At least 1,000 people, representing more than 220 diverse organizations and First Nations from British Columbia, attended the United for Old Growth March & Rally in Victoria on February 25. They marched from City Hall to the BC Legislature, demanding the implementation of the Old Growth Strategic Review, a comprehensive 2020 study that recommended the immediate protection of the remnant old growth forests in the province. Not one of its 14 recommendations has yet been implemented.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Protecting Old ForestsCategory Archives: Opinion
The Quadra Project: Structural Change
Systems are complicated. Indeed, we are just beginning to understand how complicated and unpredictable they are. And they include everything from biological ecologies to global weather.
Systems are integrated. Each part of a system is connected to all the other parts, so that any change in any part influences all the other parts. Usually, small changes are absorbed into the system with little apparent effect. But introduce enough changes, or alter key components, and something unpredictable happens. In Systems Theory, this is called “emergence”, and is marked by a sudden and unpredictable restructuring of the entire system.
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The Quadra Project: In Memoriam, Yurii Kerpatenko (1976 – 2022)
No one on Quadra Island is likely to have known Yurii Kerpatenko. He never lived here and he never visited here. Had he been alive on November 15th, 2022, he probably wouldn’t have noticed that his longer life was adding a mere half a second to the arrival of the 8th billion person to Earth’s human population. Yurii Kerpatenko would not have cared because of other pressing concerns.
These concerns were more than symbolic, and they relate to us on our little island in the wholeness of things because we are able to live in a society of law and order, to go about our daily affairs without fear, to trust that one day will be as normal as another, and to freely express our opinions without state censorship or physical oppression.
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Alexandra Morton: Open Letter to Strathcona Regional District Board
Editor’s note: The transcript that Alexandra Morton refers to, in the following open letter, is actually the transcript of my January 27 radio program. While extremely quote heavy, it is highly edited, considerably shorter, and not a word for word transcript of the meeting.
To the Strathcona Regional District Board,
I read the January 25, 2023, transcript of your Members’ Report on the Open Net Pen Transition. Thank you for the care and thought you are putting into this. The statement that logging, tourism and fish farming are critical to Campbell River’s existence must be a serious concern given all of these are facing challenges.
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The Quadra Project: Environmental Guilt
More and more sobering news on the environmental condition of our planet keeps coming from scientists, from the United Nations’ COP meetings, and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are not doing enough to avert catastrophe, and we are not doing what must be done fast enough. Indeed, we never did enough fast enough, a conclusion that comes with the burden of guilt. And now we may be reaching the point where we will never be able to do enough fast enough.
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