The Chemainus Residents Association chose board members for 2019-2020 at their Annual General Meeting, held June 3 at St. Michael’s Anglican Church hall.
About 30 people attended the meeting, and nominated a new six-member board. Lia Versaevel, Bernie Jones, Lana Halme and Craig Spence, who were already board member, will be joined by Lorraine Taylor and Carolyn Jerome.
No vote was necessary, as up to nine people can sit on the CRA board. Positions and roles will be determined at an inaugural board meeting.
The meeting also approved a motion requiring board nominees at future AGMs to be CRA members for at least six months before the meeting.
Chair Lia Versaevel acknowledged several guests: Nanaimo – North Cowichan MLA Doug Routley; Doug Fenton Islands Trust trustee for Thetis Island; Kate Marsh, Councillor with the Municipality of North Cowichan; and Sybille Sanderson, Emergency Coordinator with the Cowichan Valley Regional District.
Marsh made a presentation on a Climate Action and Energy Plan for North Cowichan (story upcoming); Sanderson did a presentation on Emergency Preparedness (story upcoming).
“Thank you for being here this evening,” Versaevel said. She also had a special note of thanks for people who served on the outgoing board, but are stepping down: Webster Parker, Mary Dolan and Don Merwin.
Jones noted that the board can invite people to join them, if there are fewer than nine board members sitting, a step that might be taken as issues emerge and new voices and talents are needed.
In her report, Versaevel recapped a busy year for the CRA:
following up on the winter storm that hammered Vancouver Island in December;
attending North Cowichan council meetings, and responding to issues of concern to Chemainus;
monitoring and advocating for better air quality in Chemainus;
re-establishing a CRA Land Use & Planning Committee;
supporting initiatives to increase child care funding and services.
“It’s also been encouraging that, when we’ve held fundraising events, like the one we did at the Riot Brew Pub on St. Patrick’s Day, that we’ve had a great turnout, and that we were able to talk a lot about what we do as a local committee in terms of keeping issues alive and following through on concerns of local land-owners and residents,” Versaevel said.
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“You can’t read the UN’s recent biodiversity report on the imminent destruction of one million creatures by human economies and not conclude that the environmental movement has failed, and spectacularly so,” he begins.
Not too many people would quibble with that statement. Perhaps there are some who still believe the environmental movement may gain traction as the pending catastrophes of unabated consumerism and industrialism become more obvious, but two mindsets are taking hold that gainsay that desperate hope:
increasingly the conversation around climate change is about how we, as a species (and to hell with every other living creature on the planet), can adapt to the unstoppable rise in temperature;
there is an almost palpable sense that no amount of protesting, letter writing, recycling and electric biking is going to stop the juggernaut of ‘progress’ in the consumerist genre, and as more and more people on the planet demand their slice of American pie, we will continue to race toward the tipping point of catastrophe at an ever accelerating rate.
Nikiforuk goes farther than saying enviros have failed, though. By some circuitous trail of deduction I can’t fathom, he actually blames the environmental movement for the mess we’re getting ourselves into.
Citing the ‘brilliant Austrian cleric’ Ivan Illich, who said the environmental movement might not amount to much, Nikiforuk says: “In many respects environmentalism has allowed a civilization intent on hacking off its limbs one by one to properly record the loss of each appendage and then pretend the amputation isn’t all that consequential.”
Hardly a rallying cry for the exhausted troops under their green banners to keep up the good fight, despite the odds!
I’m still not convinced it’s a case of sloppy writing; or confounded logic that has led to this gloomy impression of environmentalism as a worse-than-ineffectual movement, but whatever the cause, I think Nikiforuk has weighed in on the wrong side of the balance… there has never been a greater need to muster green sentiments then right now.
What are the enviros up against? Reading the comments to Nikiforuk’s article will give you an idea of the kinds of attitudes that are prevalent, and which the Green movement has to be mindful of. Here’s a culling of thoughts taken from more than a hundred comments to his article:
Humans are a pernicious species, separate from nature.
The only solution to impending global catastrophe would be extermination of the human species.
A knowing intelligencia is manipulating the economic and political process to perpetuate the capitalist, consumerist thrust of human growth and development.
The motive for planetary pillaging is profit.
Corporate entities have an overwhelming advantage when it comes to influencing public attitudes and opinion.
