Tag Archives: collaboration

Not waiting for Noah

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“Planning is best done in advance.” – Anonymous

Neighborhood on the South Saskatchewan river, June 2013

Flying into Calgary at the end of June, everyone on the plane was glued to the windows, staring at the mess of mud and debris from the Great Flood.

Eventually, rivers always have their own way.

Embarrassingly, I was there to speak at the Canadian Water Summit about collaborative drought planning. By a miracle of organization, the Summit was hastily relocated from the flooded Stampede grounds to a nearby airport hotel. I gave my talk as planned, with some blushing and a few words about unpredictable extreme events.

One of many outrageous pictures from the recent flooding in Colorado

One of many outrageous pictures from the recent flooding in Colorado

A drought could come next year.

The situation was made even more ironic, because I’d just spent several months getting my head around collaborative flood planning, much more topical under the circumstances. The deadly mudslides in BC last year had left me feeling that we are even less prepared for floods than water shortages. Continue reading →

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Water Day, every day

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“Why isn’t every day Water Day?” – Peter Gleick, on Twitter

Dear Readers,

Taken by Judie Steeves for her article "Myth of Abundance" in the Kelowna Capital News

Canada Water Week, and World Water Day (March 22) have come and gone, and I hope you all took the opportunity to lift a long, cool glass and marvel at the wonder and privilege to have such a beautiful, precious thing flow freely from our taps.  Nonetheless, this seems a good opportunity to celebrate progress in the year past, to look at where we’ve fallen behind, and to make plans for the future.

First, I want to apologize for the long blog-drought on Building Bridges. Over the past few months I’ve been taking time for family: the short illness and peaceful passing of my father. He had a great love for this blog, and I often thought of him while writing – to educate and entertain an intelligent, caring member of the public. In that spirit, I continue. Continue reading →

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Everything you wanted to know about watershed governance

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“The need for collaboration is especially clear for water. Few things are so intimately linked with life and prosperity.” – Brandes, Marshall, and Sears

The biggest watershed new stories are usually about conflicts; lately in BC, this means mines and pipelines. People want jobs, but they also want BC to be beautiful.  What’s the  balance?  In the spirit of Building Bridges, it was a pleasure to join forces with Oliver Brandes (of the Polis Institute), and David Marshall (from the Fraser Basin Council) on an op-ed for the Vancouver Sun, promoting watershed collaboration.

Water leaders of the future.

The article grew from a watershed gathering held in Vancouver in late January – a crash course on collaboration, and a chance to learn what other groups are doing in BC. Basically, we’ve all been going it alone, with little formal communication between the Island, the Fraser, the Columbia, the Okanagan, and other watersheds.

Our op-ed focused on collaboration as a principle for watershed management, but we purposely didn’t dig into watershed governance because it hasn’t been as well-defined in public conversation. My impression at the gathering was that governance means different things to different people. Here, I want to share my sense of the common threads.

In a perfect world, environmental agencies would have lots of boots on the ground, and excellent data on natural resources and economics. They’d be making decisions that suit local needs and fund health care and education province-wide. Instead, the ministries are shrinking, we have pared-down budgets and high demand for raw materials. Yet we still need to protect water sources. We have to do more with less, and do more, regardless. Continue reading →

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A Parable of Weeds: change, adaptation and leadership

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“For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy

It’s startling (and creepy) to swim into a milfoil bed – an unexpected brush against your side, a light tug at your ankles …Yikes! Is that a fish?... Some people won’t swim in the lake; and American newspapers even publish stories about “milfoil-related” panics and fatalities.  We don’t want lakes to be like swimming pools, but it’s disconcerting to know that this invasive plant is here to stay, and we have to learn to live with it.

Cleaning the beaches, circa 1974

This post is about living with change – changing landscapes, changing water supplies, changing culture and population. We have to be ready and able to change too. What can we save? Where should we throw the greatest effort? Who will lead?

The globalization of weeds (and weedy animals) seems unstoppable, coming wave after wave.  As a student, I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility and occasional despair. I imagine it’s the same for students of glaciology – watching the melt. Invasive species are a lot like climate change. Continue reading →

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Building Bridges for Okanagan Water in 2012

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“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” -St. Francis of Assisi

Welcome to 2012.  It is almost 5 months since I began this blog, “Building Bridges,” and the new year, when we traditionally look back and look ahead, seems like a good time to reflect on the message and purpose of these regular Okanagan Water updates.  A novice blogger, I’ve been learning a lot – talking to veterans of social media, water enthusiasts, and my select and devoted readership.

