Spring 2005 Acorn Newsletter - Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Content
the
Acorn
Number 29, Spring 2005
The Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Mount Erskine
Help Us Reach for the Top!
The Board asks for your generous financial support for this important acquisition by the Conservancy. A donation and pledge form is included on page 3 for your use. Please call Charles Kahn (537-1899) or Peter Lamb (537-4859) if you have any questions. We would also be delighted if you could help with our campaign in any way or have any creative ideas for fund-raising. - Peter Lamb and Charles Kahn
The Ultimate Peak Experience!
www.mounterskine.org Inside:
photo: David Denning AGM & Elections ................2 President’s Page ...................3 Director’s Desk ....................3 Erskine Pledge Form ...........3 Events Calendar...........................4 Event Notes Imagining the Worst .....5 May in July! ..................5 Travelling the Dempster 5 Eco-Home Tour ................9 Features Living Whole in a Divided World ...........................6 Nightrise, Dayfall .............8 Chocolate Lily ..................9 Inside SSIC ............................ Nancy Braithwaite ............8 Kudos Pam Barry ......................10 Susan Evans ...................10 Nina Raginsky ................10 Broom Pullers .................10
We are pleased to announce that we have reached agreement with the owner for the purchase of the 40 ha (100 acre) parcel of vacant land, which includes the summit of Mount Erskine. Successful completion of this acquisition will result in the protection of a large, contiguous area of undeveloped or covenanted land on Mount Erskine. The property contains spectacular arbutus and coastal Douglas-fir forest, (which B.C.’s Conservation Data Centre classifies as an “ecosystem at risk”) along the edge of a dramatic cliff, as well as some wetlands and Salt Spring’s largest habitat for hairy manzanita. This privately owned property also includes a vital portion of the trail network from Collins Road to Toynbee Road and provides spectacular views over Stuart Channel and Vancouver Island from the peak’s summit and western ridge. The purchase of this 100-acre property will secure this popular trail, now and for future generations. A major fund-raising campaign has begun in earnest to raise the required $650,000 total purchase cost by August 31, 2005. This amount includes related acquisition expenses such as appraisal, legal, baseline study, fund-raising and future land management expenses. This will be an ambitious campaign for us and we need to have a solid base of financial support from Salt Spring Islanders if we are to attract other major funds in the short time available.
http://saltspring.gulfislands.com/conservancy
AGM and Elections ‘05
Salt Spring Island Conservancy Annual General Meeting Friday, May 13th, 7:00 pm Lion’s Hall, Ganges Tie a string around your finger, cross your palm pilot, mark your calendar - do whatever it takes to remember your Conservancy’s Annual General Meeting. Our 2005 agenda includes a slide show by a very special speaker, Dr. Rob Butler, entitled “The Web of Life.” You’ll hear reviews of highlights of the year from our inspired and tireless committees, Pres. Peter Lamb will offer perspectives from Mount Olympus, and Exec. Director Karen Hudson will tie the efforts of board and committees to fundraising, membership, volunteers, and office management. You will be able to vote on an increase in membership fees to help offset increases in rent and postage (among other things). You will also elect new directors. This year Samantha Beare, Maureen Bendick, Charles Dorworth, Linda Quiring, Brian Smallshaw, Bob Weeden, and Doug Wilkins will let the calendar move them smoothly into year 2 of their 2year terms. Nigel Denyer, Jean Gelwicks, Peter Lamb, Rachel Ogis and Ruth Tarasoff, apparently no wiser than when they agreed to serve in 2003, have chucked their chapeaux onto the pile on the floor and are at your mercy. Two candidates, Steve and Maxine Leichter, are fresh faces. They found land on the Island 10 years ago and began readying for the move (2003) from Los Angeles. They are just finishing their pro-environment home on Mt. Belcher, which features low-energy appliances, an off-the-grid solar electricity supply, and water catchment. Other clues to their approach to life are scattered unobtrusively all around: moss divots back in place after construction dislodged them, piles of decaying Scotch broom, footpaths avoiding every possible patch of blueeyed Mary. Maxine volunteered for the Conservancy her first year here, helping to write our successful stewardship grant application. She was, in fact, a grantwriter by profession in California. Steve is an attorney, a seasoned negotiator, and an experienced business person.
Guest speaker Dr. Rob Butler will present a slideshow on the “Web of Life”. “The high tide had pushed a large flock close to the marsh edge, and their twittering calls periodically erupted in a din of chirps as flocks rose from the beach. Some flocks began to form into long lines in the air and climb higher in the sky. I followed with my binoculars their silhouetted shapes against the reddening sky until the dots became specks and the specks merged with the sky. Their next stop would be the Copper River delta. In my imagination, I flew with them.” – The Jade Coast
Rob Butler is a senior research scientist with the Canadian government and an adjunct professor of biological sciences at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He has written over 100 scholarly publications for scientific journals and authored several books. His most recent book is The Jade Coast, a popular account of the ecology of the north Pacific Ocean. Dr. Butler’s main research interest is the ecology of marine environments. Recent emphasis has been on bird migration, mostly of shorebirds; the ecology of great blue herons in coastal environments; and the ecology of Dr. Butler’s research has been reported on national science radio programs, featured on television and in magazines. He has served on the executive of scientific societies and has received several awards for his research and conservation work. Dr. Butler earned his doctoral degree from the University of British Columbia and lives in New Westminster overlooking the Fraser River.
R. MacVicar photo
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
President’s Page
Governing Environment
PLEDGE/DONATION FORM
Few could deny that effective governance of Salt Spring and, indeed, all the Gulf Islands is critical to the work of the Conservancy. It is important, therefore, that we monitor and participate in, when necessary, the activities of the Islands Trust and the Capital Regional District. To do this, we have recently established a new standing Committee on Environmental Governance which will monitor legislation, regulations and programs affecting environmental governance on Salt Spring and recommend actions to be taken by the President and the Board where appropriate. It will be taking an active role in the proposed OCP review and related potential bylaw changes. If you have an interest in this topic, please let us know. There is no doubt in my mind that 2005 will be a pivotal year in the evolution of the Islands Trust and, hopefully, the strengthening of the original vision of our Islands as a special and sensitive environment worthy of real preservation and protection. Your Conservancy intends to remain vigilant. - Peter Lamb
Mount Erskine Property Salt Spring Island
Yes, I would like to make a donation/pledge to help acquire the Mount Erskine property! I would like to donate/pledge: $50 $100 $250 $500 $1,000 $5,000 $ ___________ I would like my donation to be anonymous. Donations: Please make cheques payable to Salt Spring Island Conservancy and specify "Mt. Erskine Property." A charitable tax receipt will be issued for donations fo $20 or more on satisfactory completion of the total financing. Pledges: For pledges, 21 days notice will be given before the funds are required. A charitable tax receipt will be issued for contributions of $20 or more. Name: Phone: Email: Address:
Director’s Desk
Saturday Market
Spring is here and for Salt Spring Islanders, the arrival of spring flowers also means the infamous Saturday marketin-the-park has begun another year. For the Conservancy, this means the beginning of our 5th annual bench raffle in the market, and the quest to enlist volunteers for shifts every Saturday from May 21st to the draw at the Fall Fair on Sunday, September 18. Volunteers work with partners for three-hour shifts, either morning or afternoon, and sell raffle tickets. The driftwood bench, designed by local artisan Luke Hart-Weller, is so beautiful that the tickets sell themselves. We also need volunteers to do office work, a weekly GVM receipt collector, and assistance with this summer’s big fundraiser: the Salt Spring Eco-Home Tour on July 31. The Conservancy has now joined the AIR MILES® Reward Program. We will be giving Conservancy Air Miles Cards out to members to show at participating merchants for points towards flights and other items needed for our work. Please let us know if you want a card or more information about this program. We are also collecting Canadian Tire dollars to enable us to buy tools for broom removal on our nature reserves. You can drop these at events or the office, or mail them to us. Locally, we have a receipt box at GVM, community chest number #58 at Thrifty’s, and you can credit your bottle returns to us at the SSI Refund Centre. Happy Spring! - Karen Hudson
Postal Code: Signature: Date:
Mail or fax this form to: Salt Spring Island Conservancy Box 722, Ganges PO Salt Spring Island BC V8K 2W3 fax: 250-538-0319
Spring 2005
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Conservancy Events
Upcoming Events