The environmental movement has failed.
We are doomed to a dark age of civil and social collapse which will entail unspeakable devastation and suffering.
Science, which has brought us the standard of living we enjoy, will not be able to come up with solutions to prevent the planetary collapse our standard of living entails.
Population growth combined with the ever increasing demands of consumerist modes of living are unsustainable factors that inevitably lead to disaster.
Humanity cannot survive if the intricate web of biodiversity is degraded.
The pre-industrial mode of living was more in tune with nature than the post-industrial.
We could have achieved a higher standard of living without the kind of environmental plundering and social disruption that occurred.
The democratic process can’t lead to the type of change that’s needed to prevent global catastrophe.
Individuals, when it comes down to making the ‘right’ choices, will always choose the ‘wrong’ things: more consumer products that make life easier and more fun.
There will be winners and losers no matter how the future unfolds: change, to harmonize our behaviour with nature, entails dislocations such as job loss, divestment and so on; the status quo will lead to untold suffering for many, new forms of consolidated power for a few.
If people shared, we could attain a high standard of living without destroying the planet… but human beings are by nature greedy, self-centred, rapacious and destructive.
Knowing the mindset of thine opponents, and thine allies is fundamental to any sort of political success. Opponents words can (and must) be turned in your favour; supporters’ views can (and almost always will) be used against you. Nikiforuk has penned a strange sort of logic in his article about ‘the battle against biodiversity’, but he’s touched some important nerves in the process.
Sometimes, when we come across a magical place, we want to keep it secret – like a gem, cushioned inside a velvet-lined case. And sometimes these secret places are in plain view, thousands of people passing them by without ever imagining their hidden wonders.
Jesse Island is like that. It’s part of the rocky outcroppings that ring the northern curve of Departure Bay. Millions of people have steamed past them on the BC Ferries route from Nanaimo to Horseshoe Bay, but – like me, until recently – few suspect the inner secrets of these seemingly typical, coastal islets of the Salish Sea.
My partner Di and I set out from the popular kayak launch near the Kin Hut, just off Departure Bay Road at Loat Street. A leisurely 5 kilometre paddle took us by the Brandon Islands, Inskip Rock, around Jesse Island and back. We’d discovered in the BC Coastal Recreational Kayaking and Small Boat Atlas that there were ‘caves’ you could paddle through on Jesse Island, so off we went.
As we skirted the shoreline, we pulled away from the traffic sounds, and the people enjoying a beautiful summer day on the beach. It wasn’t long before we were immersed in a quiet zone of marine wonders. A flock of cormorants sunning on a rocky outcropping; geese, to lazy to fly away as we approached; a pack of seals watching our every move, cautious, but too curious to dive for safety.
The first hint of the inner spaces of Jesse was a basking seal, protected by the ramparts of a rocky formation. Just round the corner from there, we found the entrance to one of the ‘caves’. This isn’t the Grande Canyon we’re talking about; the channels are little spaces, perhaps twenty metres long, that kayakers can explore. But these niches offer their own sense of wonder – a convergence of geology and marine biology that makes you feel connected to the natural world.
On the return paddle we discovered a few more passageways and caves to poke our bows into and squeeze through… a delightful way to spend a sunny, summer afternoon, all within sight of the Island’s second largest city!
Next time I’m grumbling about the cost of pumping gas into my tank, and blaming –falsely – the darn gas tax, I might want to picture the analysis submitted in a letter to the editor of the Times Colonist by Thomas Martin of Victoria (depicted above). In the May 6 edition, Martin says, in reference to a TC article, New Alberta refinery could help with squeezed gas supply: Horgan, April 27:
High gas prices have made the news (again). I sat down, did the math and found the increase will cost me only $120 annually.
My car, if you account for maintenance, depreciation, financing and insurance, costs about $8,000 a year. Rent, utilities, phone and internet for my one-bedroom cost $22,200.
If we have the infrastructure, I can choose to drive my car less, but I will always choose to have a roof over my head. I hate driving to work. However, our government’s choices make us dependent on the automobile for daily life, and thus forced to spend absurd amounts on what should be a luxury item.
If politicians actually cared about the ordinary person, they would give us options to reduce car dependency (more bike lanes, better transit, etc.) and work to reduce the cost of necessities such as housing.
