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“Streams need a place to be. If we cannot get our heads around that, we are not going to keep our streams. When something does not get measured, it does not get managed. Human settlement degrades stream systems. What are the RISKS and COSTS when we fail to get it right with our land development and drainage policies and practices? A measure of the consequence is what EAP defines as the Riparian Deficit for asset management. This applies to the regulated setback which is the interface between land and a stream,” stated Tim Pringle.

“My work is about a new paradigm that addresses root causes of water quality issues by moving away from the modernist project of humans as separate from nature. Because academic systems are not really lined up with deep transformative action, I felt I had to jump ship and start swimming with the current,” stated Zbigniew Grabowski. He has made the leap from university professor and researcher to executive director of a grassroots watershed alliance which is tribally co-governed. His work aligns with that of Tim Pringle, creator of the methodology and metrics for EAP.

“It was December 2014 in Victoria when Ian Rogalski, an economist with Environment Canada, attended the Partnership’s annual year-end Water Sustainability Workshop. As the legendary Erik Karlsen would often say, it takes a conversation to bring ideas forth. Ian and I had a conversation which is a key part of the story behind the story of EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process,” recalls Tim Pringle. “Fast forward to November 2015. Kim Stephens and I made a last-minute decision to seed the idea for EAP in Beyond the Guidebook 2015. It has proven to be a consequential decision.”

“Implementation of asset management along with the associated evolution of local government thinking is a continuous process, not a discrete task. We needed a way to illustrate this diagrammatically. This led us to the concept of a continuum,” explained Glen Brown at the third in the Partnership’s Water Sustainability Workshop Series. “The continuum bridges two pieces. One piece is recognition that the asset management process is founded on an incremental approach. The other piece is integration of natural capital, natural assets and watershed systems thinking.”

John Henneberry’s eclecticism produced real insights into the operation of land and property markets, enabling all involved to see things more clearly and differently. “Quantifying and valuing nature are complex tasks. Nature appears more fragmented because we have to slice it into categories and dice those categories into bits before we can value bits of those bits. The sum of these parts is far short of the whole and does not capture the interconnectedness and holism of nature. But nature is far too complex a thing to be treated in this way,” wrote John Henneberry.

“The story behind the story is about the importance of embedding knowledge of EAP into the youth who are going to be the future of our local governments. The framework that we have set up ensures this will happen. Vancouver Island University, as a smaller university, is very focused on applied research and community engagement. This is a good fit for the EAP mission. The program enhances the ability of students to take part in applied research and have direct links to future jobs with these local governments who are providing project work experience for students,” stated Graham Sakaki.

“Context is everything. In 1999, the science was brand new and the Streamside Protection Regulation was still two years away from becoming law. This context underscores just how far ahead of the game that Metro Vancouver was with its watershed health rating system. This is context for Metro Vancouver coming full circle to build on seminal applied research undertaken in the Metro Vancouver and Puget Sound regions in the late 1990s.This legacy work provides us with a benchmark for comparison of watershed health assessments then and now,” stated Tim Pringle.