split and stack

I seem to have lost the habit of writing…or, at least, it has gone into a kind of dormancy.

What I have appreciated about the process of writing lichenology over the past few years has been the habit of writing and of the flow that comes with practice, but more than that, the habit of attending to the world.

When I know that I want to write a piece that will be engaging to a reader, and which will contain some truth, I pay a different kind of attention. I am reminded to step back from the mundane and see life in a larger frame.

The problem now is that I have become committed to the mundane—committed to earning some more money these next few years and establishing our homestead on a more solid financial footing. From this mindset of business and practicality, my personal musings on lichenology can seem frivolous, distracting, and decidedly unremunerative.

Our entire financial reality in North America is built on this principle of unwavering belief—this willingness to put aside art and conversation and community to serve some sense of economic interest.

When I studied economics in university I had a brief view into a contained and internally pleasing world where human behaviour conforms to curves and formulae. I could see how easy it would be, and how tempting, to buy into the reality of economics even though it clearly did not really fit with human reality, as the field of behavioural economics is now showing. Once inside economics, though, it appears as a clean and uncluttered world.

It’s hard to walk a middle ground here…to believe enough in our economic and financial systems to participate successfully while at the same time not losing a grip on the larger ecological and social picture. I suppose that is what is most valuable about lichenology, for me. It is that liminal space where I can mediate between these worlds.

And while I’m working more now and starting some new projects I’m also still busy around the homestead. This is the very practical and grounded aspect of life I hope never to lose touch with again.

My focus this past couple of weeks has been on getting our firewood in for next winter. It's rewarding to see the rows building in our newly extended woodshed. Even more than money in the bank, it brings a sense of security—the fleeting belief that we humans can build a bulwark against the cold of winter and the uncertainty of the future.


Photo: the growing woodpile beside our current, temporary kitchen space.

been walking

I've been remiss. I mentioned that I would be taking a break from blogging a few months ago, and didn’t really take it, and now I have left off posting for almost a month with no warning.

Well, I'm still here, but running to keep up with other projects and developments in life. There was illness and travel, now community and work projects.

I have developed a running storyline in my life—a kind of meta narrative—that is the essence of my blog. It's a way I have grown to look at the world over the past couple of years, writing here—trying to be observant for stories and images that are meaningful in the world. I’m especially interested in the imprint of our human passage through life and through the physical matter of the planet.

Some days these stories and images accumulate so quickly that it is all I can do to keep up with the flow. Life has been like that lately. Little has changed, overtly, but somehow the world seems to be hurtling toward whatever it is that lies ahead.

The big event, and one of the projects that has kept me busy these past weeks, was our first community walk—an event that my family here on the land and some other friends helped to orchestrate.

Here is how we described the event in our little poster: “Connecting Cowichan is a series of walks in the Cowichan Valley. Everyone is invited to come along, meet people, see what is happening in the region, and talk about what is possible. How can we work together to build a strong, healthy, and sustainable local economy?”

My fear about the event was creating a forum for more divisiveness in the broader community. The way we got around that bugaboo was by offering no particular agenda, no experts, and no grand speeches for the walk. The format was much more horizontal—come and walk, see what is happening, and talk with your neighbours and community about it.

It came off very well in the end, much of it last minute and on the fly. I think perhaps part of the charm of the event was the relative smoothness of the logistics (our timing for the afternoon turned out bang on) without a heavy organizational structure and set of interests at play.

On a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, threatening rain, over a hundred people turned out along with at least thirty babies, toddlers and kids to go for a community walk in the valley. As we had hoped, there seemed to be a lot of mingling along the way and a lot of discussion about land use, and economic development, and sustainability.

Fifty or sixty people stayed at the hall afterwards for Gen’s fresh muffins, tea, and coffee. We had a community mapping project where we hoped to elicit more stories and ideas, but most of conversation and exchange of information stayed informal as people milled about or tried to find their kids who naturally fell into several age-grouped tribes outside.

The great thing about the walk is that a lot of people came out who I had never met and who are not the ones who would come out to a rally, say, or a march. These were the folks that were just happy to have a facilitated community walk with their family and very interested to share information and ideas along the way. Suddenly it appeared to me that the critical mass needed for a fundamental reorganization of economics and land tenure in our region is possible. We just need to mobilize…or simply to walk.