May 13th (Friday): AGM 7:00 pm Lions Hall Salt Spring Island Conservancy Annual General Meeting. Dr. Rob Butler, a senior scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, will present a slideshow on the “Web of Life”. May 21st (Saturday): Birding with Bob at Ford Lake. Sign up at 538-0318. June 10th (Friday): 7:00 pm Community Gospel Chapel Ronald Wright - New talk from this year’s CBC Massey lecturer and local writer. Co-sponsored with Salt Spring Islanders for Justice and Reconciliation (SSIJAR) July 5th (Tuesday): 7:00 pm – Lion’s Hall Elizabeth May Book Tour. The executive director of The Sierra Club of Canada will speak about her revised and updated book: “At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada’s Forests”. Co-sponsored by The Sierra Club of Canada. July 30th (Saturday): 7:00 pm – Sustainable & Environmental Home Forum Panel of speakers including Paula Baker LaPorte, architect and author of “Prescriptions for a Healthy House” (Location TBA) July 31st (Sunday): 10am – 4pm. Salt Spring EcoHome Tour A tour to the many unique examples of sustainable homes located on Salt Spring. Look for announcements in the Driftwood. Tickets will be available at Salt Spring Books. August 18 (Thursday): 7 - 9pm - Lions Hall. Join us for John Neville’s book launch “Travelling the Dempster” and CD release “Bird Songs of the ArcticAlong the Dempster Highway”. All proceeds to the Mt. Erskine Campaign. Volunteer to protect the environment for a few years and you’ll surely be called a do-gooder. Whenever that happens I treat myself to a wry grin. Given the choices of doing good, doing bad, or doing nothing, I don’t mind the label at all. RBW
Annual Report Available
Our brochure-format annual report is available: • online: http://saltspring.gulfislands.com/conservancy • as an e-mail • at our office: Suite 201, Upper Ganges Centre • at Conservancy AGM and later events • at the SSIC table, Saturday market
Membership Fee Increase Proposed
Members attending the AGM will vote on the Board’s proposal to increase membership fees in all categories by $5. The new fees – to be applied when your current oneor three-year membership expires - are: Youth under 16 Senior/low income Regular single Regular family Group/school Business 1 yr @ $15 1 yr @ $20 1 yr @ $25 1 yr @ $35 1 yr @ $35 1 yr @ $55
3 yrs @ $60 3 yrs @ $75 3 yrs @ $105 3 yrs @ $105 3 yrs @ $165
Thank you to our business members:
Anchorage Cove B&B Baker Beach Cottages Balmoral By The Sea B&B Barb’s Buns Beddis House B&B Bold Bluff Retreat Bootacomputer Creekhouse Realty Ltd. Green Acres Resort Gulf Island Picture Framing Island Escapades Island Star Video Neil Morie - Architect Murakami Auto Body & Repairs Salt Spring Books Salt Spring Centre of Yoga Salt Spring Centre School Salt Spring Coffee Co. Salt Spring Home Design Centre Salt Spring Island Chamber of Commerce Salt Spring Kayaking Salt Spring Way B&B Saltspring Linen & Dry Cleaning Saltspring Soapworks Spindrift at Welbury Point Sprague Associates Ltd. Terra Firma Builders Ltd. The Wine Cellar
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Conservancy Events
Event Notes
Imagining the Worst
Ron Wright lecture, June 10, 7:00 pm Community Gospel Chapel In our civilization, and in others from which we have written knowledge, writers have expressed anxiety about the human place in nature whether by mythology, theology, or fiction. In ancient times this usually took the form of moral tales set in the past, warning of the pitfalls of arrogance and recklessness. In modern times, ever since the industrial revolution brought runaway growth and change, writers have focussed on the shape of things to come: a fate made more by man than God. Our cautionary tales have become nightmare futures, dystopian satires in which the fears and follies of the present are writ large. Ronald Wright was born in England to a Canadian father and an English mother, and now lives on SaltSpring Island. A novelist, historian and essayist, he has won awards in all three genres, and is published around the world in more than a dozen languages. He studied archaeology at Cambridge University and at the University of Calgary, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 1996. His nonfiction books include bestsellers “Time Among The Maya” and “Stolen Continents,” a history of the Americas that won the Gordon Montador Award. Wright is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He has made radio and television broadcasts in Canada, Britain, and the United States. In 2004 he gave the CBC Massey Lectures, “A Short History Of Progress,” the book of which became a national bestseller and is now being widely published abroad. Conservancy members will remember his talk, based on “A Short History...” last January.
Travelling the Dempster
John Neville Book & CD launch, August 18 7-9:00 pm Lions Hall. Travel Canada’s fabulous Dempster Highway with nature recordist and SaltSpring resident John Neville, the Birdsong Man. EXPERIENCE the natural history of this tundra wilderness in Yukon and the Northwest Territories. ENJOY bird encounters that’ll make your ears tingle. MEET historical characters (recently disinterred) in Goldrush Dawson. EXPLORE with MacKenzie and Franklin above the Arctic Circle, and feel the heartache experienced by the Lost Patrol and the determination of the Mounties tracking the Mad Trapper of Rat River. LEARN about aurora borealis, the Porcupine herd of barren-ground caribou, willow ptarmigan, and much more.
May in July!
Elizabeth May, July 5, 7:00 pm Lions Hall Elizabeth May, Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada, will visit the Island again to talk about her newest book, “At The Cutting Edge: Crisis In Canadian Forests.” Elizabeth is one of Canada’s most respected and effective conservationists, and never fails to inspire and inform audiences. Her topic certainly is important here in BC, where the Province has instituted a “results-based” code of Forest Practices, a system in which forest leaseholders are trusted to be good stewards - and nobody checks. According to the West Coast Environmental Law Association this approach “ignores results, shifts control to forest companies, creates red tape for environmental protection and inhibits effective enforcement.”
View from Mt. Erskine photo: Terry McIntosh
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Comment
Living Whole in a Divided World
We live in a world of divided institutions and connected problems. Common sense makes the full shape of problems visible to us as individuals. The universal challenge is to bring myriad narrowly focussed, turf-defending, responsibilitydenying institutions to the point of concerted action. There is a typical example in our own backyard. Many people live in Cusheon Lake’s watershed. Homes and cottages ring the Lake. Many of their owners drink treated lakewater. Residents and visitors boat on the Lake, swim and fish in it, and enjoy its everchanging scene just as people everywhere are drawn to water. Summer and fall algae blooms have become more and more noticeable in Cusheon Lake. Occasionally the bloom includes a massive explosion of “blue-green algae,” actually a bacterium living with a photosynthesizing algae. It produces a strong toxin that resists boiling or filtering and makes you really sick if you drink it. What is behind this situation? Algae and cyanobacterium populations are limited by the amount of phosphorus in lake waters. Phosphorus piggybacks into the Lake on soil particles washed in during rains, and from septic tank leachates. A lot of “old” phosphorus is chemically bound in lakebottom muds and sands, but is released when dead algae drift to the bottom in numbers sufficient to rob deep water of oxygen when they decompose. It mixes into the water column during fall when cooling surface water, dropping, stirs up the summer-warmed deeper water. Surface runoff carries 60% or so of yearly additions of phosphorus to the Lake. Reducing silt loads of overland and incoming stream waters is the obvious action. Rocket science it is not. Nevertheless, practical evidence tells us it is easier to send a rocket into space than to control phosphorus in a neighborhood lake.The rocket involves more people and costs more money, but one institution with one budget launches the rocket. Cusheon Lake water quality, in contrast, touches the narrow mandates of a dozen agencies, each with bits of authority they may or may not be willing to use. They may become “involved,” but commitment comes much harder. (The difference? Well, think of the favourite North American breakfast of ham and eggs: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.) Moreover, an institution playing a key role is not an agency, it is private property, which often has the most obdurate walls of them all. Reducing phosphorus means changing how individuals act on their land - how they cut trees, site homes, build driveways, control drainage, plow ground, and control livestock access to streams. After years of lake-watching and some scientific sampling, a goodly number of individuals and some agencies understand the situation. Citizen work, both dogged and inspired, has begun to move the creaking machinery. Through a Water Council, initiated and hosted by the Capital Regional District, the Cusheon Lake Stewardship Committee has made all key agencies and non-profit groups aware of the situation. The Local Trust Committee has helped the Committee produce a truly professional, persuasive statement - a Management Plan - that will be the prime educational tool for all stakeholders. It will be a long time, however, before agencies actually do what they know they should do, and even longer, perhaps, before property owners, through education or changing rules of land use, collectively reduce phosphorus-loaded runoff. Our world moves rapidly toward universal subdivision. Churches and sects parcel out religion and guard their identities and followings. Business is highly specialized so as to profit within a tightly defined market. Even huge corporations , global in scope, are internally divided into strongly walled compartments. Science and academe are divided into disciplines and subdisciplines. Professions, unions, governments - all are compartmentalized. It is hard to be devoted intensely during the workday to a narrow compartment of life and still think and act broadly the rest of the time, not only because it boggles the mind but because broad thought and loyal maximization of narrow interest will always be at odds. Institutions punish doubt. Nevertheless, people are compelled to try. This spring I was awed by the scope of understanding evident among a score of Mayne Islanders who met to talk about problems of environmental protection on their home Island. Even as they talked about seemingly small “issues” their discourse ranged easily from local and regional economics, governance and politics, demography, land use, and supra-regional environmental change, to the natural history of their own landscapes. They understood patterns and connections that everywhere characterize the real world. Conservation groups attract people with that sort of mind. Yet as institutions such groups often act more narrowly. They specialize in litigation or lobbying, land acquisition, education; in whales or butterflies, in deserts or forests, and so on. Or they tailor a broad constitution, then prioritize rigidly. Practicality demands it. There are only so many volunteers, only so much money, only a few fleeting days to seize an opportunity. I accept all that as inevitable, not as desirable. Somehow conservation groups need to make sure that their neighbors (by that I mean the entire community of people whose actions both create and resolve problems) understand not only the project-specific wins and losses time brings, but as well their broader context and meaning. Every neighbor will cherish our model, which is of lives lived whole in a divided world. - Bob Weeden
