Tag Archives: Books

Animals, Forests

Earth Day 2023: Wild Cortes Displays (P 1 – the Mother Tree)

Wild Cortes celebrated Earth Day, on Saturday April 22, with the opening of the new Mother Tree Exhibit. One of the advantages of being among the first to arrive, is that the facility was not too crowded. There were only half a dozen people when Wild Cortes opened at noon. Local biologist Sabina Leader-Mense agreed to give Cortes Currents a walk through.

She was making some last minute touches to the exhibit when I asked some of the first viewers, ‘What’s your impression of the exhibit?’  

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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.

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Arts

Cortes Literacy book club gets off the ground with eReader grant

CKTZ News, through an LJI grant from Canada-info.ca

A grant of eReaders from Rakuten Kobo has translated into a monthly book club on Cortes Island where readers use both print and digital media to access titles.

Late last year, 20 Kobo eReaders came under Cortes Literacy’s stewardship. Through the partnership, a regular book club is now being held: readers have access to the devices and subscriptions to the Kobo Plus book library included with the grant, as well as public library’s offerings.

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Communications, Education

Cortes Literacy DIY book club and Kobo e-readers

Assuming they don’t get snowed out, Cortes Literacy is holding a mandatory training session for their new Rakuten Kobo e-readers today. Manda Aufochs Gillespie explained this is connected to Cortes Island’s new book club. 

 Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “This book club is a hybrid of just another community organized volunteer ‘Let’s everybody pitch in book club’ like we have seen multiple times before on Cortes. And an attempt to blend with a program that Cortes Literacy is doing with Rakuten Kobo, which brings 20 digital eReaders into our community to loan and reuse, as well as a subscription to the Kobo Plus book library. They basically saw a need in rural and remote communities. People had no access to books during COVID. Libraries shut down, community halls shut down, schools shut down, and people in these remote communities had no access to books and reading material.”

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: A poem for our time

The long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Even by this time, however, the devastating consequence of burning coal to fuel the proliferation of factories was evident. Once pristine valleys were transformed into darkened wastelands of smoke and soot, bucolic streams and rivers were turned toxic black, quaint villages were converted to slums of indentured labourers, and the maw of multiple machines was making people into consumable and disposable objects. The artistic reaction to this perceived travesty was Romanticism, an effort to save humanity and nature from a revolution that was perceived to be destroying both.

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