We are committed now to at least one more walk, and have suggested there will be several over the course of the spring and summer. My concern is that we stumble on our own success and have difficulty organizing the logistics (while keeping a low organizational weight) for what could become a very large event. I suppose it is a problem we want to have…

The walk has been one project that has been occupying me and there are several others that I hope to write more about soon. Then there is the family, and the garden. Zena has been working the past two days digging our experimental grain patch where we are trying oats, red fife wheat, buckwheat, and quinoa. We have plans for greatly expanded production of food this year. The saffron bulbs I planted last year seem to have survived the winter although several of them already nibbled by deer. We are planning on lots of new fencing this spring.

In the midst of garden planning and planting, I just cut down our Brussels sprouts that I put in late last summer. I think we did not have enough growing season left at that point and so we will only get one small meal. They are potent little buds though.

The nettles are poking up again and we looking forward to lots of steamed greens very soon.

I will try not to fade out on lichenology again, but my postings here may be sporadic for the summer. I’ll be keeping a lookout though...and I think we best all stay tuned…

Photo: a bunch of walkers from this past weekend, cutting through a field in Glenora.

asher's one

The future rolls away from us, along the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. It’s always there, just beyond the edge of vision, in the imperceptible curve of the Earth, receding as we tip toward the sun, tumbling onwards…

Asher turns one today.

It has been a big year for all of us. In addition to the challenges of building homes, growing food, establishing community, and fighting the galloping consumption of corporate forestry in our area, there has been Asher, continually growing, pushing the limits of his world, finding his place and his voice.

As a father, my practice is to see the world through his eyes and feel the world through the firm grasp of his fingers on a gritty ocean pebble. My practice is to participate in the immediacy of his dance with life— the sheer wonder of the sea, the startling apparition of a seagull, the taste of salt. “Oooooo,” as Asher says in his sing-song, prehensile language.

There are threats I can sense from my vantage, a few feet higher above sea level—the lurking fear that we humans will mess up, will not figure out how to live well and live simply in this moment. The immensity of our possible failure.

But here, Asher is at home, at home in his skin, scrabbling on the beach, at home in the world. I squat back down and see the world afresh—kaleidoscoping with him into the patterns of sand, the jumble of bull kelp, and the soft raking of waves on the shore.

Together, we breathe in the sea air and look to the horizon.

Photo: Asher on the beach, Victoria, B.C.

sapping

Last weekend our family went to the first annual Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival in the nearest town, Duncan.

As festivals go, it was a bit of a bust—it cost us $10.00 to get in and the “events” consisted of lining up for half an hour for a tiny taste of syrup and watching a steaming evaporator do its thing. One step up, perhaps, from watching paint dry. We passed on the line-up for the train ride that wound its way around a short course (although Asher enjoyed seeing it pull into the station), and we arrived just at the tail end of a tapping demonstration. Asher was also happy to receive his first ever helium balloon, but we left before the music started.

I don’t fault the organizers too much (The Sapsuckers)…it was their first year and I think they must have been overwhelmed by the turnout. What interested me was why so many people were there, jostling for a drop of maple syrup and a glimpse of a steaming vat. Two reasons I can think of: one, that people are yearning for family-friendly community events after a long winter. The event offered the promise of spring, of sweetness, and of seeing friends. Beyond that, people seemed genuinely intrigued by the possibility that maple syrup could come from the trees that grow with tremendous vigor around here—that our food can come from the local woods.

We ended up also bypassing the syrup vendors that had set up shop. With the going price at $18.00 for 250 ml (that’s about a cup, for my American readers), it was beyond our budget. Instead we invested in a starter tapping kit consisting of 8 spiles (these are the bits that go into the tree) and some lengths of hose. We hurried home eager to stage our own sugaring off, as it was a beautiful, spring-like day.

Our property is pretty well endowed with Bigleaf Maples and I quickly found a couple of clumps of trees close by our kitchen and set about drilling. Sure enough, the trees immediately began if not gushing, at least oozing sap. By the next day we had collected about 9 gallons of sap which should give us close to a litre of syrup when boiled down. Maple syrup is the main sweetener we use around here and the possibility of making our own and saving some money appeals to our neohomesteading intent.