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Inside SSIC
Good Stewards - Nancy Braithwaite
Roots are important to Nancy Braithwaite: her family’s, her own, and the thousands of trees in her care. Roots mean choosing well and with a whole heart, and sticking to it. Her family have owned land on SaltSpring Island for almost a century, and she has made her home on Trincomali Ridge for 18 years. She is a founder of SSIC and a loyal supporter. Nancy’s land lies on the ridge that rises strongly from Trincomali Channel near Walker’s Hook, strides smoothly west for 2 kilometres and plunges boldly into St. Mary Lake. From the uppermost windows of her home there is a grand view of a stretch of Trincomali and of Galiano’s west side, but from most of the rooms the view is of nature’s variegated green and Nancy’s informal gardens. The backyard shrubs and trees grow rampant, chasing light and moisture. Nancy may apologize for their sprawl, but her bent toward tidiness is overcome by her reluctance to amputate or uproot. “The birds love the tangle of this red osier,” she says. “This bay tree is a bit wild, I’m afraid,” she says. Nancy Braithwaite was designated a “Conservation Steward” during the Conservancy’s 2000 stewardship project. A footpath - the kind your feet feel even as your eye is still looking - leads from the driveway around an orchard fence and into the woods. You follow it, aware of the sawn stubs on either side at intervals that tell you how hard the wind blew last winter. Otherwise the feeling is of following the trace of a meditative stroller who wants to leave everything unhurt. Here the path is just below a gentle ridgetop, rising soon to rockier ground where cedars are few and arbutus many, dipping into salal under mixed fir and cedar. The trail forks. One is closed to us because of fallen trees; it would drop eventually toward Malcolm Bond’s farm, turn west along the boundary, and close its loop at Nancy’s home. The other rises over the ridge, then twists and turns at the very edge of solid footing as it parallels a lovely swale full of yellow-candled skunk cabbage. Soon you are on her driveway again. This drive, perhaps 200 metres long, is laid out like the casual trail you just left, except for a somewhat wider person. Its turns preserve mysteries ahead while following the best footing and avoiding every possible wetland and elder statestree. Occasionally you see a stub of cedar or alder full of the prospect holes of several generations of woodpeckers. An owner knowing and valuing nature less would call them ugly and cut them down. While Nancy cares for them these woods will simply “be,” doing everything they are meant to do, busy even while an unattuned visitor is accusing them of doing nothing. Thirty of Nancy’s 37 acres are covenanted, giving the forest a chance to do its marvelous “nothing” halfway to forever. - Bob Weeden
A doorway to where? photo: Peter Lamb
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Feature
Nightrise, Dayfall
Each day fades as light withdraws from the eastern lee of tall things: a mountain, a wood, a barn, a tower. In cities we scurry then through a geometry of shade and light, first blinking at a sun-blazed intersection and then submerging into semidarkness as comfortably as a water-ouzel leaps in and out of a stream.The band of afternoon sun climbs storey after skyscraping storey until it vanishes into thick air. At dusk there is only the imperceptible bounce of blue or pink from distant motes of dust and vapor. At first dark on the peopled streets impossibly high noctilucent clouds may still glow. When even they are gone, it is deep night. We sleep dreamlessly, or dream sleeplessly, or perhaps toil in the night. A watchman going home meets a baker arriving. They pause to talk. They note the brightening of the eastern sky. A cloud, having stolen unseen across the nightsmothered land, shows itself first as a colorless texture, then as a passage of pink flame, and finally as a single float in a parade of yellow and white. Sun strikes the tallest spire, then slips smoothly down each glass and steel or brickwork wall, carrying daylight onto each shoe of the awakening city. For billions of years earth and its riders have seen the night rise at end of day, and day fall at the end of night. For hundreds of millenia these events have bracketed every day, been recorded in the human brain, directed our bodies through the daily dance. For how long have tongues woven stories around the flight of sun and stars? For how many centuries have hands written the science, the religion, the poetry of spinning earth? Why, then, does no one speak of nightrise and dayfall, but of their opposites? In my own tongue we say”nightfall,” or “darkness falls,” there being no word in dictionaries for the rising of the dark. I’ve made no survey of languages - itself an interesting task -but know that the Spanish speak of “la caida de la tarde,” the fall of night; Germans have no phrase suggesting whether darkness falls or rises; and in French “la nuit tombez.” When it dawned on me that night did not fall, my mind danced. After all, we ordinary folk make only one personal discovery in our lives, which is that whatever we think or say has been thought or said before. Once, and once only, grace gave me a claim upon discovery when, one summer day on an ancient hill in central Alaska, I rested beside an arctic flower unknown to botanists. It was a joy to find the hiatus in Webster and Oxford between “nightmarish” and “night owl.” I should have let well enough alone. Google knew what Noah did not. “Nightrise,” it seems, is in an album title by the music group “Phoenix,” and “Dayfall” is a new music group working simultaneously on its first album and first website. Worse, while enjoying H. M. Tomlinson’s “The Sea and the Jungle” (1928) recently I found this: “...ascending that hill which looks with uplifted and shining brow, to the far vague country whence comes the last of the light, at dayfall...” The ocean of existing print must contain more such bits of flotsam, and riverine torrents of words here and soon to come carry more. I have been warned. In his poem “Bats” (Atlantic Monthly, May 2005) Mark Jarman watches them “...skim the darkness as it rises,...” I have to disclaim unique discovery, but console myself that the company I am in is small and partly dead. “Sunrise” and “sunset” are equally wrongheaded; more forgivable, perhaps, because anyone can see night’s onset every 24 hours and should be able to describe it accurately, but can only take on faith science’s assertion that the sun neither rises nor sets but merely hangs around while earth spins toward and away from it. Are we hoodwinked by a vast, poetic conspiracy? Or does mankind have a flaw after all, an inborn and universal dyslexia? Of course, I could be the one with a contrary brain: night may, indeed, fall. How do the other billions who see its descent, explain it? Friends whom I ask just look bemused . Is light more bouyant than darkness? (We do use “light” to describe things less securely gripped by gravity.) Do particles of darkness form in the still-bright air of late afternoon and, like an invisible rain, drop downward to collect as puddles of night? Or perhaps as the disappearing sun leaves lee sides in shadow the air cools and, being heavier, sinks? Skiing through an aspen wood at dusk, the trees dark against pale snow, I have looked across openings and seen the lances of a hidden sun ricochet to me from a distant mountain peak. I have stood of a fragrant summer evening in a dimming garden and, looking up at a sound, have seen a sunlit jet carrying its passengers to a far city. Therefore, right or wrong, I hold to my conviction that the night rises every evening, having gone to ground the previous morning. The darkness hides first in the valleys, then in the deepest shadowy hollows, then in abandoned barns. Hounded from its last surface refuge it goes underground, sometimes to be surprised and unearthed by early morning diggers of graves and miners of coal. Language needs to adjust to reality; I could add “again,” given the pace at which novelty outruns language today. In this case, however, the new words need to embrace a reality known since the dawn of time. Both “nightrise” and “dayfall” are simple and accurate. The puzzle is to find words to tell the truth about our morning turn toward the sun and our evening turn away. - Bob Weeden
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Natural History
Salt Spring Eco-Home Tour
July 31st: 10am - 4pm
A tour to the many unique examples of sustainable homes located on Salt Spring. Look for announcements in the Driftwood about this exciting event and a panel of speakers at 7pm, on July 30th. (Location TBA). This event is cosponsored with the Earth Festival Society. Tickets will be available at Salt Spring Books. Call Karen at 538-0318 for more info or to help out in any way.
