The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) was talked about in the past tense, when Delores Broten and Don Malcom moved to Cortes in 1987. In the first of a series of posts about the origins of FOCI, Broten talks about the 1990 logging blockade that inspired FOCI’s rebirth, and led to the award-winning environmental magazine ‘the Watershed Sentinel.’
Continue reading Delores Broten: the 1990 logging blockade, FOCI and origins of the Watershed SentinelOriginally published on the Discovery Islander
“Noise is the amount of disagreement between people who make professional judgements.” This is the definition supplied by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural scientist and Nobel Prize winner, and his two fellow scientists, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, who were trying to understand and explain why “a lot of professional judgement actually has no connection to reality.”
Their studies were initially inspired by a survey of 208 federal judges in the United States. On convictions for the same offence that received an average of 7 years incarceration, sentences varied by as much as 50%. Another study found that the value estimates of insurance underwriters varied by 55%, a large enough range that made their assessments almost useless. Psychiatry is particularly “noisy”. So is forestry.
Continue reading Critique of Mosaic’s 2022 Forest Stewardship Plan for Quadra Island (P3)Originally published on the Watershed Sentinel
By Rex Weyler
About one-fifth of the world’s ancient forests remain intact. The forests have protectors and champions, but Earth still loses ancient forest every year to human enterprise, and now, to the new human-mediated climate.
Continue reading The World’s Ancient ForestsOriginally published on Heartwood, Field Notes
Their plan is to net out of the equation sensitive ecosystems, riparian zones, areas with very thin soils, and groves of old growth—and do selective, ecosystem-based forestry on what remains of the land base.
Continue reading The Klahoose First Nation & Origins of Cortes Community Forest
