Sierra Quadra has been educating Quadra Islanders about the unfolding environmental crisis for close to 25 years, but they have been relatively quiet since COVID. 

This is changing. On September 28 they joined with the Council of Canadians, in Campbell River, to protest the provincial governments failure to implement its strategy to preserve old growth forests. On October 21 they will be sponsoring the world premiere of Robert Bringhurst’s poem ‘The Ridge‘ at the Quadra Community Centre. They will be bringing two widely recognized films to Quadra this winter and plan to host a forum on environmental issues in March 2024. 

Cortes Currents recently asked Ray Grigg, one of Sierra Quadra’s principle Directors, for an update on their vision for the future. 

“We got disoriented and stopped by COVID, like everybody. In the time that’s transpired, we’ve been evaluating who we are, what we’re trying to do, how successful it’s been, and exactly how we should proceed.”

“We’re not quite sure what to do and that has partly been the explanation for the quietude that’s been us on Quadra for the last three years.”

“We know we have an environmental problem on the planet. We know we produce too much CO2. We know we have too many children. We know we’re consuming too much. We know we’re in overshoot, but it’s not registering deep enough for us to actually change.” 

“I remember An Inconvenient Truth, which we showed, that should have awakened some people. Things haven’t changed very much in any regard with respect to environmental emissions. With respect to forestry practices, Mosaic still is busy on the island.” 

“How much information do you need before it’s actually internalized into you and you change your behavior? It’s almost as if we’re confronted with a Zen koan and we have to reflect and think and wrestle with that koan for sometimes years and a whole lifetime until it actually changes us. It almost seems like that’s the state in which we’re in. We have this koan that we’re confronting. We know what the koan is.”

“This leaves us at Sierra Quadra in a bit of a bind.  Do we keep plodding forward with more information? We’re not perfectly clear what we’re going to do and what we should do. I’m not sure we know as a society, as a civilization, what we’re going to do and what we should do. It almost feels like we’ve stepped over the precipice and we’re losing control of the environmental agenda.”

“I think there is a great deal of angst out there.” 

“There’s hope in the sense that we’re shifting to green energies. There’s potential there. My concern is that we’ve waited too long. As we start losing control, that loss of control impairs our ability to function preemptively.”

“The more money we spend dealing with forest fires, repairing from floods, typhoons and hurricanes,  the less money we have and the less energy we have and the less attention we can give to actually preventing those things from happening.  It works in both ways against us. We get the disasters, but the disasters impair our ability to prevent further disasters.”

“If you think of the number of homes that are destroyed by a hurricane in Florida, for example, those homes have to be rebuilt. This  means more wood for houses, it means,  there’s now more demand, which creates more of the problem, which caused the problem.”

“There is some indication that people are starting to get concerned. For example, the Regional District had a brush cleaning project that they initiated, I don’t know if it happened on Cortes, but it did on Quadra. people were encouraged to clean up the debris around their houses, bring it out to the road, and it would get picked up and chipped, and this was so oversubscribed that it got canceled for the next year. It was undone by its success, but we also now have an organization on the island that informs people about fire issues, about emergency issues, so this crisis is starting to be personalized, and it’s starting to be translated into local personal concerns.”

“At the same time though, I have friends who have flown to Ecuador to watch birds, to go to a wedding, who went to France to visit with their family – actually two friends who are going to France to visit with their families. I have another friend who said that they did a tour of England, after flying to New York and then boating across the Atlantic, which is the most carbon intensive way you can possibly travel. She did apologize, but nonetheless did it. So it’s not connecting as it needs to connect. The crisis is not registering.” 

“Catastrophe doesn’t usually arrive just in one big bunch it creeps along.” 

“I’m wondering about things like the cost of food, for example, which is going up and up and up, and it’s outpacing inflation. If you start looking at food supplies, you start seeing that weather anomalies do affect food production, and there are shortages. It’s not just COVID anymore. It’s summers that are too hot. We don’t get pollination. We don’t get the kind of crops we want.” 

“India is not exporting basmati rice anymore because they’re concerned about their supplies. I’m  reading that other countries are saying, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t be exporting our food products because they’re now fearing insecurity.’ This means food shortages. It means price increases. It means lack of stability in the whole food chain system.” 

