A ferry sailing between two islands

FOCI’s Recommendations for the Official Community Plan

On Monday, Dec 11, the Strathcona Regional District will be holding an open house at Mansons Hall, pertaining to updating the Cortes Island zoning bylaws. This is the first of a series of steps that will also include a revision of the island’s Official Community Plan. The Friends of Cortes Island has prepared a 22 page study of suggested recommendations for revisions to Cortes Island’s plan for the future. 

“It’s really critically important at this moment in history that we make sure that every decision made in the community plan is made taking climate change and  climate adaptation into account,” said Forrest Berman-Hatch, author of the report. 

Forrest Berman-Hatch – submitted photo

Cortes Currents: One of the recommendations is that Cortes Island should set a goal of having zero carbon emissions by 2030. What would that look like? 

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “We don’t have an up to date carbon inventory for the island, so  I can’t state with certainty all of our sources of emissions,  but I am pretty sure of the biggest ones.   Transportation is huge. The ferry is the one I think that is the single biggest source of emissions and it’s also unavoidable because if you attribute the emissions we get from most of our building materials and quite a bit of our food that all come on the ferry. Plus everyone takes the ferry.”

He suggested that electrifying the ferry will make a huge difference.

Forrest Berman-Hatch:”One of the biggest things the community plan could do would be to have a stated intention and a plan to assist BC ferries in the province with electrifying the ferry and other means of transportation.

“Another big source of emissions on the island is heating. We all love our wood stoves, myself included, but they are a sizeable source of emissions for Cortes.  As we know, carbon emissions are  the number one cause of anthropogenic climate change, which is wreaking havoc all over the world. We’re feeling the effects of it here with droughts and wildfires, and those impacts are felt even worse in the global south. So I think we have to do our fair part.”  

“This isn’t to blame people for burning wood because at the moment that is the way the system is geared and it’s the best way to heat your home, but we should be working to create a better system where it is more affordable to have heat pumps in homes and other retrofits.  I think that should be another main priority of the plan.” 

Cortes Currents: There are also references to solar and wind energy in your report.  

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “I think it would be really cool  if we have rebates for people to do their own solar and  wind, when solar and wind are the lowest impact ways to create renewable energy.” 

“BC already has a really clean electricity grid. It’s almost all hydro.  So I’m not saying don’t do that.  I think our biggest areas of input and energy should not necessarily be creating a solar array on Cortes.”

Cortes Currents: Another focus in your report is increasing housing density. 

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “That’s one of the areas of most focus because  SRD is hosting an open house to talk about housing on the island on Monday.  They want to see what islanders think.” 

“When I opened the Official Community Plan to read it, I was  pleasantly surprised in a lot of places with how environmentally progressive it was, but  our zoning limits are not. They are contributing to the housing crisis, which I think we’re all very painfully aware of. On the island, it’s all based around this idea  of ‘rural character.’  That’s what the OCP says over and over again, that we need to preserve our rural character.  I think that the idea of rural character is why we have 1 house per 10 acres. It is really strange and anthropologically has no bearing on how humans have lived early  for most of history.”

“I do think we need to increase the density of dwellings permitted on a property. We need to do that in a way to make sure that it doesn’t result in more massive and empty homes on properties. Increasing density does not mean to go crazy and allow condos on Cortes. That’s not what increasing density means.” 

“In a lot of cases rezoning to allow for more dwellings doesn’t even mean having more people on the island. A lot of young people,  a lot of my friends,  cannot find housing. They are living in trailers and are getting creative about how to live in this place that we all love.  I think one of the ways to  combat a housing crisis just allows people to have stable housing. It’s also not an imperative.  Opening up this process does not mean that you cannot keep your property with one house, it just allows other people  to build more if they wish.” 

“There’s interesting ways to do that.”

“We have some good models already, like Siskin Lane. They did a really cool job of higher density. It seems like they’re pretty ecologically responsible and have a pretty low impact for how much density they have on that land. There are covenants on the land and strong sustainability principles associated with the development of the land in order to have minimal disruption to the ecology.”

“You can have more houses close together.  Throughout history, most people have not lived in this sort of ‘Lord of the manor,’ one house for 10 acres that we have here. Many people have lived in small village style settlements, which does not necessarily mean higher impact on the landscape, and can mean, in some cases, the opposite.”

Cortes Currents: I’ve heard of two other objections about increasing density and to a certain extent they both arise out of ignorance. 

We don’t know very much about the island’s aquifers, but we do know that Basil Creek has been reduced to a trickle the past two summers, and a number of the shallow wells close to it have ceased recharging, or were very low. There are rumours of wells not recharging in Mansons and Whaletown as well. There are a number of plans to increase the number of dwellings on Cortes. Can the island’s aquifers handle more housing?  

