Jump to content

Maleea Acker

Writers
  • Posts

    84
  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Focus Magazine Nov/Dec 2016

Sept/Oct 2016.2

Past Editions in PDF format

Advertorials

Focus Magazine July/August 2016

Focus Magazine Jan/Feb 2017

Focus Magazine March/April 2017

Passages

Local Lens

Focus Magazine May/June 2017

Focus Magazine July/August2017

Focus Magazine Sept/Oct 2017

Focus Magazine Nov/Dec 2017

Focus Magazine Jan/Feb 2018

Focus Magazine March/April 2018

Focus Magazine May/June 2018

Focus Magazine July/August 2018

Focus Magazine Sept/Oct 2018

Focus Magazine Nov/Dec 2018

Focus Magazine Jan/Feb 2019

Focus Magazine March/April 2019

Focus Magazine May/June 2019

Focus Magazine July/August 2019

Focus Magazine Sept/Oct 2019

Focus Magazine Nov/Dec 2019

Focus Magazine Jan/Feb 2020

Focus Magazine March-April 2020

COVID-19 Pandemic

Navigating through pandemonium

Informed Comment

Palette

Earthrise

Investigations

Reporting

Analysis

Commentary

Letters

Development and architecture

Books

Forests

Controversial developments

Gallery

Forums

Downloads

Blogs

Events

Everything posted by Maleea Acker

  1. It’s time to be proactive when it comes to saving urban wetlands and natural areas. EMILY THIESSEN AND I meet for coffee at Little June, the cafe on the corner of Gladstone and Fernwood, to talk about the path of Bowker Creek, and an adjacent seasonal wetland in the Shelbourne Valley that was once ringed with black cottonwood trees near her parents’ house. “They’re cutting [the trees] down today,” says Thiessen, an artist and activist, and tears spring from her eyes. She continues to weep intermittently for the next hour, as we sift through the contentious story of a Saanich-approved rezoning and development permit at 1554 Christmas Avenue, as well as her work as a muralist and printer, and her desire to see people mobilize in advance of future developments on land with ecological potential. Emily Thiessen 1554 Christmas Avenue, showing removal of black cottonwood trees to make way for development. (Photo by Maleea Acker) The Christmas Avenue development and rezoning permit was approved by Saanich Council in August 2021, despite strenuous objections from local residents, groups including the Mount Tolmie Community Association and the Friends of Bowker Creek Society (FOBC), and Councillor Nathalie Chambers. Councillors Judy Brownoff and Ned Taylor opposed the rezoning and development in the Council vote (Chambers was absent). Thiessen’s tears aren’t just for the loss of a parcel of land that provided habitat; “I should have done more,” she says. Under the soil of 1554 Christmas Ave runs a culverted portion of Bowker Creek, an urban stream I wrote about for this magazine when FOBC volunteers were working towards reintroduction of Chum salmon into the lower portion of the urban creek. Bowker Creek runs from its headwaters at the University of Victoria down through the Shelbourne Valley, crossing the municipalities of Saanich, Victoria and Oak Bay before exiting into Oak Bay proper. In Fall 2021, FOBC volunteers placed 28,000 chum salmon eggs into the creek’s gravel; they have since hatched and the fry successfully entered the sea. It is hoped they will return in 2024 for the first successful salmon spawning event in Bowker in over 100 years. Bowker Creek passes just east of the cut poplar trees at 1554 Christmas Avenue, at the edge of the property, which makes the rest of the property an important buffer area for the creek. The bulk of the property was what Thiessen and many residents identified as a seasonal wetland, where ducks would overwinter and into which the yellowing leaves of the black poplars would fall each autumn. In Saanich’s 2012 “Shelbourne Valley Land Use and Urban Design Study” report, consultants recommended that three areas in the Shelbourne Valley, including 1554 Christmas Ave, be included as future park space in a growing neighbourhood. The parcel was included in the draft Shelbourne Valley plan, until 2017, when the “intended park space” label was quietly removed. Thiessen remembers that her parents (and many others, including Mei Ang of Louise Place) questioned the planners, who assured them that a commitment remained to acquire the property as parkland. But a year later, it was sold and the new developer owner proposed a 25-unit condominium, with no designated affordable units. When Saanich approved the rezoning and development, on August 17, 2021, it was under advice from a biologist who stated that the property did not meet the definition of a wetland, and lacked any wetland species. The cottonwood trees (which some might define as a wetland species themselves) were deemed an unsuitable species in an urban context and slated for removal. “My parents went to the council meetings,” says Thiessen, and her parents’ words are recorded in the Sooke News Mirror on August 12, 2021, arguing that Saanich, in approving the development, would be failing to consider “the need for green space.” Until the Christmas Avenue development proposal, Thiessen’s work had been more focused on global social justice issues. During her undergrad, she joined Divest UVic (a group striving for divestment of UVic’s investments from fossil fuel and other climate damaging companies), then Rise and Resist, ending up on the RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group watchlist. In 2019, Thiessen helped found Climate Justice Victoria, and was involved in the Wet’suwet’en and Global Climate Strike protests. She painted murals and designed posters for the protests during her Anthropology degree, first as a volunteer, then as a paid artist, illustrating reports for non-profits and screenprinting banners for marches. Mural by Emily Thiessen at corner of Gladstone and Stanley in Fernwood area. (Photo by Maleea Acker) “It can’t all be depressing.” she says, “You have to inspire people, too.” She quotes Toni Cade Bambara’s famous dictim: “the role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible,” and smiles. In the last few years, Thiessen has begun completing commissions for murals around the Capital Region. She painted one for the Victoria Event Centre, another for the Oaklands community, focusing on endangered Garry oak meadow ecosystems. This summer, she’s working on a mural of Rock Bay Creek, at the corner of Stanley and Gladstone. Rock Bay Creek is a buried but not forgotten stream that winds its way from Fernwood into Rock Bay. She has also worked with First Nations W̱SÁNEĆ artist Sarah Jim through the Victoria Art Gallery. Art, says Thiessen, helps her communicate, “it defines things. It brings people together. It builds movements in a more joyful way.” AS THE POPLARS FALL on 1554 Christmas Avenue, it seems to Thiessen that Bowker Creek gets no closer to being truly respected—as a waterway that needs more space, with more wetlands and shaded corridors through which to meander. Thiessen wants people to learn from her experience. For others who live near an ecologically promising parcel, she advises, “before the development happens, get the neighbours together and start doing restoration. You need people who are actively interested, starting to build a community, who can not only write letters but talk to media, even do guerrilla planting.” She wishes her community had taken note of the Christmas Avenue property earlier and started restoring it on their own, adding species that could have contributed to its status as a remnant wetland. “We should start mapping other areas of the creek,” she muses, “telling neighbours to pick up garbage, have a block party.” Essentially, she wants people to gather and care for a place before it gets noticed by developers, even if it’s on what’s currently called private property. Recently, Thiessen relocated to the Comox Valley, where she’s begun an apprenticeship as an art printer. She’s noticed that the Comox Valley still has functioning creeks, that even in residential areas, wild areas seem to co-exist with development. “If we could have more of that here [in Greater Victoria], that would be good,” she muses. Thiessen is also changing her activism to include not just larger political work but also local ecosystems. “If you’re just doing the bigger things, you miss the small ecosystems.” The lesson of trying and failing to save the Christmas Avenue property isn’t lost on her, “When I was involved in trying to save it, [the work] was all new to me. If I had been working small the whole time, I might have had more influence.” Maleea Acker’s post-doctoral fellowship focuses on Nature-Based Solutions for water and climate. She is currently working with several local communities and Nations to encourage private landowners to protect and steward ecosystems. Her new book of poems, Hesitating Once to Feel Glory, is available at Munro’s Books.
  2. A biomimicry professional, who looks to nature’s brilliance to guide design and solve problems, is leading the charge for social and ecosystem mapping of the CRD. FIVE YEARS AGO, Anne-Marie Daniel woke up from a dream about the region’s languishing environmental health. “I thought, ‘we need to get the cards on the table, to know what we’re dealing with,’” she tells me from her home in North Saanich. The forest near her home was suffering from drought and an influx of invasive ivy. Climate change, even before this year’s heat wave and atmospheric river pummelled the BC coast, was already making itself known. “I wanted resilient mapping in record time. I wanted answers to opportunities and gaps, and to know it yesterday.” The urgency of the region’s increasing fragility—in the face of longer summers, decreasing natural areas and a complex tangle of politics—seemed to call for action. Now all her idea needs is funding. Anne-Marie Daniel: “I wanted to focus on what nature needs.” Daniel approached her friend and colleague, architect Christine Lintott, and they began to talk, plan, “mess around trying to find the levers,” and eventually settled on the Resilience Urban Systems and Habitat (RUSH) Initiative. Since then, she’s been planning its 2022 launch off the side of her desk, collaborating with place-makers, academics, students, developers and government in the region to tackle some of its most wicked problems. One of the key gaps the RUSH initiative hopes to fill is that of a one-stop shop for social and ecosystem mapping, data sets, participatory modelling, citizen science, and community-based research. The CRD’s Natural Areas Atlas provides some ecosystem mapping, but not all; and it’s missing citizen science and place-making features, which allow residents to contribute their own sense of connection to land and an accounting of its important features. The UVic Mapping Collaboratory once filled that community mapping piece, but lack of steady funding has meant some of the site is no longer updated or accessible. Other projects in the region, like the Little Free Library map, are great tools but represent one of many individual sites that must be visited. A mediator and conflict resolution specialist, Daniel is a founding member of The Roy Group, a leadership development firm. She is also one of only a small number of certified biomimicry professionals that uses nature’s brilliance to guide design and solve problems. Daniel has lived throughout the USA, Canada and in Scotland, where she ran a retreat centre for youth from difficult backgrounds on the Isle of Skye until 2005. When she and her family left, she was looking to recharge and to try a new chapter: “I wanted to focus on what nature needs.” The family landed in Saskatchewan and drove to the Island. “Very quickly, the land and the water took hold of my spirit and it felt so good. It’s such a place of innovation and talent,” Daniel says. Daniel, who is an amazing listener and a lively pleasure to work with, is currently paired with six of my Community Mapping students, as well as students from Crystal Tremblay’s Community-Based Participatory Research class, both in the Geography department. This term, students created two videos: one on the importance of pollinators in the region, and one on the key supports that Mother Trees provide in forest ecosystems, whether large or small. “More trees have come down in North Saanich in the last six months than in the last six years,” says Daniel. With Saanich about to rejig its tree protection bylaw, it’s the perfect time to bring current research to bear on urban forests, which Daniel says operate like an electrical grid, connected by a microbiome. Fewer trees mean fewer connections, more droughts, and more flooding. The students spoke to local activists and academics in the region, including lawyer Mike Large, who drafted the City of Victoria’s boulevard gardening bylaw, Raincoast Conservation Foundation project coordinator Shauna Doll, and James Clowater, who has mapped Victoria’s significant trees. In Tremblay’s class students conducted outreach and research in the North Park neighbourhood, looking at last summer’s heat wave through the lens of tree cover and permeable surfaces. “Students are ground-truthing by going out to people in the community,” explains Daniel, by asking about their experience last summer, and what they’d like to see happen to support health during future heat events. Jessica Neal’s GIS students are currently completing spatial analysis of the neighbourhood based on this lens. RUSH’s collaborators also include the Capital Regional District’s Community Health Network, the University of Victoria and its Geography department Map Shop, Island Health, Christine Lintott Architects, the Greater Victoria Placemaking Network, Peninsula Streams Society, SeaChange Marine Conservation Society and NatuR&D, Daniel’s biomimicry design firm. All of the students’ research will serve as background for a larger mapping and data set project set to start early next year. “The work now is like an evolutionary path,” says Daniel. The videos will live on the mapping platform as part of its engagement pieces, serving as an introduction to the project. Spring 2022 will see outreach to communities kick off with mapping events, field trips, online conversations, and opportunities for residents to define what is most important to them in the region. For student Griffin Stever, the work is an opportunity to question deeply ingrained ways of living on unceded territory. After conducting interviews for the videos, he writes, “How do we credit Indigenous ideology and learn from it without taking? As a settler how can I better treat the world using this knowledge?” Indigenous voices are also key to Daniel’s vision for RUSH; First Nations can provide an understanding of how ecological systems worked before colonization, helping to guide restoration and connect more deeply to the land. “Reconciliation is at the heart of the RUSH initiative,” Daniels writes in a project briefing note, “Settlement across the region marginalizes local First Nations and their way of life.” Solutions lie in restoration of natural habitats, pollution control, and the search for a shared respect for nature. Daniel hopes to join forces to tackle larger problems and support community connections in the mapping and data platform she’s proposing. Residents will be able to plot their pollinator gardens on the ArcGIS map. She wants people to be able to see where parking lots could be converted to patios and parks, or where tree cover needs to be retained during densification projects. The year-long engagement in 2022 will help shape what will be mapped and how the platform will develop. RUSH will look for funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and other government bodies, but it’s also looking for support from investors. One key part of RUSH is to engage and galvanize local developers, bringing those with power and money onside through showing the efficacy of good choices. “In the face of good information, leaders [and developers] will make good decisions. They’ll know how to protect themselves and their communities.” In our conversation, our laughter has a note of tiredness; Daniel knows information doesn’t always bring good decisions; recent failures at COP 26 and BC’s flood disasters show this. But she believes data can leverage conversation and action. I hope she’s right. Maleea Acker, PhD, completed her doctorate in Human Geography (Geopoetics) in September. She teaches at the University of Victoria; part of her dissertation will appear as the poetry book Hesitating Once to Feel Glory with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2022.