Unfortunately, the following day the weather turned back toward winter again and the temperatures have barely been breeching the freezing mark since. The sap has stopped flowing and the snow has started falling again. The possibility of spring has receded.

To make matters worse, all of us have been laid low by a mercurial virus that has been passed around the valley for the past two weeks. Asher was the last one to succumb, now officially in the midst of his first real sickness, just coming up to his first birthday. We’ve been holed up for a couple of days, with Zena pouring over the seed catalogues (ever hopeful) and with me moping without the energy to even read or write. I’m a bit better today, but very congested now, and still low in energy.

I trust my nose will stop running and the sap will start running again soon. Zena, Asher, and I are taking a break from home starting next week, heading down to visit family in Arizona for ten days. I think I may have written that my transcontinental flight this summer past might be my last, but once again, the force of grandparents wanting to see Asher is fueling our trip. That and however many tonnes of emissions. Well, the dry air and sunshine will be a welcome change.

…

As a quick update on my last post, I am happy to report that my piece was picked up by a number of other blogs and listserves. Most impressively, for me, was the link from Complete Growth Investor, a web-based service with three self-described goals: “to make you money, to make you a better investor, and to save you time in the process.” Unfortunately, I can’t view the context in which they posted the link to my piece (it is not worth the $250 subscription fee), but I can only hope even one investor who was considering BIP was made just a little uncomfortable.

It got me thinking about the prospect of a blog dedicated to compiling the case against Brookfield and their timber subsidiaries, although I’m not sure I could keep up with the volume of environmental and social costs the company is inflicting on places like this.

Just a couple of days ago there was a major landslide from Island Timberlands’ logging that blocked the main access road to Port Alberni’s water supply, not too far north of here. In another Island community, Nanaimo, Island Timberlands is refusing to accommodate local citizens and government officials who are trying to preserve a significant wetlands area. In yet another unfolding drama, the company is set to cut the final fragments of a 1,000 year old Douglas Fir forest in the Alberni Valley and seem unmoved by the case for restraint. Clearly their directives do not come from these parts.

Unfortunately, I doubt I have the time or stomach to document the impacts of their profit margin. And I know I’d rather be boiling down our maple sap and readying the gardens for planting.

Photo: the pattern on frost on our car windshield a recent, chilly morning.

BIP, BAM, Thank You Ma'am

...or how Vancouver Island's forests are drifting out to sea:

Today, January 31^st 2008, if all goes according to plan, a new listing will begin trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. For the first time, “BIP” will flicker across the electronic boards. A blip of a BIP.

The parent company of BIP is the somewhat more hefty sounding Brookfield Asset Management, or “BAM” as it’s known in the financial pages.

BAM controls approximately $90 billion in global assets comprised of property, power, and other “infrastructure assets” as they describe. That is to say, BAM managed these infrastructure assets until now. This corporate “spin off” has placed their timber and power holdings into the new entity, BIP.

Sounds innocuous enough. Indeed, the workings of these corporate takeovers, mergers, and spin offs are usually as remote and shadowy to us as the machinations of the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

We may get an occasional foul whiff from these corporate maneuverings and sometimes outright malfeasance is revealed—an Enron or a Hollinger will implode—but even then the repercussions seem remote from our daily lives. A kind of globalized theatre of the absurd is at work with over seven billion dollars lost in the latest fraud at Société Générale in France.

Financial markets have, for the most part, become unmoored from real transactions involving real commodities. In the rarefied cyberspace of “the markets,” corporate persons are involved in the games of leverage, acquisition, and speculation.

Meanwhile, in actual places, in our neighbourhoods and valleys, residents have real businesses involving tangible goods, services, and human interactions. Flipping through the financial pages of the Post, it's easy to believe these two realities—of the corporate and the community—exist in parallel, but separate worlds. If only it were thus.