Rammed Earth home on tour
photo: Jens Fischer
Chocolate Lily
The chocolate or checker lily (Fritillaria lanceolata) is a native perennial plant with delicate dark purplish belllike nodding flowers. The plant grows from a bulb with numerous bulblets that look like grains of rice. As a matter of fact, coastal Salish people used to dig up the bulblets and eat them either steamed or boiled just like rice, although a little bitter. Chocolate lilies are rare now; people keep the sites of these lilies secret for fear of others picking them. I had the luck to buy one from the nursery to be able to paint this picture. My knowledgeable nurseryman told me that the bulb takes 9 years to bloom. So never pick these wildflowers or dig them up! The chocolate lily is barely one foot tall. The slender stem, slightly purplish-green, bends into a delicate curve bearing a single (occasionally two) bell-flower with 6 petals that are dark purple to chocolate with very even checkered patterns. My pot of nursery-raised choolate lily is very pretty with pinky mauve patterns on the flowers whose yellow anthers add to the likeness with hanging bells. The leaves are green, alternate, and lance-like. Fritillarias bloom from March to May and can be found in grassy meadows and bluffs. After blooming, the flowers form seed capsules. If you see these rare beauties in the wild, enjoy your lucky day! - Ling Weston
Spring 2005
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Community
Recognizing Volunteers
Veteran Volunteer Retires - Pam Barry Evans May Get Life
Pam Barry began collecting Ganges Village Market checkout slips from the Conservancy’s box back when the world was young, 8 or 10 years ago. No pipes or drums, she quietly brought them to us when the box needed emptying. Our treasurer or ED checked the total and converted them to cash, courtesy of the store’s generosity. We’ve received hundreds of dollars over the years from that source (and from Thrifty’s as well, whose system bypasses the need for slips). Pam is going on to bigger and better things, the logical next step being PM. She’d get my vote. Our sincerest thanks go with her. Who will next take on this job? We need someone to volunteer, perhaps a frequent GVM shopper. Call Karen at 538-0318, pick up a key, and you are on your way. Susan Evans, early SSIC leader and strong supporter for a decade, has been nominated as Honourary Life Member by the board of the Conservancy. Susan may have been a day too late to be one of the founding directors applying for incorporation, but as our first treasurer she was never a dollar short. Susan not only established our bookkeeping process on a solid basis - we have always known where we stood and have never jeopardized our charitable status - she also “kept the books” for our first successful land acquisition campaign. Susan accurately recorded pledges and payments for the Mill Farm project, enabling us to turn over about $100,000 to the CRD as Island residents’ good-faith contribution toward purchase. Islanders’ respect for the Conservancy was so high that when pledges were converted to cheques, cash exceeded promises! Susan participated fully as director as well as treasurer until the 1998 AGM. She has remained a loyal contributor and supporter ever since. SSIC members will be asked to vote Susan Evans onto the roster of Honourary Life Members at our AGM on May 13.
Flowering Plant Endangered on Nature Reserve
A vigorous, well-known shrub with gorgeous yellow flowers in May appears to be succumbing to negative environmental factors on Andreas Vogt Nature Reserve. Its population status, once abundant, has suffered several partial, sudden declines in the past two years. The most recent seems coincident with the presence on March 28 of 13 humans of various sizes, carrying pincer-pullers and sharp hand implements. This armed force spread out on trails along the Reserve’s west side. Havoc ensued. Tender infants were tore up ruthlessly, healthy plants in their prime were sacrificially secateured or cunningly levered out of the ground. Even old-growth, some of it as much as six inches in diameter, felt the fatal bite of sawtoothed weapons. There appeared to be a hidden agenda involving brainwashing of the young. One five-year-old, Aidan Haigh, obviously had been subjected to cerebral laundering earlier and was as hostile to the target plants as the calloused adults. His sister Chloe, age two, was allowed to watch from a backpack carrier, but was subjected to quizzing afterward, before supper. Although this Government, notorious for its environmental policies, seems unwilling to act, there is a citizens’ movement to place this lovely plant, favored by haggis-chewers for generations, on the threatened list. To join, email [email protected].
Nina Raginsky Recognized
Saltspring Island resident Nina Raginsky received a Burns’ Bog Environmental Excellence Award earlier this spring. One of the Island’s best known environmentalists, Nina is also a highly gifted artist and photojournalist, an officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and recipient of the Kees Vermeer Award for wildlife conservation. Nina’s love of nature is a daily practice. She has made a jewel of beauty and wildlife habitat of her home environs, including the marvelous mini-estuary of Walter Bay. Seemingly tireless and surely fearless, she has committed her life and talents to innumerable campaigns to protect wild things and their homes. From eagle trees to heronries, from eelgrass beds to mature forests, from anemones on wharf pilings to beleaguered oystercatchers on sandspits, Island wildlife are in her debt. The Salt Spring Island Conservancy extends its thanks and congratulations to Nina for this latest recognition of her work. WELL DONE!
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Essential details
Office Update
Call for Submissions!
You are invited to submit articles to the Acorn on any topic, including: the Conservancy’s history, natural history, stewardship, and fundamental conservancy interests including selected issues beyond SSI borders. If you have any ideas, write to us at [email protected] or PO Box 722, SSI, BC, V8K 2W3. Thanks!
Items Wanted:
Donations of any of the following gratefully received. Office Items Household Items Vacuum Cleaner Hot plate Speaker phone Electric tea kettle Calculators Small refrigerator Laptop Computer Other Items Saws, clippers Compass Loppers Hand secateurs
Thank you!
Thank you to Brian Finnemore and Bob Andrew for donating GPSs to the Conservancy!
We would also appreciate donations of gifts, such as new books or items related to nature or conservation, to give to our educational speakers, who volunteer their time.
• Do you like talking to friendly people? • Do you have 4-8 hours a week that you could volunteer to the Conservancy? We need YOU to help us schedule volunteers. We have the volunteers, we just need some help calling them. Please call Karen 538-0318 for more information.
Help Wanted:
Stewardship Receives Grants
The Conservancy is pleased to announce that it has received $51,900 for its 2005 project: Habitat Protection and Stewardship of Species at Risk on Salt Spring. This funding has come from the Government of Canada Habitat Stewardship Program for Species at Risk, the Vancouver Foundation, and the Salt Spring Island Foundation.
The Acorn is the newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy, a local non-profit society supporting and enabling voluntary preservation and restoration of the natural environment of Salt Spring Island and surrounding waters. We welcome your feedback and contributions, by email to [email protected] or by regular mail. Opinions expressed here are the authors’, not subject to Conservancy approval.
Editor: Bob Weeden Layout: Brian Smallshaw Board of Directors: Samantha Beare (Treasurer) Maureen Bendick (Vice-President) Nigel Denyer Charles Dorworth Jean Gelwicks Peter Lamb (President) Rachel Ogis Linda Quiring Brian Smallshaw Ruth Tarasoff Doug Wilkins Bob Weeden
Membership Application
Youth (Under 16) Senior or Low-Income: Regular Single Regular Family Group/School Business Name: Address: Postal Code: Phone: Email: ❒ Please send me the Acorn via e-mail.
(We NEVER give out member’s email addresses to anyone!)
Volunteer Opportunities
$10 _ $15 _ $20 _ $30 _ $30 _ $50 _ We have a Volunteer Application Form that best describes areas you wish to help in. For now, which areas interest you? Please check off: ❒ Office Work (typing, filing or computer work) ❒ Information Table at Saturday Market (May through September) ❒ Education Programs ❒ Annual Fundraising Events ❒ Information Table at SSI Community Events ❒ Joining a SSIC Committee (Land Restoration & Management, Fundraising, Covenants, Acquisitions, Education, Stewardship, or Environmental Governance) ❒ Other: _______________________
1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @
3 yr @ $45 _ 3 yr @ $60 _ 3 yr @ $90 _ 3 yr @ $90 _ 3 yr @ $150 _
The Salt Spring Island Conservancy #201 Upper Ganges Centre, 338 Lower Ganges Rd. Mail: PO Box 722, Salt Spring Island BC V8K 2W3 Office hours : Tues/Thurs 10 am - 2 pm Phone: (250) 538-0318 Fax: (250) 538-0319 Email: [email protected] Web site: http://saltspring.gulfislands.com/ conservancy
Printed on 18% recycled paper
❒ This is a renewal for an existing membership
Donations
In addition to my membership fee above, I have enclosed my donation in the amount of: $50 _ $100 _ $250 _ $500 _ $1000_ $2500 _ $5000 _ Other ___________ Tax receipts will be provided for donations of $20 or more.
Conservancy
Ganges PO Box 722 Salt Spring Island BC V8K 2W3
The Salt Spring Island
Spring 2005
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Conservancy
Ganges P.O. Box 722 Salt Spring Island, BC V8K 2W3
the Salt Spring Island
40026325
Acorn
Number 29, Spring 2005
The Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Mount Erskine
Help Us Reach for the Top!