  3. “Pollinators can’t see that layer of ownership we put over the land.” We need to support them. “I LOVE THE IDEA of something that can gradually get bigger, and be a beautifying thing in the neighbourhood,” Laurie Jones tells me, as we sip tea in my living room. This fall, Jones is shepherding and cultivating beauty and sustainability in the Saanich neighbourhood of Gorge-Tillicum, aiming to make it a better place for pollinators and pollinator-supporting habitats. Pollinators, like bees, butterflies, wasps, moths, beetles, birds, and bats enable the fruit to set in our gardens. About one out of every three bites of food exists because of their work. One native pollinator, like a leaf-cutter bee, can do the work of 20 non-native bees. Many populations of native bees (and honey bees) are declining precipitously because of parasites, habitat loss, insecticides, and climate change. Jones and a small group of my UVic Community Mapping students (Geography 380) are engaged in a community-university partnership. Together, they are aiming to improve the Gorge-Tillicum neighbourhood as habitat for pollinating species, creating a map that will show where pollinators and pollinator-supporting gardens reside, and where gaps exist that need to be filled as development in the area booms. Jones, a former librarian, artist and community volunteer, moved to the Gorge Tillicum neighbourhood in 2000. She’s a sprite; her eyes dance as she describes her garden, her connections with community, students, and art, and as she imagines what might be possible in a pollinator project. “What about an annual pollinator walk?” she muses. “A wildlife space, green roofs on every new development, pollinator signs that people can display in their gardens!” Laurie Jones aims to make the Gorge Tillicum neighbourhood more pollinator-friendly Community thrives when connections are made. Wanting to foster greater attachment to the neighbourhood she’d moved to, Jones joined the Gorge Tillicum Urban Farmers collective (GTUF), a group that formed around 2010. Members grow food and other plants in the Saanich neighbourhood. “When I hear people talking about how dull their neighbourhoods are, I think, you need this!” GTUF has taught Jones how to naturalize her garden—she doesn’t cut anything down in fall anymore, leaving habitat for bees and other insects to nest, lay eggs, and survive the winter. “I grew up with this idea of control, and I’m glad I’m not there anymore.” Within GTUF, members share harvests, seeds, recipes, support and information, and hold celebrations and garden tours (I’m a member, too). “I like to say that GTUF is where all things began,” says Jones. “Before that, I didn’t know anyone here.” GTUF will be one of the primary audiences for the pollinator project. A couple of years ago, Jones also joined the Gorge Tillicum Community Association’s Natural Areas Working Group (NAWG), a subcommittee of the association’s board. The working group has several projects, including installing fish symbols on stormwater drains, restoring Walter Park as a natural area, and working to remove invasive species throughout the neighbourhood. As part of her work with the NAWG, Jones decided to spearhead a pollinator corridor project in the area. “I nudge; little bit by little bit. Anyone can do something where they are.” “Pollinators can’t see that layer of ownership we put over the land,” she explains. They fly through neighbourhoods and land where there are ecosystems to support them. “As a property owner, it’s going from rights to responsibilities.” If a bee flies along Obed or Orelia Street, she wants it to have places to feed, nest, and hibernate. In partnership with Jones, her cohort of students is creating materials to educate the public on pollinators and pollinator-supporting plants, as well as doing co-envisioned outreach and community mapping. The map they’re asking residents to contribute to will show where pollinators have been seen, where plants grow that support them, and can also serve as an indication of where habitat is missing. Jones would eventually like to see the map used to direct development and encourage native plantings, green roofs and other amenities to support native species as the area densifies. Three other student groups from my class are helping communities to map aspects of place that they find important. The Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea is creating a map of places children can find marine life in the region. The Saanich Peninsula Environmental Coalition is working to build support for its bioregional framework, and students are doing outreach in local high schools and collating a map and descriptions of local social and environmental organizations in the area. NatuR&D is working with students as they create short educational videos on pollinators and mother trees in the region, in advance of a year long mapping blitz in the region to support climate change mitigation. The projects the students work on often continue for a year or more. Each cohort hands their work off to the incoming class. Instead of writing essays that end up at the bottom of a drawer, students thus complete projects that actually make a positive difference in the region. But perhaps most importantly, a map created by a community is a democratizing force; it eschews the top-down power structures of most official maps, instead recognizing the individual contributions and sense of place that each participant carries. Story reigns in a community map; stories identify and celebrate connection to place, even as they also serve as a form of citizen science. Jones is interested in pollinators because she feels keenly the ecological disasters that climate change portends. She is also a fabric artist, and is currently creating a three-metre-square fabric quilt. Each square is a story she brings with her into this new climate-changing world. “I visualize it as a way to open conversations. It says, ‘here’s my story. What’s yours?’” Speaking of climate change, she says, “It’s going to be dark, but we can help one another, or at least have community.” The squares are made of painstakingly cut slices of colour, first tacked, then sewn into place to form collages of incredible intricacy. A detail, portraying Tod Inlet, in Laurie Jone’s quilt “I was inspired by Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice,” Jones says. “And I took that metaphor. How do we process this?” One square is the story of a braided bridge constructed by a South American community; another is a story she heard from Nikki Wright, who heads marine restoration for SeaChange. Wright’s story was a realization that the restoration of SṈIDȻEȽ, or Tod Inlet will take generations. In Jones’ depiction, the forests’ green reflects in a swirl of blue and white inlet, while the century old pilings left from the area’s cement factory ring the moonscape of the ocean bottom. “How lovely it was to hear someone weighted down by the scope of the work required [and] finding that weight lifted by the epiphany that change requires a community,” Jones wrote when sending me the images. While we are chatting, fellow GTUF member Olivia Anderson shows up at my door with a loaf of bread still warm from the oven. “Thank you again for the tomatillos and the quince,” she says. “This has spelt, red fife and rye.” The bread was amazing. Anderson, also a retired librarian, has transformed her entire front yard (a block away) into an oasis of food and flowers. Laurie laughs. This is what she means by community. On November 6, from 11:30am – 3:30pm, the GTCA group students and Laurie will hold an event at the Gorge Park Community Gardens (Gorge Road just south of Tillicum Road), celebrating pollinators, pollinating plants, educating on how to create better pollinator corridors, and helping the public to create a map of pollinator-friendly areas in the neighbourhood. Come join the fun. There will be native seeds for giveaway from Satinflower Nurseries, educational resources, activities for kids, and an opportunity to tell your story about pollinators and plants on a map. Maleea Acker, PhD, completed her doctorate in Human Geography (Geopoetics) in September. She teaches at the University of Victoria; part of her dissertation will appear as the poetry book Hesitating Once to Feel Glory with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2022.
  4. Turning the negative of invasive species into the positive of art. IF YOU’VE WALKED along the forested paths of Beacon Hill, near the end of Cook Street, or through Gorge Park’s groves, near the reversing falls at Tillicum Bridge, you may have seen Tori McLaverty’s sculptures. Spheres in the trees, hanging by woven rope. Some twisted into flowers, some a series of interlocking circles, like the rings of Saturn. Some are small, only inches wide. Others span six feet or more, suspended from branches in clusters, as mobiles, or singular, an organic nest of curves against the forest’s straight trunks. Occasionally, there is a heart or a peace sign woven into the sphere. The hanging sculptures can be found as far from Downtown as Elk Lake, the Interurban rail trail, and the Galloping Goose. Sculpture by Tori McLaverty The spheres and weavings are made of organic materials, but not native species. “I was talking to a Victoria Parks worker about ivy and invasives,” McLaverty tells me during our meeting at Gorge Park Community Gardens. He had volunteered to remove ivy and blackberry from Beacon Hill. When he learned how destructive invasives can be to local ecosystems, he decided to keep pulling, but start using the remnants as his primary materials. “I started with peace signs. Then spiderwebs. Then Valentine’s day hearts. That was all in Beacon Hill Park,” he pauses for breath, “A hater kept tearing them down and throwing them off the cliff.” After removing the invasives, he twists the ivy vines, dethorns and loops the canes, and thus restores the forest. Art in the region’s parks is usually a more formally arranged production. Saanich hosted the Gorge on Art festival prior to COVID-19; in early 2021, Kaitlin McManus created seven mindful interventions along the waterway called “Sense of Belonging: A Creative Mindfulness Walk in Nature.” The Sooke to Sidney Rock Hunt encourages residents to paint a rock and hide it for others to find. The City of Victoria, however, discourages unsanctioned art, instead providing steps for community or business-led mural projects. McLaverty tells me that he is a retired drag queen and sex worker from Winnipeg. His mother is a Dënédeh First Nation from Northern Manitoba; his father is Irish. In 2012, McLaverty moved to Victoria to join his mother, a retired art teacher, and his sister. He wanted a fresh start: a close friend had died in Winnipeg; a ten-year relationship had finished. Six days after he arrived on the island, his mother died. “I did art before, but it was my face and my clothing,” he tells me, laughing. He won “Entertainer of the Year” in 2000 at the Lucky Stars Drag club, where he played “Vanna Not So White.” He pauses to point out a Great Blue Heron flying over us, then continues. “Whenever I’m with my art work, people don’t hesitate to talk to me,” and so when he feels bad, he goes to a park to weave. His work has attracted attention. “I knew someone would notice,” he says, “but I didn’t think past that. The response has been unreal,” with write-ups in local papers, offers of money for whatever he happens to be working on, and commissions for people’s own properties. When he’s not working at his art, he also collects bottles. He lived briefly with the homeless community that took up residence in Regina Park, and now lives in an apartment on the Gorge. “My work is about doing good, and being good.” McLaverty’s work seems to occupy a realm closer to many landscape artists in Canada, such as Peter Von Tiesenhausen or Marlene Creates, who use natural materials to build installations and interventions in their local environments. To halt pipeline development, Von Tiesenhausen took out copyright on his 800 acres of land in Alberta in 1996, claiming it as a work of art. His work is characterized by the pursuit of ecological sustainability, as well as examination of large forces—birth, death, nature, growth, and decay. He has launched charred boats filled with earth into the Bow River; he has woven sculptures from willow and left them to slowly sink into the prairie; each year he constructs another panel of a white picket fence he has been building and painting for over 25 years. The previous years stretch behind the most recent, slowly weathering and decaying. Marlene Creates, a Newfoundland artist, explores the imprint humans make on landscape. One photo series documents outdoor sleeping places—and the flattened grasses her body creates—during a multi-day walk around the island. She assembles stones as sculptures, photographs her hand on rocks and tree trunks, and is slowly altering her own acreage through installations of poems in situ. Art as installation in landscape can be a way of marking presence, creating place, and collaborating with the natural world rather than thinking oneself separate from it. After we sit for a while, McLaverty takes me to the forest overlooking the Gorge Waterway, where we can see the tide rushing in. “I climb up this one to hang out with the owls,” he says, pointing to a mature alder tree. “And here,” he says, pointing to a log, “I like to sit and make the sculptures. It’s quiet.” The ground is littered with old ivy whips and dead branches. Two of his sculptures—spheres inside spheres, twined together—dangle from the branch of a Douglas-fir. The forest looks archetypal; freed from invasive ivy the trunks soar. Artists create what they see, even if it can’t yet be seen by others. “I noticed in the trees things that weren’t there yet. I saw shapes in the trees. I chose the trees because they’re the ones that speak to me.” He stops to whistle at a hummingbird that zooms by us in the forest, and then we continue walking through his work of art, arriving back to the parking lot, where he gives me the six-foot blackberry sphere with an intricate ivy flower interior that he’s been carrying. It’s now hanging from a tree in my yard. Maleea Acker, PhD, completed her doctorate in Human Geography (Geopoetics) in September. She teaches at the University of Victoria; part of her dissertation will appear as the poetry book Hesitating Once to Feel Glory with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2022.
  5. Could oldgrowth specklebelly save the Fairy Creek Rainforest? Not unless Horgan keeps his promises about species-at-risk legislation. IN A FEW REMAINING OLD-GROWTH FORESTS on Vancouver Island, a rare species of lichen, the oldgrowth specklebelly, Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, lives on the branches and trunks of trees. Hanging in draping lobes, its topside is the colour of a pale robin’s egg, its underside a pale peachy-pink, speckled with white, raised spots and brown speckles. It has been found in only 41 localities in BC, all of them north of the Nitinat River. Until now. “I’m at peace when I’m out there,” Natasha Lavdovsky says. A Princeton graduate and Master’s of Fine Arts student, Lavdovsky works with lichens in her art. She is also an amateur lichenologist. In July, she was at Fairy Creek working on an art project. In the branches of a tree that had fallen across a logging road, she found a small population of this specklebelly lichen, a blue-listed, species of concern. Her find was on slope outside of the Fairy Creek watershed ridgeline. But the only part of Fairy Creek protected by BC’s two-year logging deferment is the riparian zone in the watershed valley, which leaves the area where she found the oldgrowth specklebelly vulnerable. “There’s a cutblock where the lichen lives that is already partly clearcut.” Lavdovsky tells me. “The road went right through the lichen zone. The whole area is up for grabs.” Natasha Lavdovsky looking at oldgrowth specklebelly growing side by side with Lobaria linita (the greener lichen), on a tree marked with falling boundary tape, indicating the edge of a future clearcut beside a creek/riparian reserve (photo by Natasha Lavdovsky) BC currently has no species-at-risk legislation, though Premier Horgan was elected on the promise to pass this into law four years ago. Currently, BC has two systems classifications for species at risk. Its red, blue and yellow lists are comprised by the BC Conservation Data Centre and give additional protection to red and blue-listed species. Listed species are supposed to inform conservation priorities in the province. The second classification system was created by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), an independent advisory panel to the federal minister of environment. According to COSEWIC’s 2010 report, oldgrowth specklebelly is a species of “special concern,” which means that it is particularly sensitive to human activities or natural events, and its numbers have declined enough that “its persistence is increasingly threatened.” The specklebelly thrives in nutrient rich areas, within the drip zones of old yellow cedar trees or near the ocean fog zone, where it can harvest nutrients from the sea air. It is a nitrogen-fixing lichen. It takes nitrogen from the atmosphere and disperses it through its tree’s drip line. Like other lichen and mosses, it sequesters carbon. It spreads when pieces of its thallus body break off and land in another habitable spot—that is to say, it spreads extremely slowly. For Trevor Goward, a naturalist and lichenologist who lives and studies lichen ecology in the Clearwater Valley, BC, and has been an advisor to the COSEWIC panel for decades, the key species that allows oldgrowth specklebelly to exist is yellow cedar. The issue, he says, is “not the lichen, it’s what it points to: the power of BC’s old-growth trees.” Yellow cedar lives longer than any other BC tree (up to 2,000 years). During their extraordinary lifespan, they become nutrient gatherers and feeders of other species around them. Coastal sea fog contains ocean nutrients; the moisture condenses on the cedar’s limbs and drips to the ground. The nutrients from this drip zone feed other trees, and even change the bark chemistry of the amabalis fir (Pacific silver fir), making it into a habitat for specklebelly. Oldgrowth Specklebelly lichen (photo by Natasha Lavdovsky) Lavdovsky found a small colony of oldgrowth specklebelly on the limbs of that first tree near Fairy Creek. It turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. She has returned half a dozen times this summer and found more at the edge of the clearcut: 20-foot long patches on two trees. By time of publication, she had found 55 trees with specklebelly. The lichen community was bisected by the logging road, including trees buried in road-building rubble with the bottom 10-feet of their trunks covered in the rare lichen. “I’d like to find out who the forester was who approved that cutblock,” she says, “and hold them accountable.” Specklebelly is only present, Goward says, because the yellow cedar are there to feed them. “The lichen is an outward manifestation of the gift of nutrients from the yellow cedar. The trees have created this community of other organisms that benefit from that knack they’ve taught themselves.” A young yellow cedar cannot provide this habitat; only ancient forests—what Goward calls “antique forests”—provide this service. “Cutting down these trees is immoral,” says Goward. Lavdovsky spent time analyzing lichens at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Gatineau, Quebec, and she is taking the find seriously. She approached Goward and fellow lichenologist Troy McMullin, as well as Loys Maingon, a registered professional biologist, and Andy McKinnon (of famed Pojar and McKinnon BC field guides) to identify the specklebelly lichen and confirm her methodology for documenting its extent. “I thought if you find something that’s a listed species, it means you can’t [mess] with it. It’s not the case. I was really surprised, through this process, to see how terrible the laws are in BC when it comes to biodiversity conservation. As a province that prides itself on the natural environment, well, it’s…all just unfettered extraction on stolen land.” A large population of Oldgrowth Specklebelly lichen on a tree trunk at the edge of a logging road. The pile of felled trees in the background are from the road building. (photo by Natasha Lavdovsky) Lavdovsky values the relationships between people and land. She is aware of the complexity of settler/Indigenous relations, and of finding a rare species in a watershed that is itself a contested place. “It’s a problematic position to be in as a white settler: finding a rare species that’s only rare because of white, colonial, destructive, extractive industries.” But she is enamoured by lichens, and their complex role in a forest’s health. “You can’t call a lichen an ‘it’; it’s a ‘they,’” Lavdovsky tells me. “They’re a fungus and an algae and a yeast, and at times a cyanobacteria…They are metaphors for an ecosystem, for a community.” Natasha Lavdovsky. Self Portrait, 2020. Lichens were once described by Goward as “fungi who have discovered agriculture.” They are a unique partnership of species that work together to achieve what neither could do separately. They were one of the first to re-green (and blue and yellow…) the land after the last glaciation. They help rocks to hold more water, increasing moisture in landscapes. They can change the