I find corporate gamesmanship becomes disconcertingly relevant when their assets encompass our lands and the ecosystems on which we depend. I start to feel nervous when absentee and largely unaccountable powers own the very hills, trees, and waters of home. And when our forests and streams morph into their “infrastructure assets” it's worth pulling aside the corporate veil.

…

Vancouver Island has a legacy of privately held lands carried over from the E&N Railway grants in the late 19^th Century. Vast areas of the southeastern Island, along with all the incumbent rights, were traded for a railway line. After a dizzying lineage of deals and transactions, a few corporate owners have ended up with great stretches of private lands now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The communities around here? Well, we got a walking trail along the defunct rail bed. This section of the Trans Canada Trail through the Cowichan Valley provides a pleasant way to view the logging, underway twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week on several sites. It's a sunnier walk now too, with the hills logged to the edge of the trail and the clearcuts stretching off into the distance. I'm sure it will be a tremendous boon to tourism operators.

Getting back to BIP...

One of BAMs earlier corporate birthings was of Island Timberlands, now one of the major private forest landholders in the province, with over 250,000 ha and almost all of it on Vancouver Island. As of today, by way of an obsure securities conjuring, BIP now holds a 37.5% interest in Island Timberlands and has, as they describe, the intention of “actively managing underlying assets to improve performance.” In other words, BIP intends take charge and squeeze the island of its forest wealth.

Now BAM, the proud parent, is a global asset manager that grew out of Brascan a few years ago and is headquartered and registered in Canada at least. Toronto is a long way from the Island here, but it is vaguely within our sight. BIP, on the other hand, is of a more truly global generation—born, bred, and registered in Bermuda. Why stay in Canada with such cold and blustery winters?

Even beyond the weather, there are some nifty benefits to carrying papers from Bermuda—the ability to avoid Canadian and US securities regulations, taxes, and court proceedings. Oh those sunny islands.

Bermuda is an exclusive club and BIP puts it best in their Prospectus for the new entity, filed with what used to be their Ontario securities regulator on December 21^st of last year: “It is the advice of our Bermuda counsel that an action brought pursuant to a public or penal law, the purpose of which is the enforcement of a sanction, power or right at the instance of the state in its sovereign capacity, is unlikely to be entertained by Bermuda.” In securities legalese, this is the equivalent of flipping us, the people who live here and might care about what happens, the bird.

Our sovereign capacity, as of today, has lost out to corporate rapacity.

This development is especially troubling given recent changes in Provincial laws governing private managed forest lands in B.C. Under current legislation, local government—and by extension, local people—are expressly prohibited from any say in regional land management: “A local government must not adopt a bylaw ... that would have the effect of restricting, directly or indirectly, a forest management activity” (Private Managed Forest Land Act, s. 21).

The offshoring of of the Island's forests through the creation of BIP does away with any final semblance of local control or oversight over the land base.

And what they have in mind for their infrastructure assets is clear enough: the maximum return to shareholders, with some hefty corporate bonuses and salaries thrown in for good measure. Here is how BAM sums up its corporate mission: “Our goal is to achieve superior, risk adjusted returns for our clients and partners by identifying investment opportunities across select asset classes on a value basis supported by sound fundamentals.”

I recommend downloading the Prospectus for Brookfield Infrastructure Partners—it’s available if you search the database SEDAR, under public companies, but please don’t print. At 361 pages, it’s a lot of verbiage and numerage. However, there are sections that provide a glimpse into the corporate persons mind, and into the direction our environment and our communities…I mean our infrastructure…is headed.

Of particular interest are the twenty pages of “risk factors” contained in the Prospectus. The Directors of BIP are obliged to inform potential investors of these uncertainties and eventualities.

While many of BIP’s risk factors relate to broader economic conditions, as with the rise and fall of currencies or interest rates, there are other troubling items flagged. They are worried about unruly unions; about any pesky interference by governments in the way of regulations or laws; about unsettled land claims and Aboriginal rights; about the possibility that they will have to leave some logs in Canada rather than ship them raw to their US and oversees customers where they can maximize their profit; and about the unpredictable forces of nature. While they don’t mention climate change directly, they do allude to the possibility of man-made disasters and other uninsurable losses.

