Islands are not convenient places to live, so why do people choose to settle on them? No single answer will suffice, but some insight can be gleaned from the fact that they are surrounded by water. This separation from elsewhere gives the impression that they are places of refuge for people who are at odds with the world, or when the world is at odds with people.
North America is such an island—even called Turtle Island in some Indigenous mythologies. The first Europeans who settled it—Jamestown in America in 1607 and Quebec in Canada in 1608—were religious, political and economic refugees. After their migration over the Atlantic, they continued to move westward across the continent, a process that displaced Indigenous peoples, making them refugees on their own land. While this injustice is being rectified, slowly and laboriously, the migration of non-native refugees still continues in various modern forms.
When the early westward wave of these migrants in Canada finally reached the barrier of the Pacific in the 19th century, they sloshed onto the West Coast islands, in part because they were accessible by boat, and in part because they had the geographical features that conformed to the restless and individualistic psychology of the settlers. Island people tend to be miscellaneously distinctive.
Settlement on Quadra was slower than on the more southerly Gulf Islands, but, for a while, before Quadra’s importance was displaced by Campbell River’s growth, it was a busy place, with steamships laden with passengers, cargo and mail stopping at five island settlements.
Perhaps the first notable influx of modern refugees were the hippies and conscientious objectors of the Vietnam war who arrived on Quadra in the 1970s. They infused the island with fresh social and ideological principles, which mixed incongruously with the conservative independence of the resident fishers and loggers—giving credibility to the definition by the Salt Spring folksinger, Valdy, “that an island is differences of opinion surrounded by water.”
In the subsequent years, the radical edge of everyone softened, fishing and logging declined, and Quadra slowly populated with professionals, with families searching for a safe and rural community in which to raise children, and with retirees seeking a quiet lifestyle. The old values moderated, and were replaced by experience, expertise, and a cultural richness.
This hiatus ended when the brewing anxiety about global climate change amalgamated with the pervasive insecurity of the covid pandemic. For those attuned to these risks, cities felt crowded, vulnerable and unsafe. High property values and low interest rates gave these people the opportunity to search for escape. The psychology implicit in island geography was as irresistible an attraction to this wave of refugees.
So this brings us to the present on Quadra. Property values have soared, along with superfluous wealth. Affordability favours an older, affluent demographic. Some of the tourists who came to visit the island as a retreat from elsewhere, have been inspired by expectation and hope to live here. Quadra has been discovered. And with this discovery, people bring some of the attributes from the places from which they came.
This is a precarious time for Quadra, for the island risks losing the qualities that made it attractive and special. As has always been the case, those who come to live here will leave behind some of their values and standards, but some of those values and standards will come with them, a process that continually remakes the character of the community, just as it has in the past.
In this particular time in history, the future seems more ominous and frightening than at any time in the past. A climate crisis, resource depletion, pervasive pollution, species extinction and ocean acidification are threatening the security of everyone everywhere. Not even our little island in the wholeness of things is exempt. Not only do we have to navigate ourselves through this larger unfolding disaster as best we can, but we have to consider what we want to become as a community living on the edge of massive uncertainty.
The times are an invitation for searching through the recesses of ourselves to discover who we are individually and collectively. As history attests, we become who we are. We are who we have been. And we will become who we are now. Whether we change who we are, and how quickly we change who we are, will determine the future on our island, and by implication, the future of our entire planet.
The climate, environmental and sociological anomalies of the last few years compel us to consider the possibility that we are now experiencing the initial phases of civilizational breakdown. This is not something we want to overtly admit, but it seems to be expressing itself as uncertainty, apprehension, anxiety, cynicism, despair and even fear. The time has come for us to act with foresight, bravery and resolve, before the possible becomes the inevitable, and all of us, everywhere, become refugees with no place to escape.
Ray Grigg – for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: May Day 2011 on Quadra Island – Photo by dreamponderCreate via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)