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!!!


Comments : Leave a Comment »

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.


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
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 :)


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Biodiversity, geography, Philosophy

Not just smoke and mirrors

16 04 2010

What is happening in Iceland at the moment is really very cool. I really do find it fascinating to see, in action, the processes that have made the planet what it is today. The Atlantic Ocean has an enormous rift that runs from the southern hemisphere right up into the northern hemisphere, and on to the north of Iceland. The rift is where two tectonic plates are spreading apart, pushing the Americas away from Europe and Africa. Iceland sits right on top of this rift and is the only place where the diverging plates are above sea level.  The volcanic activity is all tied into this rift and the spreading of the plates–which in turn is making Iceland bigger. All pretty neat stuff!

But what is really interesting, in the context of how we are inextricably linked to the earths processes, is the impact it is have on the population surrounding areas. At the moment, the largest impact seems to be on those traveling by plane. Take a look at a recent article on CBC.ca – Ash cloud hindering businesses, travellers. Normally, there are 28,000 daily flights in Europe. Today, because of the airborne ash, only 11,000 are expected to take off. Moreover, share prices in the airlines are dropping and the delays are expected to be costing airlines as much as $16 million dollars a day, each!

While the technology we have developed as a species is very cool in many ways, there are still so many things that we have little to no control over, and that can throw our lives, and economy, into total chaos. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis are all extreme examples of these types of events, but there are so many others that we rarely give thought to. Some examples are the decline in honey bee numbers, receding glaciers that may soon stop irrigating our prairies thought-out the summer, trees and and algae that produce oxygen for us. Time will tell as to which of these are part of the natural ebb-and-flow and which are directly caused by us, but they are all touch points where we are directly linked to the nature of the world around us.

Update - I just found this video. It tells the Iceland story really well. enjoy.


Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : geography, Philosophy

“Oh no, not another photography blog!!”

14 12 2008


That was pretty much my reaction when I first thought of doing a blog to accompany my photographic website. But as I continued to develop my photography, from all aspects of the discipline, I felt I did have something to say. And so, say it I will! That’s what blogs are for, right? Whether anybody cares or not!

If you are anything like me, you will have the same thoughts running around your brain that get re-hashed over and over again. Just thinking about them does not seem to help move things onto the next stage. Writing, however, has the affect of pulling those over cooked thoughts out of the way so the new shoots can come through. So, expect to see anything from rare to well-done in the maturity of ideas, but hopefully from a large gamut of topics that will be of interest.

So why Life & Landscape? Landscapes seem to be what a lot of photographers do. I know it is often my subject of choice. The first joy of landscape photography is just being there. For me, I just like to stand there and take in a magnificent vista. Sometimes, it can be a deeply emotional experience. Then, I start to think about what makes the scene special. How would I convey this? What aspect can I focus on that would evoke the right feeling? Then, there is the whole thought process around how the camera will see the landscape. How will this lens see this scene? How will the camera record the light? How can I use these things to make a powerful image? No wonder photographers love landscapes. But what is a landscape?

In the realm of Human Geography, one textbook definition of landscape is: “the characteristics of a particular area, especially as created through human activity”. Geography in general studies the relationship of humans and the physical things around them. In this field there are many different schools of thought. Some see humans as being part of nature; others see us as being apart. Some see human culture being determined by our physical surroundings, while others insist our choices are not influenced by physical attributes and are solely self-deterministic. And so our society is formed!

In my photography I am trying to convey this relationship. I will often make an image of a beautiful vista that shows, in one way, how it affects us. But, I also wish to relate the effect we have on the landscape; how we live in the landscape, and how our lives are tied to the landscape in more ways than most of us understand – of Life & Landscape.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : geography, introduction, photography


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.