pH of rainwater, balancing the acidity of a forest. They’re also excellent indicators of healthy old-growth forests; many don’t appear in young or previously-logged forests. Lavdovsky is afraid that with so much logging in BC in the last decade, the chances of oldgrowth specklebelly crawling up the endangered species list is high. But when she spoke to the biologists doing COSEWIC’s new status report, they told her it was “unlikely they’ll be able to make it down” to see her discovery. She wonders whether it might be because of its proximity to the Fairy Creek blockade—or a lack of funding. “This story isn’t just about lichen,” she says, “It’s not about trees. It’s about whole ecosystems. And that’s one of the problems with the approach of our conservation system.” Goward agrees and expands it to “the capitalist neoliberal agenda. No one’s given this any thought because it would impact BC’s bottom line.” The underside speckles of the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, seen through a 10x hand lens (photo by Natasha Lavdovsky) Currently, instead of halting old-growth logging to save species like oldgrowth specklebelly and the ancient cedars that feed them, BC has begun a second round of evaluation, bringing together an independent Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel, after its 2020 publication of the Strategic Review of BC Old Growth Forest Management (if you can tell the difference between these two, let me know). Goward is skeptical about this new panel. “Basically, the whole thing is choreographed,” he tells me. “You can feel the gears moving, but they’ll wait until almost nothing is left before making an announcement to stop.” Goward also believes that the presence of oldgrowth specklebelly means that the forest has existed, without the presence of large-scale forest fires, for much longer than the current yellow cedars’ life spans. “When you find a population as large as Tasha found, it means that the forest has been there for thousands of years. I’d be astonished if anyone is able to find evidence of charcoal. [Those trees] have been standing in place since glaciation.” For reference, the last glaciation was 10,000 years ago. Lichen diversity is higher in older forests, and his studies show a continued increase into the sixth century and beyond. “A forest that’s 600 years old is not the same as a 2,000 year old forest.” The diversity just keeps growing. Lavdovsky’s art works address the other-than-human world, “using temporality, seasonality, and the agency of organic materials as integral parts of its methodology.” Her website features a plethora of stunning works, which engage with species to produce photographs, installations, textiles, natural dyes and sculptures. “Moss Chair” art installation by Natasha Lavdovsky In her current work with lichen, she first obtains the chemical data of various lichen species in a particular location. She then uses the data set like a musical score, creating a visualization and then a sonification of the data. “Each lichen…will have a particular tonal sound or chord.” Together, they create a soundscape, an auditory experience of the lichens from a particular place. “Lichens have given me so much joy,” she says. “It’s really important to me to have reciprocal relationship with the ecosystem of non-humans that I’m a part of.” When she found the oldgrowth specklebelly, it seemed to her an opportunity to “give back, to perform reciprocity.” As a result of her find, other biologists have filed a formal complaint with BC Forest Practices Board against the negligence of whoever approved the cutblock. The board is currently pushing back against the complaint because the specklebelly was only blue-listed. The resolution of the complaint will take up to two years. She also reached out to Teal Jones, and an office worker told her to send an email to info@tealjones.ca (the same email that receives all the complaints about logging in Fairy Creek). When she said that perhaps this email would get lost in the hundreds of complaints sent by concerned citizens around the world, the office worker gave a verbal shrug. Morning sea fog obscuring the view of a recent clearcut, near the area where the rare lichen was found (photo by Natasha Lavdovsky) Lavdovsky is also in the process of reaching out to a hereditary chief of the Pacheedaht Nation, Victor Peter, as well as Bill Jones. “This is the privilege of a lifetime for me,” she tells me. “Not just to be [at Fairy Creek] but to find this lichen and try to help it be protected and represented.” Lichens are misrepresented and overlooked, she says. “But they do so much for us, and so much for the forest.” When Lavdovsky spoke with Andy McKinnon, he told her that humans have only discovered and recorded perhaps one or two percent of the species in an old-growth forest. “How come we don’t know this?” she wants to know. “We don’t really understand [the forest] yet—we don’t know.” Eleven years have passed since COSEWIC’s last report, and the committee is currently completing a new assessment of endangered wildlife. Lavdovsky is confident that, thanks to logging, fewer confirmed localities will be identified this year. Even so, these classifications systems lack “teeth,” as Goward puts it, to actually prevent destruction of species. Only stand-alone species-at-risk legislation can do this. Until then, oldgrowth specklebelly and its innumerable community members will have to wait for Horgan to keep his promises, and hope that a forest fire or a timber cruiser doesn’t get them first. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which is in its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  6. Langford has been scraping away its native ecosystems at a furious pace in the last year—but change may be afoot. ON A SMALL TRIANGLE OF LAND bordered by McCallum Road, Leigh Road and the Island Highway, piles of slash line a dirt entrance road. Stumps of Garry oak, cedar and Douglas-fir trees lie upended. Bulldozer tracks criss-cross the higher areas, but when I visit on May 9 there are still unbroken areas, where mossy bedrock gives way to clusters of shooting stars, fawn lilies, and flowering camas—the traditional carbohydrate food source of Coast Salish peoples—a lily that has been cultivated for thousands of years. A patch of licorice fern just clipped by a bulldozer’s cat tracks lies exposed and spattered with upturned soil. The undisturbed patches look like they could be from Thetis Lake Park, and in actuality, the park is just down the road. But outside of the park border, it seems every inch of the municipality of Langford is up for grabs by developers. And native species are quickly disappearing. It’s in this few-acre parcel, named as part of the 1100/1130 McCallum Road Development, that residents of the region are mobilizing to salvage native species. When I arrive, Adam Birch and his wife Katie, with their infant daughter, are already at the site. A post on Facebook, written by Jodie Densmore, advised members of the Saanich Native Plants Restoration Group that the site had been logged but that many native species remained unmolested. “It’s heartbreaking to see the excavators plow over the camas,” she writes, “Next step is for them to scrape the top soil off so no guarantee [the plants] will be there next week.” Over 60 comments resulted from the post; one musing whether this was the last intact Garry oak meadow in Langford. Rescuing native plants in Langford. Photograph by Kylie Buday The McCallum site was offered for sale as part of a 50-acre land assembly by Colliers in 2019. The land was rezoned for mixed-use Employment Zone 3 in 2020 for KeyCorp Consulting Ltd, on behalf of owner Leanne Kramer. Rezoning and approval occurred even though a First Nations midden was identified on part of the property in 2000. The midden was likely near Florence Lake’s shores, which means that the upland site, where I and others harvested, was likely a camas production meadow, cultivated and maintained by First Nations for millennia. While Katie holds their child, Adam and I teeter over the freshly plowed soil, searching for patches of intact native plants. I focus on the rocky fringes, where, using a pitchfork or a hari-hari knife, I can fulcrum entire chunks of soil off the rock, including native grasses, camas bulbs, liquorice fern, and mosses. The feeling is sickening. I am used to treading lightly in these ecosystems, not forcing 10,000 years of post-glacial accumulations of biomass off the bedrock. “I feel a bit horrible doing this,” Adam concurs. Even though we are rescuing plants that would otherwise be scraped away or buried, there’s something sacriligious about the act of stabbing down to find an intact camas bulb, then pushing its neighbouring species out of the way while the flowering top of the bulb waves tenderly above. It’s difficult to see how this development site could become an inviting place to live or work, given its proximity to the highway. It’s even more difficult to see how identification of archaeological remains could warrant this sentence in the February 10, 2020 staff report to Langford’s Planning, Zoning and Affordable Housing Committee: “Council may wish to have a covenant registered to require a qualified archaeologist to assess the site, prior to site disturbance, and have the applicant complete the recommendations of the archeologist’s report as a condition of development.” Nowhere in the report is development not recommended. Basically, staff urge the committee to check the boxes, then continue on with the destruction. Langford has been destroying and scraping away its native ecosystems at a furious pace in the last year, and now these remnant sites are some of the last left to develop. One need only look at the face of Skirt Mountain, where a grey rocky moonscape now looms over Costco and Millstream road. But the pace of development, which won Langford “Best City” award from Maclean’s Magazine and an economic development award, isn’t appreciated by everyone. A new Facebook group, “Langford Voters for Change,” has gained over 1100 members in the last four months. On it, residents of the municipality complain about the breakneck pace of development, the clearcutting of forests they used to walk through, the viewscapes obliterated, the noise from blasting, the fake green astroturf Langford uses instead of living grass on boulevards, and the loss of biodiversity. The group’s aim is to “coordinate, motivate, and facilitate positive change in Langford’s policies and decision making” and to address “the deep-seated systematic problems underlying our rapid growth.” READERS MAY BE FAMILIAR with my endless battle to naturescape my own front yard. Recently, I’ve moved on to the boulevard (Saanich issues boulevard gardening permits if you provide a drawing and a plan; in Victoria no permit is needed). Road work left the patch in front of my house bare and I’ve started a project to restore it into a native plant meadow, adding to the camas seeds I’ve been scattering for the last few years around the boulevard Garry oak tree. It’s been a long process. In February, Saanich’s contractors mistakenly reseeded the boulevard with invasive grasses, covering up over $200 in native plants and seed I had just added. But Saanich isn’t Langford. Kristen and James Miskelly of Saanich Native Plants donated a new spring wildflower seed mix and Saanich refunded me the cost of my first flat of seedlings. I purchased another couple of flats and planted and seeded the meadow again in April. After my visits to McCallum road, the camas, fawn lilies, shooting stars, Pacific sanicle and nodding onion I rescue also make their way into the meadow. Spring is the worst time to transplant native bulbs, but many seem to weather the trip. I also gave camas to friends, and donate more to PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱ (The Blossoming Place, a native plant nursery in W̱SÁNEĆ territory). Maleea Acker's boulevard, replanted with native plants, some from Langford. Many know the statistics of Garry oak meadows: less than 4 percent remain in BC; many of the species within their ecosystems are red- and yellow-listed by the BC Conservation Status Rank and COSEWIC (the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada). The Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem is also highly endangered, with less than one percent still existing in its natural state. Langford used to contain vast swaths of both of these. Now, not so much. Many in the Langford Voters for Change group ask why there aren’t protections for these species and habitats. It’s because there is no tree protection bylaw in Langford, and because zoning is a municipal issue, not a provincial one. Could Langford residents fight for a tree bylaw? Yes, if there was enough support. The CRD’s urban containment boundary also encompasses the entirety of Langford, meaning there is no curb to urban development within the municipality’s boundaries. I MEET A FRIEND, Kylie Buday, at the Langford site a few days later, when I come back for more plants. She takes a picture of her daughter carefully removing an Oregon grape shrub from the rubble. Around her, the heaved meadow soil glints dry in the late afternoon light. One might ask how a species like the Garry oak (Quercus garryanus), which is red-listed, or the pink fawn lily (Erythronium revolutum), which is yellow-listed, could end up being destroyed by the thousands if they are part of an endangered ecosystem. That’s a good question. Maybe it’s time for us to stand up for what’s left, rather than dragging the remnants all over the region and hoping they’ll survive. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which is in its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  7. Image: Frances Litman in 2012 at the first CUP festival Frances Litman has a passion for bringing people together and fostering conversation around creative solutions to environmental problems. Go to story
  8. Litman has a passion for bringing people together and fostering conversation around creative solutions to environmental problems. LIKE MANY OF US, FRANCES LITMAN receives a lot of emails—about saving salmon streams and protecting water rights or forests; from environmental and human health organizations looking for support. As a photographer, she is used to seeing the world through many lenses. She thinks a great deal about the relationships between the arts, the environment, health, even the disappearing old-growth forests in BC. To Litman, it all seems connected—all facets of planetary health. But by 2012, with so many organizations asking for support, Litman’s despair was beginning to grow. The problems seemed insurmountable. “I [felt I had] to do something,’” she tells me over a Zoom call this spring, while Indian plum was beginning to bloom in gardens and parks between my house in Saanich and hers in Esquimalt. “What can I do?” A communications and arts professional with a glowing personality and a large network of friends and community members, Litman also has a tonne of drive. “I want to be a good human and a good ancestor,” she says, her eyes shining at me through the screen. Litman wants us to stop feeling smug about our position here on the west coast of Canada, enjoying the Indian plum blossoms and luxuriating in the relative peace in our part of the world, while many other regions go up in flames or disappear under massive floods. “We need to recognize our privilege, put our energy into creating a future that’s livable for everyone.” Recognizing that climate change and ecosystem protections don’t happen unless people feel inspired, Litman decided to build an annual event—tied in with Earth Day in April—that would allow the public to meet and interact with people she calls the “hero workers”: artists, environmentalists, activists, musicians. She called it “Creatively United for the Planet (CUP)”; the festival’s first year in 2012 provided concurrent entertainment and education—inspiring people with good music while teaching people about climate change, biodiversity and a whole host of other environmental issues. “We had Daniel Lapp, The Getting Higher Choir, Paul Horn, and films, music, exhibits. It was the first opportunity for new food trucks in the region. And the whole thing was zero waste.” The event drew thousands; they had only “a bag and a half of garbage” by the end, she proudly tells me. Frances Litman at the 2012 Creatively United for the Planet Festival. Photo by Daniel Etiene Litman held eight more years of CUP festivals, helping to bring visibility to non-profits and provide an outlet for positive action in the region. Then in 2020, a familiar refrain: COVID hit, and along with the rest of the world, she had to pivot to an online event using her website [creativelyunited.org]. She held a week-long free festival that included First Nations Elders, youth panels, a webinar series and a whole new website to connect residents and celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The pivot, however, took its toll. Now, she needs help to continue her mission. CUP’s website features a variety of solutions to today’s complex environmental and social issues, including food, housing, nature, arts, conservation, transportation, zero waste, energy and climate. Many topics contain tips and fact sheets, articles and documentaries. She has led initiatives on environmental stewardship with Rock Heights School and the Esquimalt Climate Organizers. The CUP site also hosts several standalone organizations within its pages: the Ecoforestry Institute Society, the new iteration of Merv Wilkinson’s Wildwood forest in Yellowpoint; Project Drawdown, a collaboration to reverse global warming; and Conversations for a One Planet region, UVic Professor Trevor Hancock’s informal network of citizens. Litman wants the site to function as a community resource, where organizations can post upcoming events and contribute to the community blogs. “A lot of people maybe think this is an ego thing for me; but someone has to be the spokesperson,” she emphasizes. Her climate partners include organizations like the Sierra Club but also groups of her own devising, like the Community Trees Matter Network which advocates for respectful development and urban tree preservation and protection in the Capital Region. No one who volunteers with Trees Matter had the money to create a stand-alone site, so she folded it into CUP. Litman smiles: she admits she has a habit of picking up on what needs doing in the region and just doing it if no one else comes forward. “We need to recognize that solutions for a better world are possible. We need to let go of the fear of change.” This spring, CUP is also featuring a Climate and Artists webinar series, which will continue every Wednesday from 11am-noon until May 19th. The breadth and depth of Litman’s site is prodigious. It also provides an environmental events calendar on which non-profits can post their events. She says, “I’d truly like to see [the site] become a community solutions hub, where everyone wins. It’s meant to lift everyone up.” But Litman doesn’t have staff. Other than the webmaster, volunteers keep the site running, but what she really needs is an expert in coding, someone who could set up automatic curation and display of events from websites across the region, and someone who could organize, streamline and clarify the site’s pages. “We really need people with the ability to get this [information] out. But when you’re on a limited budget, it’s hard.” The festivals, the website and the outreach are all labours of love, done off the side of her desk while she continues as a photographer and communications professional. She laughs, her enthusiasm bubbling through the computer screen, “I thought, ‘I’m going to kill myself if I keep doing this.’” Last spring, Litman was diagnosed with breast cancer. Since surgery, she has taken a step back from the work of Creatively United, and tried to find balance in her life. “It was too much work and too little self care,” she admits. “I find this work so energizing and encouraging, and a positive lift, but I’ve been totally out of my comfort zone. COVID has made me realize I’m an introvert. I can’t do everything. I can’t do it all.” Still, Litman appeared in Saanich News just this week, miming pulling the winners for a draw for the Mountain Road Forest fundraiser. CUP partnered with three artists to enhance the fundraising efforts led by Habitat Acquisition Trust for the protection of a 49-acre forest in Saanich. (Go and donate if you haven’t already; the forest is beautiful and the fundraiser ends at the end of April.) Litman’s next episode of the Climate and Artists Series, on energy, climate and transportation, airs on Wednesday, April 7 from 11am-noon. Registration is free. “I feel that people need to wake up,” she tells me, her hand to her chest and her curls shaking. She smiles again, “We don’t sense [the urgency] on this beautiful island, but climate change is going to wreak havoc in ways we can’t even imagine. I feel it’s a moral obligation to help people recognize that solutions exist.” There’s an exhaustion hovering over many of us after after a full year of pandemic stress and uncertainty. We’re all tired. But somehow, Litman is still egging us on toward a liveable future. “This is the perfect opportunity for us to pivot.” Explore Frances Litman’s labour of love at https://creativelyunited.org/ Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which is in its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  9. Image: Some local suppliers of wood treated with arsenic warn customers; others don't. Allan Galambos’ fight against CCA treated wood products. Go to story
