Tag Archives: SFU

Forests

Save Old Growth organizer fears his climate activism has made him a target for deportation

National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

An international student leading a controversial civil resistance campaign to end old-growth logging in B.C. is fearful the Canada Border Services Agency is looking to deport him.

Zain Haq, a co-founder of the Save Old Growth (SOG) protest group behind a recent series of highway blockades across the province, has been ordered to show up at a CBSA office.

The third-year history major at Simon Fraser University who hails from Pakistan is in Canada on a study permit, a document issued by Immigration Canada. 

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Water

Cortes Island’s impending water shortage

Cortes Island is experiencing a wetter than normal Spring this year, but some of Cortes Island’s shallow well owners experience water shortages every summer. Scientists appear to agree that there will be more severe shortages in the future. 

This is a global phenomenon and there appear to be many causes: the depletion of forest coverage, growth of human infrastructure, natural drought cycles and, on top of all that, the transition to a warmer global temperature.

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Indigenous Nations History

Precolonial Forest Gardens and Orchards

Dr Chelsey Geralda Armstrong is an associate professor from SFU and the lead author of a paper, about the ancient forest gardens in Nuu-chah-nulth territory, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. While individual species do grow in the wild, forest gardens and orchards exhibit a sophisticated understanding of cultivation and are found adjacent to ancient village sites. In a related study, Armstrong and her colleagues wrote that forest gardens largely disappeared around the time of the smallpox epidemic that swept through B.C’s Indigenous communities more than 150 years ago.

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Indigenous Nations History

Tse’K’wa cave field school underway

By Tom Summer, Alaska Highway News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

A new dig at the Tse’K’wa cave in Charlie Lake continues this month, with University of Northern B.C. students and community members from local First Nations already discovering flakes of stone tools through their field school.

It’s the first time in over 30 years that any archaeological research has been conducted at the historic site, picking up where Simon Fraser University professor and bone expert Dr. Jon Driver left off in the 1990s at the beginning of his career.  

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Rivers & Oceans

DFO needs to adopt a science based management model, scientist says 

(Click here to access other presentations taken from the Committee.)

In the second of a series of posts gleaned from the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, Dr John Reynolds proposes that DFO adopt a prime directive “where management objectives are expressly prohibited from influencing science.”

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