Wildcrafting Strawberries

For a few years now I've been giving a little help (occasional watering and weeding) to a patch of especially large wild strawberries. Each year they reward me with a special harvest - not large but very sweet. This year's gift was substantially greater than last year's:

Foxes in the Cariboo and London

This is an image of a fox, fairly common around here (the South Cariboo):

For contrasting lifestyle and season, here's a picture, from a friend, of a fox making itself at home in a London garden. Apparently this is not uncommon, especially around Hampstead Heath:

Chris Czajkowski's Chilcotin Photo-journal

Chris Czajkowski, author of Wildfire in the Wilderness, The Cabin at Singing River and other books, is back home at Nuk Tessli, hiking and paddling "her" piece of Chilcotin wilderness. Join Chris, as the early summer sun begins to melt last winter's heavy snows and she records in words and pictures the spectacular scenery and fascinating plant and animal life of this beautiful corner of British Columbia.

The pine beetle aftermath requires a fundamental culture change

Dave Neads writes from knowledge and experience about the forestry industry in BC. After hoping it would go away or some miracle cure would appear, the reality of the pine beetle aftermath is beginning to set in. This is going to require a deep, cultural change from those of us in affected areas, whether we are involved with forestry or not. Dave's article provides a welcome perspective. (The photo is mine - taken today in my backyard).

LET'S JUST FIX IT

"Why can't they just fix it, spray the trees or something?" This question came from a European traveler visiting the Chilcotin Cariboo, but it may have just as easily been posed by someone from the lower mainland or even from Williams Lake.

Even though this person had driven from Williams Lake to Anahim Lake, had done a flightsee over the West Chilcotin, had spent a lot of time on back roads, and had seen the size and extent of the beetle kill, the scale of the problem was still incomprehensible. The question still came "Why can't they fix it?"

At the same time, for many, nothing appears to need fixing right now. Times are good. Everyone is working, the economy is robust, investors and speculators are buying properties, building big box stores and playing the real estate market, looking for future gain.

The problem is that these seeming good times hide the reality that we are facing two radically different visions of the future: one built on the dream of a continuing working class community, closely knit and vibrant, and the other built on land speculation and expected demographic shifts.

One future is driven by the aging baby-boomer population which is selling up in the south and moving farther north. They have income, they don't need forestry jobs, they are retired or semi-retired and looking for a more rural, small town lifestyle. It is this future that the land speculators and the big box store owners are betting on, the new economy driven by investment, retirees and land price increases. For example, recently, a helicopter load of speculators from the western US dropped out of the sky in the Tatla area, just checking to see what was for sale, what the country looked like. Lakefront property is at an all time high, house prices are rising, and speculation is rampant.

On the other hand, the future based on traditional forest economy is in trouble and faces two possible outcomes. To give you an idea of the scale of the forestry problem consider the Chilcotin, an area the size of Switzerland, predominantly forested with lodgepole pine. By 2010 it is estimated that the MPB will have killed roughly half a billion trees in the Chilcotin. Half a billion. That would represent 25 years of logging at current rates. All gone in the next few years.

Even if it were possible to harvest these trees while they are still useful for the industry, say in the next five years, you would need five times as many mills, five times as many logging roads, five times as many logging contractors, five times as many rail cars, five times as much market space in the U.S, five times as many mill workers and on and on. And even if that were possible, what happens at the end of the five years? The trees are gone, and a crash much bigger than the one we face implodes the local economy.

We can't fix the tree supply problem. There will be a drastic reduction in harvest levels in the near future. There is nothing we do can about this. If we don't accept these facts and adopt a new strategy the working class economy in the forest industry as we know it will come to the end of an era.

That is the more negative outcome, but there is an alternative. In the past we have logged more and more to maintain jobs. That option is no longer possible. The cut levels will be reduced drastically in the next few years. The only way to compensate for this is to increase the number of jobs for the trees cut. In other words, we need to reverse our thinking and get more jobs from fewer trees.

