In the Field – Page 3 – Keiran's World

Rights of passage serve as rites of passage

Pathway lined by tall cedar privacy hedges

A little-known network of shortcuts and passageways knits many of the region’s urban areas together.

These connecting pathways—they’re too short to be called trails—pass unobtrusively among municipalities’ houses and yards. They stitch residential streets to other residential streets, quiet parks to formal trail systems, seemingly dead-ends to pedestrian-only exits, and neighbourhoods to crescent beaches or rocky shorelines. They wind through neighbourhoods, linking a person’s travels into lines and loops through local urban geography.

Each of the region’s municipalities treats these access points and rights of way differently. Some, like Saanich, glory in their abundance, and chart their locations like chicken scratchings on trail maps. Some municipalities, like Victoria, make the most of the few no-vehicle passageways that century-old urban planning and decades-old development have left them, and have worked them into formal walking and even lazy-day cycling loops. Some municipalities keep quiet about them, leaving local explorers to scrutinize municipal maps for faint lines and other signs that may—may—indicate the little-used laneways amidst the bolder cartographic connections.

Regardless of whether they’re published or not, most of these passages seem to remain neighbourhood secrets, known primarily to those who live alongside them.

In fact, these rights of passage could be seen as rites of passage….

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

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Rare native molluscs return to an urban waterway

Olympia Oyster. Photo © Deep Bay Marine Field Station, Vancouver Island University, www.viu/deepbay

Beneath the quiet surface of the Gorge Waterway and Portage Inlet, life, death and survival play out in a drama affecting a rare, tasty B.C. marine species.

The Olympia oyster is the only oyster species native to the province. Once abundant from Alaska to Panama, it disappeared from much of its habitat by the early 20th century, a victim of its own tastiness, overfishing, and waters contaminated with sewage, chemicals and sediment that poisoned and suffocated the oyster beds. The fished-out waters included the Gorge Waterway, from which the oyster was considered locally extinct by the 1920s.

The state of Olympia oyster populations in the province remains such that Canada’s Species at Risk Act lists it as a species of special concern.

However, the oyster has surprised everyone. Some years back, researchers found the small, unprepossessing-looking mollusc had returned and set up house in the Gorge.

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

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

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….

The body contains its own timekeepers

08. March 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, In the Field, Science Scribe, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: body clocks, brain, camping, cardiovascular disorders, cellular processes, circadian rhythm, Daylight Savings Time, metabolic disorders, metabolism, mood disorders, Pacific Daylight Savings Time, sleep disorders, spring

We lose an hour of sleep this weekend, and over the next couple of weeks will be adjusting to that shift to Daylight Saving Time. This coming week, we’ll be waking up before sunrise again and eating later in the evening, because we’re just not hungry for supper at six o’clock. Everything will be just a little bit off, as our internal body clocks try to catch up with the regimented requirements of modern life.

But no matter. We’ll have more daylight in the evening, when we’re awake to appreciate it. This will help us prepare to fine-tune our inner body clocks—every one of them—to longer, brighter days.

It was once thought that the brain controlled our body clocks. That any human-caused shift backwards or forwards on the sundial meant we had to reset that part of the brain that woke us automatically at 6:30 every morning, or at 2:30 a.m. if we’d jetted over to Hawai’i for the February break.

Research over the last decade suggests that the brain is indeed involved, but more as master networking device than a solitary systems timekeeper. It would seem many organs within our bodies measure the passage of time according to their own internal cellular timepieces, quite independent of what HQ in the noggin or the clock on the wall dictates. Cells within each of these organs track time throughout the day, and accordingly produce and release different amounts of enzymes and molecules at different times of day….

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

Flocking and shoaling for protection works in school, too

One crow for sorrow; Eight crows for heaven. Photo © Ingrid Taylar @ thewildbeat.com

If this were 2000 years ago, the population may have rioted in the streets.

At the very least, Romans leaders would have put off major undertakings until portents improved. Seers would have watched weather and bird life, listening for the whisperings of Olympian gods in the croak of the crow, the whistle of the eagle or the chirp of the sparrow. They would have looked for signs that the gods had recovered from their most recent bouts of indigestion—side effects of indulging in all that nectar and ambrosia—and were once again smiling favourably on Roman endeavours.

But we live in unsuperstitious times. So, when a major religious figure and a couple of kids in Rome released white doves in a gesture of peace last month, and those very birds were roughed up by their mean-streets feathered brethren, people merely pronounced it a bad omen for events in the Ukraine, for the Olympics, for Syria….

The event and its interpretation presented the pointy-headed crowd with opportunity to roll its eyes and say (I paraphrase), “Hey, those doves are white—the result of generations upon generations of inbreeding. Of course wild birds would attack them. “

White, in Nature, is a statement of nonconformity. And Nature, for the most part, encourages conformity. Being a white animal is Nature’s equivalent of wearing a giant ‘Kick Me’ sign….

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….

Clean coast living provides no escape from dirty air

Ferry across Georgia Strait. Photo © JamesZ_Flickr

On a recent trip to Vancouver, a great yellow tongue of dirty air greeted us as the ferry surged into Georgia Strait. Stretching out from Vancouver, the tongue licked at the shores of Galiano and Mayne islands.

“We’re travelling right into it,” Nature Boy said. “Gotta love these temperature inversions.”

For much of January, warm air sat like a pot lid over the south coast, trapping cooler air in valleys and against the mountains. At higher elevations, the warm temperatures messed up the ski hills. Down below, in the Lower Mainland, people stewed in chill, polluted air.

And here, coiling out of the Fraser Valley, the corpse-coloured smog tongue demonstrated, on a small scale, pollution’s potential long reach. Wind, rain and pollution recognize no boundaries, and don’t stop at the shoreline, the farm gate or the border….

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

Keiran's World

Rights of passage serve as rites of passage

Rare native molluscs return to an urban waterway

Our heritage sites need love, attention and money

Lights out for the planet and for the birds

The body contains its own timekeepers

Flocking and shoaling for protection works in school, too

Building unpredictability into traffic design transforms
streetscapes into people places

Clean coast living provides no escape from dirty air

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