The Board asks for your generous financial support for this important acquisition by the Conservancy. A donation and pledge form is included on page 3 for your use. Please call Charles Kahn (537-1899) or Peter Lamb (537-4859) if you have any questions. We would also be delighted if you could help with our campaign in any way or have any creative ideas for fund-raising. - Peter Lamb and Charles Kahn
The Ultimate Peak Experience!
www.mounterskine.org Inside:
photo: David Denning AGM & Elections ................2 President’s Page ...................3 Director’s Desk ....................3 Erskine Pledge Form ...........3 Events Calendar...........................4 Event Notes Imagining the Worst .....5 May in July! ..................5 Travelling the Dempster 5 Eco-Home Tour ................9 Features Living Whole in a Divided World ...........................6 Nightrise, Dayfall .............8 Chocolate Lily ..................9 Inside SSIC ............................ Nancy Braithwaite ............8 Kudos Pam Barry ......................10 Susan Evans ...................10 Nina Raginsky ................10 Broom Pullers .................10
We are pleased to announce that we have reached agreement with the owner for the purchase of the 40 ha (100 acre) parcel of vacant land, which includes the summit of Mount Erskine. Successful completion of this acquisition will result in the protection of a large, contiguous area of undeveloped or covenanted land on Mount Erskine. The property contains spectacular arbutus and coastal Douglas-fir forest, (which B.C.’s Conservation Data Centre classifies as an “ecosystem at risk”) along the edge of a dramatic cliff, as well as some wetlands and Salt Spring’s largest habitat for hairy manzanita. This privately owned property also includes a vital portion of the trail network from Collins Road to Toynbee Road and provides spectacular views over Stuart Channel and Vancouver Island from the peak’s summit and western ridge. The purchase of this 100-acre property will secure this popular trail, now and for future generations. A major fund-raising campaign has begun in earnest to raise the required $650,000 total purchase cost by August 31, 2005. This amount includes related acquisition expenses such as appraisal, legal, baseline study, fund-raising and future land management expenses. This will be an ambitious campaign for us and we need to have a solid base of financial support from Salt Spring Islanders if we are to attract other major funds in the short time available.
http://saltspring.gulfislands.com/conservancy
AGM and Elections ‘05
Salt Spring Island Conservancy Annual General Meeting Friday, May 13th, 7:00 pm Lion’s Hall, Ganges Tie a string around your finger, cross your palm pilot, mark your calendar - do whatever it takes to remember your Conservancy’s Annual General Meeting. Our 2005 agenda includes a slide show by a very special speaker, Dr. Rob Butler, entitled “The Web of Life.” You’ll hear reviews of highlights of the year from our inspired and tireless committees, Pres. Peter Lamb will offer perspectives from Mount Olympus, and Exec. Director Karen Hudson will tie the efforts of board and committees to fundraising, membership, volunteers, and office management. You will be able to vote on an increase in membership fees to help offset increases in rent and postage (among other things). You will also elect new directors. This year Samantha Beare, Maureen Bendick, Charles Dorworth, Linda Quiring, Brian Smallshaw, Bob Weeden, and Doug Wilkins will let the calendar move them smoothly into year 2 of their 2year terms. Nigel Denyer, Jean Gelwicks, Peter Lamb, Rachel Ogis and Ruth Tarasoff, apparently no wiser than when they agreed to serve in 2003, have chucked their chapeaux onto the pile on the floor and are at your mercy. Two candidates, Steve and Maxine Leichter, are fresh faces. They found land on the Island 10 years ago and began readying for the move (2003) from Los Angeles. They are just finishing their pro-environment home on Mt. Belcher, which features low-energy appliances, an off-the-grid solar electricity supply, and water catchment. Other clues to their approach to life are scattered unobtrusively all around: moss divots back in place after construction dislodged them, piles of decaying Scotch broom, footpaths avoiding every possible patch of blueeyed Mary. Maxine volunteered for the Conservancy her first year here, helping to write our successful stewardship grant application. She was, in fact, a grantwriter by profession in California. Steve is an attorney, a seasoned negotiator, and an experienced business person.
Guest speaker Dr. Rob Butler will present a slideshow on the “Web of Life”. “The high tide had pushed a large flock close to the marsh edge, and their twittering calls periodically erupted in a din of chirps as flocks rose from the beach. Some flocks began to form into long lines in the air and climb higher in the sky. I followed with my binoculars their silhouetted shapes against the reddening sky until the dots became specks and the specks merged with the sky. Their next stop would be the Copper River delta. In my imagination, I flew with them.” – The Jade Coast
Rob Butler is a senior research scientist with the Canadian government and an adjunct professor of biological sciences at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He has written over 100 scholarly publications for scientific journals and authored several books. His most recent book is The Jade Coast, a popular account of the ecology of the north Pacific Ocean. Dr. Butler’s main research interest is the ecology of marine environments. Recent emphasis has been on bird migration, mostly of shorebirds; the ecology of great blue herons in coastal environments; and the ecology of Dr. Butler’s research has been reported on national science radio programs, featured on television and in magazines. He has served on the executive of scientific societies and has received several awards for his research and conservation work. Dr. Butler earned his doctoral degree from the University of British Columbia and lives in New Westminster overlooking the Fraser River.
R. MacVicar photo
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
President’s Page
Governing Environment
PLEDGE/DONATION FORM
Few could deny that effective governance of Salt Spring and, indeed, all the Gulf Islands is critical to the work of the Conservancy. It is important, therefore, that we monitor and participate in, when necessary, the activities of the Islands Trust and the Capital Regional District. To do this, we have recently established a new standing Committee on Environmental Governance which will monitor legislation, regulations and programs affecting environmental governance on Salt Spring and recommend actions to be taken by the President and the Board where appropriate. It will be taking an active role in the proposed OCP review and related potential bylaw changes. If you have an interest in this topic, please let us know. There is no doubt in my mind that 2005 will be a pivotal year in the evolution of the Islands Trust and, hopefully, the strengthening of the original vision of our Islands as a special and sensitive environment worthy of real preservation and protection. Your Conservancy intends to remain vigilant. - Peter Lamb
Mount Erskine Property Salt Spring Island
Yes, I would like to make a donation/pledge to help acquire the Mount Erskine property! I would like to donate/pledge: $50 $100 $250 $500 $1,000 $5,000 $ ___________ I would like my donation to be anonymous. Donations: Please make cheques payable to Salt Spring Island Conservancy and specify "Mt. Erskine Property." A charitable tax receipt will be issued for donations fo $20 or more on satisfactory completion of the total financing. Pledges: For pledges, 21 days notice will be given before the funds are required. A charitable tax receipt will be issued for contributions of $20 or more. Name: Phone: Email: Address:
Director’s Desk
Saturday Market
Spring is here and for Salt Spring Islanders, the arrival of spring flowers also means the infamous Saturday marketin-the-park has begun another year. For the Conservancy, this means the beginning of our 5th annual bench raffle in the market, and the quest to enlist volunteers for shifts every Saturday from May 21st to the draw at the Fall Fair on Sunday, September 18. Volunteers work with partners for three-hour shifts, either morning or afternoon, and sell raffle tickets. The driftwood bench, designed by local artisan Luke Hart-Weller, is so beautiful that the tickets sell themselves. We also need volunteers to do office work, a weekly GVM receipt collector, and assistance with this summer’s big fundraiser: the Salt Spring Eco-Home Tour on July 31. The Conservancy has now joined the AIR MILES® Reward Program. We will be giving Conservancy Air Miles Cards out to members to show at participating merchants for points towards flights and other items needed for our work. Please let us know if you want a card or more information about this program. We are also collecting Canadian Tire dollars to enable us to buy tools for broom removal on our nature reserves. You can drop these at events or the office, or mail them to us. Locally, we have a receipt box at GVM, community chest number #58 at Thrifty’s, and you can credit your bottle returns to us at the SSI Refund Centre. Happy Spring! - Karen Hudson
Postal Code: Signature: Date:
Mail or fax this form to: Salt Spring Island Conservancy Box 722, Ganges PO Salt Spring Island BC V8K 2W3 fax: 250-538-0319
Spring 2005
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Conservancy Events
Upcoming Events
