Inland Rainforest and Wildlife Habitat

8 07 2011

As many of you know, one of my favorite areas to go hiking is the Rogers Pass area in Glacier National Park. The Selkirk Mountains run almost north–south through the park and it is a wonderland of mountain peaks, glaciers, and alpine meadows. Aside from being an amazingly majestic place scenery wise, it is also an important area for wildlife habitat. Grizzly and black bears, mountain caribou, mountain goats,  moose, cougar, and elk all call Glacier National Park home. Many of these animals naturally cover a huge area over the course of a year they are unaware of the arbitrary park boundaries established by humans. It has often been argued that small islands of park are not effective in maintaining populations of larger migratory animals, or complete ecosystems, and it would be preferable for parks to connect to form large contiguous corridors.

The Valhalla Wilderness Society is proposing  the Selkirk Mountain Caribou Park to create an extended wildlife corridor and to protect unique habitat. The park would extend from the southern boarder of Glacier National Park down into the Kootenays and connect with Bugaboo Provincial Park and Goat Range Provincial Park. According the the society, the park would add over 27,000 hectares of wilderness connected to Glacier National Park. The park would not only provide much increased protected habitat for the endangered mountain caribou, it would also include an area of rare temperate rainforrest around the Incomappleux River. The forest is largely unprotected at the moment and is being actively logged in many areas.

The Incomappleux is a unique area of inland temperate rainforest. According to the Valhalla Wilderness Society, the area is home to 2,000 year-old trees , newly discovered species of lichen, and abundant biodiversity.  A Kelowna resident, Riel Marquardt, recently release a documentary on the Incomappleux area and it is well worth viewing to understand of why this area is so amazing. Riel’s movie can be viewed on-line at Culture Unplugged or it can be rented from Leo’s Video here in Kelowna.

So, what can you do to help save this area? Well, there is a bunch of stuff you can do.

  • Get educated about the area.
  • Read about the rainforest on the Valhalla Wilderness Societies website.
  • Watch Riel’s video on Culture Unplugged.
  • Like the Incomappleux on facebook.
  • Sign the petition supporting the formation of the park (contact me directly to get a copy).
  • Contact your MLA and tell them why this is so important.

Lets make our voices heard!!!


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Categories : Activism, Environment, geography, Habitat Destruction, Mountains

Sustainable by Nature

18 11 2010

Below is a copy of a short address I gave at the Building Sustainable Communities conference held by the Fresh Outlook Foundation here in Kelowna. Following the address there was a 6 minute slide presentation of my photography. I have included the video at the bottom of this post. I hope you enjoy it. Dont forget to use full screen mode and turn up the volume!

The American writer and activist Muriel Rukeyser wrote: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” While the physicists in the audience may not entirely agree with this statement, I think it rings true for at least how we perceive the world around us. That is to say, that the narrative of our society influences how we perceive our universe. The value that we place on our planet comes from stories created by us, and from the generations before us. So when we consider Sustainable Communities, it is these narratives that we need to review.

Because of my limited time, I ask to be forgiven for the broad and blunt generalizations I am about to make. These are that we live in a society whose stories are compelled by a model of economics that is outdated and broken. A model that measures prosperity only by the amount that we consume and does not consider what we destroy. A model that does not value anything it does not know how to measure in dollars.

You see, the stories from our European past tell us that this planet is an enormous ball of inexhaustible resources and that continual growth is good for everyone. These stories often ignore the very processes and resources that keep us alive. Things like the natural purification of water; the pollination of plants by insects; plant life that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen so we can breathe; the decomposition of wastes by insects and fungi; the list goes on.

These processes are referred to as Ecosystem Services—stuff nature does for us, for free. Of course, some have tried to put a dollar value on these services and an average figure is approximately $38 Trillion dollars annually. That is, if we had to manually pollinate the fruit trees, replenish the oxygen, break down our wastes, it would cost us $38 Trillion dollars every year. Clearly, this is not a viable option.

But knowing these things is not enough. History is filled with examples where information was available, but the dominant culture would not accept it. Galileo comes to mind. That is why cultural change, changing our narrative, is possibly as important as the science itself.

