PKols sign-Mt Doug, Victoria, BC

Atop Mount Douglas—PKOLS—Victoria, BC.

When University of Victoria anthropology and computer science students joined forces in 2011 with the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group out of Ladysmith and local Elders to develop a video game, they were furthering the concept that names confer power and presence.

In the game, players embark on a virtual journey through Coast Salish landscapes, and explore uses of the land, historic place names, and traditional knowledge through video, audio, maps and photographs. Based on an earlier board game developed by the treaty group, the game serves as a step towards reclaiming culture, history, and presence in the region.

It followed two significant events in which First Nations cultural geography on the coast was reclaimed. In 2009, B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands were officially renamed Haida Gwaii as part of a historic reconciliation agreement between the province and the Haida Nation, and in 2010, the coastal waters off the province’s south coast became known officially as the Salish Sea.

Last year, the progression towards reclamation took another step. Local First Nations publicly proclaimed PKOLS as the original name of Mount Douglas, a site of cultural significance. They held a ceremony on the mountain, and commemorated the mountain’s deep roots in their history with a carved cedar sign near the summit. They have submitted a formal request to B.C.’s Geographic Names Office to have the old name reinstated.

They also announced plans to reclaim Mount Newton within their historical and cultural geography of place names. The mountain, or ȽÁU,WELNEW (place of refuge) is sacred as the site where the Saanich people escaped a great flood about 10,000 years ago.

Names are much more than mere labels. They signify culture and history. They indicate relationships and responsibilities between people and provide glimpses into long-held knowledge. They denote connections between people and places.

Benign or otherwise, renaming causes what existed before to be filtered through a new lens. It can obscure prior relationships, and even erase them….

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

Stranded velella, relatives of sea jellies. Photo © Dan (Newslighter), via flickr and Creative Commons

Nature Boy spent a few minutes dabbling his toes in the water at Willows Beach last week.

“I don’t feel it,” he reported. “They say a great blob of warm ocean water has moved up to the northern coast. It appears to not have arrived at Willows.”

“Maybe it’s something only marine critters can easily feel,” I say. “If you spent all day in the water, you might notice.”

“If I did that,” he said, “someone might mistake me for a great, warm blob.”

The system Nature Boy refers to first appeared in the North Pacific Ocean in late-2013. Named the Blob by one of the University of Washington researchers who discovered it, it spread across almost two million square kilometres of the Gulf of Alaska, and now plugs up the Bering Sea, with daughter Blobs (Blobbies?) warming offshore waters all the way south to Mexico.

Acting much like the high-pressure Polar Vortex systems that lobed southwards over the prairies and pushed away systems of warmer air throughout the winter and spring of 2013–2014, The Blob redirects cold ocean currents from their eons-old routes. The two phenomena may not be connected.

Some unlikely warm-water species are now checking out northern latitudes as a result. Fishermen caught a skipjack tuna caught off Alaska last September, warm-water Velellas, relatives of sea jellies, washed ashore at Tofino and Haida Gwai’i, and rare pygmy orca have been spotted off Washington State.

However, The Blob is primarily a dead zone. With temperatures as much as three degrees above the region’s average, it not only redirects ocean currents, it dampens the natural mixing of water layers. This affects salinity, dissolved oxygen and acidity within the water, which in turn reduces nutrients and biological productivity….

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

Coffee cups—reusable is more environmentally friendly if you use them often and for a long time. Photo © Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar, via creative commons and flickr

Coffee cups—reusable is more environmentally friendly if you use them often and for a long time. Photo © Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar, via creative commons and flickr

Back when I was young, a University of Victoria researcher published a paper that shifted the ground under my idealistic, environmentally conscious, fairtrade sock-clad feet.

The year was 1994. Scientists had published the first big studies documenting rapid, modern climate change. Alberta’s tar-sands companies had publicly accepted government bail-outs. Earth Day was big, and environmental education was the new cool, despite—perhaps in spite of—Canada’s conservative Fraser Institute’s statements that it constituted social brainwashing.

