Partnership for Water Sustainability in BC

“Once you start understanding where your food comes from, and what you are eating, it opens conversations into all kinds of water and land issues. Almost always, Canada’s own exposure to weather extremes are lower than the other places we depend on…especially the USA. When we look at trade and food coming into a country, we always look at the national level. This is the first time it has been done at a provincial scale. And we know where food is coming from within the USA. Our food systems need to be transformed,” stated Kushank Bajaj.

“Not everyone gets to plan a brand-new community on top of a mountain as I did at Simon Fraser University. To everybody embarking on these gentle densification projects to construct 4 or 6 homes on single-family lots, you must get the drainage right. Get it wrong and it can be expensive to fix the problem,” stated Michael Geller. “One of the real advantages we had at UniverCity is that I was able to try out new ideas. Whenever people would say, we cannot do that, I could say: I will give you written assurance from the university that if this idea does not work, we will fix it.”

“I see myself as merely a narrator speaking about a shared experience that we all had in planning the Cowichan Region Climate Gathering. We just know that ultimately, the network of networks can help us to work together towards a common vision,” stated Keith Lawrence. “It was recognized from the beginning how important it would be to ground the event in the traditional ways of the local First Nations communities and people in the region. And we recognized that we needed to have this big space discussion about climate action to connect a network of networks within the region.”

“Nature-First Cities is not a heavy academic book. We wrote it to be inspirational…and we challenge readers to understand why we have become so disconnected from nature and what happens when we start to rebuild that connection. What happens ecologically? What happens socially? Equity is a huge component of the book and one of the pillars around what makes nature-directed stewardship work. So, there is that broader picture around rehabilitating that sense of connectivity with people and nature in cities,” stated Sean Markey.

“I would like to say taxpayers are unhappy but that would be an understatement. They are angry! Everywhere there is distrust due to failure to communicate the purposes of local government as defined in the Community Charter for municipalities and in the Local Government Act for regional districts. So, what do we do? We reset. It is clearly a time of change. I think it is an appropriate time for local governments to reflect and self-evaluate the services they provide and how they provide them. This isn’t about blame. It is about putting pieces together,” stated Arnold Schwabe.

“Natural Intelligence is an idea that resonates because it is intuitively obvious. I believe it is that simple. Natural Intelligence is another angle on interweaving Western science and Indigenous knowledge because it explores what Indigenous knowledge is based on. Blue Ecology is a Natural Intelligence approach. Natural Intelligence is a form of Indigenous wisdom…which is knowledge of Natural Intelligence and how to live with it and how to be harmonious with it,” stated Michael Blackstock.

Bruce Milne was elected mayor of Sechelt the same year Janyk was first elected to council, in 1996. “He held us all to account for the next three years, to make sure we really did make some change,” said Bruce Milne. “Elected officials who weren’t as confident sometimes found a lack of space left over for less confident people to be difficult for them, but it was never a problem when he was actually advocating for Gibsons or the Sunshine Coast.” Barry Janyk’s environmentalism was a pillar not only of his life, but his time in office.

The “may you live in interesting times” quote has an interesting history. The first documented use of the quote was in a 1898 speech by Joseph Chamberlain, British politician and social reformer. “I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety,” he stated. Despite being so common in English as to be known as the “Chinese curse”, the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced.

We share our world view through our stories and storytelling This is how we pass on our oral history. Storytelling is the way we share intergenerational knowledge, experience and wisdom. “Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times,” stated Professor Rives Collins, Northwestern University, author of “The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling”.

“On election day in British Columbia, an atmospheric river deluged Metro Vancouver and parts of the province’s south coast. Flooding was widespread across the Lower Mainland. The storm caused more than $110 million in insured damaged according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, reported the Canadian Press on November 15, 2024. On top of this are the flood costs incurred by local governments. Timing is everything. When Metro Vancouver’s Liquid Waste Committee met in October and again in November, the Election Day Flood was top of mind,” stated Kim Stephens.