If I were considering an investment in BIP, here's the proviso I would be especially concerned about: “There can be no assurance that our timber operations will achieve harvest levels in the future necessary to maintain or increase revenues, earnings and cash flows. There can be no assurance that the forest management planning by our timber operations, including silviculture [sic], will have the intended result of ensuring that their asset base appreciates over time.”

I live adjacent to areas that are being intensively cut by Island Timberlands now, and I can say with confidence that the asset base will depreciate over time. From what I’ve seen, the depreciation is already well underway. I saw the land base washing out to Cowichan Bay from flooding earlier this winter.

My advice to any investors who remain untroubled by regard to social or environmental damages, is to buy in for two or three years while the final old growth and high value timber is harvested and during which time all possible lands are flipped into real estate and sold with a blustery windfall profit.

But be ready to shift your assets quickly. From all appearances, Island Timberlands and their corporate masters have a similar approach to land management. BIP BAM BOOM.

Be wary too. Another risk factor conspicuously absent from the BIP Prospectus, a risk which merits consideration by potential investors, is that the people who live among their infrastructure assets might toss them all the way back to Bermuda. Perhaps their investment team needs a historian.

I say I wouldn’t invest in BIP as a costly matter of principle. Admittedly, they promise a healthy return on investment, but then I look at the very real damages and costs to the region where I live. These damages are adding up: increased flooding and erosion, loss of wildlife habitat, loss of local milling jobs and value-added opportunities, destruction of fisheries, loss of viewscapes and recreation opportunities, loss of tourism potential, loss of First Nations sacred sites. For the communities around here, it is a very costly return on investment.

As a final irony, it turns out that I do invest in BIP, by way of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. These are the “arms-length” folks who manage our retirement investments (to the tune now of $120 billion). The CPP IB is a large investor in BAM and in Island Timberlands and has entered into several other consortium agreements with Brookfield. By virtue of this new corporate spin-off we are all investors in Brookfield Infrastructure Partners as they drain away our real wealth.

The citizens of B.C. have a couple of choices. We can sit back and we can wait for our pension cheques as we watch any possibility of a sustainable local economy cut from underneath our feet and washed away with the hillsides, or we can muster whatever sovereign and civic powers we have left and wrestle our lands back from BIP and their Bermuda haven.

The tax system may be our most effective tool in the short term. As it stands in B.C., the Private Managed Forest Land Act cuts the corporations a deal, bypassing local government and taxing “managed” private forest lands at much lower rates than you or I. Local residents are, in effect, subsidizing unsustainable land management. If we were to start taxing these corporations at a rate commensurate with the full costs to local ecosystems and local communities, I believe investors would quickly look elsewhere for their infrastructure assets and we could get on with building sustainable local economies, grounded in place, by people who care.

BIP does in fact anticipate the troubling visage of tax policy changes in their Prospectus: “Any change in tax legislation (including in relation to taxation rates) and practice in these jurisdictions could adversely affect such company or entity, as well as the net amount of distributions payable to our unitholders.” Life is full of adversity.

Welcome to the world, Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. Congratulations unitholders. Bust out the ticker tape. (I just found the following complements of nyse.com. Apparently there is a web cast of the opening bell today if you want to see the real crowning of the baby.)

Now can we get our forests back?

Photo at top: Friends stopped at a logging road which now crosses the Trans Canada Trail in our valley.

blue monday

The sun rose in the clear eastern sky this Blue Monday morning, January 21st, noted for being the unhappiest day of the year by some researchers in seasonal depression. For me, it was not so bad…

Global markets were skidding while I was getting a boost of sunlight, walking to the far, southwestern slope of our property in the afternoon and taking sun on the rocky hillside. I’ve even had the impulse to stretch and to breathe more deeply again which can only portend good things.

…

I’m also breathing easier as we begin to tidy up a bit around the property. It’s time for spring cleaning as the snow and rain finally take a break, and the blight of torn blue tarps starts to blow and flutter in the wind.

We were in such a rush to move into the new kitchen late this past fall, that a lot of stuff got stranded—piles of picked over lumber and wood scraps, leftover strips of galvanized roofing, partial coils and ends of pipes and fittings from the kitchen plumbing. I added another decrepit appliance to the collection we are developing under the cedar tree, by the driveway—this, the second washing machine, (which replaced our original wringer-washer) replaced in turn by a newer, and functioning one finally. All of them so far have been free or close to it.