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “There has never been, as far as I’m aware (and I did look), an in depth hydrological review of what the capacity of the aquifer is. This is one of the Friends of Cortes Island’s recommendations for the OCP . It’s a top priority to be well aware of how much water there is in our aquifers and in our watershed. We should commission that study.”  

“I’m not a hydrologist, but I also think that shallow wells running dry doesn’t mean that the aquifer, which is quite deep, is depleted.”

“It’s a complex field of study. One of the other recommendations is to encourage wetland restoration, like projects like Dillon Creek, which I think you’ve covered before, because they allow more water to be stored in the watershed to trickle down into the aquifers.” 

Cortes Currents: Another objection I’ve heard concerned the island’s septic systems. From the algae bloom problem at Hague Lake a few years ago, we know that septic systems may look okay on the surface and still be seeping into the water table. We have a lot of relatively older homes, which could be seeping into our water table. Can we handle an increase in the number of septic systems? 

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “I’m not an expert on septic systems, somewhat fortunately, but I do think that quality is probably a bigger factor than quantity in how we deal with waste.”

“I think the island can probably support quite a few more people than it currently is.”

Cortes Currents: Some of your other recommendations pertain to Cortes Island’s  food sovereignty

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “That’s something we should think about both from the perspective of ensuring that the community has access to affordable and healthy food as the climate crisis continues and also from how we can reduce the carbon emissions associated with bringing our food to Cortes.  I don’t know the percentages, but it’s a large percentage.”

He talked about growing food on Cortes

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “A lot of people on Cortes do this individually, really quite impressively and nobly, I would say, but if we wait for everyone to do that of our own accord on a global scale,  we will not solve this crisis. It’s a collective action problem waiting for  everyone to take action of their own accord. LuckiLy we have come up with a solution to solve collective action problems and they’re called laws and community plans. That’s why we need to amend our community plan to focus more on encouraging development of sustainable agriculture and protecting fisheries.”

Cortes Currents: One of your suggestions was toxin centres for aquaculture, so that shellfish doesn’t have to be sent off island and more can be consumed locally. 

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “That is, I think, a great idea. I’m not an expert on the topic and I do not know the costs, but I think it would be worth a deeper dive because at one point we had a  shellfish processing plant here on Cortes, not that long ago in living memory.”

“If you want to sell shellfish on Cortes, you have to send them off island to be tested and then brought back. That’s what Hollyhock and the Gorge restaurant (when it’s operating) has to do.  That seems like  a  silly situation, but a lot of islanders harvest shellfish of their own accord. I’m not sure what the statistics are on how big of a reduction that would be, but I think it would be worth looking into. “

Cortes Currents: The report also mentions possible roles for schoolchildren and a youth climate corps, in climate adaptation and wildfire and wildfire preparation. 

Forrest Berman-Hatch: “It was one of the things in the research that was done  in conjunction between FOCI and the reset lab at SFU. I was a research assistant. One of the things I ran across was I think in Lytton, I could be wrong with that. It was a town in the southern interior. They found funding to have  summer jobs for youth doing wildfire mitigation. Not fighting the wildfires, but removing dead fuels and assisting seniors with making their properties firesmart.”

“That’s another lens that is one of the top priorities of revisions to the official community plan,  prioritizing local employment opportunities that are in line with climate adaptation and ecological restoration. There are many.  One of the best ways we can adapt to climate change is just stop destroying our best assets in climate change, which in many cases are aquifers, the fish stocks in the ocean and  the forests (which sequester carbon dioxide and produce the air that we breathe).” 

“There’s many ways  to sustainably harvest all of these resources. And there are other ways  to restore them, and those are jobs for people.” 

“One of the biggest, most immediate impacts of climate change that we’ve already experienced are heat waves and they are predicted to get worse. Just a few days ago, Oxford released a study of scientists from around the world talking about the state of climate change and they said we’re entering into uncharted territory as far as heat goes in general and heat waves as well.”

“We have to adapt to that. It’s not going away.  We can take action to do our best to make that not get extremely worse, but we have to be realistic and it is predicted to get worse. The official community plan should take that into account and plan accordingly.”

“One thing I think we can do, which would be really low cost, is have a list of at-risk people who would like to be checked up on when the heat reaches a certain threshold.” 

“I’m  hugely grateful to the medical responders on Cortes. I think they do a fantastic job and they are a great example of the community adapting without much  push from above.” 

“The fire department’s creation of a wildfire brigade, to respond to increasing risk of wildfire, is an example of the kind of action we need more of.”

“I think the SRD’s open house on the opening of the official community plan on Monday is a great way to get involved in this process.”

“I think it’s really critically important at this moment in history that we make sure that every decision made in the community plan is made taking climate change and  climate adaptation into account.”

“I’m grateful to Max Thaysen and Lisa Ferentinos for their  invaluable help on crafting this report.” 

Top image: The ferry ‘Tacheck’sails between Cortes and Quadra Islands – Photo by David Stanley via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 DEED)

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