Tag Archives: water stewardship

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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Lift a long, cool glass of gratitude

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“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” – Dan Quayle

Crammed in a cab with Bob Sanford and David Brooks, listening to adventure stories about Middle East river agreements.  I jumped in with one of my few international water anecdotes. “An Ethiopian hydrologist told me that water security – for them – is five litres a day, per person, within a three kilometre walking distance.”

A Kenyan farmer, building a catchment for her water supply. Photo credit: Eva Kaye-Zwiebe

The driver gave a derisive cough. “That guy must have been from the countryside,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m from Addis Ababa. We used at least six litres, and we didn’t have to walk for it.”

Strolling from kitchen to bathroom, I might use 100 litres of pure, fresh water a day without giving a second thought. If I wander out and turn on my sprinklers, that might go to 1000. And I’m average!

Let’s raise a glass to drinking water: so cheap, so abundant, we wash our cars with it. If it weren’t for the empty plastic bottles lying around, water would be almost invisible.

Back at home, I asked some guys next to me at a restaurant what they thought about drinking water. “We don’t think about it. We don’t want to. We just want to be able to get it.” Tommy and Ken were executives from the auto industry, and after some discussion, they admitted to being skeptical about climate change, but aware there were problems out there. “Without water there’s no life. Look at the Dead Sea, it’s dying!” Continue reading →

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Water and the Future

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“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.” – Jim Dator

Sometimes I can’t resist philosophical bones thrown by speakers on the internet. One recent video was on changing spending behaviour to save money, but it introduced the interesting idea of a wrestling match between our present and future selves.

A thoughtful woman writer from a Pompeii fresco. Someone who might appreciate a bit of advice from the future.

It’s an unequal competition.  In the present, I want to have hot apple pie and lie on the couch. My future self would prefer me to eat lightly and exercise more, but she isn’t around to speak for her interests. Instead, she relies on my fuzzy and sometimes skeptical sense of cause and effect: “Will this latte really make me fat and broke in 20 years?”

We regularly remind each other about saving resources for our grandchildren. There are many changes, small and big, that individuals and communities can make, adding up to water savings, energy savings, and money in the bank. But how do we move from “knowing what to do” to actually doing it? 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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It’s like money in the (snow)bank

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“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” – John Ruskin
 
Yesterday in Kelowna, I saw a woman standing on the sidewalk, all decked out in ski gear – boots and skis on.  It was dark, and there was no snow.  I don’t have an explanation, just to say, many people move here for the winter sports.

Snow in the Okanagan - it's not just for skiiers.

 
If you aren’t a skier, and your winter experience involves driving around, fighting the elements, snow seems like a terrible bother.  I won’t post the picture of my totaled Toyota on the Coquihalla.  Whether you love it or not, I’d argue that snow is even more important to the Okanagan in the summer than the winter. 
 
Think of snow as a giant, slow-release water reservoir.  Most of the planning and infrastructure changes we need for adapting to climate change involve ways to adapt to changes in snow cover. Less snow means less skiing, less boating, less wine, less apples, less cherries and most other things we hold dear.  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

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Water communication: making water visible.

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“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
Steven Wrightfont

I’ve been thinking lately about the incredibly complexity of our water systems. Any town or city, treating millions of gallons of drinking water, pumping it to our homes, then pumping it back for re-treatment and recycling. Millions of gallons – out of sight, out of mind – taken completely for granted.

It was a matter of civic pride to have these invisible systems, a sign of progress, where at the turn of a tap, water (hot and cold) arrives instantly at any sink in the house.  Now, funnily enough, every municipality has a water awareness campaign emphasizing the value of water and how people need to get informed, stop wasting water, and reduce pollution.  We are busy making water visible again.

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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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Loving the lake so much it hurts: why we need a whole-lake plan.

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“Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.” – Mikhail Gorbachev

Here in the Okanagan, we’ve had a summer of news and controversy about lakeshore protection.  One study, covered by the Globe and Mail, reported that when provincial staff randomly checked 35 lakeshore properties on Okanagan Lake, they found 35 violations for structures or other disturbances to the foreshore. In July, a Foreshore Inventory Mapping study by a group of local governments and environmental organizations (OCCP), found that only 46% of Okanagan Lakeshore remains in a natural state. Later that month, in an editorial to the Vancouver Sun, Tom Siddon, former federal fisheries minister, called on the Premier to set a national example and improve protections through the modernization of the Water Act.

I think of this situation as “death by a thousand cuts,” and would like to address it in a way that doesn’t involve a thousand Band-Aids. This is an issue for water quality protection, as much as anything. I had a visitor from China this summer who couldn’t get over the health of our water, protected by the natural areas around the lake. Continue reading →

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