Tag Archives: Wildfires

Animals

Monarch Butterflies Listed As Endangered

Editor’s note: According to a University of Victoria study, the Vancouver Island population has been considered highly vulnerable since 2014, when it was listed as ‘threatened’ by the British Columbia Species at Risk Act. Cortes Island naturalist Gorge Sirk added, “there are no Monarchs here.”

By Dean LaBerge, The Grizzly Gazette, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

For the first time ever, the migratory monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) has been added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) “red list”, categorized as endangered. The IUCN was created in 1948 and is now recognized as the world’s largest and most diverse environmental network, with more than 1,400 member organizations and 15,000 experts. According to the IUCN website, they are effectively known as “the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it.”

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Rivers & Oceans, Water

Reflections on the extraordinary power of slow water

National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The advance of the climate crisis, marked by its extremes — droughts or deluges, fires or floods — makes abundantly clear the human habit of trying to contain and control water isn’t working. 

For her new book, Water Always Wins, National Geographic Explorer Erica Gies criss-crossed the globe, witnessing some of the unanticipated results of modern society’s preference for engineered solutions. 

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: The War Years

The 20th century did not begin well. After the warm-ups of the Crimean and Boer Wars, Europe stumbled into World War I in 1914, a fatal combination of hubris and stupidity that killed about 17 million people. The trauma inspired an unflinching examination of the dark recesses of the human psyche in an effort to understand what happened. Dada, the mindless artistic expression of absurdity, was not a satisfactory answer. The philosophical loneliness of existentialism was arguably a nihilistic consequence of the monumental blunder of the First World War—a loss of any remnant of idealism and collective human wisdom.

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Fire

Feasibility study for Outer Discovery Island Fire brigade

How our local government works

Tim Pley and Associates has been hired to conduct a feasibility study for a fire brigade to serve the Outer Discovery Islands. The Surge Narrows Community Association (SNCA) requested the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) investigate the costs and implications of this project last September. A motion to hire Pley and Associates passed without comment at the April 27, 2022 SRD Board meeting.  

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Fire, Indigenous Nations

Cultural burning holds important place in wildfire mitigation

By Shari Narine, Windspeaker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As the forest fire season in Canada continues to start earlier each year, destroying more and more hectares of wooded area, a new study recommends removing barriers so Indigenous-led cultural burning practices can be used as prominently as the western way of fire suppression is today.

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