  10. Allan Galambos’ fight against CCA treated wood products. IN 2016, PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER Allan Galambos and his wife moved to Cordova Bay to enjoy retirement. His wife was hoping to garden but the back yard had a significant ash pile. Rather than mixing the ash into the ground, they made the decision to gather it for disposal and test a sample. It was a good thing they did. The testing revealed an extremely high level of arsenic—344 parts per million (ppm), nearly 14 times the allowable level for livestock grazing in BC—and high levels of chromium and copper. One tablespoon of the ash would have killed a person; 5 tablespoons a cow. The ash was a result of burning chromated copper arsenate (CCA) treated garden posts; the water-soluble inorganic pesticide is used to make posts more rot resistant, as it repels both fungi and bugs. You have probably seen CCA treated wood—it has a distinctive green stain and pressure treatment marks. And you might remember when it was removed from use in playground construction, in the early 2000s. Over 4 million CCA treated posts are still produced each year in BC. The International Journal of Women’s Dermatology links skin cancer in the USA to CCA treated wood. Galambos found a disposal company to remove the ash and several tonnes of soil, as Hartland Landfill wouldn’t take it. Leachability for the ash was shown to be 4.13ppm, almost twice the landfill’s limit. Thousands of dollars later, Galambos had a new retirement project: figure out why this poison-laced wood was still being sold, unlabelled, at hardware stores around the region in 2020. Treated fence posts and ties read for sale at a local supply outlet The issue has turned out to be an all-consuming bureaucratic tangle for Galambos. But now, residents also have an opportunity to weigh in on the sale and regulation of the posts. The Canadian Standards Association Group has opened a public review on wood preservation. “What really worries me is that these ties are the perfect size for building raised beds,” Galambos told me when we met for tea on my back deck last fall. They are especially tempting because they often cost less than a less toxic post (treated with copper azole), they last longer without decaying, and they’re not individually tagged with a warning label. The two types are often sold side-by-side. “The residential lumber industry now requires copper azole treated lumber to be labelled with an end tag,” says Galambos, but “nothing like that has evolved for wood treated with CCA.” I have four posts in my garden, holding up my raspberry canes and supporting an aging pear tree. Fortunately, they’re not the green ones; but they easily could have been. Allan Galambos poses in front of arsenic-treated garden posts at a local supplier’s yard In 2003, the wood treating industry agreed worldwide with authorities, including Canada, to voluntarily withdraw CCA treatment of residential lumber, but would continue to treat wood for industrial use (utility polls, bridge beams) and for agricultural purposes (where the posts are used in fencing or staking). The sale of the posts is supposed to be restricted, but a government game of “pass the buck” has meant that the posts occupy a limbo zone that leaves residents at risk of buying and handling these pesticides without knowledge. Burning, touching or cutting these posts without using personal protective equipment can mean inhalation or absorption of arsenic. Poisoning results in skin swelling and lesions, abdominal pain, cramping, tingling, and increased risk of cancer. Galambos reached out to various levels of government in 2018 to get clarification on the regulation and labelling of CCA treated posts. He shared the responses he received with me. Through his correspondence with the Federal Minister of Environment and the Minister of Health, and the BC Provincial Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, Galambos discovered that though regulations for use are in place, sale and labelling regulations are not preventing local hardware stores from offering the posts; neither are they mandating labelling. The Minister of Health argues that “most residential uses of CCA treated wood were voluntarily withdrawn in 2003 by North American CCA producers.” But as Galambos discovered, this doesn’t mean it still isn’t being sold to residents. Galambos toured hardware stores around the region last summer; he found green posts at most stores, including Buckerfields, Slegg Building Materials, Integrity Sales, Russell Nursery, and Rona. In some cases, they were side by side with end-labelled Copper Azole treated brown lumber, which is significantly less dangerous to health but costs more. If you didn’t know the history or dangers of CCA, wouldn’t you choose the cheaper wood product? Another problem is that the CCA posts aren’t labelled. In 2018, the Federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) responded to another letter from Galambos saying that “there is no requirement…to afix a pesticide label to the [CCA] treated lumber” because the wood is only sold for agricultural use. The Federal Minister of Health wrote that “CCA-treated wood must not be burned, except in authorized disposal facilities,” but wood products “are specifically excluded from…the Federal Hazardous Products Act,” which would mandate their labelling as toxic. The Provincial Ministry of Climate Change Strategy also passed on the issue, writing that “labelling inquiries concerning the protection of workers, are managed by the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System, under the Federal Hazardous Products Act and Regulations.” After Galambos found the CCA posts in local lumber supply stores, he sent letters to all of them, copying the PMRA, explaining the loophole and lack of labelling and asking them to voluntarily stop stocking the posts, since their residential use couldn’t be guaranteed. As of last fall, two stores had changed their practices: Slegg Building Materials and Buckerfields both put signage in place (a stapled tag on one out of 100 posts) identifying CCA treated wood products and advising customers on how to handle them. Warning to would-be customers of treated posts Galambos was also worried about the protection of workers who might be handling the posts without gloves, which he discovered is a WorkSafeBC responsibility. But WorkSafeBC, when Galambos contacted them, passed the responsibility for protection of workers on to the employer. The Federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency is in charge of inspections to make sure CCA treated products are being handled properly. When Galambos wrote to them asking for findings of noncompliance, there was no response. Various regulatory bodies seemed to be pointing the finger at one another, while Wood Preservation Canada (WPC) quietly kept producing and selling the posts. When Galambos wrote a post on the issue on the Canadian Standards Association Communities page, WPC contacted him. “They called me, saying ‘I will handle this offline with you. Let’s talk, but stop writing,’” says Galambos. In 2019, Green Party MP Elizabeth May wrote to the Minister of Health on behalf of Galambos. She outlined his concerns and urged the immediate requirement that all agricultural posts treated with CCA be labelled. She also made a call to restrict the sale of the posts, while aiming toward a stop in production. Minister Petitpas responded, writing “CCA treated wood is not generally available at lumber yards that serve the general public.” When I phoned around this February, Slegg, Buckerfield and Rona said they no longer carried any green posts, but a visit in person tells a different story. Slegg, Integrity and Buckerfields all had green posts available in the yard. One post in the pile had an arsenic warning label. Online, Rona lists the CCA posts as “round posts”; their ends have been sawn flat, making them perfect for garden bed planters or retaining walls. There is no mention of the posts’ toxicity on their website. Has Galambos’ persistence scared distributors into at least identifying the arsenic content? “I’ve talked to the Saanich Environment Committee, to the City of Victoria, and I’d like to get a resolution to the Union of BC Municipalities,” Galambos tells me. Back in the fall, he rued that “the only way might be to tackle the individual stores and post negative informative reviews online for each green post sold.” This seemingly endless process of whack-a-mole may have increased labelling, but it has not prevented the sale of the posts. Meanwhile, the government bodies continue to refer Galambos to one another. Until February 18, anyone can write in support of more stringent regulations for CCA treated wood. Email your comments to Kat Crew, Project Manager for the Canadian Standards Association, which is currently reviewing standards for treated wood. Here, you can voice your support for the removal of CCA treated posts from any residential lumber stores. In the meantime, we have Galambos and his wife to thank for choosing not to till that ash into their backyard soil. Kat Crew, Project Manager with the CSA, can be reached at kat.crew@csagroup.org. Galambos recommends also copying the Federal Minister of Health, Patty Hajdu at hcminister.ministresc@canada.ca. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which just entered its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  11. Posted January 25, 2021 Gerald Harris and other volunteers are making progress towards introducing chum to the meandering city creek. Go to story
  12. Gerald Harris and other volunteers are making progress towards introducing chum to the meandering city creek. IN 1978, GERALD HARRIS wrote a short series of articles on Vancouver’s buried and long lost watercourses. The articles were eventually collected and published as a short book: Vancouver’s Old Streams, and offered by the Vancouver Aquarium in 1989. In the book, Harris weaves stories from fishers and “old-timers” with research from the Vancouver Archives into a compelling portrait of a city of salmonberry-lined pools and streams, laden with coho, chum and rainbow trout, including steelhead. Forty years later, it seems fitting he has become one of the chief caretakers and protectors of Bowker Creek and its watershed. Now, he’s set to try to bring spawning salmon back to the heart of Victoria. Bowker is a small creek that stretches from its headwaters at the University of Victoria, down to its mouth in Oak Bay, near Glenlyon Norfolk School. In 2011, the Bowker Creek Initiative, a multi-jurisdictional effort, published the Bowker Creek Blueprint, a document endorsed by almost a dozen community associations and municipal governments (including the Friends of Bowker Creek Society [FBCS], with whom Harris volunteers). The blueprint sets forth a 100-year plan of action to support creek restoration. Harris has volunteered with the FBCS since 2009. A tall, genial man, he worked as a fisheries technician, then a special education instructor until retirement. We walked the creek edge this winter, strolling from the Oak Bay Recreation centre along a daylighted section below Oak Bay High, then over a culverted portion near the Oak Bay Fire Hall, ending at the Monteith section of the creek. Passionate but a slow talker, he loves the teamwork that volunteering with the society allows. “I’m realizing that this work is moving along my consciousness and my philosophy,” he mused. He understands humans as beings within a larger ecology. “We’re ecosystems ourselves, and we’re part of larger ecosystems.” His volunteer work actualizes these life beliefs. Gerald Harris holds up a sample of water taken from Bowker Creek Bowker Creek has suffered under over 100 years of urbanization, including stream channel degradation, culverting of the creek waters, clearcutting of the watershed for development, runoff that pollutes the water, habitat loss, invasive species, and flooding, which causes erosion of the creek bank. It’s one of many creeks in the Victoria area that almost completely disappeared under a tide of development in the early 1900s. Part of the creek runs under the Hillside Mall shopping centre parking lot. Other areas have been daylighted but remain encased in artificially straightened and deepened corridors. All of these factors increase the creek’s flow speed, which results in less water soaking into the watershed, flooding and big variations in flow. In winter, the creek is too high; in summer, it’s too dry. The Victoria area’s named watersheds. The Bowker Creek watershed is on the far right side (click to enlarge) Harris’ work involves completing habitat assessments of various sections of the creek, restoring sections by removing invasive species such as yellow flag iris and planting native species like Skunk cabbage, cattail and willow, and monitoring flow and water quality. But this past year, he’s set his sights higher. Harris is working with about 35 volunteers, scientists and with Derek Shrubsole, a teacher at Oak Bay High who has won a national teaching award for his work building stream ecology into his classes. Together, they want to reintroduce chum salmon into Bowker. They are currently completing a streamkeepers assessment of the creek. Gathering data to prove the stream has good water quality and sufficient natural habitat to support salmon is key to getting support from DFO. “It’s an interactive process,” he explains, “even applying [for funding] creates interest and will and opens doors.” Harris is also working with Peninsula Streams Society, which helps to coordinate stream restoration and habitat conservation in the region. Peninsula streams “really know small urban and rural salmon streams. They know how to put funding together, and they have lots of friends in the community. They have ways of getting boulders or gravel” for restoration work. The chum salmon’s lifecycle is ideal for the habitat, he tells me, “they’re a low hanging fruit, because they are in the ocean for the summer, when the flow gets low and the water heats up.” The chum return after the mid October rains wash pollution into and then out of the creek. Unlike coho, juvenile chum salmon also exit the stream for the ocean immediately after they hatch. Harris hopes to introduce the first baskets of eggs into gravel in winter 2022 in the Monteith area of the creek. It sits downstream of a long culverted section of the creek, which passes under the Oak Bay Fire Hall parking lot. Salmon most likely wouldn’t brave the culvert. But below it, a soft-banked area, overhung with snowberry and red osier dogwood, burbles. Several years ago, a group of volunteers helped remove invasive species, planted a garden and now maintain the section. “Teaching people about native gardening has been interesting,” he says. They’ve had to accustom themselves to a wilder look than much of Oak Bay cultivates. Deer also continue to be a problem—native bushes that should be 10 or more feet tall are small and heavily browsed. But Oak Bay Parks helps by bringing tree sections and mulch. Last fall at Monteith, they found invertebrates, including caddisfly and dobsonfly larvae, which aren’t found in poor water quality. “Findings like that are equivalent to a year’s worth of water sampling,” Harris says. Crayfish also live in the creek, as well as a small fish called three-spined stickleback. A natural, healthy creek meanders. Its flow is moderated by soft banks, good permeability of surrounding soils and an ability to expand widthwise rather than shoot down a narrowed channel. The only reason Bowker continues to be a year round stream is because of the underlying geology, Harris tells me. Underlying the UVic and Gordon Head areas is a large swath of glacial gravel that came down from Howe Sound and across the Salish Sea during the last Ice Age. Called a drumelin, the gravel collects, holds and then slowly discharges this water, releasing it out of the sides of the hill UVic sits on. “Mystic Spring and Mystic Vale and, I suspect, Mount Douglas are all benefiting from this pile of water.” Restoration of Bowker Creek can help control what happens to this water, says Harris. But people can also control what happens to rainwater the region (and the creek) receives over the winter. Impermeable surfaces, including pavement and building roofs, contribute to flooding, preventing the water from soaking in where it lands. Planting native species, using rain barrels and avoiding concrete can help a lot. Harris wants to start a campaign called “Does a raindrop feel wanted?” which would provide real time monitoring of flow rates and compare them to precipitation levels, so a game could actually be made of trying to slow a raindrop down as it moves from where it lands to the sea. Before COVID, the Friends of Bowker Creek Society did some creekside concerts as a fundraiser. During one, they set up an art table where people could write a message on a “fish” (a shape cut out of a rhododendron leaf), then take their fish down to the creek and let it take their messages. “It was a way of giving people a connection to place,” Harris remembers. Now, he wants those fish to actually swim. To support restoration on Bowker Creek and receive a tax deduction, donate to the Peninsula Streams Society and ask that the funds be directed towards Bowker Creek Restoration: https://peninsulastreams.ca/ Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which just entered its second printing. She is a PhD student, a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  13. Posted December 3, 2020 Photo: Bob McMinn at Mary Lake in the Highlands Without his stewardship, it’s unlikely Victoria would have the nearby forests it has. And at 96, he’s not finished yet. Go to story