This Christmas was spent with friends at a boat-in cottage - after a thrilling lake crossing. Beautiful, but cold

If there is anything I’d like people to take away, it is the conviction that in a time of change, we have the power to work together and solve water issues as they arise. There are pockets of real problems in the valley, especially with groundwater, and many potential future challenges with climate change, but with planning and collaboration we can avoid severe crises. Starting with what’s necessary, and then carving off what’s possible, we can begin to tackle what now might seem insurmountable. Continue reading →

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No vacation in the Salmon Nation

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“All men are equal before fish.” – Herbert Hoover

Last week, I attended a workshop in Portland, Oregon, on the future of salmon under climate change.  Our delegation had been invited to talk about the resurgence of sockeye in the Okanagan River, and our experiences with collaboration. Scientists, managers, fishers, First Nations, and other friends of fish, gathered from around the north Pacific to talk about good news, bad news, and what’s possible. It was a diverse group from far-flung geography,  bound together by the need to manage salmon under rapidly changing conditions.

And while much of the conversation was focused on science, there was an important thread about values. What we protect and care for depends strongly on what we value as communities.

While there is uncertainty about the impacts of climate change in specific salmon areas, almost all models project the same outcome: warming waters, summer and winter. Warmer summer waters interfere with spawning, rearing, and migration – and can lead to fish kills in oxygen-poor water.  Warmer waters in winter (particularly in the ocean) could expand the range of salmon to the north as the sea ice breaks up; but this wouldn’t replace the loss of salmon to southern ecosystems and communities. Continue reading →

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Rocks, computers, and other water tools for distributed networks

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“We shall neither fail nor falter; we shall not weaken or tire…give us the tools and we will finish the job.” – Winston Churchill

 I once read about a farmer in Africa who’s land was bare, eroded and cracked by drought.  Without many alternatives, he tried an ancient practice of piling small rows of rock along the contour of the slope. The rocks slowed overland flow from short cloudbursts, and captured dust and seeds from the wind. Within a season he could see the land begin to recover. It is a simple, effective technique now being used around the world.

Okanagan old timers talk about how most people used to have rain cisterns for drinking water. Now, rain barrels supplement irrigation water in urban back yards, and divert water that might otherwise enter the storm system.

For a while after reading this, I walked around saying “we need more stone-age solutions!” Really, it’s about appropriate technology: sometimes you need a rock, sometimes a satellite.

As information and communication become more integrated (What was life like before the internet?), distributed networks are emerging as powerful components of our social system. Rather than Big Brother gathering data and taking top-down action, responsibility is shared.

It’s happening politically (the Arab Spring, the “Occupy” movement, and the BC trend to localize planning and decision-making), and it’s happening with resource management. With less funding and capacity from the central governments, we must figure out how to protect water quality, water supplies, and the health of the ecosystem by organizing the contributions of individuals across the region. Continue reading →

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From vision to action with environmental grantmaking

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“A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.” – Henry David Thoreau

Resources take many forms. To make real changes in a watershed, money is often far less important than having a strong, networked community and a shared vision. In the Okanagan, we are using small amounts of funding in strategic ways to build community capacity and reinforce our sense of interconnectedness.

Riparian restoration field trip with Lee Hesketh

Continue reading →

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Water Stewardship for the 21st Century

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“The creation of the Water Stewardship Council is a significant action in advancing water conservation and quality…” – Greg Selinger, premier of Manitoba, on the national Water Stewardship Council (June 2011).

I think we might be going back to the future with our new paradigm of watershed collaboration. Having the right people in the room has always been a recipe for good government (probably before the Romans and Greeks…). What may be new is formally using collaboration to improve our resource management.

Goofing around at a photo-shoot for the Sustainable Water Strategy - From L to R: Anna Warwick Sears, Bernie Bauer, Tom Siddon, Kellie Garcia, and Nelson Jatel.

And let’s put “new” in quotes. The Okanagan’s Water Stewardship Council, Ontario’s Conservation Authorities and Alberta’s Watershed Planning and Advisory Councils have been on the landscape for decades. But never mind that. Ten years into the 21st century, this idea is coming of age. Continue reading →

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Water leadership in changing times: trials and innovations

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“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”  – African proverb, quoted by Al Gore

I got fairly hot under the collar at a Bill Rees’ talk last fall – in my mild-mannered Canadian way.  He’s a UBC professor famous for his work on ecological footprints – great stuff, that I’ve used to teach classes in the past.  Where I took issue was the tenor of Bill’s talk. To begin with, I never do well with extremely grim forecasts. Being in the environmental field, the future can easily be cast in a dim light, but fearless optimism is more to my taste. We start with the premise that the situation is workable.

World population from 1800 to 2100, based on UN 2004 projections and US Census Bureau historical estimates - by Loren Cobb

Bill’s subject was climate change and population growth, the likely tides of environmental refugees, and how we needed to draw the line in some way on our own growth and development.

I grant that we need to change our approach to the growth of our cities, but as the world approaches 7 billion people this year, we have to accept that some will move here. We even welcome them – Canadians are aging, and we need workers of all kinds and levels of education.  Canada is one of the world’s great immigrant nations.

Although climate change is likely to be gentler to western Canada than many other parts of the world, we won’t be untouched.  Climate adaptation is, as they say, all about the water.  I’m often asked, “When will we run out of water? Should we stop all growth and development?” Continue reading →

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