“It isn’t that we’re going to suddenly have a civilizational collapse, it’s these wounds, little bit by bit, piece by piece, that are expensive and

inconvenient and start undermining the security of our society.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if this is the leading edge of the civilizational crisis that is slowly unfolding because  of the climate crisis.” 

“I still spend a fair amount of time looking at what is happening in the environmental world. We know that almost all of the worst case scenarios forecast by the climate models  have in fact, been correct. Not the conservatives, but mostly the radicals who said things are on the upper edge of worst case scenarios.” 

“There’s an interesting study out by a University of BC professor,  I don’t think he’s a climatologist, he might be an economist. It’s called Overshoot.”

Dr William Rees, from the School of Community Planning at UBC is internationally recognized for his work in this field and has published dozens of papers on the subject.

RG: “He’s talking about 8 billion of us on a planet which really can’t support more than a quarter of that. As our aspirations go up for materialism, for comfort, for luxuries, we seem to think that international travel is now a right, not a privilege,  everybody wants a home, everybody wants the mod cons, the conveniences, mangoes in the middle of winter.”

“This becomes progressively untenable and at some point it’s got to break, it seems to me. I try to be optimistic. I try to be more of a realist than a pessimist. I also don’t know how resilient humanity is, how adaptable it is and how capable we are going to be to address these issues that unfold.”

We are a pretty adaptive, ingenious species. We’re also supported by the systems that give us comfort and allow us to communicate and function in an orderly way.

“Then we have strange things happening, like the news Hamas and Israel are at each other’s throats again.” 

“We have Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is just almost literally the last thing we needed on this planet. We need to be functioning cooperatively,  not adversarially. This invasion of Ukraine is an environmental catastrophe, it’s also a food catastrophe. Ukraine produces vast amounts of the world’s grains  and those supplies are certainly handicapped, and what will happen next year and the year after. We don’t know, we don’t know how long this war is going to go on, assuming that it doesn’t get out of control.” 

“We’re keeping the lid on as best we can, but Russia seems to have no sensitivity for world order. Here we have the United Nations, which is our world governing body, and on it we have Russia that has veto power in the Security Council. In effect, what they’ve essentially done is totally handicapped the international governing body we have on this planet.”

“It thwarts the kind of cooperation we need to be addressing environmental, political, economic, social, philosophical, psychological issues, all of the things we really need to be addressing. So, yeah, I’m concerned. I’m also of an age where I’m going to miss, perhaps, some of the more catastrophic consequences.”

“Having said that, we live in a forest on Quadra Island. It’s a mixed forest. It’s not conifer, but it will burn. It could burn and we did have a fire on the north end of Quadra this summer that was caused by a tree coming down. It brought down the power line. The forest was tinder dry. The fire was contained to a few hectares, but it could have raged out of control. Fortunately we had firefighters, we had local people helping, we had water bombers. It was put out, but that was a close call.  It’s not so far away anymore, the consequences  of a global climate crisis.”

“We’re in this conundrum. The situation is getting worse and worse and we’ve talked about this for 25 years or more. We have known for half a century that this is coming. We’ve been trying to advise people of what it means, what the implications are and they’re still not getting it.” 

“Civilizations have come and gone, they’ve come and gone, they’ve come and gone. This is not without precedent. Every civilization thinks that it is permanent and stable until it is no longer.”

“Our global civilization doesn’t have to be an exception. It probably won’t be an exception.”  

“Exactly what’s going to happen, we don’t know. I don’t think there’s going to be a huge cataclysmic collapse and all people will die, but there will be disconnections, there will be discord, there will be breakdowns. There will be all kinds of problems that we can hardly imagine.”

“Sierra Quadra is in this situation where we are processing all of this stuff, and we really don’t know what to do. We’re a few people on a little island on a big planet that is rapidly shrinking and we feel powerless. I think lots of people feel powerless. One thing we might do is just explore what all of this means and how we can energize ourselves. Maybe that’s one of the directions we’re going to go.”

Top image credit: paddling into the smoke Photo by Naomi McKinney on Unsplash

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