Cortes Island’s First Housing Forum

About 100 people came together for Cortes Island’s first Housing Forum on Saturday, December 2, in Mansons Hall.   

There were break-out sessions devoted to tiny homes, rental housing, short term rentals, worker housing, empty homes, landlord-tenant relations, home upgrades and making land and home ownership more affordable. A session devoted to environmental issues was added at the last minute. 

The Forum began with opening addresses by Regional Director Mark Vonesch and Sadhu Johnston, Executive Director of the Cortes Community Housing Society.  

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BBC’s Planet Earth does a deep dive on West Coast whale poo

Editor’s Note: Most of what follows is applicable to our waters, doubly so because MERS operates in our waters. Stay tuned to see if there are any scenes from Cortes or the surrounding islands in the BBC story.

Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Whale researcher Jackie Hildering and her colleagues never imagined their work on humpbacks would capture the attention of the globe’s premier documentary series.  

Or that whale poo would be of such interest to Planet Earth — BBC’s famous nature show. 

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Cortes Island’s 2023 MicroGrants for Neighbours Program

The thirteen projects that applied to Cortes Island’s MicroGrants for Neighbours Program this year received a total of $6,000 in funding. 

“This was the first year we ran it in partnership with Neighborhood Small Grants, which is actually  part of the Vancouver Foundation,” explained Isabella McKnight, Executive Administrator of the Cortes Island Community Foundation, which runs the local microgrants program.”’  

“I believe that having this seed money and the ability to then rent a space, or buy supplies, or hire facilitators really helped to kickstart these events. Without even just a couple hundred dollars to pay for somebody’s time to run these events, I don’t think all of them would have happened. I’m really hoping that after seeing the success of the programs and the events that ran this year, we’ll have even more applications next year.” 

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The Quadra Project: Overshoot – Part 2

The essence of the proposition that Professor William Rees presents in The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable, is that human population, consumption and pollution have combined to exceed the ability of our planet’s limited ecological systems to sustain it. This situation is not unusual. It has commonly happened in the past with other civilizations, and is a frequent and natural occurrence in all biological systems. Overshoot, then, is just the inability of species to be supported by their environment if they exceed its carrying capacity. This, Professor Rees suggests, is now the condition in which humanity finds itself. Earth is not big enough, rich enough, or regenerative enough to deal with the impact of more than 8 billion people who are hungry, materialistic, wasteful and unrestrained. The result, he suggests, will be a major “population correction” by the end of this century.

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Discovery Island Sea Snail Species Threatened By Warming Oceans

A new study found that a species of Sea Snails found on the beaches of Cortes, Quadra and neighbouring Discovery Islands is already experiencing ocean temperatures beyond their comfort zone. According to the associated UBC press release, oysters will survive as the oceans warm up, but the Nucella lamellosa might not. 

“I conducted a research study using a combination of field and lab experimental methods to answer the big question: are marine ecosystems going to be able to keep up with the rate of environmental change that they’re experiencing? We know that species can respond to ocean warming by moving, by genetically adapting, or by acclimatizing within generations. Every species is going to have a different ability to employ those strategies based on its traits,” explained Lead author Dr Fiona Beaty, from the University of British Columbia.

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As Broadcast over CKTZ, Whats Current on Cortes and Beyond