LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: Jim Dumont’s clear thinking, innovation and experience underpin the foundation for his risk reduction approach to maintaining “water balance” in a changing climate (October 2023)
“So, why have the practitioners of Rainwater Management in British Columbia fallen behind practitioners in Washington State, Oregon and California in protecting streams? One must understand how we arrived at this situation and then it will be easy to see a path forward,” stated Jim Dumont. “While many advances have been made in managing rainwater on-site, BC communities are failing to utilize practices that directly benefit streams during droughts and floods. Everything is in place. We have led people to it, but we cannot force the uptake. We cannot force the change.”
BLUE ECOLOGY OFFERS HOPE AND REMOVES THE FEAR OF RECONCILIATION: “As long as you show a genuine curiosity, the willingness to learn, cross-cultural conversations blossom,” stated Michael Blackstock, Independent Indigenous Scholar and co-founder of the Blue Ecology Institute Foundation
Michael Blackstock believes that a message of hope is paramount in these times of droughts, forest fires and floods. “Rather than looking through a cumulative effects lens, I also see the concept of ‘cumulative healing’ landing as a way to give back to water and land. Rather than wondering how much more can we take or impact land before we need to stop, instead we should ask how much longer should we let the water and land heal, before we ask for more,” states Michael Blackstock.
LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Our rivers, our watersheds are connected to many aspects of our lives. A First Nation perspective would recognize water as life,” stated Paul Chapman
“The earliest inhabitants on the land, BC’s First Nations, settled near rivers. More recent settlements have followed suit, settling near rivers for fresh water supply, travel, commerce, food supply, recreation, and in our built environments storm water and wastewater services. Climate change has compounded the stresses our modern practices and settlements impose on watershed health and healthy functioning. The new normal includes drought, flood and fire on a seasonal basis. A hopeful way forward is found in Blue Ecology,” stated Paul Chapman, Chair of the Watershed Moments Team.
LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: The voices of experience remind us that progress is measured in terms of decades.
The Partnership for Water Sustainability in its present form was birthed in 2003. It was a case of seizing the moment and moving into a vacuum. Timing is everything. At the beginning of 2003, the members of an intergovernmental committee comprised of three levels of government were in place. In September 2003, mere weeks after the Kelowna fires resulted in evacuation of some 27,000 residents, Lynn Kriwoken of the Ministry of Environment asked the committee to spearhead development and implementation of the Water Sustainability Action Plan for British Columbia, released in February 2004.
CONTEXT AND HISTORY DO MATTER: “We have had two decades to prepare for the obvious and the inevitable. 2003 was the first of a series of ‘teachable years’, with the full onslaught of a changing climate hitting hard as of 2015,” stated the Partnership for Water Sustainability in BC’s Kim Stephens (September 2023)
“Mother Nature has an amazing sense of timing. On the 20th anniversary of the evacuation of 27,000 people from Kelowna due to forest fires, history repeated itself in August in the Kelowna region, in particular West Kelowna. We have had two decades to prepare for the obvious and the inevitable. Some of us have spent our careers working on solutions to watershed, water and food security issues and challenges. Climate change is accelerating. There is no time to re-invent the wheel, fiddle, or go down cul-de-sacs. Understand how the past informs the future and build on that experience,” stated Kim Stephens.
BLUE ECOLOGY IS A PATHWAY TO WATER RECONCILIATION AT THE LOCAL SCALE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: Blue Ecology is about taking responsibility for care of the land. Indigenous scholar Michael Blackstock discusses interweaving Indigenous oral history and Western water science.
The Blue Ecology video documentary seeds the idea that hope lies within the spheres of influence for local governments…whether they are Indigenous OR non-Indigenous. At its heart, Blue Ecology is about taking responsibility for care of the land and passing on the intergenerational baton. The video also seeds the idea that making it so requires a change in attitude to achieve the five Blue Ecology principles – Spirit, Balance, Harmony, Respect, Unity. The primary audience for the video are people in local governments. The Watershed Moments goal is to help remove their fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
DOWNLOAD THE ARTICLE: “Is it time for Biocultural Diversity Zonation in British Columbia?” asked Michael Blackstock (BC Forest Professional, September – October 2014)
“British Columbia has an an amazing diversity of Indigenous languages, about 60% of Canada’s First Nations languages are found in BC. Language is an essential component of the cultural diversity of the planet. Biocultural diversity emerged as a term this millennium that inextricably links cultural and biological diversity, focusing on correlations between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. The evolution of the two in BC can be portrayed by interweaving Biogeoclimatic (BEC) Zones and linguistic zones to create Biocultural Diversity (BCD) Zone maps,” explained Michael Blackstock.
UNCHARTED WATERS: “America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow – Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide,” reports the NY Times in the first of a series on America’s disappearing water (August 2023)
“A wealth of underground water helped create America, its vast cities and bountiful farmland. Now, Americans are squandering that inheritance. The Times analyzed water levels reported at tens of thousands of sites, revealing a crisis that threatens American prosperity. Nearly half the sites have declined significantly over the past 40 years as more water has been pumped out than nature can replenish. In the past decade, four of every 10 sites hit all-time lows. And last year was the worst yet,” wrote Mira Rojanasakul.
PARTNERSHIP FOR WATER SUSTAINABILITY PASSES ECOLOGICAL ACOUNTING BATON TO VANCOUVER ISLAND UNIVERSITY: “We have been degrading streams and complaining for too long. We need to start maintaining and ensuring that the functions of these streams are improved,” stated Graham Sakaki of Vancouver Island University in an article published in the Asset Management BC Newsletter (July 2023)
“We can do a better job of this, and we know that is what we must do. It just takes somebody to come up with the idea for how to do it. And that is what the Partnership for Water Sustainability has done with the EAP methodology and metrics. EAP, the acronym for Ecological Accounting Process, is about maintenance and management (M&M) of stream corridor systems. The spotlight is on outcomes. EAP is cutting edge. It is innovative, very new and very unique. And it has the ability to really change the game. The framework that we have set up ensures this will happen,” stated Graham Sakaki.
LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “We have raised expectations that communities can do a better job of managing land and water. But what happens if knowledge, experience and the lessons we are learning are not passed on or are lost?” – a question posed in 2007 by Jay Bradley, Chair of the Vancouver Island Coordinating Team
This edition brings to a close the current season (January through June 2023) of the Waterbucket eNews weekly newsletter series. We celebrate the leadership of individuals and organizations who are guided by the Living Water Smart vision. During the past 5-month period, the Partnership for Water Sustainability has published 20 feature stories. This finale edition constitutes our “season in review”. To refresh reader memories about the topics and how much ground we have covered, we have brought forward the headline plus defining quotable quote from each of the 20 storylines.