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Chris May

CHRONICLE OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION: “You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. We adjust our baseline. And the question is, why do people accept this? Well, because they don’t know that it was different,” stated UBC’s Daniel Pauly, a legendary global fisheries scientist, when he coined the term Shifting Baseline Syndrome in 1995 (1st installment of a preview series)

September 18, 2024


Launched in 1994, the Georgia Basin Initiative was a call to action by the provincial government of the day. There was trouble in paradise. All communities knew they were under intense pressure and that we had to do something about it. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Just turn it. Solutions to complex problems require deep knowledge. The living legacy of the Georgia Basin Initiative is embedded and embodied in the successor Georgia Basin Inter-Regional Education Initiative (IREI). Three decades and counting is an amazing legacy. The IREI itself is in Year 13.

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GEORGIA BASIN INTER-REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE: “You can bend the hydrology of a watershed for the better over decades just because of the housing redevelopment cycle. But you get just one chance every 50 years to get it right.” stated Robert Hicks, career engineer-planner in local government in the Metro Vancouver region of British Columbia

May 28, 2024


Robert Hicks was the internal champion at Metro Vancouver for creating the Water Balance Methodology and Model for scenario comparison purposes. Such comparisons were transformational in helping decision makers visualize HOW their municipalities could meet watershed targets and mitigate population growth and climate change. “Metro Vancouver had the budget to fund the early work on the Water Balance Methodology and thus bridge the source control information gap. What we learned from the 50-year scenario comparisons became a foundation piece for BC’s Stormwater Planning Guidebook,” stated Robert Hicks.

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SCIENCE OF LAND USE CHANGE AND STREAM SYSTEM INTEGRITY: “Twenty years after release of BC’s Stormwater Planning Guidebook, how water gets to a stream and how long it takes, is still not widely understood. Parksville’s Shelly Creek is an ongoing test case for the Water Balance Methodology to raise awareness of what needs to be done to reconnect hydrology and stream ecology,” stated Peter Law, Vice-President of the Mid Vancouver Island Habitat Enhancement Society (June 2022)

June 7, 2022


“Small streams are now going dry and have zero levels of riparian protection, mostly because in the early days of streamside protection they weren’t seen as worthy of protection. We need more than a setback to protect aquatic habitat. The science shows that communities also need to tackle what is happening on the land that drains to streams. To reach consensus on a shared vision of what is desirable and achievable for watershed protection or restoration, people need a picture of what a stream corridor could and/or should look like. Often, the visioning process boils down to whether or not a stream corridor will have a functioning aquatic ecosystem,” stated Peter Law.

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