Tag Archives: Paul Stamets

Arts, Education, Nature

The Cortes Island Academy looks ahead to 2024/25 & back at the past year

The Cortes Island Academy’s school year is over. Graduation was on January 25. Executive Director, Manda Aufochs Gillespie, just gave Cortes Currents an overview of the 2023/24 semester and a peek into the year that is just about to begin.

“This school year (Sep 2023-Jan 2024), the Cortes Island Academy was a lot of fun.  We learned a lot from our first year. So this year we really got to just revel in the model, the awesome kids and local knowledge holders that came out to make this year happen. It felt to me like a lot more fun, and a lot less trailblazing,” she began. 

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Forests

MYCOBlitz 2023 on Cortes Island

“The goal of a MYCOblitz is to document MYCOdiversity; i.e. the diversity of fungal species present on Cortes Island.Fungal fruiting bodies vary month to month, location to location, season to season. Therefore ongoing MYCOblitz’s are required to cover these bases!!” – email from Sabina Leader Mense

Close to 70 people of all ages took part in Cortes Island’s community fungal forest walk on November 1, 2023. The students of the Cortes Island Academy were among them. We were greeted outside the Linnaea Education Centre by one of the islands better known scientists, who declared:

“Good afternoon. Good afternoon. ‘Truncocolumella citrina‘ you can call me, the Latin name for Lemon truffle. On any day other than MYCOblitz, my name is Sabina Leader Mense. I’m a founding director and an educational research associate with the Forest Trust for the Children of Cortez Island Society and it’s my pleasure on their behalf to be hosting MYCOblitz 2023.” (Cheers)

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Forests

Expert Panel Discussion: Suzanne Simard, Tzeporah Berman, Paul Stamets

An expert panel discussion featuring Suzanne Simard, Tzepoarh Berman and Paul Stamets was one of the highlights of the Children’s Forest AGM on January 28. The topics ranged from finding an effective way to communicate with industry to a proposed research collaboration on Cortes Island. The podcast below is an abridged version of that segment, starting with the introduction Forest Berman-Hatch gave for his mother.

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Arts, Forests

The New Children’s Forest Video

The Cortes Children’s Forest Trust has just released an incredible video, as part of fundraiser that will end of Tuesday November 29, 2022.  As the audio is strong enough to stand on its’ own, I am playing it in today’s program.

If you live on Cortes, you may recognise a few of the voices:  Al Huuskonen, Andy Ellingsen, Bruce Ellingsen, Christine Robinson, Daniel Tucker, Emma Mathieu, Kai Harvey, Kiera Tsaknoas, Paul Stamets, Tosh Harvey, Tzeporah Berman, or Zyla Schmidt.

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Forests

Recognizing Root Rot

(#2 in a series coming out of the Cortes Forestry General Partnership’s 2022 AGM)

According to BC Hydro, more than half the province’s power outages are caused by falling trees. That number is probably higher on Cortes and Quadra Islands, which are heavily forested. Trees appear to be dropping on the power lines every time there is a storm. There are also large numbers of relatively young trees falling over in the forest, and in people’s yards. Some of them were critically weakened by root rot. 

In yesterday’s interview, General Manager Mark Lombard said a significant number of the fir trees that Cortes Forestry General Partnership recently harvested were afflicted by root rot.  

So Cortes Currents asked, “how do you recognize root rot?”

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