May 13th (Friday): AGM 7:00 pm Lions Hall Salt Spring Island Conservancy Annual General Meeting. Dr. Rob Butler, a senior scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, will present a slideshow on the “Web of Life”. May 21st (Saturday): Birding with Bob at Ford Lake. Sign up at 538-0318. June 10th (Friday): 7:00 pm Community Gospel Chapel Ronald Wright - New talk from this year’s CBC Massey lecturer and local writer. Co-sponsored with Salt Spring Islanders for Justice and Reconciliation (SSIJAR) July 5th (Tuesday): 7:00 pm – Lion’s Hall Elizabeth May Book Tour. The executive director of The Sierra Club of Canada will speak about her revised and updated book: “At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada’s Forests”. Co-sponsored by The Sierra Club of Canada. July 30th (Saturday): 7:00 pm – Sustainable & Environmental Home Forum Panel of speakers including Paula Baker LaPorte, architect and author of “Prescriptions for a Healthy House” (Location TBA) July 31st (Sunday): 10am – 4pm. Salt Spring EcoHome Tour A tour to the many unique examples of sustainable homes located on Salt Spring. Look for announcements in the Driftwood. Tickets will be available at Salt Spring Books. August 18 (Thursday): 7 - 9pm - Lions Hall. Join us for John Neville’s book launch “Travelling the Dempster” and CD release “Bird Songs of the ArcticAlong the Dempster Highway”. All proceeds to the Mt. Erskine Campaign. Volunteer to protect the environment for a few years and you’ll surely be called a do-gooder. Whenever that happens I treat myself to a wry grin. Given the choices of doing good, doing bad, or doing nothing, I don’t mind the label at all. RBW
Annual Report Available
Our brochure-format annual report is available: • online: http://saltspring.gulfislands.com/conservancy • as an e-mail • at our office: Suite 201, Upper Ganges Centre • at Conservancy AGM and later events • at the SSIC table, Saturday market
Membership Fee Increase Proposed
Members attending the AGM will vote on the Board’s proposal to increase membership fees in all categories by $5. The new fees – to be applied when your current oneor three-year membership expires - are: Youth under 16 Senior/low income Regular single Regular family Group/school Business 1 yr @ $15 1 yr @ $20 1 yr @ $25 1 yr @ $35 1 yr @ $35 1 yr @ $55
3 yrs @ $60 3 yrs @ $75 3 yrs @ $105 3 yrs @ $105 3 yrs @ $165
Thank you to our business members:
Anchorage Cove B&B Baker Beach Cottages Balmoral By The Sea B&B Barb’s Buns Beddis House B&B Bold Bluff Retreat Bootacomputer Creekhouse Realty Ltd. Green Acres Resort Gulf Island Picture Framing Island Escapades Island Star Video Neil Morie - Architect Murakami Auto Body & Repairs Salt Spring Books Salt Spring Centre of Yoga Salt Spring Centre School Salt Spring Coffee Co. Salt Spring Home Design Centre Salt Spring Island Chamber of Commerce Salt Spring Kayaking Salt Spring Way B&B Saltspring Linen & Dry Cleaning Saltspring Soapworks Spindrift at Welbury Point Sprague Associates Ltd. Terra Firma Builders Ltd. The Wine Cellar
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Conservancy Events
Event Notes
Imagining the Worst
Ron Wright lecture, June 10, 7:00 pm Community Gospel Chapel In our civilization, and in others from which we have written knowledge, writers have expressed anxiety about the human place in nature whether by mythology, theology, or fiction. In ancient times this usually took the form of moral tales set in the past, warning of the pitfalls of arrogance and recklessness. In modern times, ever since the industrial revolution brought runaway growth and change, writers have focussed on the shape of things to come: a fate made more by man than God. Our cautionary tales have become nightmare futures, dystopian satires in which the fears and follies of the present are writ large. Ronald Wright was born in England to a Canadian father and an English mother, and now lives on SaltSpring Island. A novelist, historian and essayist, he has won awards in all three genres, and is published around the world in more than a dozen languages. He studied archaeology at Cambridge University and at the University of Calgary, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 1996. His nonfiction books include bestsellers “Time Among The Maya” and “Stolen Continents,” a history of the Americas that won the Gordon Montador Award. Wright is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He has made radio and television broadcasts in Canada, Britain, and the United States. In 2004 he gave the CBC Massey Lectures, “A Short History Of Progress,” the book of which became a national bestseller and is now being widely published abroad. Conservancy members will remember his talk, based on “A Short History...” last January.
Travelling the Dempster
John Neville Book & CD launch, August 18 7-9:00 pm Lions Hall. Travel Canada’s fabulous Dempster Highway with nature recordist and SaltSpring resident John Neville, the Birdsong Man. EXPERIENCE the natural history of this tundra wilderness in Yukon and the Northwest Territories. ENJOY bird encounters that’ll make your ears tingle. MEET historical characters (recently disinterred) in Goldrush Dawson. EXPLORE with MacKenzie and Franklin above the Arctic Circle, and feel the heartache experienced by the Lost Patrol and the determination of the Mounties tracking the Mad Trapper of Rat River. LEARN about aurora borealis, the Porcupine herd of barren-ground caribou, willow ptarmigan, and much more.
May in July!
Elizabeth May, July 5, 7:00 pm Lions Hall Elizabeth May, Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada, will visit the Island again to talk about her newest book, “At The Cutting Edge: Crisis In Canadian Forests.” Elizabeth is one of Canada’s most respected and effective conservationists, and never fails to inspire and inform audiences. Her topic certainly is important here in BC, where the Province has instituted a “results-based” code of Forest Practices, a system in which forest leaseholders are trusted to be good stewards - and nobody checks. According to the West Coast Environmental Law Association this approach “ignores results, shifts control to forest companies, creates red tape for environmental protection and inhibits effective enforcement.”
View from Mt. Erskine photo: Terry McIntosh
Spring 2005
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Comment
Living Whole in a Divided World
We live in a world of divided institutions and connected problems. Common sense makes the full shape of problems visible to us as individuals. The universal challenge is to bring myriad narrowly focussed, turf-defending, responsibilitydenying institutions to the point of concerted action. There is a typical example in our own backyard. Many people live in Cusheon Lake’s watershed. Homes and cottages ring the Lake. Many of their owners drink treated lakewater. Residents and visitors boat on the Lake, swim and fish in it, and enjoy its everchanging scene just as people everywhere are drawn to water. Summer and fall algae blooms have become more and more noticeable in Cusheon Lake. Occasionally the bloom includes a massive explosion of “blue-green algae,” actually a bacterium living with a photosynthesizing algae. It produces a strong toxin that resists boiling or filtering and makes you really sick if you drink it. What is behind this situation? Algae and cyanobacterium populations are limited by the amount of phosphorus in lake waters. Phosphorus piggybacks into the Lake on soil particles washed in during rains, and from septic tank leachates. A lot of “old” phosphorus is chemically bound in lakebottom muds and sands, but is released when dead algae drift to the bottom in numbers sufficient to rob deep water of oxygen when they decompose. It mixes into the water column during fall when cooling surface water, dropping, stirs up the summer-warmed deeper water. Surface runoff carries 60% or so of yearly additions of phosphorus to the Lake. Reducing silt loads of overland and incoming stream waters is the obvious action. Rocket science it is not. Nevertheless, practical evidence tells us it is easier to send a rocket into space than to control phosphorus in a neighborhood lake.The rocket involves more people and costs more money, but one institution with one budget launches the rocket. Cusheon Lake water quality, in contrast, touches the narrow mandates of a dozen agencies, each with bits of authority they may or may not be willing to use. They may become “involved,” but commitment comes much harder. (The difference? Well, think of the favourite North American breakfast of ham and eggs: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.) Moreover, an institution playing a key role is not an agency, it is private property, which often has the most obdurate walls of them all. Reducing phosphorus means changing how individuals act on their land - how they cut trees, site homes, build driveways, control drainage, plow ground, and control livestock access to streams. After years of lake-watching and some scientific sampling, a goodly number of individuals and some agencies understand the situation. Citizen work, both dogged and inspired, has begun to move the creaking machinery. Through a Water Council, initiated and hosted by the Capital Regional District, the Cusheon Lake Stewardship Committee has made all key agencies and non-profit groups aware of the situation. The Local Trust Committee has helped the Committee produce a truly professional, persuasive statement - a Management Plan - that will be the prime educational tool for all stakeholders. It will be a long time, however, before agencies actually do what they know they should do, and even longer, perhaps, before property owners, through education or changing rules of land use, collectively reduce phosphorus-loaded runoff. Our world moves rapidly toward universal subdivision. Churches and sects parcel out religion and guard their identities and followings. Business is highly specialized so as to profit within a tightly defined market. Even huge corporations , global in scope, are internally divided into strongly walled compartments. Science and academe are divided into disciplines and subdisciplines. Professions, unions, governments - all are compartmentalized. It is hard to be devoted intensely during the workday to a narrow compartment of life and still think and act broadly the rest of the time, not only because it boggles the mind but because broad thought and loyal maximization of narrow interest will always be at odds. Institutions punish doubt. Nevertheless, people are compelled to try. This spring I was awed by the scope of understanding evident among a score of Mayne Islanders who met to talk about problems of environmental protection on their home Island. Even as they talked about seemingly small “issues” their discourse ranged easily from local and regional economics, governance and politics, demography, land use, and supra-regional environmental change, to the natural history of their own landscapes. They understood patterns and connections that everywhere characterize the real world. Conservation groups attract people with that sort of mind. Yet as institutions such groups often act more narrowly. They specialize in litigation or lobbying, land acquisition, education; in whales or butterflies, in deserts or forests, and so on. Or they tailor a broad constitution, then prioritize rigidly. Practicality demands it. There are only so many volunteers, only so much money, only a few fleeting days to seize an opportunity. I accept all that as inevitable, not as desirable. Somehow conservation groups need to make sure that their neighbors (by that I mean the entire community of people whose actions both create and resolve problems) understand not only the project-specific wins and losses time brings, but as well their broader context and meaning. Every neighbor will cherish our model, which is of lives lived whole in a divided world. - Bob Weeden
