Recording by Bryan McKinnon; Broadcast and text by Roy L Hales.
NDP incumbent Michele Babchuk came to Cortes Island Saturday, October 12, in the second in a series of meet the candidate events organized by FOCI’s Climate Action Committee.
There is not room to unpack close to two hours of fact filled conversation into this half hour, but the full podcast is at the bottom of this page and here are some highlights.
Continue reading Michele Babchuk Meets With Cortes Island Voters
In the first of a series of articles from Cortes Islands recent Wildlife Coexistence Gathering, Cortes Currents looked at Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The problem at that time was human/bear conflicts. By the time Sabina Leader Mense reached out from Cortes Island, in 2009, Bear Aware (later renamed WildSafeBC) had been dealing with wolves and cougars for more than a decade.
Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC, described the wolves’ sudden appearance.
“Up until this point in time, it was bears and nothing but bears. In 1998/99, the wolves showed up after being missing from our area for decades. Their presence was very dramatically felt. I remember getting a phone call from the local paper in January of 1999, ‘have you been getting wolf reports?’ I checked our database, and we’d had six wolf reports since 1972. I said, ‘nope.’ Within two weeks it started, the wolves were back.”
Hansen suspects that modern forestry methods may be at least partially responsible for the influx of wolves and cougars into his area.
Continue reading Connecting the Dots: Forestry Management And Some Implications For Wildlife
On Monday, May 15, Rami Rothkop and Oliver Scholfield unveiled their ‘Business Roadmap for Value-Added Forestry Products’ on Cortes Island at Mansons Hall.
Most of what they presented has been discussed before, the difference being that they were not just talking about ‘ideas.’ These were things they had already accomplished. That is why the Cortes Community Forest Cooperative hired them.
Continue reading Cortes Island’s Business Roadmap for Value-Added Forestry Products
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The BC Green Party has tabled legislation to uniformly protect bear dens, which double as winter nurseries, across the province.
Adam Olsen, Green MLA for Saanich North and the Islands, said the party’s private member’s bill is timely with bears bulking up before their winter hibernation — a critical period for pregnant sows, which give birth to their cubs in the safety of their dens.
Continue reading BC Greens push for provincewide protection for bear den ‘nurseries’
David Broadland recently wrote a devastating critique of the old growth logging at Hummingbird Lake on Quadra Island. It is sometimes necessary to cut down an old growth tree, so I asked the Cortes Community Forest how often this occurs in their operation.
Continue reading Controversy over a Quadra Island Woodlot