As a photographer and a student of geography, I realized there was a role I could play in re-telling the narrative. The slide show you are about to see documents some of the amazing things that nature does for us. But, as nature does so well, the intricacies are hidden in the simplicity of the scene. Some of the locations are exotic, like the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains; the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon; the coastal areas of the Olympic Peninsula and Long Beach. Visiting these places has always filled me with awe and wonder at their beauty, but now I add to that wonder the amazing things these landscapes do for us. Some of the locations are not so exotic; indeed, some of the images are from my own back yard. Thankfully, the gifts of nature surround us everywhere.

While I hope you enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the images, I want you to think about how these places make life possible. I have added some text to each image to help with this, but it is not the whole story. Please consider: “to keep these ecosystems intact, what can I do without?” And ask yourself “how does this fit into the narrative of my world?” I hope that these images will also renew in you a feeling of wonder for the amazing place that is planet Earth.

I would like to leave you with one last thought:    The planet is, by nature, sustainable.

Thank you.


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Categories : Activism, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Consumption, Environment, GDP, geography, Habitat Destruction, kelowna, Mountains, okanagan, Philosophy, photography, Politics, Video

Biology and Philosophy – the makings of a great day

4 10 2010

I am really starting to enjoy my Tuesdays. It gets me looking at life from two very different angles. As some of you already know, I have returned to school full time to pursue an undergraduate degree in Geography with a minor in Environmental Studies. One reason for doing this is to understand the issues facing our planet, and species, on an intellectual level as well as an emotional one. So what does this have to do with Tuesdays? I have a biology class in the mornings and a philosophy class in the afternoon on Tuesdays.

The biology class is first year level where we talk about the building blocks of life. The different kinds of cells–prokaryotic and eukaryotic–and all the stuff that goes into them. We talk about water molecules and hydrogen bonds. DNA, peptides, and amino acids. It is a great way to re-awaken a wonder for life in general and how amazing it is at all levels. A great video we recently watched was this YouTube clip of an amoeba digesting a single celled protist. If you watch on the right-hand side, you can see the amoeba wrapping its pseudopodia around the protist. The amoeba then excretes a digestive enzyme to break down the protist. The crazy thing is that you then see the protist wriggling around, trying to escape. This is a single celled organism we are watching having what equates to a flight response. Interesting!?

Tuesday afternoon is a second year philosophy class called Knowledge and Reality. If you are a purist, that would be Epistemology and Metaphysics. To para-phrase, it asks what do we know about reality and how do we know that we know it? Currently, we are reviewing the meditations of Rene Descartes. He’s the guy that wrote “I think therefore I am”. This is around the question “how do I know I exist?” He argues that the very fact that I am having these thoughts must mean that I exist. If I have these thoughts, how can I not exist? It all seems self evident, but what Descartes was trying to do was to take everything back to basics and see what kind of foundation our knowledge was based on. He also asks how we can trust our senses and how do we know that the things we see really exist. Again, this all may seem a bit self evident, but think The Matrix. The work of Descartes has been credited, in part, for the story-line of the film.

It all make you go hmmm, eh? How do we know that protists and amoeba are not thinking things? How do we know that we are not the equivalent of an amoeba inside some larger organism? How did all of this marvel and intricacy come about? Cool stuff to contemplate. One thing it really does for me it to renew my excitement about life. It truly is an amazing and precious thing.

If this all seems a bit on the heavy side I’ll end this post with a clip of one of my favorite philosophical statements–that no matter how much you think, there is often alcohol involved :)


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Categories : Biodiversity, geography, Philosophy

No meteors, plenty of stars – a night of photography

13 08 2010
Photo of Night Sky

Night Sky above Kelowna

I need my eight hours of sleep each day. So, when my brother-in-law Simon invited me on a night-photography trip starting at 1am, I had mixed emotions. Those emotions lasted about 5 seconds and I said yes. Simon arrived at my home just before 1am and we drove up to the Myra Canyon trestles. The trestles are the site of an old railway that wound its way through the hills above Kelowna. There are some great vantage points looking down onto the lights of the city, as well as the ability to hide from the same light pollution and get a good look at the night sky. Wednesday night was also reported to be a peak time for the meteor shower that occurs every August  in this part of the world.

We arrived at the parking lot, donned our backpacks, and headed off down the old rail bed into the moon-less night. It really is amazing how much light a city of 100,000 people radiates. We  walked confidently down the trail and over the trestles with no need for a flashlight.