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Inside SSIC
Good Stewards - Nancy Braithwaite
Roots are important to Nancy Braithwaite: her family’s, her own, and the thousands of trees in her care. Roots mean choosing well and with a whole heart, and sticking to it. Her family have owned land on SaltSpring Island for almost a century, and she has made her home on Trincomali Ridge for 18 years. She is a founder of SSIC and a loyal supporter. Nancy’s land lies on the ridge that rises strongly from Trincomali Channel near Walker’s Hook, strides smoothly west for 2 kilometres and plunges boldly into St. Mary Lake. From the uppermost windows of her home there is a grand view of a stretch of Trincomali and of Galiano’s west side, but from most of the rooms the view is of nature’s variegated green and Nancy’s informal gardens. The backyard shrubs and trees grow rampant, chasing light and moisture. Nancy may apologize for their sprawl, but her bent toward tidiness is overcome by her reluctance to amputate or uproot. “The birds love the tangle of this red osier,” she says. “This bay tree is a bit wild, I’m afraid,” she says. Nancy Braithwaite was designated a “Conservation Steward” during the Conservancy’s 2000 stewardship project. A footpath - the kind your feet feel even as your eye is still looking - leads from the driveway around an orchard fence and into the woods. You follow it, aware of the sawn stubs on either side at intervals that tell you how hard the wind blew last winter. Otherwise the feeling is of following the trace of a meditative stroller who wants to leave everything unhurt. Here the path is just below a gentle ridgetop, rising soon to rockier ground where cedars are few and arbutus many, dipping into salal under mixed fir and cedar. The trail forks. One is closed to us because of fallen trees; it would drop eventually toward Malcolm Bond’s farm, turn west along the boundary, and close its loop at Nancy’s home. The other rises over the ridge, then twists and turns at the very edge of solid footing as it parallels a lovely swale full of yellow-candled skunk cabbage. Soon you are on her driveway again. This drive, perhaps 200 metres long, is laid out like the casual trail you just left, except for a somewhat wider person. Its turns preserve mysteries ahead while following the best footing and avoiding every possible wetland and elder statestree. Occasionally you see a stub of cedar or alder full of the prospect holes of several generations of woodpeckers. An owner knowing and valuing nature less would call them ugly and cut them down. While Nancy cares for them these woods will simply “be,” doing everything they are meant to do, busy even while an unattuned visitor is accusing them of doing nothing. Thirty of Nancy’s 37 acres are covenanted, giving the forest a chance to do its marvelous “nothing” halfway to forever. - Bob Weeden
A doorway to where? photo: Peter Lamb
Spring 2005
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Feature
Nightrise, Dayfall
Each day fades as light withdraws from the eastern lee of tall things: a mountain, a wood, a barn, a tower. In cities we scurry then through a geometry of shade and light, first blinking at a sun-blazed intersection and then submerging into semidarkness as comfortably as a water-ouzel leaps in and out of a stream.The band of afternoon sun climbs storey after skyscraping storey until it vanishes into thick air. At dusk there is only the imperceptible bounce of blue or pink from distant motes of dust and vapor. At first dark on the peopled streets impossibly high noctilucent clouds may still glow. When even they are gone, it is deep night. We sleep dreamlessly, or dream sleeplessly, or perhaps toil in the night. A watchman going home meets a baker arriving. They pause to talk. They note the brightening of the eastern sky. A cloud, having stolen unseen across the nightsmothered land, shows itself first as a colorless texture, then as a passage of pink flame, and finally as a single float in a parade of yellow and white. Sun strikes the tallest spire, then slips smoothly down each glass and steel or brickwork wall, carrying daylight onto each shoe of the awakening city. For billions of years earth and its riders have seen the night rise at end of day, and day fall at the end of night. For hundreds of millenia these events have bracketed every day, been recorded in the human brain, directed our bodies through the daily dance. For how long have tongues woven stories around the flight of sun and stars? For how many centuries have hands written the science, the religion, the poetry of spinning earth? Why, then, does no one speak of nightrise and dayfall, but of their opposites? In my own tongue we say”nightfall,” or “darkness falls,” there being no word in dictionaries for the rising of the dark. I’ve made no survey of languages - itself an interesting task -but know that the Spanish speak of “la caida de la tarde,” the fall of night; Germans have no phrase suggesting whether darkness falls or rises; and in French “la nuit tombez.” When it dawned on me that night did not fall, my mind danced. After all, we ordinary folk make only one personal discovery in our lives, which is that whatever we think or say has been thought or said before. Once, and once only, grace gave me a claim upon discovery when, one summer day on an ancient hill in central Alaska, I rested beside an arctic flower unknown to botanists. It was a joy to find the hiatus in Webster and Oxford between “nightmarish” and “night owl.” I should have let well enough alone. Google knew what Noah did not. “Nightrise,” it seems, is in an album title by the music group “Phoenix,” and “Dayfall” is a new music group working simultaneously on its first album and first website. Worse, while enjoying H. M. Tomlinson’s “The Sea and the Jungle” (1928) recently I found this: “...ascending that hill which looks with uplifted and shining brow, to the far vague country whence comes the last of the light, at dayfall...” The ocean of existing print must contain more such bits of flotsam, and riverine torrents of words here and soon to come carry more. I have been warned. In his poem “Bats” (Atlantic Monthly, May 2005) Mark Jarman watches them “...skim the darkness as it rises,...” I have to disclaim unique discovery, but console myself that the company I am in is small and partly dead. “Sunrise” and “sunset” are equally wrongheaded; more forgivable, perhaps, because anyone can see night’s onset every 24 hours and should be able to describe it accurately, but can only take on faith science’s assertion that the sun neither rises nor sets but merely hangs around while earth spins toward and away from it. Are we hoodwinked by a vast, poetic conspiracy? Or does mankind have a flaw after all, an inborn and universal dyslexia? Of course, I could be the one with a contrary brain: night may, indeed, fall. How do the other billions who see its descent, explain it? Friends whom I ask just look bemused . Is light more bouyant than darkness? (We do use “light” to describe things less securely gripped by gravity.) Do particles of darkness form in the still-bright air of late afternoon and, like an invisible rain, drop downward to collect as puddles of night? Or perhaps as the disappearing sun leaves lee sides in shadow the air cools and, being heavier, sinks? Skiing through an aspen wood at dusk, the trees dark against pale snow, I have looked across openings and seen the lances of a hidden sun ricochet to me from a distant mountain peak. I have stood of a fragrant summer evening in a dimming garden and, looking up at a sound, have seen a sunlit jet carrying its passengers to a far city. Therefore, right or wrong, I hold to my conviction that the night rises every evening, having gone to ground the previous morning. The darkness hides first in the valleys, then in the deepest shadowy hollows, then in abandoned barns. Hounded from its last surface refuge it goes underground, sometimes to be surprised and unearthed by early morning diggers of graves and miners of coal. Language needs to adjust to reality; I could add “again,” given the pace at which novelty outruns language today. In this case, however, the new words need to embrace a reality known since the dawn of time. Both “nightrise” and “dayfall” are simple and accurate. The puzzle is to find words to tell the truth about our morning turn toward the sun and our evening turn away. - Bob Weeden
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Natural History
Salt Spring Eco-Home Tour
July 31st: 10am - 4pm
A tour to the many unique examples of sustainable homes located on Salt Spring. Look for announcements in the Driftwood about this exciting event and a panel of speakers at 7pm, on July 30th. (Location TBA). This event is cosponsored with the Earth Festival Society. Tickets will be available at Salt Spring Books. Call Karen at 538-0318 for more info or to help out in any way.