We all know log home builders achieve several times more jobs per tree than dimension lumber mills. But we can't stop there. For example, there is a small business in the West Kootenay that restores vintage bi-planes. They employ only four people year round, but they use just a few spruce trees. That is true value-added - and there are probably many more possibilities out there for those who are willing to think about things in a new and different way.

To achieve a new economy for forest workers we really need to spend a lot of time and energy thinking of new products, processes, markets and ideas. Not biofuels, not pellets; these still depend on a huge supply of saw logs, the very commodity that will shortly disappear. No, we need truly innovative and sustainable ideas to carry us forward. We also need things like government policy shifts and tenure re-arrangements to make more wood available for non-traditional products and services.

So don't be fooled. If you are in the forest resource sector, your future is very different than if you are in the service, retail or land business. How well the working-class families that depend upon these jobs will fare in the next decade will depend on a lot of things like innovation, new products and markets but, in the end, there will be a sharp change in the community and lifestyle of the Chilcotin Cariboo as we have come to know and understand it.

Like the European tourist who doesn't understand that we can't fix it, those who think that traditional forest employment will still be the backbone of the region just don't understand the scope, scale and size of the inevitable change we are facing. They need to face the facts and prepare for a future that is filled with new and unfamiliar experiences.

-Dave Neads-

Dave Neads is coordinating the regional conservation campaign in response to the Mountain Pine Beetle Epidemic. In this capacity he is a director on the Cariboo Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition and is a member of the Premier's Mountain Pine Beetle Provincial Task Force.

Birds from a Cariboo Deck No.5 - American Robin

A pair of robins have honoured us with setting up a nest nearby. They join others in the neighbourhood in their sweet evening singing. Aside from singing, the most popular visible activity of robins is their flamboyant bathing:

More Birds from A Cariboo Deck

Kamloops/Thompson School District gets free software

Some interesting news on the computing front:
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Kamloops school district gets an education in free software
Tuesday June 05, 2007
By: Bruce Byfield

The Kamloops/Thompson School District in British Columbia, Canada, is a free software success story. Gregg Ferrie, manager of information technology for the district, believes its infrastructure may be "the largest Linux on-the-desktop implementation in Western Canada" in public education. According to Ferrie, hardly a week goes by without another of British Columbia's more than 60 school districts consulting Kamloops. Currently, five other districts are considering or planning to implement the Kamloops district's custom-built thin client solution, and the department of education at the University of British Columbia is also investigating the possibility.

Read on

Fairyslipper / Calypso Orchid - spring beauty

Here in central BC it's the season. Fairyslippers are still fairly common, despite significant loss of habitat and being very fragile. For those who express their appreciation for flowers by picking them, these flowers are vulnerable because of their beauty and because picking a bloom can easily uproot the whole plant. Join me in a salute to the Calypso orchid (I prefer that name - more dignified).

And, yes, that is a little insect crawling up our beauty's face.

More on Wild BC.

Birds from a Cariboo Deck No.4 - Dark-eyed Junco

Once the Varied Thrush invasion subsided, the Dark-eyed Juncos started arriving in numbers. These birds enliven our back yard with their cheerful twitting and the little flashes of white as they fly around.

More Birds from A Cariboo Deck

I've just heard from our neighbour that he is planning to take down most of his trees - essentially the continuation of our bit of forest.

Part of our forest at dusk

This will of course have a direct impact on the fauna and flora on his property and, I suspect, a smaller but significant impact on the life on our little acre. It was only a few weeks ago that I photographed a couple of deer on his land.

Birds from a Cariboo Deck No.3 - Varied Thrush

It's been a while but spring has sprung and definitely time to feature another bird seen from my back deck. This time the honour falls to the Varied Thrush who this spring arrived in unprecedented numbers and stayed longer than ever (there are still a couple around). It's the males who arrive first so I will feature a male varied thrush here:

More Birds from A Cariboo Deck

Earth Day 2007

As the birds come north . . .

. . . celebrating the day, the birds and the air we breathe.

Photo: April 21. Birds over the Cariboo. Photo Jeffrey Newman.

More British Columbia birds