  14. Without his stewardship, it’s unlikely Victoria would have the nearby forests it has. And at 96, he’s not finished yet. Bob McMinn at Mary Lake Nature Sanctuary (Photo by Koi Neah) “I’M A FIRM BELIEVER IN FOREST BATHING,” Bob McMinn tells me as we sit in the house that hangs over the green and pristine edges of Mary Lake in the District of the Highlands. The lake stretches out from the windows, framing the November colours of the far shore’s forest. “Two reasons I have lived to 96,” he tells me, “is my mother’s genes and I’ve lived in the woods all my life.” I’m in quarantine so that I can care for my 84-year-old father, so McMinn agrees it’s safe to meet me in person, albeit at a 6-foot distance. No worries there—I have to race to keep up with his long stride as we walk around Caleb Pike Heritage Park. I race again when I follow his car from Caleb Pike to Mary Lake. I feel a little decrepit beside him, a bit COVID-weary: too much teaching from the couch. At age 96, he demurs, he can’t walk as easily through a pathless wood without thinking about his balance. I feel my feet grow roots. McMinn has been a resident of the Highlands since 1953, when he and his wife Nancy first bought an old stone-faced log house on Millstream Road, but it burned down thanks to a chimney fire. The next year, they moved to 360 acres surrounding First Lake, or Mitchell Lake, which they purchased for $20,000. With a doctorate in ecology from UBC, McMinn went to work for the federal government, a researcher in forest ecology in the Kootenays first and then the white spruce forests in the Prince George Forest District. But part of his heart stayed in the forested area just north of Victoria, where one can still, even today, get lost in the woods. At urging from his wife, who realized that as Victoria grew, so would pressure to develop the Highlands, McMinn started the Highland Ratepayers Association in 1967, which transitioned to the Highlands District Community Association a few years later. Working with local community he built up interest in greenspace protection and a regional trails system with the CRD and the provincial government. He was a founding member of the Greater Victoria Greenbelt Society (GVGS) in 1979. “I was reading about the city forests of Europe and thought they were an excellent idea.” City forests are woods within easy distance of urban areas which can be used for timber needs, though now mostly serve recreational needs. As more of Vancouver Island was logged (his doctoral dissertation focused on the Nanaimo River Valley, the giant trees of which were cut a few years after his research was completed), McMinn realized the need for conservation. In the 1980s, Langford and Highlands were both part of the Langford Electoral Area, similar to the current Juan de Fuca Electoral Area. In 1986, McMinn had left the federal government; he retired from contract work in 1992. His second career saving the Highlands began in earnest. As development pressures grew in the early 1990s, incorporation separate from Langford seemed the best way forward. McMinn assisted with an incorporation study and supported a referendum, which voted 70 percent for incorporation and 80 percent to incorporate as a separate municipality from Langford. It was an amazingly prescient decision. In 1993, the year the two areas parted ways, McMinn became Mayor of the Highlands. Construction and bulldozing of natural areas in Langford hasn’t stopped since, while Highlands has maintained large tracts of older second-growth forest and has increased its protected areas from 6 to 40 percent parkland. Today, the two municipalities could not look or feel more dissimilar. McMinn became first chair of the Highland Heritage Park Society when he formed it in 1983, 10 years before Highlands incorporated. Restoration of the first dwelling in the West Highlands, the Caleb Pike House, and its heritage orchard, provided Highlands with a community centre even before incorporation. McMinn has provided over $400,000 in land and cash, as well as secured grants towards restoratiing and developing the Pike House property. He also served as Chair of the CRD’s Parks Advisory Committee, and as a director of the Christmas Hill Association and the Thetis Lake Sanctuary Association (as well as other boards too numerous to name here). Over the years, he has carved off pieces of his property for donation to the Land Conservancy of BC (which was later transferred to the Nature Conservancy of Canada). He was instrumental in beginning the work to create Gowlland Tod Provincial Park. It was his work with Mary Lake which inspired me in 2010 to donate to a conservation project even though I was a student. The Greater Victoria Greenbelt Society, chaired by McMinn, was trying to acquire a large property in the south-west Highlands with rare wetland and riparian habitats in the Millstream Creek watershed. McMinn, though in his 80s, set up an online fundraising initiative that saw people from around the globe “buy” square metre parcels of the Mary Lake property as a contribution to the land’s purchase price. I remember clicking on my three metres, right on the edge of the lake. McMinn donated $100,000 to support the challenge. Later, he provided $300,000 more to secure a mortgage with Vancity to purchase the land. The mortgage was recently paid off by the sale of some of the land to the CRD for a trail corridor connecting Thetis Lake and Gowlland Tod Parks, and by a grant from the Province. “My family is very good natured about it. They understand that the money they might have inherited is no longer there,” McMinn tells me. McMinn closes his eyes as he remembers dates and places. He takes me through his childhood in England, after his birth in Toronto and a brief spell in Vancouver. His time in Somerset, in WWII in India and Palestine. His studies at UBC and Washington State University. The whole story has the charmed feeling of the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the terror of a world war, its aftermath brought his generation opportunities never seen before (or since): education, jobs, low land prices, and the chance at a new life in a land that still held remnants of the beauty and diversity First Nations stewarded here on Southern Vancouver Island for millennia. In short, he was lucky beyond belief. At 96, McMinn looks a spry 70. But he says he no longer has the vigour to do the conservation work he used to do. I ask if he plans to donate his own acreage. “That’s up in the air,” he demurs. In the meantime, he is saturating the property with protective covenants so that “it will be worthless, with no building allowed.” As we talk, I feel my feet root into a municipality that, through a stroke of luck and foresight, managed to free itself from Langford’s clutches. “You’ve seen West Hills?” he asks me. “The whole of the Highlands would have been a West Hills if we hadn’t incorporated.” There is the sense, despite his protests, that he isn’t quite finished his work. McMinn closes his eyes again, “Politics is the art of the possible. My feeling is that although parks can disappear, at least if there’s a significant area of park, the Highlands can remain predominantly green.” His ambition is to see the percentage of parkland in the municipality continue to climb—to 50 percent, like the City Forest of Hannover. And to get a letter of congratulations from the Queen on reaching 100 in four years. Donations to the Mary Lake Nature Sanctuary can be made at: https://www.marylakeconnections.ca/donate/ Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which just entered its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  15. Posted August 6, 2020 Image: Map of the meadow Sonya McRae helps Shoreline students honour and learn about biodiversity and the Songhees and Esquimalt Peoples. Go to story
  16. Sonya McRae helps Shoreline students honour and learn about biodiversity and the Songhees and Esquimalt Peoples. AT THE FAR EDGE of Shoreline Community Middle School’s fields, which run from the Old Island Highway down to the inner reaches of the Gorge Waterway, a Kwetlal ecosystem, or meadow sits atop a rise. Kwetlal is the Songhees name for camas, one of the key plants in native Garry oak ecosystems. The garden’s approximately 500 square feet abuts a vestige coastal Douglas-fir forest, with remnant species of arbutus, oak, fir and maple. When I visit with Sonya McRae, the garden’s co-creator, there are swaths of yarrow in bloom, as well as seeds forming on shooting stars, camas, barestem-desert parsley (Qexmim), and miner’s lettuce. Small stepping-stones mark a path through the thickest parts. This is where the kids are taught to step, McRae tells me. McRae is an art and outdoor education teacher at Shoreline Middle School, where Songhees Nation kids number over half of its English program students. “It’s really important to honour [their culture],” she says, on a grassy knoll next to the garden project she has stewarded from idea to reality over the last two years. “We speak to that on a daily basis.” McRae tells me that Sarah Rhude, the Indigenous Art and Cultural Facilitator for the Indigenous Education Department in School District 61, dreamed up the idea of planting camas meadows in multiple schools across the region. Rhude found funding through a Harvest 4 Knowledge Grant from the Horner Foundation. Then McRae and fellow teacher Brenda Pohl applied for and received a grant from Farm to School BC for the Shoreline site in 2018. Since Rhude’s initial work, gardens have gone in at Esquimalt, Spectrum, Vic High and Arbutus school. McRae also notes that both Butch Dick, as the cultural Liaison for SD61, and Cheryl Bryce worked on the project. The Shoreline garden is a way of bringing Songhees culture to life within the school grounds, says McRae, and of offering children the opportunity to learn about biodiversity, history and relationships to the land. “This is my passion project,” McRae says, “It’s super rewarding being out here in this space.” Another of the school’s projects is to slowly remove invasive ivy and blackberry from the adjacent forest. McRae chose the location so that the borders of meadow and forest could eventually blend. She wants to see edge species like thimble berry and salmonberry mingling at the meadow’s perimeter, allowing an existing ecosystem to merge into the new one she and her students have planted. McRae has also produced a suite of learning resources about the meadow, including a map which goes beyond basic cartography. The map charts the history and importance of many of the species found within it. The Spelxen meadow is divided up into four quadrants, representing the seasons of the year and the stages of growth and rest of a Garry Oak meadow. In each coloured frame, there are drawings of people digging, planting, harvesting and tending camas, miner’s lettuce, bare-stemmed desert parsley, nodding onion, stinging nettle and yarrow. Drawings of birds and insects crowd the spring and summer quadrants. Wintering bulbs fill the “Earth Getting Cold” quadrant. Small stories detail the seasonal burning of the meadows to keep them clear of woodlands, pitcooks, varieties of grasses, and an acknowledgement in Lkwungen of the lands that South Islanders share with its many plant and animal species. “Hay’szw’qa,” or “Thank you” in Lkwungen (pronounced hai-sch-qua) concludes the map. The Spelxen Meadow map. (Click image to enlarge) “A lot of it was off the side of my desk, but the kids did all the work,” McRae demurs. She also gives credit to others, like Edward Thomas (Esquimalt Nation) and Diane Sam (Songhees Nation), for the knowledge they shared. McRae and her students sheet-mulched the grass, shovelled soil, spread seeds, and continue to weed and tend the plot, which has expanded from its original smaller circle into a larger plot as further grants came in. The map she helped create with others, including students Marcus Atleo-George and Calvin George, will soon stand as an interpretive board by the meadow. She hopes to install split rail fencing to further highlight and protect the spot. “I would love the public to know that this is here, and there’s a very specific purpose for it being here. It’s not just landscaping. We’re trying to actively re-establish biodiversity on a plant and cultural level—a physical presence of what was here before settlers came and changed the land. To honour that in a way that’s beyond just plants,” she says, is integral to understanding kinship and relationships for the Songhees and Esquimalt Peoples. “It’s about the plant and animal nation all interacting together.” McRae uses the garden as a teaching location with her students, learning about bugs and plants, harvesting techniques and propagation. At some point, she hopes that “we can cook [camas bulbs] and taste them and pass them around.” Site by site, schools are incorporating experiential learning opportunities for students on their grounds, helping to form a set of ecosystems that will help support this region’s species and its cultural legacy. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which just entered its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  17. Posted June 20, 2020 Photo: Victoria's Owl Clover, a red-listed (Endangered) plant Join a group of volunteers working to restore the Upland Park Garry oak meadow. Go to story
  18. Help restore—or just enjoy—one of the most intact Garry oak meadows on the island. LOOKING FOR MORE nature-bathing time? Residents can now socialize while staying safe during BC’s Phase 2 reopening. Margaret Lidkea, president of the Friends of Uplands Park Society is looking for more volunteers to help restore and maintain the beauty of Cattle Point and Uplands Park in Oak Bay. A 30.6 hectare municipal park, Uplands contains 17 rare plants in its vernal, shallow and deep soil meadows, and is one of the most intact representations of a south coast Garry oak meadow ecosystem on the island. In spring and summer, wave after wave of wildflowers bloom in its meadows. It’s one of the most spectacular wild areas on the South Island. Lidkea’s education and restoration programs came to a halt in March during BC’s COVID-19 lockdown. During the spring’s sensitive wildflower season, the society managed to get materials to rope off the most delicate and threatened areas of the park—including the main meadow—in anticipation of increased traffic from residents looking for places to escape their homes while physically distancing. Still, damage was done, as is being recorded in parks around the region. “Camas and other plants have undergone a challenge this year. There were many new visitors, and some trampled the wildflowers on the edges of the paths” in their attempts to distance from others. “We are hoping [the plants] will recover,” says Lidkea. Now that BC has graduated to Phase 2 of its reopening plan, Lidkea has restarted the Society’s volunteer program, as the park gives residents a perfect opportunity to physically distance while helping contribute to restoration projects. “It’s important we honour everyone’s needs,” she tells me by phone, “as some people are very anxious. We have to be cautious.” Still, Lidkea feels comfortable, given the precautions she is now taking. All materials are quarantined between events. No tarpaulins are being used, and a limited number of people can join each work party. Lidkea’s funding comes from the Federal Habitat Stewardship Project, Trees Canada, Telus and Oak Bay municipality. This past year, the Society began a larger restoration project in an area of the park overgrown with invasive species, including Norway maple, blackberry and Sow thistles. They removed 307 maples last year, and this August, a few more will come down. When I visited in April, the newly cleared area was already thick with new plantings of native sea blush, camas and other native species, as well as several sapling Garry oaks. Wylie Thomas and Matt Fairbairns, two local ecologists, serve on the Friends of Uplands Park board. “I feel very, very blessed to have such expertise,” Lidkea says. Thomas is keeping a record of rare plants and their yearly numbers. “COVID is going to trigger austerity,” says Lidkea. She worries that environmental programs and protections will be the first to be cut as the country attempts to restart the economy. Uplands has one of the greatest concentrations of rare species in all of Canada, including tall woolly-heads (Psilocarphus elatior) and Macoun’s meadowfoam (Limnanthes Macounii), and until recently was home to one of only four populations in the world of Victoria’s owl clover (Castilleja victoriae). The latter was destroyed by foot traffic in Uplands Park’s vernal pools. Victoria’s owl clover (Castilleja victoriae). (Photo courtesy of COSEWIC) The park has also been plagued with invasive species such as Daphne laureola, Himalayan blackberry, English ivy and carpet burweed, all of which have had special removal attention from volunteer parties since the Friend’s formation in 2009. In June, volunteers have been working in a rare species meadow, helping to remove crow garlic. Crow garlic sends up a stalk of tiny purple flowers that emerge from a cluster of bulblets, The bulblets develop green sprouts like the tails of a meteor, then eventually fall and colonize the surrounding area. Lidkea thinks that its presence may have resulted in decreases in the number of native flowers, which compete for space in the meadows. If you would like to help, send Margaret an email and grab some gardening gloves. “I know people are finding out the value of families and friendships during this pandemic,” she says. She hopes they also recognize the value of parks, and the volunteer hours that keep them beautiful. Events will continue every couple of weeks through the summer. Check the Friends’ website at https://friendsofuplandspark.org and watch a video here. To join a volunteer party, email Margaret Lidkea at mlidkea@shaw.ca. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast, which just entered its second printing. She is still a PhD student. She’s also a lecturer in Geography, Canadian Studies, and Literature, at UVic and Camosun.