Rammed Earth home on tour
photo: Jens Fischer
Chocolate Lily
The chocolate or checker lily (Fritillaria lanceolata) is a native perennial plant with delicate dark purplish belllike nodding flowers. The plant grows from a bulb with numerous bulblets that look like grains of rice. As a matter of fact, coastal Salish people used to dig up the bulblets and eat them either steamed or boiled just like rice, although a little bitter. Chocolate lilies are rare now; people keep the sites of these lilies secret for fear of others picking them. I had the luck to buy one from the nursery to be able to paint this picture. My knowledgeable nurseryman told me that the bulb takes 9 years to bloom. So never pick these wildflowers or dig them up! The chocolate lily is barely one foot tall. The slender stem, slightly purplish-green, bends into a delicate curve bearing a single (occasionally two) bell-flower with 6 petals that are dark purple to chocolate with very even checkered patterns. My pot of nursery-raised choolate lily is very pretty with pinky mauve patterns on the flowers whose yellow anthers add to the likeness with hanging bells. The leaves are green, alternate, and lance-like. Fritillarias bloom from March to May and can be found in grassy meadows and bluffs. After blooming, the flowers form seed capsules. If you see these rare beauties in the wild, enjoy your lucky day! - Ling Weston
Spring 2005
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Community
Recognizing Volunteers
Veteran Volunteer Retires - Pam Barry Evans May Get Life
Pam Barry began collecting Ganges Village Market checkout slips from the Conservancy’s box back when the world was young, 8 or 10 years ago. No pipes or drums, she quietly brought them to us when the box needed emptying. Our treasurer or ED checked the total and converted them to cash, courtesy of the store’s generosity. We’ve received hundreds of dollars over the years from that source (and from Thrifty’s as well, whose system bypasses the need for slips). Pam is going on to bigger and better things, the logical next step being PM. She’d get my vote. Our sincerest thanks go with her. Who will next take on this job? We need someone to volunteer, perhaps a frequent GVM shopper. Call Karen at 538-0318, pick up a key, and you are on your way. Susan Evans, early SSIC leader and strong supporter for a decade, has been nominated as Honourary Life Member by the board of the Conservancy. Susan may have been a day too late to be one of the founding directors applying for incorporation, but as our first treasurer she was never a dollar short. Susan not only established our bookkeeping process on a solid basis - we have always known where we stood and have never jeopardized our charitable status - she also “kept the books” for our first successful land acquisition campaign. Susan accurately recorded pledges and payments for the Mill Farm project, enabling us to turn over about $100,000 to the CRD as Island residents’ good-faith contribution toward purchase. Islanders’ respect for the Conservancy was so high that when pledges were converted to cheques, cash exceeded promises! Susan participated fully as director as well as treasurer until the 1998 AGM. She has remained a loyal contributor and supporter ever since. SSIC members will be asked to vote Susan Evans onto the roster of Honourary Life Members at our AGM on May 13.
Flowering Plant Endangered on Nature Reserve
A vigorous, well-known shrub with gorgeous yellow flowers in May appears to be succumbing to negative environmental factors on Andreas Vogt Nature Reserve. Its population status, once abundant, has suffered several partial, sudden declines in the past two years. The most recent seems coincident with the presence on March 28 of 13 humans of various sizes, carrying pincer-pullers and sharp hand implements. This armed force spread out on trails along the Reserve’s west side. Havoc ensued. Tender infants were tore up ruthlessly, healthy plants in their prime were sacrificially secateured or cunningly levered out of the ground. Even old-growth, some of it as much as six inches in diameter, felt the fatal bite of sawtoothed weapons. There appeared to be a hidden agenda involving brainwashing of the young. One five-year-old, Aidan Haigh, obviously had been subjected to cerebral laundering earlier and was as hostile to the target plants as the calloused adults. His sister Chloe, age two, was allowed to watch from a backpack carrier, but was subjected to quizzing afterward, before supper. Although this Government, notorious for its environmental policies, seems unwilling to act, there is a citizens’ movement to place this lovely plant, favored by haggis-chewers for generations, on the threatened list. To join, email [email protected].
Nina Raginsky Recognized
Saltspring Island resident Nina Raginsky received a Burns’ Bog Environmental Excellence Award earlier this spring. One of the Island’s best known environmentalists, Nina is also a highly gifted artist and photojournalist, an officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and recipient of the Kees Vermeer Award for wildlife conservation. Nina’s love of nature is a daily practice. She has made a jewel of beauty and wildlife habitat of her home environs, including the marvelous mini-estuary of Walter Bay. Seemingly tireless and surely fearless, she has committed her life and talents to innumerable campaigns to protect wild things and their homes. From eagle trees to heronries, from eelgrass beds to mature forests, from anemones on wharf pilings to beleaguered oystercatchers on sandspits, Island wildlife are in her debt. The Salt Spring Island Conservancy extends its thanks and congratulations to Nina for this latest recognition of her work. WELL DONE!
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The Acorn - Newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy
Essential details
Office Update
Call for Submissions!
You are invited to submit articles to the Acorn on any topic, including: the Conservancy’s history, natural history, stewardship, and fundamental conservancy interests including selected issues beyond SSI borders. If you have any ideas, write to us at [email protected] or PO Box 722, SSI, BC, V8K 2W3. Thanks!
Items Wanted:
Donations of any of the following gratefully received. Office Items Household Items Vacuum Cleaner Hot plate Speaker phone Electric tea kettle Calculators Small refrigerator Laptop Computer Other Items Saws, clippers Compass Loppers Hand secateurs
Thank you!
Thank you to Brian Finnemore and Bob Andrew for donating GPSs to the Conservancy!
We would also appreciate donations of gifts, such as new books or items related to nature or conservation, to give to our educational speakers, who volunteer their time.
• Do you like talking to friendly people? • Do you have 4-8 hours a week that you could volunteer to the Conservancy? We need YOU to help us schedule volunteers. We have the volunteers, we just need some help calling them. Please call Karen 538-0318 for more information.
Help Wanted:
Stewardship Receives Grants
The Conservancy is pleased to announce that it has received $51,900 for its 2005 project: Habitat Protection and Stewardship of Species at Risk on Salt Spring. This funding has come from the Government of Canada Habitat Stewardship Program for Species at Risk, the Vancouver Foundation, and the Salt Spring Island Foundation.
The Acorn is the newsletter of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy, a local non-profit society supporting and enabling voluntary preservation and restoration of the natural environment of Salt Spring Island and surrounding waters. We welcome your feedback and contributions, by email to [email protected] or by regular mail. Opinions expressed here are the authors’, not subject to Conservancy approval.
Editor: Bob Weeden Layout: Brian Smallshaw Board of Directors: Samantha Beare (Treasurer) Maureen Bendick (Vice-President) Nigel Denyer Charles Dorworth Jean Gelwicks Peter Lamb (President) Rachel Ogis Linda Quiring Brian Smallshaw Ruth Tarasoff Doug Wilkins Bob Weeden
Membership Application
Youth (Under 16) Senior or Low-Income: Regular Single Regular Family Group/School Business Name: Address: Postal Code: Phone: Email: ❒ Please send me the Acorn via e-mail.
(We NEVER give out member’s email addresses to anyone!)
Volunteer Opportunities
$10 _ $15 _ $20 _ $30 _ $30 _ $50 _ We have a Volunteer Application Form that best describes areas you wish to help in. For now, which areas interest you? Please check off: ❒ Office Work (typing, filing or computer work) ❒ Information Table at Saturday Market (May through September) ❒ Education Programs ❒ Annual Fundraising Events ❒ Information Table at SSI Community Events ❒ Joining a SSIC Committee (Land Restoration & Management, Fundraising, Covenants, Acquisitions, Education, Stewardship, or Environmental Governance) ❒ Other: _______________________
1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @ 1 yr @
3 yr @ $45 _ 3 yr @ $60 _ 3 yr @ $90 _ 3 yr @ $90 _ 3 yr @ $150 _
The Salt Spring Island Conservancy #201 Upper Ganges Centre, 338 Lower Ganges Rd. Mail: PO Box 722, Salt Spring Island BC V8K 2W3 Office hours : Tues/Thurs 10 am - 2 pm Phone: (250) 538-0318 Fax: (250) 538-0319 Email: [email protected] Web site: http://saltspring.gulfislands.com/ conservancy
Printed on 18% recycled paper
❒ This is a renewal for an existing membership
Donations
In addition to my membership fee above, I have enclosed my donation in the amount of: $50 _ $100 _ $250 _ $500 _ $1000_ $2500 _ $5000 _ Other ___________ Tax receipts will be provided for donations of $20 or more.
Conservancy
Ganges PO Box 722 Salt Spring Island BC V8K 2W3
The Salt Spring Island
Spring 2005
11
Conservancy
Ganges P.O. Box 722 Salt Spring Island, BC V8K 2W3
the Salt Spring Island
40026325
