All posts by Ray Grigg

Rivers & Oceans

The Quadra Project: Salmon Farming in Perspective

The salmon farming industry in BC is once again challenging the authority of the Minister of Fisheries to make decisions about whether or not its feedlots should continue to be located in open ocean settings. Their first successful court challenge overturned Minister Bernadette Jordan’s 2020 decision to close down open-net operations. Now, in 2023, Minister Joyce Murray’s similar decision is also being challenged. For perspective, this challenge invites a review of the history of salmon farming in BC’s waters.

When corporate salmon farming arrived in a relatively pristine British Columbia, the marine wilderness was already occupied by many native species. The farms were totally incongruous with this ecology, and immediately found themselves in conflict with the seals, sea lions, orcas, whales, eagles, osprey, mink, otters and kingfishers. The result was carnage to wildlife as the farmers tried to defend their salmon from a traditional food that had always been available to the natural predators.

Continue reading The Quadra Project: Salmon Farming in Perspective →
Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: Defending Identity

An obvious question has haunted environmentalists for decades. It is echoed in various forms, one of which is implicit in the powerful statement by Tanya Steele, the Chief Executive Officer of the United Kingdom’s World Wildlife Fund: “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”

Since we know our collective and individual behaviour is initiating a global climate crisis, why, then, are we so slow to take the corrective action?

An insightful answer comes from Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist who has recently written a book called What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, has given a TED Talk, and is one of 100 authoritative contributor’s to Greta Thunberg’s new publication, The Climate Book.

Continue reading The Quadra Project: Defending Identity →
Forests

The Quadra Project – Logging’s Carbon – Part 2

Click here to access part one

Loggers on Quadra Island are confronted with a dilemma. Whether they cut trees from TFL 47 or from any of the 11 licenced woodlots, the carbon stored in the forests is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, thereby contributing to the climate crisis. But loggers are required by law, as operators of their tenures, to cut an annual amount of merchantable wood—measured as cubic metres—to earn royalties, called stumpage, for government revenue. Because most logged wood becomes the raw material used for making paper, packaging and many other disposable products, most of the cut wood is quickly consumed or discarded, and its stored carbon is released into the atmosphere as CO2 within the first year following logging—only about 20% of the cubic metres measured as forest product is sequestered up to a century as lumber for buildings or as kept objects such as furniture.

Continue reading The Quadra Project – Logging’s Carbon – Part 2 →
Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: Logging’s Carbon – Part 1

Click here to access part two

The global climate crisis is forcing us to restructure our thinking about almost everything we do. In the last two centuries, rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the single most influential greenhouse gas, have risen from 280 parts per million to 419 ppm, and are now threatening to literally cook us off the planet. At the seemingly modest temperature rise of 1.2°C, we are already starting to experience the disastrous effects on climate, species, ocean levels, weather patterns, food production, human health, and our general sense of physical and psychological wellbeing. Meanwhile, as carbon dioxide emissions continue to go up rather than down, the circumstances invite a paradigm shift in our thinking.

Continue reading The Quadra Project: Logging’s Carbon – Part 1 →
Uncategorized

The Quadra Project: Protecting Old Forests

At least 1,000 people, representing more than 220 diverse organizations and First Nations from British Columbia, attended the United for Old Growth March & Rally in Victoria on February 25. They marched from City Hall to the BC Legislature, demanding the implementation of the Old Growth Strategic Review, a comprehensive 2020 study that recommended the immediate protection of the remnant old growth forests in the province. Not one of its 14 recommendations has yet been implemented.

Continue reading The Quadra Project: Protecting Old Forests →