  19. March 2020 Two UVic librarians volunteering for Surfrider are leading the battle against industrial plastic on our beaches. DANIEL BRENDLE-MOCZUK takes a small jar from his office shelf and shakes it, his eyebrows knitting together. “This is from one site, one collection, ten litres of sand.” He hands me the 192 millilitres of small plastic pellets, about the size and shape of a Baby Aspirin. They are various colours of white, beige, pale yellow, and grey. They darken as they absorb contaminants from the ocean, he tells me. Brendle-Moczuk’s colleague, David Boudinot, walked into his office with a jar of the pellets in 2016. “I started going to monthly beach cleanups at Willows Beach,” Boudinot tells me. A foot down, the sand was saturated. “I didn’t know what they were.” The beach clean-up Boudinot attended was organized by Surfrider, an international organization started by surfers to clean up the places they love. Brendle-Moczuk soon joined in. Both are University of Victoria librarians, and their investigation into the pellets—called “nurdles,” or pre-consumer plastic pellets—have led them to surprising places. Brendle-Moczuk’s daughter calls him and Boudinot “Nurdle Man 1 and 2.” She’s picked up on their dedication to their work. Together, they are helping to illuminate an unfolding environmental disaster occurring quietly on southeast-facing beaches all over the region. Daniel Brendle-Moczuk holds nurdles found on the shore of the Fraser River near an Annacis Island facility that uses nurdles Pre-consumer plastic pellets are just that—plastic which has been produced by a refinery, but not yet made into the plastic bags, buckets, storage containers, and packaging we see in stores. The pellets are small and oval to facilitate easy transportation (imagine trying to ship, then melt, a giant plastic cube). Plastic consumer products are produced all over the world, including just across the strait, in Port Coquitlam, North Burnaby, and Annacis Island, which lies between Richmond and Surrey. Brendle-Moczuk and Boudinot couldn’t figure out how the plastic pellets were arriving to Inside Passage waters on the West Coast. At first, they looked to Asia. But there’s a commonality to the locations on the mainland: the Fraser River. Brendle-Moczuk took a trip to see his in-laws and stopped by Annacis Island on his way. With a ballcap pulled down low, he shot photos of several plastics manufacturers’ facilities grounds. Though they declined to give me company names, Google map lists Plasticon Plastics, ibox Packaging, Merlin Plastics Supply, and Plasti-Fab Delta as operating facilities on the island. Brendle-Moczuk’s photos show train tracks (where the pellets are unloaded into trucks), yards (where pellets are shifted from truck to facility) and parking lots littered with plastic pellets. At the edges of these stretches of sidewalk are storm drains—which empty into the Fraser River. When Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk took their research to the Canadian Plastics Industry Association (CPIA), they denied responsibility: the pellets, CPIA said, came from Asia. But intertidal movement wouldn’t push plastic pellets that far upriver, and certainly not into the canals of the island, or all the way into the storm drains. “This is an industrial solidified oil spill that’s been happening for decades,” says Boudinot, “and no one is doing anything about it.” David Boudinot holds a nurdle sample retrieved from a West Coast beach Since 2016, Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk have spent countless hours researching the spills, the types of plastic the pellets are made from (both high- and low-density PolyEthylene and Polypropylene), and monitoring spill sites. Brendle-Moczuk has watched pellets disappear from parking lots after staff pressure-washed them down the drains. Every time he goes to Vancouver, he does research on the sites he’s been keeping track of. Boudinot spends hours each month combing beaches and sifting sand to get an idea of pellet concentration. Last fall, he spent four hours walking the beach at Goose Spit in Courtney. “This is what we do, every time we go somewhere,” he says. They look for southeast-facing beaches without a hard edge (like a sea wall or rock face) where pellets tend to gather. Esquimalt Lagoon is a prime location. Cadboro Bay, Willows Beach, any southeast facing beaches on the Gulf Islands. Strong winter storms come from this direction, pushing the pellets onto the beaches. They are keeping a map of areas where pellets have been found, which includes locations all over Vancouver Island, the mainland, Sunshine Coast, and the San Juan Islands. It’s estimated that more than 8 million tonnes of plastic are dumped into oceans every year. Over 90 percent of sea birds have plastic in their stomachs. Photos from Midway Island, in the South Pacific, show wildlife that has succumbed to plastic ingestion, literally starving albatrosses to death. By 2050, it’s expected there will be more plastic than fish in the Earth’s oceans. Much of this comes from post-consumer plastic (plastic which has been made into a bottle or disposable food packaging, for example) but pre-consumer plastic pellets are just as dangerous—not to mention a totally unnecessary and preventable form of pollution. Plastic pellets absorb hydrophobic pollutants in water, becoming more contaminated the longer they float. These pellets have been found in 22 percent of marine fish, according to a 2016 Marine Pollution Bulletin study. Ingestion of plastics can induce hepatic stress, intra-epithelial cysts, affect blood calcium levels, and cause endocrine disruptions in animals. Studies on humans wouldn’t be ethical to do, but many extrapolate the effect on animals to include humans. Bisphenol-A, one compound in plastics, has been found to increase anorexia nervosa, disrupt the endocrine system, and impact fetal development in humans. Recently, its replacement, Bisphenol-S, has been found to be just as (if not more) dangerous. This fall, Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk made a video, in collaboration with Surfrider, on plastic pellet spills in the Fraser River. Along with scenic shots of the West Coast, the video shows students from the 2019 Geography Sustainability Field School, who found hundreds of nurdles in just an hour of sifting. Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk are also working with law professor Calvin Sandborn to figure out how to best publicize the issue, since the plastics industry is notorious for fighting back against bad press (remember their challenge of Victoria’s plastic bag ban?). They’ve also enlisted the help of UVic’s chemistry students to analyze the pellets, and biology students to research the effects of plastic in fish. Geography cartographer Ken Josephson helped them put together their map. The Canadian Plastics Industry Association promotes Operation Clean Sweep, an international best practices program designed to prevent plastic pellet contamination in waterways and oceans. But participation is voluntary. The Ministry of Environment states that discharge of pollution to the environment is prohibited under the Environment Management Act. But it has not responded to Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk’s findings, other than to say it will be “looking into these concerns and determining appropriate next steps.” Last Fall, Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk sent their Surfrider video to the media. They held a media conference on Annacis Island in October. CBC and Global News turned up. Boudinot and Brendle-Moczuk recommended that industries should be required to install storm drain covers to collect pellets and prevent them from entering waterways. When Brendle-Moczuk returned to Annacis Island later that fall, he noticed that many of the work sites he had previously documented were suddenly cleaner. Some storm drains had felt filters installed (albeit not all correctly). But he and Boudinot worry this is a temporary measure, designed to ease tensions until media and public attention turns to the next story. “We’re calling on the Ministry of Environment and the Province of BC to investigate these spills and monitor them, and make sure they don’t happen in the first place,” says Boudinot. Their fears were confirmed last month. The heavy rains of late January and early February sent thousands of pellets into Annacis Island’s Audley Channel. According to Surfrider, the piles of pellets were up to three centimetres deep. They also want the public to be aware of the insidious nature of plastics production. “The oil industry is pivoting away from oil and gas for cars, and building plastic manufacturing plants instead.” Despite recent moves to reduce single-use plastics, the material is used everywhere. Brendle-Moczuk and Boudinot would like to see pellets labelled as an industrial pollutant. They encourage the public to call RAPP (Report all Poachers and Polluters) if they see a spill. They plan to liaise with First Nations and make another video about the spills happening in their traditional territories. And Boudinot has a simple solution for what to do when pellets escape. “When a spill happens, clean it up!” Residents can call RAPP to report pellet spills or the presence of pellets on beaches or waterways at 1-877-952-7277. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast. She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between the social sciences and poetry.
  20. January 2020 A Fernwood well brings history lessons, community, and precious water together. AFTER A CAPITAL REGION SUMMER of near-normal precipitation and one of the wettest Octobers on record (though one of the driest Novembers), it’s easy to forget the troubles much of the world has with limited water supplies. California’s groundwater supply is dwindling; Cape Town is running dry; even Tofino has run out in the past. Climate change promises to bring water insecurity to much of the world. So when a water source is dedicated by the Hudson’s Bay Company to the people of Victoria for all eternity—a source that produces from a fractured rock spring in the middle of a growing city—it’s best to count your blessings, and perhaps even take a sip. Bill Goers was talking over the fence to a neighbour not long after moving to Fernwood in 1979 when he heard that Fernwood had once been the main water source for Victoria. “This was interesting to me,” he says when we talk at his store, Common Sense Orthotics on Fort Street. The water came from several springs on Fernwood’s Spring Ridge—from which Spring Street takes its name. Flowing from gravel deposits left from the last ice age, the water was collected and delivered first by bucket, and then by wooden pipe until the 1870s. “People have been meeting at wells forever,” Goers muses, “It’s very old stuff.” Less controversial than saving trees or protecting grizzly bears, water is basic. It draws people together and highlights commonalities. The springs in Fernwood—and the wells that were built over them—were a gathering place for 1800s settlers. Bill Goers (Photo by Tony Bounsall) During a Fernwood Community Association radio interview, Joanne Murray, Goers’ wife and vice president of the Fernwood Community Association, recounts the story of Englishman George Hunter Carey, a settler who attempted to privatize the springs. In 1861, Carey bought land that included a popular Fernwood spring. He fenced it off and tried to charge for water. Locals were outraged and burned the fence down. He was excoriated in Victoria newspapers. Carey had the protesters arrested, but the courts sided against him. Over 20 years after first hearing the story of the Fernwood springs, a friend of Goers was doing research in the UVic Law Library and found evidence of an 1866 land conveyance as part of the Act of Union. It dated back to pre-confederation, when the Hudson’s Bay Company passed ownership of Vancouver Island to the Crown. As part of the union, a well on Spring Ridge was set aside and dedicated, forever, to the people of Victoria. The dedication of the well by HBC was likely a result of the public outcry against Carey’s attempt to privatize a public water source. In the 1870s, when the city began drawing its water from Elk Lake, the Fernwood well ceased to be used; its location was eventually forgotten. Much of Spring Ridge itself was turned into a quarry. But Goers’ interest was piqued. He continued his research. Historical maps placed the well just north of William Stevenson Park, near the Fernwood Community Centre. Telling me the story, his enthusiasm spills out, fingers raking his hair until it stands on end. Goers relates how he gathered together local dowser Ron Welch and a few members of the Fernwood community to start planning. Welch dowsed the entire Fernwood neighbourhood, and eventually found water in a corner of Stevenson Park. The Fernwood Community Well project was born, ushering in the return of an old, old practice of gathering around the well. The group won a $3500 neighbourhood matching grant in 2005 and worked with Victoria’s parks department and gained permission to drill a shallow well of 25 feet. They hit water immediately, which explains why even in the heat of summer, you can walk through Fernwood and hear a trickling of streams under manhole covers. The area, says Goers, is one of Victoria’s only dependable water sources. In 2008, Goers was prodded by the City of Victoria to spend the rest of their grant money. He worked with Tri-K Drilling to drill a deeper well of 150 feet. Goers won the fourth annual World Water Day Award for his work in 2008. Yet the well still didn’t have a pump. Spring water, or well water, is still the primary source of water for most who live outside of the Capital Region’s urban areas. I used to live in a house in Willis Point that had one. Iron and calcium turned the linens yellow and scaled the inside of the toilet. It was worth it, though, for the minerals it infused into my garden and for the taste. But for those of us who don’t have our own free source, water remains an uncertain resource in the event of a catastrophic earthquake. Are we prepared to supply water in an emergency in the Capital Region, Goers asked the Emergency Preparedness team in the region? “Not really,” they admitted. Goers had been negotiating with the CRD, VIHA and the City for permission to drill the well, slowly gaining their trust. He finally convinced officials to let him build and fit the well with a pump by appealing to the need for an emergency source of water. At the end of 2008, Goers and the Community Association won funding to install a pump and cement footing. The CRD has stipulated that the pump can’t remain operational, for liability reasons. They tried locking it, but people kept cutting the lock off. So when it’s not in use, Goers keeps the handle at his house. A well dedication celebration took place in October 2008. Goers was joined by MP Denise Savoie and MLA Rob Fleming, Songhees Chief Ron Sam and Lieutenant Governor of BC Steven Point. “Water is a public resource,” Savoie said, “It just flows through, it can’t be owned.” As a crowd observed, the well was blessed in Christian, Buddhist, Jewish and Wiccan ceremonies. Ceremonial cups were drunk by many, including Point and Sam. Goers, who is incredibly modest, watched from the background. “Officially, it’s not for drinking,” Goers tells me, “But it belongs to all of us; no one can take this away from us.” Goers thinks of the well as a 150-year project, and the community as its steward. Eventually, he’d like to see the well earn a series of good testing reports so that officials consent to keeping the well unlocked and available as a dependable drinking source. It could offer what so many towns in Europe offer: drinkable spring water as part of public infrastructure. In the meantime, Goers is out at 9am every third Saturday of the month, rain or shine, to reattach the well handle and pump for anyone who wants some water. You can join him. Many swear their tomatoes grow larger from the mineral content, and bring buckets. Though the water is not officially sanctioned as potable, some stock up, filling glass containers for an iron-rich drink. Some use it for the making of essential oils, which need chlorine-free water for distillation. I’ve joined him a couple of times this fall, and a varied assortment of people always show up. Kids like hanging off the pump while getting the water flowing. “People light up to the idea of what we have,” says Goers. “I’m always pleased to go, because every time, I meet someone I haven’t met before.” The five gallons I bring home tastes of rock and pine and minerals. It’s more thirst-quenching than water out of the tap. I fill my glass every day. Visit Bill Goers in Stevenson Park, below the Fernwood Community Centre, on Pembroke Street. He’s there on the third Saturday of every month at 9am. Bring a container. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast. She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between the social sciences and poetry.
