Food Secure Canada (FSC) is expressing strong concern about the orientation of Bill C-18, the Agriculture Growth Act. Introduced by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, Bill C-18 is a wide-ranging piece of legislation that would modify many other laws. Overall, the proposed changes would further undermine the resilience of our farming sector and entrench corporate control over vital elements of our food supply, namely, seeds. FSC is particularly concerned with the proposed changes to the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act. These changes, if passed, would commit Canada to the 1991 Act of the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of…
Author: thegreengazette
By Beatrix Linde — World Animal Day was on October 4 and countries all over the world held events to honour, remember, and pay tribute to animals. World Animal Day came into existence at a convention of ecologists in Florence, Italy in 1931. The idea was a way of highlighting the plight of endangered species. This year over 500 events are being planned globally to bring awareness to the treatment of animals. Spelling bees and poetry contests in Africa, treks in South America, and marches in Jakarta are just a few gatherings that will occur. …our standard donkey was so…
By Brianna van de Wijngaard — Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society We say this every year, but when you return from a busy summer, frolicking at the beach, avoiding work, and barbequing the 20 pounds of zucchini squash that your garden manages to dump on you every week, it’s amazing how quickly the Christmas holidays can creep up on us. Especially when you’re writing about them in September. And, depending on how we typically spend the holidays, this can be exciting or kind of terrifying; despite encouragement in recent years to scale down the St. Nick festivities, our shopping habits have…
By Ciel Patenaude — Shamanism is the oldest known system of healing practice on Earth, and yet it offers great wisdom to our contemporary challenges. Deeply connected to and reflective of nature and the oneness of all things, this practice seeks to reconnect an individual with their spiritual path within the context of the whole. It views illness of mind and body as, ultimately, illness of spirit first, and views illness of spirit as springing primarily from the misinformed view that one is separate from the rest of existence. The Shaman (or Shamanic Practitioner, depending upon their level of initiation…
By Sage Birchwater — Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) made a key acquisition in the Chilcotin this spring, with the purchase of the picturesque 470-acre Poet Place in the Klinaklini Valley. The property, located 250 km west of Williams Lake and a dozen kilometres down the Klinaklini Valley from Highway 20, is book-ended by two waterfalls in the Klinaklini River. Poet Place is the second property in the Klinaklini Valley obtained by the NCC in the past two years. In 2012, the Conservancy purchased a 160-acre parcel at Wheeler Bottom, 20 kilometres beyond the Poet Place, and named it Dalton’s…
By Sage Birchwater — It’s been a long two months since August 4 when a breach of Mount Polley Mine’s tailings storage facility near Likely dumped 17 million cubic meters of effluent and eight million cubic meters of mine tailings solids into the pristine, salmon-bearing waters of Quesnel Lake. In a matter of hours one of the deepest and purest freshwater lakes in the world became contaminated with mine waste that will likely be there forever. The trail of the breach left a 10-kilometre-long, 50-metre-wide toxic moonscape replacing Hazeltine Creek, once a one-metre-wide Coho spawning stream meandering through the interior…
By Teena Clipston — I grew up celebrating Halloween, and, like many other children, never understanding the meaning of the day. All I knew was I was getting candy, and if I had the stamina to walk for blocks in the cold, it could very well mean lots of candy. Now in those days, we kept things rather simple: with an old, white sheet we could be a ghost or a mummy… with old tattered clothes we could be a hobo… a cardboard box and we could be a walking TV. We would carve a pumpkin and stick a candle…
By Margaret-Anne Enders — This is an article about relationships and about our personal and collective work of building, maintaining, repairing, and honouring relationships. As one of the co-ordinators of the Women’s Spirituality Circle, I am blessed to have a job where relationships are the cornerstone of my work. Our Circle was formed just over a year ago when the Multiculturalism Program at the Canadian Mental Health Association worked together with Gendun Drubpa Buddhist Centre, St. Peter’s Anglican Church, the Women’s Contact Society, and the Immigrant and Multicultural Services Society to secure funding to do interfaith work in Williams Lake.…
By Jessica Kirby — According to a report authored by Rodolfo Dirzo, Hillary S. Young, et al, called “Defaunation in the Anthropocene,” the world is right in the middle of its sixth extinction. We owe the last and most famous extinction to the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, but we have no naturally disastrous phenomenon to blame for the current state of affairs. Over the past 200,000 years humans have roamed the Earth, more than 1,000 species have gone extinct, so there is no real way to shake off responsibility for this tragedy. The Wilderness Committee, Canada’s largest membership-based…
