Field Notes – Page 5 – Keiran's World

Our heritage sites need love, attention and money

Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre, Sidney, B.C. Photo © Herb Neufeld, via flickr & creative commons

Picture a community hall on a weekday evening. About 40 people sit in rows. Official-looking sorts look back over the audience.

The people have gathered at this fictitious meeting to discuss the fate of a nearby fictitious historic site/nature centre/community museum/natural or cultural heritage site. Like so many real sites in the region—Craigflower Manor and Schoolhouse, the Centre of the Universe, Undersea Gardens, Crystal Gardens, BC Experience, the Soviet Submarine, or Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, to name a few—is no longer open to the public.

For two hours, those gathered have spoken in support of the site. Government Gus has presented how the government, which owns the site, is looking for a new operator—even if it means repurposing the site.

Education Eli has spoken of the site’s value to the community, especially to its youngsters. “It’s the kind of vital enrichment that connects classroom learning to the community,” she says.

Others have spoken, too, suggesting new activities, new uses, new revenue sources. Everyone agrees the site is an important resource. It helps define and focus the community. It creates common identity and builds community spirit….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Undersea Gardens no longer operates in Victoria, B.C.’s Inner Harbour. Photo © Brian Chow, via flickr & creative commons

Transition to a Zero-Waste economy will require
sacrifices and global change

The Hartland landfill faces a revenue shortage. The $107 tipping fee covers the costs of running the dump and the region’s Blue Box recycling program. Although the Powers-That-Be are considering solutions, shortfalls in user-pay income at the dump will likely continue. As more and more items are diverted from the garbage stream, less material will end up at Hartland, and fewer fees will be paid.

We’ve all experienced other versions of this scenario. We’ve upgraded to energy-efficient appliances, draught-proofed our homes, and brought household energy use down. Yet, our Hydro bills are higher than ever. We’ve switched to water-efficient dishwashers, toilets and showers, landscaped our yards with drought-tolerant plants, and now use less water than ever. Yet, water bills have increased.

Even as we recycle more and more, the costs of managing our waste—be it materials that are reused, recycled, composted, turned into fuel, or landfilled—are unlikely to go down. How we pay those costs will change. New provincial recycling regulations, coming into effect May 19, will shift costs from taxpayers to producers and, ultimately, to consumers. But as traditional user-pay revenue streams shrink, more and more pressure will be placed on governments (read, taxpayers) to make up shortfalls.

And with the CRD aiming for an eventual zero-waste goal for the region, the question of how to pay for the Hartland Landfill will become ever sharper. To quote CRD Communications and Education Development Supervisor Monique Booth from the March 29 edition of this newspaper, “Our direction now is to move up the hierarchy, in the sense that if we reduce or reuse these items, we don’t even have to deal with recycling them. It’s about only buying what you need, buying items that are higher quality so you don’t have to replace them as frequently…. So it’s about being smart with your purchases and only buying what you need.”

Zero waste is a laudable goal. The world is awash in waste. A Texas-sized island of plastic garbage gyres in the mid-North Pacific. Beaches and bays along the coast accumulate refuse brought in on currents and tides. Landfills are filling up. The waste-incineration industry, which zero-waste proponents insist falls outside the reduce–reuse–recycle definition of zero waste, is booming in many countries.

But turning towards a zero-waste economy will entail excruciating growing pains….

Read the rest of the editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Human brain views all stressors as matters for survival

Cougar as stressor. Photo © Marie Hale, creative commons

You’re walking on Centennial Trail along West Saanich Road when suddenly a large, tawny animal leaps out of the bushes at you. The movement triggers your brain’s most ancient emotion-and-alarm system, deep in the most primitive part of your brain. Your amygdala, or fright centre, buzzes the nearby fear-processing centre in your hypothalamus, which instant-messages the alarm to your adrenal glands atop your kidneys, telling the glands to pump out stimulating epinephrine.

Almost simultaneously, your heart starts pounding, your muscles clench, your breath speeds up, you yell, you leap, pivot and crouch to face the animal with your arms raised defensively.

But, wait just a microsecond—your hypothalamus hasn’t finished with you. As you confront the threat, the hypothalamus recruits its nearby buddy, the pituitary gland, and goads it into sending its own alarm signal to the adrenal glands. This time, cortisol floods out, elevating blood-sugar levels and giving you energy to fight or flee—to save your skin.

And then—finally!—your prefrontal cortex kicks in. It analyses the visual data, it riffles through your memory index, and identifies the beast. The cougar about to sink its teeth into your neck… it’s a friendly house cat intent on winding its body around and between your tensed ankles….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Lights out for the planet and for the birds

Dead Annas hummingbird. Photo © Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com, creative commons

Tonight, at 8:30 p.m., many people, businesses and institutions here on the eco-friendly south coast will be turning out the lights.

We’re taking part in Earth Hour, an international grassroots event started by former-Pearson International College graduate Todd Sampson and now hosted by the World Wildlife Federation. The goal is to celebrate our commitment to the planet by cutting energy consumption for an hour, raising awareness of our own, individual impacts on the environment, and sending a message to policy makers.

The event’s success in attracting participation is astounding. Since its start in 2007, the event has spread from Sydney, Australia, to more than 7,000 towns and cities in 153 countries. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, New York City’s Empire State Building, Seattle’s Space Needle, Ontario’s Niagara Falls and CN Tower, and our own B.C. Legislature will go dark for Earth Hour tonight—among hundreds of landmarks around the world.