  21. September 2019 Saving forests and removing invasives in Saanich FROM HIS HOME IN EAST SAANICH, Harry Drage tells me “It’s fun to say that you worked your entire career in the forests of BC.” A member of the Saanich Environmental Advisory Committee for over ten years, Drage, a forester, has been an ardent volunteer in both Haro Woods and Konukson Park (in East Saanich) since his retirement. This summer, Drage received Saanich’s Individual Environmental Achievement Award for 15 years of leadership in stewarding invasive species removal in Haro Woods and Konukson, a testament to his dedication to local ecosystems. Together with local residents, Drage has removed invasive species, applied for grants, helped to inspire the community and supported student research in the parks. He and other volunteers have logged over 4,500 hours clearing large areas of invasive species from both parks. Konukson encompasses seven hectares of upland terrain in Ten Mile Point, with arbutus and rocky outcrops; Haro Woods is a large parcel northeast (5.6 hectares) of the University of Victoria, with tall stands of second-growth Douglas fir. Harry Drage (Photo by Tony Bounsall) “Haro is about half done,” Drage tells me, and now, areas that have been cleared of invasives are recovering well, with ferns, snowberry and other native underbrush sprouting up under the firs. “You can actually see the [restored] area of the park gradually moving through like a force not to be denied,” he laughs. Haro Woods was the centre of recent controversy during the planning for the region’s sewage treatment facility, which will see wastewater and biosolids pumped to McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt for treatment. As part of the plan, Haro Woods was proposed as the site for a series of underground attenuation tanks and an above-ground pumping station; the construction would have seen a significant portion of forest cut down. In 2009, public consultation around the Haro Woods site resulted in strong pushback by local residents. I remember attending those meetings (at the time as an employee of the CRD). Haro Woods, then an unprotected greenspace zoned for large lot residential development, was nonetheless known informally as a forested trail system, and supported a variety of uses (including mountain bike trails). Some of the meetings grew quite heated. Drage demurs talking about this period. “I know some people think confrontation is hard to overcome,” he says. He tries to remain optimistic, focusing instead on the cooperation between residents’ associations and developers, and the growing support for the environment, and biodiversity, by Saanich. “We have 50 volunteer projects [in the municipality] with people stepping up. They’re coming forward on their own. That’s a really good sign.” As a result of the community’s resistance to the proposed pumping station site, the CRD retreated from its plan. Attenuation tanks will still be built on part of the site, but they will be located underground in a previously disturbed area. In 2011, Saanich purchased the CRD-owned portions of the site for $7.6 million, allowing for protection of 94 percent of the urban forest as parkland in 2013. For Drage, who began restoration work long before the land caught the CRD’s eye as a potential sewage treatment site, it simply shows the commendable actions of Saanich, which, along with the acquisition of Panama Flats in 2011, added 79 hectares to its park inventory in one year. Drage applauds the purchase, and his experiences in the park mirror many I heard speak at those 2009 community consultation sessions. The decision to save Haro Woods, however, many not be as simple as portrayed by former Mayor Frank Leonard’s joyous announcement. Saanich is the largest municipality in the CRD, and its reach stretches beyond the high-value properties of Queenswood, Ten Mile Point and Cadboro Bay, where many residents have time to become organized defenders of local green spaces. There are numerous properties throughout Saanich’s land base that would also seem to demand attention. Priorities change depending on the lens through which we look. Haro Woods is a recovering second-growth forest. Drage’s work has rid approximately half the park of invasive species. The other half sits waiting, while Saanich concludes its park management plan. But damage to the park over the decades—by invasives, through the construction of mountain-bike jumps, and through heavy use by residents—is extensive. In contrast, one might look at the protection of Maltby Lake, also within Saanich’s boundaries (and covered in this magazine). From an ecological perspective, Maltby has a much higher biodiversity rating; it contains old-growth pockets of Douglas fir; it supports a colony of freshwater jellyfish and dozens of listed species. And it could eventually be connected to Francis King Park, forming a contiguous wildlife corridor through the area. Maltby is owned in part by the Land Conservancy of BC, and in part by private landowners. Should that $7.6 million have been put instead toward purchase of portions of Maltby, or of other parts of the Saanich Highlands, which are under increasing threat from development? Drage has another solution. As a forester trained in the latter half of the 20th century, he subscribes to management practices that see a forest as a resource or a crop, as well as an ecological refugium. For much of his career, Drage was district manager in the Salmon Arm and Shushwap Lake area. In Victoria, he worked as an analyst for the BC Forest Practices branch, including planning for woodlots. For him, city boulevards—and forests such as Haro Woods—provide an opportunity for use as woodlots. City trees could be a part of this plantation, offers Drage, with orchards planted on side streets (and even on some lanes of streets, he offers) and selective harvesting of larger forests. It’s a novel vision. But when asked, he doesn’t have a ready answer to the question of biodiversity levels in mature forests as opposed to woodlots. The former support species such as great horned owls and bats. The latter tend not to have the decaying trees and forest floor detritus necessary to house and feed these creatures. Still, planting more trees would certainly help bolster Saanich’s currently spotty record with boulevard tree planting. “To me,” he says, “[boulevard planting] isn’t moving very far very fast. The profile needs to be increased.” One of the simplest ways to combat global warming, he stresses, is through the planting of trees. As someone who’s been trying to get my nearly treeless street in Saanich planted for over seven years, I concur. Drage would also like to see more incentives for landowners and developers to choose nature-scaping and the retention of trees on their properties. When beginning work in Haro Woods and Konukson, Drage had to read up on invasives before he knew what to look for in each park’s tangle of English ivy, Daphne, Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom. In Konukson, he and other volunteers sectioned off areas to work methodically, somewhat like what’s happening in Cuthbert Holmes Park, in Saanich’s Tillicum neighbourhood, or the meticulous record-keeping that Jarrett Teague does for John Dean Park. “It’s almost a war, in some cases it’s so thick,” he says. “When the last invasive [in a section] comes out of the ground screaming in agony, it’s not fun, but it’s close to that.” Haro Woods and Konukson are all the better for his and his compatriots’ dedication. “It’s amazing to walk through [the park] now. The natural plants have come back—oh, it was fabulous,” he says. Due to the region’s deer overpopulation problem, the rebound of native species in some areas hasn’t been as quick as he’d like to see, but he has a solution for that, too. “Venison could become the feature meal out of the forest!” he tells me. I offer to provide the wild blackberry sauce to complete the dish. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast. She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between social sciences and poetry.
  22. July 2019 A deep and abiding love for ȽÁU,WELNEW/John Dean Park is evident in the stewardship work of volunteer Jarrett Teague. IN OLD GROWTH STANDS of Douglas fir and cedar, interspersed with sunlit, mossy meadows of Garry oak and arbutus, Jarrett Teague is surveying a landscape that he’s helped restore into an archetype of Southern Vancouver Island. Free of mature Scotch broom and other invasives, it looks largely as it did before colonization. In winter, rains blanket the park’s forests and trails; in spring, calypso orchids dot the mountain’s slopes. This past May, the W̱SÁNEĆ name for John Dean Provincial Park, ȽÁU,WELNEW (pronounced Tlay will nook), was officially recognized and added to the park’s moniker; Teague was thrilled to see the acknowledgement of a place that has helped sustain him for decades. Over the last 30 years, Teague has logged nearly 13,000 hours of volunteer work in ȽÁU,WELNEW/John Dean, which includes a sacred mountain on the Saanich Peninsula that once sustained the W̱SÁNEĆ peoples during the Great Flood millennia ago. In 2012, Teague was named BC Parks Volunteer of the Year. This past May, his 30-year restoration and caretaking efforts were recognized in the Provincial Legislature by MLA Adam Olsen. In my interview with him at a Tim Horton’s this spring, Teague at first seems reserved, in fact he stops speaking as soon as I begin to write notes. But he visibly relaxes over the course of our chat. About an hour into the interview, I ask him what he remembers of me. Over three decades ago, we were students together at Sidney Elementary. We haven’t had contact since, but somehow we both recall one another. He was a dark-eyed kid; he took things seriously. He wanted to do good. Perhaps we recognized this in one another. He answers my question easily: “I knew you had good parents.” It is a moment that has stayed with me since. Teague isn’t a stranger to good shepherding. A 22-year service member with the Canadian Forces and a father of three, he’s been a doting caretaker of ȽÁU,WELNEW since 1989. “I used to spend hours on ivy removal, and I’d watch the sun move the whole way over,” he gestures, and looks up, as if into a forest canopy. “Different lights, winds, birds. If you’re there for that long, you really know it.” ȽÁU,WELNEW/John Dean Provincial Park was established in 1921, when John Dean donated most of his 100-acre property to the Crown. Subsequent donations through the 1900s brought the park’s size up to 173 hectares, encompassing the summit of Mount Newton and its surrounding forest. A “Class A” park, it was one of the first in BC developed by Forest Rangers for open access by the public; some of its trails are almost 100 years old. Teague, who is a fourth-generation Vancouver Island resident, now lives in East Sooke, but grew up in North Saanich. “In grade six, I did some scouting in the park. I learned how to light a fire in the rain with two matches. By grade nine, I found the Friends of John Dean and started working with them.” Building trails, picking up garbage, preventing erosion and pulling invasive species, Teague quickly became enamoured with the park and its history. He has published two books on the history of John Dean, John Dean’s Cabin Diary, and Camp 20, a history of both ȽÁU,WELNEW/John Dean and BC’s other Provincial Parks. Jarrett Teague clears tree roots from a path in the park following a storm Mount Newton’s original name, ȽÁU,WELNEW, means “place of refuge.” As Adam Olsen tells the story, XÁLS, the Creator, caused a great flood to occur, and told the WSÁNEĆ people to prepare themselves. Many gathered their belongings and wove a long cedar rope to attach to their canoes. As the flood waters rose, the people paddled to the highest mountain nearby, ȽÁU,WELNEW, and tied their canoes to an arbutus tree, surviving the flood. Today, both the mountain and the tree are sacred (arbutus is not cut or burned by WSÁNEĆ peoples). WSÁNEĆ means “the emerging people,” which comes from the sight of their land emerging in the distance after the flood. For Teague, work in the forest is also spiritually significant. He has served two tours of duty overseas in Afghanistan, as well as circumnavigating the globe with the Royal Canadian Navy. The second tour, in Kabul, was uneventful, but the first, to Afghanistan in 2002, left him shaken. “I was like a mouse in a shoebox,” he says. He demurs using the term PTSD, preferring to call it being “wound up.” For the summer after his return, he spent much of every other day at ȽÁU,WELNEW. “It helped me decompress and heal from the experience,” he says. Teague’s time with the military has influenced his management of the park in prominent ways. He refers to his two-hour commute to and from East Sooke as his “deployment.” He has a system to keep track of tasks that need doing in the park: a piece of garbage in the park for 45 days or longer is a “debt;” fewer than 45 days and it’s a “deficit;” when he picks it up, it’s “paid in full.” These categories apply to invasive species, trail washouts, or signage in need of repair (he takes down, dries, sands, paints and reinstalls all 32 signs in the park with new hardware on a yearly basis). He has spreadsheets to keep track of each task. BC Parks often comes to him for advice. Teague’s organizational skills keep him functioning as a manager, rather than reacting. “When you’re reacting,” he explains, “you’re dealing with the obvious, and you’re missing the details. Everything becomes a priority.” His professional discipline has inspired the trust of local history keepers. He was gifted with retired BC Park Ranger Davey Davidson’s photographs and records of both Manning and John Dean parks. Much of his learning was done at the side of elder volunteers for the Friends of John Dean Park. “I feel I’ve really lost that generation of people who knew me,” he muses. “They affected me.” Teague, at 43, isn’t as concerned about a succession plan for his work as some of the volunteers I’ve profiled in this column. He has no intention of letting go his post. But he is acutely aware of the passage of time. “I realize I only have 50 more Junes left. It spurs me to enjoy the day, to think about what [the park] will be like in 100 years, and what it was like 100 years ago.” This musing about time has led him to expand from restoration to teaching. He now leads Scout and Beaver troops along the same paths he was led along. His children are also learning with him. “It’s kind of a neat feeling for me to see [my son] discovering and connecting with the park. I don’t have to make him, or teach him; he’s just doing it on his own.” Upon Teague’s retirement from the military, which is an option in 2020, he plans to study as a horticultural technician, revelling in the opportunity to work in Royal Roads’ gardens as part of his training. On May 2, 2019, MLA Adam Olsen supported passage of a bill to honour the sacred mountain through addition of the WSÁNEĆ name to the park. During his speech, Olsen briefly lost his composure. Thanking the students from the Tribal School and Cordova Bay Elementary for the petition that spurred the change, he wiped away tears. “That’s the first time that’s happened,” he murmured to a colleague at his side, before continuing. Teague also recounts the moment in his blog, “at exactly 11:19:45 am, the new name “ȽÁU,WELNEW/John Dean Park” was spoken in the Legislature, it sounded perfect and beautiful…” More information on ȽÁU,WELNEW/John Dean Park and its history can be found on Jarrett Teague’s website, www.johndeanpark.com. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast. She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between social sciences and poetry.
  23. May 2019 A molting elephant seal on Gonzales Beach offered lessons in nature and an occasion for friendship. FOR OAK BAY RESIDENTS Kerri Ward, Gina Lemieux and Stephanie Weinstein, April 2018 was an exhausting month that changed their lives. A female elephant seal arrived on Gonzales Bay beach to complete its annual spring molt. The three met on the beach, while trying to protect the seal. “I don’t think it was an accident,” Ward tells me, of the three women’s introduction to one another. I meet them in Ward’s kitchen, her character house surrounded by red-winged blackbirds, Garry oaks and early spring buds. “I think it was a kindred connection.” But despite their new friendship, the seal’s arrival is not an event they’re eager to repeat. Left to right: Stephanie Weinstein, Kerri Ward, Gina Lemieux Lemieux and Weinstein are biologists; Ward’s background is in conservation, but she now works as a museum curator and as a long- time volunteer for Wild Animal Rescue Centre (Wild ARC). Ward discovered the seal; Lemieux and Weinstein encountered her trying to erect a caution-tape barrier around the animal. A friendship blossomed from their shared love of the natural world. “We are part of nature, not separate from it,” explains Lemieux. “It was amazing to see this seal go through this phenomenal life process.” Ward’s ribbon barrier was a reaction to the frenzy that surrounded the seal’s arrival, which had quickly attracted attention from local residents and media. Even tour buses announced its presence during their travels through Oak Bay. Thanks to the media attention, crowds began visiting the beach, pressing closer and closer to the wild animal. “The behaviour of people was depressing and discouraging,” Ward says. “We’re invading their habitat!” And yet, she says, she encountered many people whose conception of nature was something closer to Disney—where wild animals can be approached for selfie shots or close inspection. Elephant seals go through a “catastrophic molt” every year, during which they lose their fur and their topmost layer of skin. It’s a painful and taxing process. Normally, they don’t eat during their month-long molt, and often lose 25 percent of their body weight. Males normally top out at 4,500 pounds, with a length of 13 feet; females can reach 3,000 pounds. During their molt, they loll on the beach or dip into the water, using the salt and sand to keep cool and relieve pain. Their bodies conserve water during these periods, concentrating their urine so that they excrete less and can go long periods without drinking. In the initial days after the seal’s arrival, Ward, Lemieux and Weinstein quickly formed a team, taking at least three shifts a day to ensure a barrier remained around the seal and helping educate the public. “For the most part, people were respectful,” says Lemieux, and Weinstein agrees, but those that weren’t led to a couple of frightening incidents for the women. The media attention culminated in a confrontation with the public on the sand beside the seal. “I could see the seal, and they were surrounding it, and it was stressed,” Ward recounts. Afraid a confrontation might occur between seal and human (or dog), Ward raced across the beach to ask people to step back. “People started swearing at me, they threw driftwood, they screamed. One guy stood up for me and they turned on him. It was sheer insanity.” Ward contacted Fisheries and Oceans to let them know what happened. The next day, there was a massive response by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Marine Mammal Rescue (an initiative of the Vancouver Aquarium), and local Bylaw enforcement. Pylons and signs were erected. Enforcement officers patrolled. The northern elephant seal’s range stretches from northern Alaska south to Mexico. Many molt at Race Rocks, off Metchosin. Mostly a solitary creature, they migrate as far south as Mexico, congregating to breed and feed. Once hunted for their blubber (like whales), they were nearly extinct by 1882. Less than 100 individuals found refuge on small Guadalupe Island, off the Baja Peninsula, where they were discovered in 1910. The island became a biological reserve in the 1920s, and since then the population has grown to more than 200,000 individuals, all descended from the Guadalupe population. This recovery from near-extinction makes the seals even more precious in Ward’s eyes. “They were here long before us. It’s not fair that we stress them out.” All three women credit the natural world as a guiding force in their lives. Lemieux has worked extensively in Southeast Asia in marine biology and education. After a masters in tropical conservation and development, Weinstein began working in environmental education, and now provides schools all through the CRD with techniques to connect kids