The Federation of B.C. Writers held its annual Spring Writes conference and AGM in Nanaimo May 2 to 5, and writers from all over the province converged on the Vancouver Island Convention Centre for four days of workshops, presentations, blue pencil sessions and hobnobbing.
Presentations and workshops included everything from the art and craft of writing, to strategies for pitching your manuscript to publishers, to 21st Century promotional tools writers can use to get their work into the hands and minds of readers, to discussions about the relevance of literature in an era of digital entertainment.
As a novelist, Fed member, and MiF reporter, yours truly took in as much of the action as was humanely possible on the conference Saturday, and – as much as I learned sitting in on the workshops and panels – I had to admit I missed out on much more than I took in. Kudos to the Fed, and to the Nanaimo area members in particular, for pulling together such a rich program of events.
My observer’s day started at 8 a.m., with a Morning Write, facilitated by Keith Liggett. The day before participants had been assigned a 200 word ‘show, not tell’ writing assignment, which they were to read to the group during the Saturday session. The stories were good, many would have earned a high grade in any course or contest… but Liggett could always find something to offer to improve the pieces, or at least for the writer to consider.
“It’s about habits, and it’s about opening creativity and opening doors, and being forced to do things that you wouldn’t do on your own, if you were just sitting in your closet and writing,” he said.
A raison d’être of the FBCW is to get writers out of solitary, bring them together, and help them engage, though collaborative learning and sharing, the realities of writing as an art and a discipline. Inspiration is a spark that ignites the creative naphtha; then the work of putting all the pieces together into a superbly crafted story begins.
Poet and Author Betsy Warland, during a panel on the whys and hows of publishing, said the vital role of creative writing in the 21st Century has not been diminished by the deluge of new media bringing entertainment and information to audiences.
Literature takes us places no other media can, places we need to go. “There’s so much that’s still missing in our collective narrative – that is forbidden, stereotyped,” she said. “We need to have these narratives present in our collective brain and understanding. So that’s why I think it’s important to publish a book.”
The sources of inspiration and information may be different, but youth are still drawn to creating and reading literature. Said Adam, to a gathering of youth at Literacy Central Vancouver Island, “Really, if you want to get to know a character, and get to know a world, reading is the best way to do it.” And bringing those kinds of penetrating experiences to readers is what drives him to write. “What’s closer to magic than being able to do that for someone else?” he said.
You can find out more about the Federation of BC Writers on their web site. For writers and poets who want resources and camaraderie along the way, it’s an organization that’s there for you.
Eleven years ago, Antonia Olak was walking in the trails near her home in Qualicum, when she encountered a couple of equestrians, one riding Gypsy, the horse that would inspire a series of paintings capturing the spirit of its kind: freedom, speed and surging power.
It was a eureka moment. “That whole experience will never leave me, I was just so excited,” she said, recalling the instant. “I was doing horse profiles before then, but this is the one where everything clicked, and I realized what I was doing.”
Olak wanted to capture the essence of the animals in abstract representations. More than that, she wanted to separate the equine qualities from any background noise, and place her likenesses on absolutely still canvases.
“I feel that extra space gives it a bit of weight, it’s a very quiet image, not quite vulnerable, but just calm,” she said. There’s a felt-tension between the abstract representations of the horses, and the limitless background – the works capture her subjects’ essence, without limiting their vital energy.
In Machusla, a ‘roly-poly’ somewhat clumsy animal she had actually ridden herself, Olak saw qualities many would not have detected. “As a painter, you understand, once you get going, that a painting has a life of its own, and it takes off and you just go with the flow, right?” she remembered.
“Well I realize what I did, was I got Machusla’s spirit, but it doesn’t look like Machusla at all,” Olak said. “She was always so willing to please, and so excited to be ridden, and she had this wonderful spirit.”
The negative space in Olak’s works is often linen instead of canvas, with the horses rendered in charcoal and acrylic. The works aren’t behind glass, so she has finished them with a polymer medium and varnish to fix and protect the actual image.
In some of the paintings Olak has included calligraphic elements. “A lot of my abstracts are like writing,” she said. “My mentor when I was young was Jack Wise.” An artist known for his eastern philosophy, mandalas and calligraphy.