Night photography has always been a bit on an enigma for me. Many of the rules of exposure go out the window and everything behaves differently. I first tried to capture the night sky using film years ago. Having to wait a week to get my film back from processing really made it a trial and error endeavor. Digital has certainly changed that, however, it is still not without its challenges. Mainly from noise introduced by the long exposures. But the biggest challenge is common to both mediums and that is the issue of focus. How do you focus on something when it’s dark outside?!! There are these little pin pricks of light in the sky, that are quite dim in the viewfinder, and I am supposed to focus on that?! The problem is especially bad when I am using a wide angle lens as the dots of light are even smaller.

So, here is what I do. First thing is to switch to manual focus.  Look at your composition and find some object that is relatively big in the viewfinder and somewhat distant. This is going to be your infinity focus point. Zoom in on this object ( if you use a zoom) and place it in the middle of your frame. Then, rock the focus ring back and forth, narrowing in on what you think is sharp. Be careful not to activate the light meter, as the display in the viewfinder will affect your night vision. Once you think the subject is in focus, recompose the image and shoot. Depth of field will give you some wriggle room here, so choose your focal length and aperture thoughtfully.

For the image at the top of the page I used a 20mm focal length and was at ISO 400. Exposure was f 5.0 for 22.5 minutes.  The lens is a 12-24mm zoom and so I did not have a lot of extra focal length to play with. I just concentrated on the tree branches in the foreground and the stars behind.

The image below was a little different. I used a 35mm prime lens, still at ISO 400. To focus, I placed my headlamp on the trestle and shone it at the railing about half way in. I could then go back to my camera and manually focus on the illuminated railing. Aperture was f5.0 – enough depth of field for the stars to be sharp. The shutter was open for seven minutes and during this time I walked down the trestle shining my headlamp on the railing on one side. I then walked back, shining the light on the other side. I think it adds a little interest to an otherwise average shot. The lights of Kelowna create the glow on the horizon.

So what about the meteors? They were out but not in the huge numbers promised–at least not to my eyes. Even though several of them streaked across my open shutter, they were simply not bright enough to show up. Was it worth the five hours of sleep deprivation? For sure! The riddle of night photography is a little more understandable! Thanks for getting me out there Simon!

Photo of Night Sky

Myra Canyon trestle at night


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Categories : Creativity, kelowna, photography

Just feeling lucky

3 08 2010

Photo of Bighorn Sheep in the Canadian Rockies.

After returning from a trip to the Rockies I am reflecting on what a lucky person I am. First, I was able to do this trip with my lovely partner Shaunet and our dog Summit. Shaunet’s idea of a good time is sleeping in a tent with me, drinking wine around a campfire at night, and spending the day hiking in the mountains. Like I said, I’m a lucky guy! Summit’s idea of a good time involves sleeping, lying in glacial-fed streams, sleeping, scrambling on rocks, and wondering when we are all going to sleep in that tent-den thing.

I have now been in Canada for twenty years and I am still awe-struck by the beauty of the Canadian Rockies. On this trip we concentrated on a stretch of the Icefields Parkway just north of Lake Louise. As we traveled through this area, and hiked into the alpine, we met tourists from all over the world that have come to marvel at the beauty of this place. It is then I feel really lucky because I live here! Western Canada is simply one of the most stunning places I have been on the planet. OK, I have only been to a few other countries. And, I am sure there are other prettier places in the world. But, for the moment, this is tops for me and I feel really lucky to be here.

I also have to feel lucky for some of the great people I have met recently. One person in particular allowed me to borrow his Nikon 80-400mm VR lens. It is quite a beast which I lugged to every location we went. Some times I was questioning the wisdom of this as it is certainly not a landscape lens. It’s real purpose on this trip is wildlife. Then, we crested an alpine bench in Wallace Pass and in front of us was a herd of Bighorn Sheep. Out came the big lens and it all became worth-while. Then I was just thankful for the amazing wildlife that still inhabits these mountains.

The image above was shot at the short end of the focal range. I have some other images at full zoom, but they will have to wait for another post. As you can imagine, I have a lot of photos to work though. Not sure if I am feeling so lucky about that!


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Categories : Environment, Journey, Mountains, photography, Travel

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