Chemist Martin Hocking’s paper presented an analysis of which type of beverage container was most energy efficient to use—paper cups, ceramic mugs, glass mugs, styrofoam cups, or hard plastic cups.

The answer surprised me and many others.

Conventional wisdom was that ceramic or glass—reusable—cups beat plastic or paper cups in eco-friendliness….

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

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.

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….

bald eagle, by Mark Stephenson

Victoria Times Colonist, December 8, 2012—We’re in Courtenay at the end of this year’s salmon run. We’ve already seen two eagles fly over the Comox Air Force Museum like B-52 bombers with full payloads. From where we stand today on the banks of the Puntledge River, we spot three more birds of prey perched in trees overhead. The seagulls near us are in a post-feast daze, too full to fly, too full to eat.

A few salmon skitter through the shallows, but most lie dead and grey on the gravel bars.

“Such a waste,” says Nature Boy.

Nature Boy, decrying the natural cycle of life and death and organic matter! Can it be?

Then he says, quite testily, “Yes, yes, I know it’s not a waste. I was just thinking of how much salmon costs at the grocery store.”

These stinky fish corpses are—thank goodness!—food for thought today, not food for us. Instead, they’ll be feeding the forest around us. The salmon spend four years at sea gulping down ocean nutrients, then return to the river to spawn and die. Eagles, gulls, bears and other scavengers eat the ocean-fed carcasses, carrying them deep into the bush. There, what remains fertilizes the forest.

During the last decade, researchers at the University of Victoria have discovered salmon-derived nitrogen in trees, shrubs, moss, beetles and other insects. They’ve even found it in the feathers of songbirds that feast on the insects that feast on dead salmon.

Their work tracking salmon-nutrient cycling through coastal forests parallels research by others into how corn nutrients filter through the human food chain. Salmon confers a unique signature on its nitrogen. Carbon from corn likewise carries a molecular label that shouts “Corn!” to those equipped to read it. It shows up in corn-fed animals and in animals that eat corn-fed animals.

Including us. We North Americans nibble nachos and niblets like nobody’s business. We ingest dextrose, lecithin, high-fructose corn syrup, and other unpronounceable corn products. We feast on corn-fed beef, pork, and poultry, and on eggs, milk and cheese from those animals.

Apparently, as much as half of the carbon in the typical North American is corn carbon.

But there’s more about the food we eat staying with us and within us. Scientists in China have discovered genetic material from rice and vegetables circulating in the blood and tissues of humans and other animals.

If nutrients such as nitrogen and carbon are a body’s most basic ingredients, then genetic material provides the blueprint that dictates an organism’s design and the processes for assembling and maintaining an organism out of that raw “stuff.”

The genetic material in question here is microRNA. Ribonucleic acid—RNA—is critical to gene coding, decoding, control and expression. MicroRNAs—tiny snippets of RNA—help control cellular production of proteins, which do most of a cell’s work. The snippets amplify or dampen protein production, thereby affecting cell function and, thus, an organism’s development and health.

The researchers found 30 kinds of plant microRNAs in human and mouse blood and cells. The microRNAs come from rice, broccoli, cabbage and other vegetables.

The scientists are still determining how the plant molecules interact with animal genes, but some are apparently similar enough to mammal microRNA and abundant enough to affect protein production within our own cells.

Clearly, we have to watch what we eat. Literally. While it is inside us.

All this goes to show we each carry within us ghosts of repasts past, rattling our chains of DNA and RNA, haunting our health, and directing our cellular mechanisms into the future in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

It’s something to contemplate as the eagles and seagulls on the Puntledge River finish their feasting season and we embark on our own. With each mouthful, we will become those mouthfuls: ham, cheese, chicken, turkey, tart, fruit.

Nuts!

And because the pigs that become the ham we eat eat corn, and the cows that provide the milk that becomes the cheese we eat eat corn and the turkeys that become the drumsticks and leftovers we eat eat corn, we will remain corn-y, too.

… With a side of rice and veg.

… And salmon, too.

 

A version of this article appeared in the Victoria Times Colonist….