The global nature of the event means a wave of more-dimness-than-usual will circle the planet, time zone by time zone.

In a way, it’s too bad the direction of the wave of darkness doesn’t run, say, from the equator to the planet’s poles. Oh, I get the circle-the-globe thing, but supposing it were possible for the wave to go from zero degrees latitude northwards, for instance, another emblem of the global web of ecological connectedness would also benefit from the resulting path of reduced lighting.

That emblem is the songbird….

Reach the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Parking positions inspire passion and politics

15. March 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: cheap parking, Donald Shoup, free parking, Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, parking, parking policy, taxpayers, The High Cost of Free Parking, Victoria BC, Victoria Times Colonist

Curbside parking, Victoria. Photo © Christina T, creative commons on flickr

Parking brings out a surprising amount of passion in people. Whenever changes to parking rates and availability are proposed, claws unsheath, and accusations and fur fly.

Looking at the reactions since the City of Victoria proposed changes in February to city-controlled downtown parking, you’d think planners had suggested they intended to make young children and puppies play on Blanshard Street during rush hour, or use parkades for hospital-ward overflow.

Although I’m as delighted as the next person when I find free or cheap parking near a destination, I suggest we park passion and politics for a moment….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Building unpredictability into traffic design transforms
streetscapes into people places

One of the buzzwords in urban planning these days seems to be “people-friendly streetscapes.”

The intent is to transform the car-centric corridors that crisscross our region into people-oriented spaces.

For example, Victoria’s new official community plan, unveiled last week, calls for transportation systems that prioritize pedestrians, cyclists and people using public transit.

You could consider Quadra Village as an example. As soon as you cross Hillside Road going south, the driving lane narrows, more vehicles are parked at the kerb, more street plantings, arty, low-hanging street lamps and banners change the feel of the street. They immediately shift roadway priorities away from traffic towards the people who live, work, walk, cycle, shop, and make the village viable.

Saanich’s draft plans for Shelbourne Street also call for improved focus on people. In the past, transportation planning along the corridor focused on vehicles, as many as 25,000 of which travel the corridor daily, en route from somewhere else to points beyond. Walking and biking routes are piecemeal. The plans recognize that communities along Shelbourne Street now need to be retrofitted to serve people and these multiple uses.

Brentwood Bay’s slower speed limits, and the Gorge–Tillicum area’s roundabouts also help refocus community throughways on people.

They manifest a paradox known as psychological traffic calming, or playing with drivers’ minds to slow them down….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

West Coast weather wimp wises up
about winter in Winnipeg

11. January 2014 · 1 comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: Harry Potterisms, Polar Vortex, Victoria Times Colonist, Voldemort, weather, windchill, Winnipeg, winter

Ploughing snow in Winnipeg. Photo © AJ Batac

I spent some time in Winnipeg before the holidays. While there, I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing, among other things, a goodly period of the city’s second coldest December on record.

Yay, me.

I grew up on the prairies, and I thought I knew what cold was. But apparently my time in Alberta was misspent. My time here in Victoria has made me even softer and weather-wimpier.

As many prairie-folk-come-to-Victoria can attest, –46-degree windchill is Something Else. Minus 46-degree windchill atop –35 degrees out of the wind, for day after day after day, is also exhausting and, in my case anyway, cranky-making….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist….

From birds to stars:
Opportunities to add to how we understand the world

Victoria residents recently demonstrated again how keen many of them are about birding. Preliminary results from this year’s Christmas Bird Count show more than 200 volunteers turned out in mid-December to watch for birds throughout the Capital Region. The birders recorded 144 species this year.

Data collected by birders during the count are used to assess and monitor bird population numbers and health in communities across North America. Community organizers select one day from December 14 until January 5, and send their volunteers out to scour a 24-kilometre-diameter area that stays the same from year to year. Ninety-five communities in B.C. have taken part in the annual event this year. The final numbers of species sighted won’t be tallied until the event officially finishes tomorrow.

Started by the Audubon Society in 1900, the Christmas Bird Count now provides 114 years of regularly collected data about bird population numbers across the continent. It helps bird scientists and ecologists assess and monitor species health in regions and individual communities. For example, scientists have used information gathered by community birders during the count to get the Western Screech-Owl, Rusty Blackbird, and Newfoundland Red Crossbill added to Canada’s Species at Risk lists.

It also provides opportunity for regular people to engage in and contribute to science. In fact, the Christmas Bird Count is one of the longest-running and better-known citizen-science programs going.

The concept of citizen science has grown in scope, popularity and opportunity during the last decade. Thanks in large part to advances in web technology, folk like you and me, who don’t have Ph.D.s and lack access to science labs, can make our own small marks in the scientific process—and learn more about things that interest us….

View the rest of this article in the Victoria Times Colonist….

Keiran's World

Our heritage sites need love, attention and money

Transition to a Zero-Waste economy will require
sacrifices and global change

Lights out for the planet and for the birds

Parking positions inspire passion and politics

Building unpredictability into traffic design transforms
streetscapes into people places

West Coast weather wimp wises up
about winter in Winnipeg

From birds to stars:
Opportunities to add to how we understand the world

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