Vancouver sunrise. Photo © Tucker Sherman, via flickr and Creative Commons

The hottest, driest summer on record for British Columbia ends this week, three weeks after the first substantial rains in months cleared the air. We will, however, be paying for this past summer for years to come.

Wildfires cost the province more than $260 million so far this year, well over the $63 million allotted. Even though B.C. posted a budget surplus this spring, belts across government will tighten to cover the unplanned-for extra expense. We’ll pay for that when we access programs and services. More »

Photo © Ray Frances Ong, via flickr and Creative Commons

 

I hope the organic food I purchase is “organic,” even though I KNOW all the food I eat is organic.

I realise that sounds confusing, but the word organic has many definitions.

The B.C. Government recently announced it would introduce regulations to govern the word’s use by food producers.

As we know, some farmers undergo extensive and expensive certification to demonstrate they’ve eliminated chemically made fertilizers, hormones and pesticides and genetically altered seed from their operations. Under B.C. and Canadian law, these producers may legally call their products “certified organic.”

Some other farmers eliminate the nasty stuff, but aren’t certified organic. These operations tend to be small and often lease farmland instead of owning it. Current regulations permit them to call their products organic, unsprayed, or pesticide free, provided they don’t market or sell their products outside B.C., or claim certification.

A third group of producers and sellers may exist who don’t use organic practices, but market their goods as such. The intended regulations mostly are meant to stifle these claims.

In these examples, we use Merriam-Webster’s definition of organic—“of, relating to, yielding, or involving the use of food produced with the use of feed or fertilizer of plant or animal origin without employment of chemically made fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides.”

The dictionary’s other definitions of organic encompass broader meanings—for example, “of, relating to, or derived from living organisms” and “of, relating to, or containing carbon compounds.” These definitions turn the organic word-world into a muddy, microbe-infested swamp of connotation and implication….

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

Sooke reservoir, March 5, 2014. Photo © Capital Regional District

We can relax. The Sooke Reservoir is filled to capacity—once again, and at last. The series of storms that recently charged across the region did the honours. Together, they dropped 83 per cent of the rainfall we typically see in all of a March in the month’s first nine days, and ended the region’s latest winter dry spell.

A full reservoir means we now face summer with only the usual limits on water use. Years of summertime water restrictions have trained many of us to turn blind eyes to brown lawns and dusty vehicles.

Managing water is key to ensuring enough remains to go around in coming years. Last year’s hot, dry weather provided a taste of what climate-change models predict for the coast in coming decades—longer, warmer, drier summers, and more more-intense storms, particularly in winter. Although we cannot control when, where or how much rain falls here, we can to some extent control what happens once it hits the ground.

Two measures in B.C. that relate to that concept come to mind….

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

Bottled water. Photo © Steven Depolo, creative commons