By Pat Teti — Two weeks living and working with a middle-aged couple in a small town in northeastern Spain sounded like a great way to sample a distinctive culture outside the normal tourism envelope.” “Pat, could you sing Happy Birthday to my mother”? Pep asked from the other end of the large dinner table. It was two hours into a long afternoon meal with an extended family near Barcelona. I was in a soporific state after several courses of alcohol, delicious food, and listening to incomprehensible Catalán. The sudden query in English was so unexpected, all I could do…
By Ron Young — While attempting to navigate the shoals of life’s challenges, when you find yourself out of your depth on a particular matter and need to call in an expert, you’re going to encounter three types of people. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a problem related to a mechanical or electronic device or a medical problem or a relationship problem. There is the garden variety, “never found a problem I couldn’t make worse by making you feel worse” type of person. The proffered solution consists of admonitions about why you shouldn’t have the problem in…
By Sage Birchwater — There are more questions than answers concerning the August 4 breach of Mount Polley Mine’s tailings facility near Likely, BC. It’s being called the single worst environmental disaster in British Columbia’s history. And that’s before all the details are in. The full impact of millions of tons of toxic mining waste spilling into one of the most pristine deepwater lakes in the world may never be known. It is a nightmare unimaginable. Witnesses at the spill say the lake was fizzing and popping like a can of Pepsi being poured into a glass The fact that…
Dear Readers, It’s hard to find words to express the scale of the impact of Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley Mine tailings pond breach and spill into Quesnel Lake on August 4. The magnitude of this disaster is staggering. For those who live and work in the area and treasure the pristine gem of the Quesnel Lake watershed, it is heartbreaking. As the shock and disbelief wear off, sadness and fear for the river, fish, animals, ecosystem, and people who love and depend on this area, now covered in a river of gray sludge, continue to flow. Anger and mistrust grow…
By Jessica Kirby — So, what is peace? I ask him, brushing the hair away from his forehead as we lay on his bed, spooning, his back to me. What does peace look like? Quiet, he says. Quiet and no fighting. What about fear? I ask. Some people say peace is the absence of fear and worry. I guess so. As long as you’re quiet at the same time. Is that important? I ask. That you be quiet to be peaceful? It means sitting quietly and calmly with nothing in your head. Do you feel peaceful most of the time…
By Pat Teti — Like eggs, beer, wine, and cheese, “bread” refers to a single food category while encompassing endless variety. Part of the variety comes from using different ingredients but altering the proofing, loaf size and shape, and baking conditions can also add great diversity to the finished product. When you are following a recipe and trying to replicate a loaf you see in a photo, this also means that getting the ingredients right is only the beginning. The temperature and duration of the proofing (rise), dough handling and shaping, and oven temperature and humidity also affect the outcome.…
By Bill Chapman — Familiarize yourself with these mushrooms in a good book or online and you could have a great fall mushrooming season this year There are many reasons to take part in the free bounty of wild mushrooms we have in the Cariboo. First and foremost is that wild mushrooms are to the farmed mushroom as the tree picked peach is to supermarket picked variety, that is, unbelievably more flavourful. Other reasons for picking fall mushrooms include the diversity of kinds and flavours available, the excellent nutritional and health properties of wild mushrooms, and the very reasonable price…
By Jessica Kirby, Senior Editor of TheGreenGazette — When September rolls around, many families head to the mall to stock up on school supplies, backpacks, and lunchboxes, not to mention the yearly closet full of clothing meant to help kick off a new school year with a sense of newness and a fresh start. Us? We go camping. There is really nothing like enjoying all the amenities of provincial campsites when there is barely a soul in sight. Our kids look forward to this time of year and to the quiet, relaxed approach we take to fall. Our almost nine-year-old son…
By Jacquie Lanthier — Rivers have a way of calling us back to ourselves. The river cradles us, and in the carrying shows us who we are. We have come from all across the Fraser Basin, travelling from the outskirts of the city, meeting for the very first time on the overnight Greyhound bus. We have left our homes in Port Coquitlam, New Westminster, and Burnaby. Taken off from towns like Gold Bridge and Horsefly. We have travelled from Lillooet, Quesnel, Williams Lake, Prince George, and beyond. And, at the beginning of August, as others have for the past ten…
By Van Andruss — This year the BC government carried out an online public inquiry called an “Area Based Forest Tenure Consultation,” which ended May 30, 2014. Advertised as a response to a dwindling timber supply and particularly to the devastating beetle kill of the past decade, the Consultation invited comment on a proposal regarding “tenure” for large-scale logging interests. Basically, two kinds of tenure exist in BC. Both involve logging rights. One is known as an FL, or Forest Licence; the other is known as a TFL, or Tree Farm Licence. There is a big difference between the two.…