Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
A parliamentary committee wants Ottawa to limit the environmental damage and plug response gaps for marine cargo spills after a container ship lost more than 100 sea cans and was immobilized by a stubborn fire on the B.C. coast last year.
Continue reading Canada’s not prepared to handle marine cargo spills, House committee finds
The drought conditions settling throughout the West Coast are another example of what Fisheries and Oceans Canada has identified as the #1 threat to BC’s endangered salmon population.
“While there are many stressors that affect Pacific salmon survival, climate change is rapidly superseding these threats,” DFO media spokesperson Lara Sloan emailed Cortes Currents.
Continue reading Salmon Runs in the midst of a West Coast DroughtCanada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
After hiking along the Campbell River in unseasonably warm September sunshine, wrestling my middle-aged body into a wetsuit is no easy feat.
But I’m determined to get a new angle on the iconic West Coast keystone species I so regularly write about as a reporter. I’m going swimming with salmon.
Continue reading I swam with the salmon — they taught me about dignity and strength
Originally published in the Watershed Sentinel
By Delores Broten
Thirty years ago, I was running the tiny Friends of Cortes Island office out of the community hall at Manson’s Landing. This led to many interesting and sometimes passionate conversations. One regular visitor was Basil Seaton, veteran of the internment camps for British soldiers in Burma during World War Two. Basil took it as his mission to educate me about climate change. I remember in particular a floppy disk he brought that contained various climate change scenarios.
Fast forward thirty years. My computer is more like a Ferrari than a horse and cart, and the Province of British Columbia advises communities to plan for one metre of sea level rise by 2100, and two metres by 2200. But the predictions are still all over the place, depending on the modelling used and the assumptions made.
Continue reading Salish Sea Rising
There are probably a dozen abandoned boats on Cortes Island right now, and Dominic dos Santos would like to have them towed away.
“A lot of them are floating. Some of them just have no names on them. People just leave them there. it’s just been 15 years of ‘not my problem.’ We have fiberglass shards on every beach now because they abandon the boats and let ’em get destroyed on the rocks . All this stuff is gonna wind up on the beach in the next five, 10 years?” he said.
Continue reading Trying to clean up Cortes Island’s abandoned boats and provide homes for the homeless
