We thought you'd enjoy the invitation to the party in honour of Bill Rees' retirement from UBC, particularly the graphic. Here it is:
Dear Guest of Bill Rees’,
Attached is an invitation for Bill Rees’ retirement.
Please register at www.events.scarp.ubc.ca
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about the debate over the future of the forest here in Nova Scotia -- which is, I think, pretty much the same debate you'd see anywhere else. Industry wants to clear-cut the forests, and people with a longer-term view want to use the woodlands in a sustainable way. My original column brought a couple of responses, and I thought the issues raised in the responses deserved a bit of discussion on their own. So here is today's column.
The Forests of the Crown
Steve Talbot is right, I'm not a forester. I stand before you naked and disqualified.
Steve Talbot is the executive director of the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia. He speaks for the industry. He contends that – because I'm not a forester – my recent column on forestry “contained misleading statements about forest ecology, Nova Scotia’s forest industry and the Natural Resources Strategy process.”
In particular, I described the forest industry as dominated by a few large companies that have far too much power over both our forests and the people who work in them – and also over the government agencies that ostensibly regulate them. Not so, says Talbot. “The forest industry in this province is run and mostly owned by generations of Nova Scotian families” who “work in forests and mills, and in the companies and communities that support them. They’re your neighbours, friends and family.”
Well, yes and no. Mostly no.
An old friend sent me a video -- Declan Galbraith, aged 13, singing an inspirational song that he'd written and performed in 2002. I'd never seen it before, and I thought it was astonishing and inspiring. If ever you ask yourself why we keep trying to resolve these huge problems even though people our age -- my age anyway -- aren't going to be around all that long, a performance like this ought to galvanize you.
I don't think I can send the actual wmv file through the blog, but here's a link to a YouTube version. Powerful stuff.
The valleys of the Interior of British Columbia are like slashes in the earth's skin -- deep, steep, dramatic, falling precipitously into dark, narrow lakes. The landscape looks like frozen violence, the product of a time when tectonic plates collided, their edges crumpling and folding under the unimaginable force of crustal jockeying.
But the violence is not frozen, and the jockeying is not over. The plates are still moving. Their sudden shifts are earthquakes, and their vents are volcanoes. These mountains and valleys are part of a stupendous “Ring of Fire” that surrounds the entire Pacific Ocean.
We think of geology as finished, complete, the world having been made ready for its masters. But geology is never finished. Nature is always a work in progress. On our recent trip, Marjorie and I enjoyed the hot springs of Ainsworth and Nakusp. What heats that water? The hell-fires in the basement of the mountains.
The slopes of these valleys should be a uniform swath of green: spruce and fir, pine and cedar. In 2010, however, great rusty smudges on the mountainsides mark the corpses of vast numbers of dead trees. British Columbia is suffering from a massive mountain pine beetle infestation, and more than a billion of its trees have died. The infestation stretches south to Colorado and east to Alberta.
A friend suggests that members of The Green Interview may not have seen this Sunday Herald column from last February, and may enjoy it. I really don't understand the evangelical fury of those who don't accept the evidence about anthopogenic climate change. - SDC
Last week, I wrote about the implosion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and about what I called “the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual.” Alas, I said, 't ain't so. Natural processes are impervious to human opinions.
Some readers went ballistic.
IGUASSU FALLS, Brazil — As of 2008, more than 17 percent of the Amazon rainforest had been cleared for agriculture and otherdevelopment. But in Brazil the rate of deforestation has dropped dramatically in recent years, thanks to a variety of incentives that nmay provide a model for other regions.
It really creates a warm, fuzzy feeling when people you respect say nice things about you.
Here's Chris Benjamin on Twitter: "For inspiration and knowledge that is mind-blowing, and world-changing, check out the Green Interview"
In the town of Blue Earth, Minnesota, alongside Interstate 90, there's a 55-foot statue of the Jolly Green Giant. He's the familiar mascot of Green Giant Foods, the fella we see on TV commercials bragging up the foods that come “ From the valley of the jolly – ho, ho, ho – Green Giant.”
In a recent Energy Bulletin, Dan Allen offers a first draft at a foundation document called A Land and Community Ethic – a document that addresses the complex issues that beset us as the Age of Oil comes to an end. Here's the link: http://www.energybulletin.net/52973
I haven't posted here for a couple of weeks, but this is truly a unique opportunity. Our Elizabeth May interview will be posted in July, before this event. The Farley Mowat interview is already posted. -- SDC
