Everyone was talking about the murals, when they were first unveiled. Thirty-seven years later, the image of three proud First Nations faces comes to many people’s minds when they hear the name Chemainus. Municipalities throughout British Columbia embraced this former logging town as a model for how communities can be reinvented after their principal industry collapses. There are still hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to see this Vancouver Island town every year.I recently dropped in to see how how Chemainus Transformed itself.
Though British Columbia’s hydrologists have fifty years of stream flow data to formulate its’ responses to climate change, a recent study from the University of Victoria shows this is not enough. Tree ring data shows that, since 1658 AD, their have been 16 droughts exceeding anything evidenced in the instrumental record. The most recent and severest of these events took place in 1958. According to one of the study co-authors, Bethany Coulthard, “It was a cool time and yet we still saw these extreme natural droughts.” Add problems like urbanization, deforestation and rising Global temperatures into the equation and we can expect a mega-sized drought coming to BC.
Everyone was talking about the murals, when they were first unveiled. Thirty-seven years later, the image of three proud First Nations faces comes to many people’s minds when they hear the name Chemainus. Municipalities throughout British Columbia embraced this former logging town as a model for how communities can be reinvented after their principal industry collapses. There are still hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to see this Vancouver Island town every year. I recently dropped in to see how how Chemainus Transformed itself.
