Around 30 people turned out to meet Green candidate Nic Dedeluk when she came to Mansons Hall on Monday, October 7. Cortes Currents recorded 145 minutes of the two hour meeting, which is far too much to fit into a half hour broadcast. So today’s program consists of a few highlights.
This event was put on by FOCI’s Climate Action Committee (The Climate Action Network) and there is a link to the unedited audio at the bottom of this page.
“A ccording to NASA, if we look back 800,000 years, we can see that carbon dioxide concentration fluctuated between roughly 180 and 280 parts per million and just in the geological blink of an eye, we have sent that parts per million up to just about 400. So we’re getting very close to a doubling of CO2 relative to where it has been for a long time.”
That quote was Max Thaysen, from the Climate Action Network, explaining one of the slides (top of page) shown at ‘Our Fair Share,’ an interactive online climate solutions workshop held in Mansons Hall on Thursday, October 3, 2024.
The event was hosted by the Climate Action Committee.
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.
Map of the Children’s Forest
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.
While the Green party has shown promise in the past, especially on Vancouver Island, this has yet to translate into votes on election day. So my biggest question for Nic Dedeluk, the candidate for North Island riding, is why should we vote Green?
Nick Dedeluk: “The Green Party is running candidates in 69 ridings, but we have six ridings that we are really hopeful will actually get elected. Getting six green MLAs voted in would be really positive for BC politics and holding the other parties accountable to moving forward in a way that’s better for our environment.”
A small group of people turned out to hear an overview of FOCI’s Western Screech Owl Project at Mansons Hall on Friday September 27, 2024. Participants listened to different owl calls, examined owl feathers and learned why putting up nest boxes is important. The speakers were the two biologists from Madrone Environmental who wrote FOCI’s final report. Cortes Currents interviewed the lead author, Roxan Chicalo, afterward.
“What gets me up in the morning, when I’m working at these species at risk, is thinking about balanced ecosystems. Everything is working together to create the ecosystem that supports our lifestyles as humans. In my mind, every animal and plant has a role that they play,” she began.
“Screech owls are a small avian predator. They eat anything from amphibians to small mammals to fish, insects, slugs, all sorts of different small animals in the ecosystem. As a predator, they keep a check on those prey species populations so that they don’t get out of control, and they also support biodiversity. If one of these prey species booms in their populations, they might start to compete against other populations of other animals. We might see that we’re having more extinction events. That’s why we should care to promote a balanced ecosystem and support that.”