Olak is the featured artist at Rainforest Arts in Chemainus for the months of May and June. She will have an Artist’s Demonstration at the gallery, 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus, May 11 from 1 to 3 pm. Go to RainforestArts.cafor more info.
Nicole Potvin & Adult First Prize winner Katy Weicker
Adult Second Place winner Jonathan Sean Lyster
Adult Third Place winner Dawn Stofer
Junior First Place winner Thunya Dudley
Youth First Place winner Charlotte Taylor
Full-house at the Island Short Story Contest awards
The 2019 awards ceremony for the Islands Short Fiction Contest opened to a full-house April 27 at the Nanaimo Harbourfront branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library.
The crowd was there to meet the winning authors and hear some of the 127 entries in this year’s literary showcase, co-sponsored by the Nanaimo Arts Council, Vancouver Island Regional Library, and Vancouver Island University’s Department of Creative Writing and Journalism. In the running were: Adult writers (19 and over), Youth (13 to 18), and Junior (12 and under).
Victoria’s Katy Weicker took First Prize in the adult category for her story Tender Embers, which judge Stephen Guppy described as an ‘anti-heroine’, ‘anti-romance’ take on the morning after an on-line dating, one-night stand. “The author has taken the formula of romance and turned it on its head,” he said. “The use of social media for involving the narrator with an offstage character functions as a foil which is particularly effective.”
Weicker, joining the audience via digital video link, watched as her story was read by Nanaimo actress Nicole Potvin. The story begins with the narrator in bed nursing a blinding hangover, and gets more complicated from there, as she tries to disentangle herself from the jaded romantic recollections of the night before.
The morning light is an aggressive slash of orange, Potvin read. It burns with a brightness that makes me squint my already closed eyes even tighter to try and block it… My breath is hot. It reverberates off the underbelly of the comforter and onto my face in moist waves of sick. My stomach contents slip up into the back of my throat. I swallow the burning chunks and cough, they surge again. I toss the blanket, roll across the mattress towards the edge of the bed, and stare at the dingy, beige carpet, waiting for a tsunami of vomit to decimate the unfamiliar loafers haphazardly discarded below me…
Thoughts and emotions get more jumbled from there, as the narrator and her best friend text each other with brief snippets of chat, accentuated with suggestive emojis, all exchanged as a ‘jackhammer’ dawn unfolds.
Nine prizes were awarded, three in each of the categories. Jonathan Sean Lyster took second prize in the Adult category for his story, Target Market; Dawn Stopher took third for Identities Reclaimed. In the Youth category, judged by VIRL’s Lee Losell: Charlotte Taylor took first for Calm Before the Storm; Yinan Cao, second; and Jocelyn Diemer third. In the Junior Category, judged by VIRL’s Nathan McKay: Thunya Dudley took first prize; Esemé Iverson, second; Carolynn Warden, third.
Students at Penelakut Elementary School celebrated months of hard work, and powerful learning, with the opening of the Spaal’i’Skwitth’uts’Shelh (Raven and Stellar’s Jay Trail) April 24.
It’s a 1.5 kilometre path winding through the island’s coniferous forests, but more than that, it connects the community’s past and future. Penelakut Elementary School Principal Len Merriman described his walk along the trail, with stops at a couple of the gathering places along the way.
Elders were teaching students the traditional ways of their people. A deer hide was flanced, students also discussed the song they would dance-to, celebrating the opening of the trail – including one specifically composed for the occasion.
“The trail is getting our students out onto the land,” he said. “We’ve had deer skinning, and duck plucking, oyster shucking.” It’s not only a journey through the Penelakut First Nations territory, he said, its stations are places where students and elders will gather to share cultural awareness about themselves and the place they live.
Riley McIntosh, the contractor who helped plan and construct the trail (a project he has done with other First Nations communities), said the eight month project brought people together in a positive way. “It’s been incredibly positive and tons of kids are learning teamwork, overcoming challenges and connecting to their territory,” he told the Chemainus Valley Courier in an April 18 article.
Penelakut Elementary students Nicholas, who named the trail, and Student Council President Arthur, unknotted the cedar rope under the entranceway to Spaal’i’Skwitth’uts’Shelh, officially opening the trail. Then hundreds of students, teachers, elders and guests walked into the traditional lands of the Penelakut people.