The downside of our salvage economy here is having to collect and recycle the left over items that turn out to be beyond repair, and beyond reasonable hope. I’ll borrow the neighbours’ truck later this week and make a trip to the scrap yard and dump, recycling what I can and wishing the rest a peaceful burial.

On my walk by the pond today I was weighing up the damage wrought by the early winter flooding—how the water overflowed and blew a hole through the old beaver dam. I was considering the prospects of repairing the damage and reclaiming the lost depth of our pond as a refuge for amphibians, ducks, and the seasonal passage of birds and animals. The beavers, as it turns out, are long gone.

Apparently, the owners of the land before us, the ones who cleared patches in the woods for building sites and contoured the land in places with their excavator, had an ongoing battle with the resident beavers. I suppose these former landlords figured that maintaining the flatter, fertile land at the valley bottom constituted a better selling point than a messy, unproductive beaver dam.

The beavers, as it turns out, had the greater persistence and we bought the property with the pond and wetland area firmly established. As my readers will know, the pond has become my most cherished destination on walks with Asher—it’s a fecund and dynamic ecosystem. I imagine the beavers will be back someday, although it might be beyond our tenure here.

…

The full moon rose over the far eastern hills tonight, in the same place the sun will rise in July, in the height of summer. This glimpse of our relative position in the solar system always gives me hope, and some sense of order for the year ahead.

I don’t know what the financial markets will hold, but I know our lives here will continue to be illuminated by the passage of sun and moon.

Photo: moon rise in the valley tonight.

small steps toward a big walk

The weather has broken out of its winter rut, at least for a short while. The temperature was up to 7 or 8 Celsius today, and the persistent crusty layer of snow is finally melting, washed away by the more than occasional showers. There's the possibility of spring in the air, the green and earthy notes of life floating in the breeze.

…

We had an unexpectedly full day in the valley yesterday.

In the morning, Zena, Asher and I went to visit our friend Bill. I’ve written about Bill before. He’s a big foodie in the region—a chef, author, and mushroom forager. The core of his business is based from his home, where he hosts occasional dinner events in a small, country kitchen. Bill will prepare a series of dishes based around a particular food or theme and serve his guests while talking about where the food is from, and how prepared.

Bill’s business epitomizes, in many ways, a strong economic current in the Cowichan Valley—it's built around a business model that is small, locally-based, value-added and, in a fundamental way, improvisational. All of the guests at Bill’s dinners share a couple of tables and by its nature, this sharing of food and talk builds a sense of conviviality, and of community.

Not surprisingly, this form of local economic development is diametrically opposed to the corporate model which increasingly dominates the life and the future of this place. The corporate model is large, exceedingly large--into the hundreds of billions of dollars when you trace back the lines of ownership. The corporate model is based on separation, rather than locality—my chances of ever meeting the people that make the real decisions around timber harvesting in our valley are less than slim. The corporate model is about volume, not value. A lot of the logging around here is happening 24 hours a day now, seven days a week. The trucks roar out of the valley by the hundreds every day.

And the corporate model does not particularly allow for improvisation. The structure of the whole enterprise rests upon control and premeditation. It’s the logic of the assembly line transplanted onto the world. My biggest hope for a flourishing economics of place is that this lack of flexibility will ultimately bring down the corporate machinery. Large corporations are not designed to adapt to the pace of change that is upon us. Eventually, the lines of ownership will fray and the whole edifice will implode. But people will go on living here, interacting and trading with each other, and we’ll get by.

Perhaps it's my own mythic imagination, but everywhere I look now I see this confrontation between the local and the industrial/corporate. The Trans-Canada Trail runs adjacent to Bill’s property and we took a walk with him yesterday morning. After a kilometer and a half we got to our destination—not a beautiful waterfall, in this case, or a magnificent stand of trees, but a massive clearcut, right down to the trail. More shocking even, the access road, where they haul out the timber, runs across the trail—we stood and watched for a few minutes as another truck was loaded up and belched pass us (paying no heed to the stop sign) taking with it another small piece of a possible, sustainable future.

