When we think about environmentalism, we tend not to consider the oceans because we don’t live on or in them, and they are just there as they have always been, defining the edge of the land that we occupy. Of course, oceans provide us with most of our fish, but in the popular understanding, they are mostly experienced as vast spaces of waves and wet that separate the faraway continents that we visit. So we tend to give much more importance to landscapes that we occupy. And because we live within the thin layer of air that girdles the globe, weather is also a concern to us. But we generally don’t consider that much of our climate and weather is determined by what happens in the oceans.
Continue reading The Quadra Project – Deep WaterTag Archives: Books
The Most Exciting Conservation Story on Cortes Island
Transcript of a radio broadcast by Sabina Leader Mense
Just last weekend several of us were at the Cortes Island Museum for the launch of Sheila Harrington’s new book ‘Voices For The Islands: 30 Years Of Nature Conservation In The Salish Sea.’ What Sheila does in this book is she celebrates this amazing community of conservationists that are living and working in the Salish Sea.
In the foreword, Briony Penn wrote, “If you’ve picked up this book, chances are that you’ve fallen in love with the islands in the Salish Sea. You might have wondered how the heck they’ve retained their natural beauty against the hostile tsunami of contemporary clear-cuts, cookie cutter suburbs, and mindless malls that are encroaching elsewhere.”
Briony talks about the collective efforts of thousands of people over generations that have actually been working to maintain the beauty of the islands.
Sheila’s book documents the last 30 years of people (voices in the islands) who have been working at conservation. She includes a chapter on Cortes, so we’re in there with the best of them! I encourage everybody to pick her book up and have a read to see what the island community of conservationists have been doing.
The most exciting conservation story on Cortes today is definitely the Children’s Forest! This is the 624 acres of forest lands that stretch all the way from the Carrington Bay Road trailhead, east across Carrington Lagoon to Goat Mountain, just on the northern shore of Blue Jay Lake. These are lands owned by Island Timberlands. It’s part of their privately managed forest land base on Cortes Island.
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The Quadra Project – Pure Consciousness
What is pure consciousness? In simplistic terms, it seems to be awareness of awareness. That is, it is not an awareness of the content of awareness such as being conscious of fish or trees or ideas, but an awareness of the awareness itself. As such, it would seem to be a distancing from the content of awareness—of the things that we think about—to the awareness itself. This detached awareness from experiences and ideas would give us the perspective to assess the substance of our thinking, to give us special insights into how we think, and perhaps more appropriately, to allow us to assess how we behave.
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The perfect Recommendation: Marnie’s Books
It’s been a busy season for Marnie’s Books.
Marnie Andrews explained, “It’s really fun to have a bookstore on Cortes Island. There’s some amazing readers here. I get so many of my titles because friends come in and recommend what they’ve been reading. There’s a lot of regular people, but I think a lot of people came west because of all the wildfires. It’s been a great bookstore season, people are reading like crazy. They want real books.”
A young customer named Devran was perusing the contents of a nearby shelf, “It’s very nice to have a bookstore on the island. I can walk in, look at the books and pick what I want. I also like that I can order books from here.”
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Tales from Land Conservancies on Cortes, Quadra & 15 Other Islands
In 2021 Sheila Harrington embarked upon a three-year journey to explore the creation of local nature conservancies on 17 islands. Cortes and Quadra Islands were among them. She conducted more than 50 interviews, and wove together a chronicle of land conservancies and the people behind them since the 1990s. The resulting book, ‘Voices for the Islands, 30 Years Of Nature Conservation On The Salish Sea’ is just being released by Heritage House.
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