Doug Griffiths, CEO and ‘community therapist’, presented his ideas on rural community development to an appreciative audience at Lake Shawnigan School April 4, as part of the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s Placemaking Vancouver Island Speaker Series
Sometimes, as a journalist, you put up your pen, close your notebook, and start listening in a different way. You find yourself asking, “Who is this guy?” instead of trying to take down what he’s saying, because things aren’t adding up.
That moment came for me when 13 Ways CEO Doug Griffith said towns shouldn’t place the word ‘sustainability’ too prominently on their literature, because it doesn’t have the gusto and glitter of other words. Communities need to portray themselves as innovative, aggressive, focused, not lumped in with the NOPE (Never On Planet Earth) crowd of naysayers.
The audience laughed, and I heard a few people sitting near me making appreciative comments. Being of a martian green hue, I cringed. I mean, really, in the 21st Century, not to think of sustainability as something progressive, exciting, fraught with wonderful possibilities? How could people not see the flies in this man’s ointment?
He’d prefaced his NOPE declaration with an avowal of himself as a ‘staunch’ environmentalist, but then went on to humorously depict sustainability–types as people who want to wrench the spigots closed tomorrow, depriving the world of its hydrocarbon fix overnight… None of the staunch environmentalists I know think remotely like that, so which martians has Griffith been talking to, in which coffee shop, and on what Planet B?
Trying to make sense of his comments, I remembered it had been mentioned in his introduction that he’d graduated university as an honours student of philosophy, and taught high school, amongst other things. Any freshman PHIL 101 student would have seen right away that Griffith had pulled the ‘straw man fallacy’ on his appreciative audience – one of the favourite strategies of the most accomplished and insincere politicians.
As a demolition tool the straw man is pretty effective. All you have to do is recast the intentions and policies of your opponent – and the straw man is only used against an opponent – as ridiculous and outrageous for a receptive audience, then tear that effigy apart to the cheers of the crowd. Never mind that the straw man is a gross misrepresentation; the object isn’t a slavish adherence to accuracy or truth, it’s winning. As a former Progressive Conservative MLA and cabinet minister from the other side of the Rockies, as well as a philosophy grad, Griffith would no-doubt be well versed in the straw man tactic, and he deployed it skilfully.
The premise of his schtick was what you might call a thought inversion, one he’d first practised on his high school students. Instead of encouraging them to make the best of their lives, Griffith challenged them to think how they could ruin their chances, and what their degraded futures might look like if they made all the bad choices open to them.
Brilliant idea! But in the classroom he listened to his students and wrote their ruinous ruminations on the blackboard for them to reflect on; at Shawnigan Lake School he told everybody what the ruinous 13 mindsets in town are, then berated some unnamed characters who had dared think that way, dragging their communities into the abyss with them. Griffith cited numerous instances when he rode into town – he’s a rancher by heritage, and rightfully proud of it – and offered up his ideas as to what the locals needed to do to fix things, then left them to it, only to return and find they hadn’t acted on his advice and were wallowing deeper into the mire of mediocrity and decline.
As a philosophy grad, former Alberta cabinet minister, and pretty good comedian, I’m sure Griffith is aware that ‘causality’ hasn’t been established just because two variables on a graph happen to change at the same time. For instance, if I gather together a crowd near sunset and predict vehemently that, if they don’t do something, the sun will drop out of the sky; and if the crowd neglects to do what I’ve suggested and, indeed, the sun does set; that doesn’t mean my saying so and them not heeding my advice was the reason; it might have had something to do with the rotation of the earth!
Griffith wound up his presentation by urging people to take responsibility. Personal responsibility. The cumulative effect of not doing so was the most important point on his list of 13 don’ts that will doom a community. And he’s bang on there. But I found myself asking on my way to the parking lot: How could I take responsibility for the future of my town based on the other things he’d said before that?
Answer: Put on a blue blazer and go volunteer for the Conservative party nearest you. Tout the inviolable efficacy of competition, while lauding the wonderful benefits of cooperation; make sure ‘sustainability’ doesn’t become an inconvenience; snap my fingers in a way the appeals to youth and seniors in the same time and place; et voila, I’ll have done well. And if I don’t achieve the complex goals he’s set for me, and my town goes down for the big swirl as a result, I can always invite Doug Griffith back to say: “I told you so,” just for a laugh.