Bill pointed out a small gate off the trail, beyond which stretched a messy clearcut, but which, until a month previous, had opened onto a forest lane connecting a nearby farm (another hub of the food culture here) to the trail and from there to Bill’s place. One of the annual events Bill had organized consisted of a food walk, from farm to table, through the woods and long this trail. The magic of the walk and of the experience has been written up by the San Francisco Chronicle, Gourmet Magazine, and many other publications. In a final note of disgust and resignation, Bill pointed out that this forest had also been prime mushrooming ground. Now it’s a sorry industrial landscape. We’re probably one of the few parties that will bother to make the trip to take in this blight. The magic of the place is gone along with the final truckloads of timber.

On the way back to Bill’s we stopped further along the trail, just up from his property, where a metal fabrication plant and excavating company is set to start up business. It reminded me of the recent conflict to the south of us, near Shawnigan Lake, where a developer was proposing a motocross facility adjacent to a Provincial Park, in the middle of a quiet rural-residential community. The notion of incompatible use comes to mind. I committed to writing a piece about the situation for the local paper.

Finally we made it back to Bill’s place and we loaded up a washing machine in the back of the car. The last time we had met at a local café Zena was doing laundry and Bill had offered us an extra machine he had in his basement. This social capital and gift economy is one of the rewards of a commitment to place and to neighbours.

…

From Bill’s, we headed down the road a bit to visit our friends David and Cara. Cara was five days overdue with their second child and was keen on a walk, so after a lunch of macaroni and cheese we set out to a more northerly section of the Trans-Canada Trail, once again walking alongside great, gaping clearcuts. At one point a smaller trail headed off in a loop through a forested gully—part of a Provincial Park (one of the very few in the sea of private lands on this part of Vancouver Island). The trail was beautiful, but we never got away from the presence of the clearcuts that hemmed in the small strip of land along the river. There is no feeling of deep forest left here—rather a sense of remnant forest, of vulnerability.

I appreciate it when my friends hold me to my best intentions—David and Cara took on this role during our afternoon together, asking me about plans I was making for a large event I’d been thinking about. It’s an idea I’d been floating to raise the profile of private forest land logging on Vancouver Island—I had an image of hundreds or thousands of people walking along the Trans-Canada Trail, converging from all over the Island, celebrating what is sustainable and local while bringing attention to the sorry state of land use, finally arriving at the Provincial capital in Victoria, at the Legislature, to demand a sustainable future for the Island. We need to make a grand gesture and this strikes me as such an event.

But despite my initial enthusiasm for the idea, my energy has been lagging. The sheer complexity and logistics of pulling off a large scale walk that would take place over the course of a couple of weeks, with a coordinated media campaign and coherent political strategy (and with no immediate prospects of funding or organizational support) was getting me down. All that in addition to everything I have already committed to.

Finally, David suggested that I scale back my grand vision and start small. Just start with an informal walk—a simple sharing of food and ideas on a Sunday afternoon. Pick a manageable segment of the trail to hike and a place to rendezvous, bring some background on land use issues in the area, and invite people to come and walk, to bear witness to what is happening, to write a letter. If it works out, make it a monthly event, exploring different sections along the trail, different questions of land use and local economic development. If it keeps working out, try to seed the idea in other regions around Vancouver Island and this way, build the infrastructure and momentum for a large, high-profile walk in the fall.

As soon as we started discussing these ideas I started to feel excited again—like it is a manageable project that will allow me to meet my other family and work obligations. We had a small community organizing meeting today, in fact, and we set a date for our inaugural walk, likely along the same stretch of trail that we explored with Bill. The clash of development paths is so stark there.

And I just heard that our walk yesterday led to other rumblings—Cara had her baby early this morning. Welcome to the world Avery.

…

Meanwhile Asher is still on his first go around the sun and the linear progression of seasons this past year is all he knows. Spring, to him, is as remote now as his first blurry perceptions of terrestrial life. But another month and his witch hazel tree will be back in bloom and he will perhaps begin to understand something of return and of the cycles of life.

Photo: Asher off and away.