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“Blue Ecology is about interweaving two ways of knowing through a collaborative framework that would help facilitate how Indigenous, provincial and local governments work as leaders on a common problem, the climate crisis. Tools like EAP can be used to shape the future, as our new attitude deploys these existing tools in new ways. Has the moment come to reframe ‘ecosystem services’ as ‘gifts of nature’? If it does not get measured, it does not get managed. EAP helps us measure and assess the trade-offs; and helps us understand when it is time to just let the land heal,” stated Michael Blackstock.

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.

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.

“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.

“We have landed at the crux of two of the most important issues facing Canadians – relationships with First Nations and relationships with water – in an era when we must also adapt to a changing climate. Communities have a once in a generation opportunity to get our relationships with both right. First Nations talk about the responsibility for care of the land being passed on from one generation to the next. They have been much more effective than us in having the community understand their role in stewardship and why that matters,” stated Richard Boase.

“I have been reflecting on the recent UN climate change conference in Egypt. It seems that the wind is coming out of the sails. It seems like climate adaptation is too big a hill for nation level governments to climb and solve. My hope lies in local government because local people understand their local area. And at the local scale, we are able to self-organize better on specific execution of executable tasks. I have lived in many communities throughout BC and have learned that those towns each have their own culture. So, local knowledge is important, whether it is Indigenous or non-Indigenous,” stated Michael Blackstock.

“If Thomas Bayes (1702-1761) was alive today, I have no doubt that he would say, oral history extends the period of period and our understanding of what the data mean. One of his most memorable quotable quotes is that, probability is orderly opinion (and) inference from data is nothing other than the revision of such opinion in the light of relevant new information. Four decades ago, UBC Professor Emeritus Denis Russell developed a methodology to show how Bayesian statistics offers a framework for combining different kinds of information and making best use of what is available,” stated Kim Stephens.

“Our children’s children will be faced with daunting, complex, and urgent environmental problems. The impending crisis requires us to begin to lay a foundation for our children’s children to have a starting point, and some options to grasp in the urgent moment. We owe them hope,” stated Michael Blackstock. “Now is the time to act on the belief that if we interweave our strengths as traditional knowledge keepers, scientists, poets, artists, and architects in a collaborative manner, we can make a difference.”

“It seems obvious that oral history provides context. Oral history interweaved with science would provide more than just the 100 odd years of rigorous data collection we have. It would turn it into thousands of years of knowledge,” stated Neil Goeller. In BC, hydrometric records are fairly limited in time and geographic coverage. From a hydrology perspective, then, interweaving science and a rich oral history would turn a comparatively short period of data collection into thousands of years of knowledge. This might profoundly change how we view extreme changes in the water cycle and the consequences in BC.

“Considering traditional Indigenous perspectives and social psychological research, we wanted to understand whether people’s support for reconciliation was related to their attitudes toward nature and other animals. And if this was the case, why? At the core of our project is the idea that moral expansiveness, or the breadth of entities a person feels moral concern for, is important for motivating support for reconciliation. Our results showed that people who felt more connected to nature also supported reconciliation more,” stated Aleah Fontaine.