universe so ridiculously vast? It’s a question worth exploring, if you have five minutes in your busy COVID day. Almost all scientists assume that the Universe is a... Read more
Highlands community association seeks to quash Province’s decision to approve strip mine
The Highlands District Community Association (HDCA) has filed an application to the BC Supreme Court for a judicial review of the Province’s recent approval of a new rock quarry near the southern Millstream Road entrance to the Highlands municipality. The court... Read more
Just Which Predator Needs to be Controlled?
An opinion piece in this newspaper on June 4 from the B.C. Chamber of Commerce and the Thriving Orcas, Thriving Communities Coalition (composed of a number of coastal communities’ chambers of commerce) warned that coastal communities are on the brink of extinction because they rely on recreational fishing, which is in jeopardy.
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Rebuilding BC: A Portfolio of Possibilities
In early May I was approached by the Green Technology Education Centre, based in Vancouver, and invited to join its Council for the New Green Economy, to help design a positive green recovery for BC. This we have done. The result was published last week as Rebuilding... Read more
If not for Life, what for?
More than ever, vision is needed if we want to change the course of things. We need vision, but also dedication. We need to be whole-hearted visionaries with warriors’ dedication. We need each other to stay on path, to bring into fruition our bold visions.
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Join us in our Facebook Group: KickAss Gardeners & Their Gardens
Do you LOVE gardening? Are you interested in food security, permaculture or just want to grow the best veggies you can? One way to do that is to join us in our Facebook group and add your voice to the conversations and discussions.
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