to nature. Ward has transported seals, squirrels and countless birds in her car, through her work with Wild ARC. “This is the best place in the world,” they tell me, of BC’s South Coast. They are spider rescuers, snake and jellyfish befrienders, entranced with all that gallops, shimmies and glides. Weinstein and Lemieux qualify that Ward’s bad experience on the beach doesn’t represent the majority of their encounters with the public. Most were far less confrontational, though still lacking knowledge. “They thought the seal was sick or dead, so they went closer and were curious,” Weinstein explains. So she decided to set up an education table. She brought seal skulls, colouring books and information about the seals, gained from her work with the Habitat Trust Education Program and Wild BC. “One of the most positive experiences was talking to a bunch of teenagers, who all had their drinks,” she laughs. One interested girl kept asking questions, and then excitedly took the information back to her friends. It only served to confirm her optimism: how interested children can become in the natural world, and how much their behaviour can influence others. Unlike the Pacific harbour seal and California sea lion, who often get blamed (inaccurately) by fishers for eating salmon, elephant seals feed primarily on squid. Diving down as deep as two kilometres, they can hold their breath for up to two hours while in search of squid, as well as small amounts of fish and crustaceans. The inflatable snout of the male elephant seal amplifies his snorts, bellows and grunts, which help to ward off rival males. The females have no proboscis. After the seal left, the women breathed a sigh of relief. But it didn’t last long. A second seal arrived in May, staying for only a day. Another was seen in Gorge Inlet on May 30. And a third arrived at Gonzales Bay in June, staying for two weeks. The women’s daily patrols resumed. They were asked if media should be informed. “No!” they shouted. The seal left the Friday of the Canada Day long weekend. Weinstein smiles, “It was perfect timing!” Lemieux, Weinstein and Ward don’t know why the seals chose Gonzales Bay to molt. Are they confused about their location? Is the changing climate altering their habits? Or is this just the result of a rebounding population that now needs more beaches on which to molt? They relate the story of California’s Drakes Beach, which was taken over by elephant seals during the recent US federal government shutdown. A lack of park rangers meant the seals easily colonized the beach, mating and rearing their pups in what is normally a busy destination for humans. The park stayed closed until the seals and their young departed. Lemieux, despite the stress of monitoring and facing off with the public, looks at the seal’s arrival as a gift. “That’s been the silver lining, to connect with these two amazing women who I never otherwise would have met,” she says. “I’ve connected with local neighbours, seen beautiful spirits and hearts who have the same outlook on what we’re trying to do.” But that’s not to say they wish for another arrival on Gonzales, or any populated beach in the Capital Region. If an elephant seal does arrive, their advice echoes that of Fisheries and Oceans and conservation organizations: stay clear, keep your dog and children away, and let the seal endure its natural process without disturbance, and particularly, without having to appear in a selfie. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast. She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between the social sciences and poetry.
  24. March 2019 Combining creative work with research, Estraven Lupino-Smith collaborates with HAT to monitor and celebrate bats. A FEW YEARS AGO, when Estraven Lupino-Smith was living in Philadelphia, they threw their back out. (Lupino-Smith is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.) Miserable, between contracts and home-bound in winter, instead of succumbing to depression, they fell back on their long history as an artist. “I’m going to make something,” they decided, “I’m going to do a series of prints on nocturnal animals.” Many are vilified, they explained, considered dangerous, part of the underworld. Lupino-Smith wanted to change the way we view wolves, bats, barn owls, raccoons. In particular, I learned during our conversation at a local cafe, they love bats. A lot. Estraven Lupino-Smith Lupino-Smith, a creative researcher with a degree in political science and equity studies, is currently completing an MSc in geography at Concordia, but art has always been a part of their research. “That’s how my brain works,” says Lupino-Smith. Focusing on bats and other vilified animals seemed an ideal way of combining creative work with research. “I think we don’t realize how much social context there is to issues of science and politics. This is a key reason people undervalue creative work.” Lupino-Smith’s Etsy website offers the artwork as pins, t-shirts and prints, but it was when they moved to Victoria (via Montreal) that things really came together. When Lupino-Smith arrived here, they emailed Habitat Acquisition Trust (HAT) and offered to volunteer, sending a copy of the linocut bat print they’d made. The HAT staff member who answered the email just happened to be wearing Lupino-Smith’s bat design t-shirt that day. A collaboration was born. With funding from a CRD arts development grant, Lupino-Smith gathered sound files on the bats using a heterodyne detector, which allows humans to hear the echolocation bats use to find food and move through space. “We can’t normally hear it, but they’re actually screaming; they’re quite loud!” BC is home to 16 of the 19 bat species in Canada—the greatest diversity of any province. Bats are the only mammal that can truly fly, and half of BC’s bat species (all insectivores) are listed as vulnerable or threatened. Coming from the east, where bat populations have been decimated by White Nose Syndrome fungus (recorded deaths total over six million), Lupino-Smith was eager to see a population that is, relatively speaking, still intact. “It will take 10,000 years, they told me, “to recover the population numbers on the East Coast.” Lupino-Smith counted bats with HAT over the summer, watching over 1,200 bats emerge from the attic of the Metchosin Community Hall, which the bats had chosen as their female maternity colony. That means there are both adults and pups in the groups volunteers count in summer. Some volunteers are retired, Lupino-Smith says, but many just like the work, which is communal and provides a chance to view the world in all its complexity. “You get your blanket out. You bring your dog.” Watching the pups learn to fly can also be hilarious. “They’re not great fliers yet. They hit things, they do loops to get higher,” laughs Lupino-Smith. White Nose Syndrome wasn’t initially found on the west coast of the continent. But in 2016, a sick brown bat was found by hikers near Seattle. The syndrome was confirmed a few days after the bat died. This means the disease has travelled over 1,300 kilometres past its last known western-most appearance. Bats keep mosquito and other insect populations in check, protecting crops from infestation and protecting us from vector-borne diseases. Many also pollinate plants and help with seed dispersal. A fall in bat numbers means diseases like West Nile virus could become a serious problem. If the disease becomes as wide-spread as it has on the east coast, the west coast of North America could lose 90 percent or more of its bat population. The culmination of Lupino-Smith’s summer work with HAT occurred at the Big Bat Bash in October 2018. Combining video files, footage from a slow-motion camera, and a sculptural piece, Lupino-Smith created a multi-media presentation meant to inspire and educate. The event drew more than 300 people and included workshops, dinner and a dance, with donations supporting the Metchosin Community Hall bats. Lupino-Smith’s plan, working with CFUV, the University of Victoria’s community radio station, is to create a podcast called “Mediated Natures” from the project, integrating science research with art creation. Lupino-Smith also works in sound, film, and text, providing workshops on the natural world to children, and nature walks with a political ecology component. Their plan is to eventually do a research-creation-based PhD. “Art is in the ideas. That’s where you start.” The HAT work was great, they explain, “because it was a rural project, not in a gallery. There was a bat cave, a bunch of kids.” The work made them realize the importance of outreach. Many landowners in the region don’t know that it’s illegal to remove bats from private property—even if they nest in the eaves of buildings. HAT provided training to Lupino-Smith that included a 14-hour session with other volunteers in Stanley Park, learning about bats, echolocation and data from scientists. “It made me realize that it’s all the work of these individual [volunteers] that makes the difference.” Lack of resources, social or political will, they argue, means that much of the data gathered by scientists is effectively lost if it’s not translated to the public. Lupino-Smith also admires the way HAT liaises with First Nations (with their restoration work on Senanus Island, for example). “I’d like to see more work on the part of settlers to follow Indigenous leadership.” One of the key changes Lupino-Smith would like to see in the non-profit world is a greater openness to art-science collaborations, which they stress are key to developing greater connection to place, and acknowledging humans as just one species in a large, complex ecology. Before HAT said yes to their proposal, Lupino-Smith approached another non-profit in the region. It turned Lupino-Smith down, worried they might compete with the NGO for funding. “There’s a funny thing in Victoria. Every organization looks fun, but then there’s a board of directors full of ancient white people who [work] to maintain the conservative frameworks that exist.” Part of being a queer, non-binary person, they argue, is an inclination to question the dominant power dynamic, which can see art and science as disparate fields. For Lupino-Smith, collaboration between the two is an integral step in dismantling colonialism and finding alternatives to institutionalized power. “Art is in creatively and critically thinking about things you don’t normally get to think about,” argues Lupino-Smith. “What excites you? What are your ideas? We’ll go from there.” This past year, they dreamed up the Artemisia Institute ( see estraven.ca/research), a name that gives authority to the work they’re already doing in various guises around the continent. So far, the Institute can only point to a research vehicle (the Research Creation Vessel Putt-Putt) and a business card. But if their track record is any indication, it won’t stay that way for long. “If a thing doesn’t exist, I do it. I’ve always had a DIY mentality.” If you have bats in your house or on your property, email HAT: hatmail@hat.bc.ca! They study and monitor bats, and need to know where they live. Bats are shy (and cute) and don’t want to harm you. Maleea Acker recently submitted the first draft of her geography doctoral dissertation on the intersections of art and science. One chapter of the dissertation is a manuscript of poetry.
  25. January 2019 Julian Anderson and Cuthbert Holmes Park AN IMPORTANT FACET OF ANY SUSTAINABLE CITY is its green spaces—providing opportunity for residents to step off a city bus and walk into wild areas to enjoy the ecosystems that make a region what it is. On Southern Vancouver Island, that includes salmon-bearing streams, Douglas-fir forests, wetlands, and habitat for a variety of bird and mammal species. Saanich’s Cuthbert Holmes Park, though sandwiched between a suburban mall, a residential neighbourhood and the Island Highway, satisfies all of these needs. But throughout its lifespan it has been both helped by its stewards and troubled by development. Julian Anderson, who directs the Friends of Cuthbert Holmes Park (FCHP), acts as main steward of the park. He made up the organization on the spot when asked to join the Gorge Waterway Initiative years ago. “Everyone else was part of a group already,” he explains, smiling, so he said he was part of the Friends of Cuthbert Holmes Park, which, at the time, didn’t yet exist. Julian Anderson (Photo by Tony Bounsall) Anderson’s invention of the organization, which shares its reports and findings with Saanich, was fortuitous. Anderson began a Restoration of Natural Systems diploma program in 2002 through the University of Victoria. Whenever he had a course project to complete, he used Cuthbert Holmes as the site location. Now, FCHP works in collaboration with Pulling Together, a Saanich invasive species removal program, and Anderson hosts work parties to plant native species, remove invasives, and generally care for the park’s ecosystems. Anderson and other volunteers have cleared large areas of the park, exposing native plants and stopping species like English ivy from smothering trees. Cuthbert Holmes is also home to a portion of the Colquitz River, one of the region’s primary Coho salmon spawning waterways. The park’s paths wind through forests, over two bridges, and out to a point where the Gorge waterway meanders past residential backyards. A fish-counting fence on the Colquitz helps keep track of returning salmon each year (see Focus’ October 2015 edition for Dorothy Chambers’ salmon work). Nootka roses and fawn lilies bloom in hidden corners of the park in spring. Anderson is no stranger to the area. He grew up beside the Victoria Canoe and Kayak Club, in one of several houses along the Gorge that have since been demolished. “In those days, we’d get kicked out of the house [in the morning], and come back for dinner,” he tells me at a coffee shop in Tillicum. Roving around the neighbourhood as a boy, he learned the local animals and plants. After starting FCHP he found himself directing volunteers and often serving as nature interpreter for school and volunteer groups that visited the park. Saanich was all too happy to see someone take a long-term interest in Cuthbert Holmes, and collaboration with the municipality is something for which he’s also thankful. Saanich’s invasive species management program and their openness to volunteers working in Saanich parks makes them “the envy of the entire south Island region,” Anderson says. As an example, Saanich’s management of the ferociously invasive species Japanese knotweed has been relatively successful in comparison to the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s. On the Cowichan River, whole areas of streamside native habitat have been supplanted in the last five years by a monotonous sea of knotweed. Knotweed decimates biodiversity and grows through concrete, so Saanich has taken a proactive stance, working to eliminate every new infestation, whether on private or public property. Luckily, none has yet been found in Cuthbert Holmes. Anderson’s primary focus these days concerns a new (but familiar) chapter for the park’s borders, as the Ministry of Highways completes an interchange on the Island Highway at McKenzie Avenue. In 2016, the Ministry of Highways vetoed Saanich’s decision to reject a cloverleaf design for the intersection. The ministry used 1.4 hectares of the park, including an area with mature Garry oak trees and a stand of rare Oregon ash and trembling aspen, for the cloverleaf. Some of the land was replaced with Ministry of Highways land alongside the TransCanada, but Anderson argued that infringement into the park was unjustified. Additionally, a constructed berm along the park’s edge will be planted with cultivated grasses and groupings of trees. Recommendations by an ecologist to leave the berm “rough and loose” to allow for gradual growth of native species was rejected. “We’re an impatient species,” rues Anderson. It’s been proven that enlarging highways increases dependence on single-vehicle travel. More cars move in to fill the new space. The noise pollution from commuting vehicles is already extreme in Cuthbert Holmes. But “there’s no sound fencing planned next to the cloverleaf right now,” laments Anderson. The park’s history can be more easily understood, Anderson explains, through aerial photos of the land. Perusing his series of air photos of Cuthbert Holmes park from 1928 to the present is a sobering experience. Anderson describes the changes he’s documented as we leaf through the decades. The earliest, at 1928, shows tracts of farmland stretching out from the park’s original, larger borders; there is no housing to be seen. The neighbourhoods of Burnside, Gorge and Tillicum mostly haven’t yet been built. Then the island highway bisects Saanich in 1956. Greenspace that makes up the park continually shrinks, as development chips away at its edges. A drive-in movie theatre replaces a field, then Tillicum Mall replaces the theatre. Pearkes Recreation Centre lops off a forested edge; its parking lot takes over a further swath. Then in the 1990s, the Silver City movie theatre replaces another edge. As the decades tick by, the wide swath of fields and wetlands surrounding the s-curve of the Colquitz River slowly shrinks. Changes in the park’s boundaries have also affected its species. “I used to walk by the drive-in on my way to school,” Anderson tells me. “There were choruses of frogs” near where the Tillicum Mall parking lot now stands. “You don’t hear that anymore. That’s an incremental change.” Salmon, he points out, are resilient creatures, but “they handle change until they can’t anymore. They’ll reach a limit, too.” One of Anderson’s primary hopes for the park is that people step forward who can eventually act as his successors. Anderson is nowhere near burnout, but he recognizes that, as an introvert, the education portion of environmental stewardship is a challenge. “If I disappear, I want this to carry on.” This desire for a succeeding generation of knowledge-keepers is a common refrain among environmental stewards in the region; most of those I have spoken with in the last three years voice concerns about what will happen to their carefully stewarded ecosystems in future decades. Cuthbert Holmes is no exception. Two-thirds of the park belong to the Province, and is currently leased by Saanich. It’s hard to say what decisions future governments will make about an urban park beside a highway, even if it does nurture great-horned owls, nesting herons and other at-risk species. The park hosted the largest great blue heron rookery on the island until 2010. Anderson hopes they will return. “I want future generations to go into the park and see the same things I’m seeing. This is a salmon-bearing river in the middle of an urban area,” he pauses to let that amazing fact sink in. Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star, 2012). She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between the social sciences and poetry.
×
×
  • Create New...