Collapse Anxiety: It’s Okay to Feel It

I’ve never been so good at the whole relentless optimism thing. So I’ll just come out and admit it: I’m feeling pretty anxious these days. It’s an odd twinge in my gut telling me that—despite the assurances from economists who swear up and down that “these things are cyclical”—that the present situation feels more “cyclone” than “cycle.”

Who among us can honestly keep a smile plastered on when the earth is heaving so mightily underfoot?

Oh, I know, I know, I’m supposed to keep a laser focus on solutions. It’s the only productive response to all this. There’s no shortage of good ideas out there, important goals to work toward, and, thank god, at least one gushing firehose of hope to sip from.

But can I propose we ditch the talking points for a moment, and allow ourselves to feel terrified.

Because the current “correction” feels more like a sudden and dramatic contraction, a massive pandemic stitch, the first few nanoseconds of a star going supernova. It’s the sound of a paradigm breaking. Let’s call our associated collective “oh-shit” response what it is, folks: collapse anxiety.

If there’s wiggle room to feel good here, it’s knowing that we’ll emerge on the other side with a much-improved society. It has to get worse before it can get vastly better.  Like the prez says, “we will rebuild” and make something much better, a place of greater understanding, sensitivity, awareness, happiness. A place where we define prosperity based on something other than profit. We’ll get there. But there’s no harm, I’d argue, in a good scream on the way down.

The Future of Influence

Liveblog on “The Future of Influence” talk, by Nate Elliott, Principal analyst, Forrester Research, Northern Voice Conference, Vancouver B.C, February 21 2009

- In my line of work, I hear a lot of people asking me about word-of-mouth marketing. But power of consumer influence been around for centuries: Tupperware, Amway, Avon. They all do billion in sales each year based on consumer to consumer influence.

- Companies ID influential consumers, give them something valuable (content, a product) then they find ways to motivate them to pass that message along.

- Not all influence is created equal. The internet didnt’ invent influence but carries a lot of power. New influencer: People active in social media. Motivations? To share their thoughts and opinions.  Classic influentials: Internet users who are the first person others come to for recommendations. Most of the latter group only influentials in a single product category. Former group has a broader base. “They know quite a lot but they talk more as well.”

- New influentials exert active influence by proactively giving advice, classics are instead “go to” people. “If we didn’t ask them for advice there is very limited chance they wil give it.”

- New influentials want people to hear them. Why? A genuine sense of altruism, a desire to be famous. Even if new influencers are complete morons it wont matter because other people believe them.

- How do you change nature of consumer influence? Number of new influencers is only going to grow. Based on population of online Canadians ages 18-25:

• Nearly half (69 percent) are consuming social media; reading blogs, comments.
• Some 67 percent are joiners, who join social networks.
• Just 28 percent are actual creators
• While 27 percent are “critics.”

- Classic influence is going to remain stagnant.

- People are going to start getting overwhelmed by influence. Not only is there a lot of info out there about products and services, but the information is getting richer. Cites tripadvisor.com. Used to ask guests for one review. Now they ask for four different reviews: one about quality of service, location etc. The advice is now a lot richer.  I can see photos of the rooms taken by guests w/stuff spread about.

- New Infuentials not growing leaps and bounds; there are not enough centralized sources of advice. Consumers don’t know how to I.D. the advice that is relevant to them.

- 4,000 reviews on an amazon listing are more annyoing than just two. How do I find out what an “average’ reader thinks of this book? Too many fan reviews. It doesn’t matter to me what honeymooners or backpackers think of my hotel. I want to know what other business people thought about it.

- Needed: Spread of reviewer profiles. Burpee Seeds sells seeds online, important that they have reviewer profiles. I need to know how that seed has worked for people like me. Has the person been gardening for one year or 20? What state do they live in, etc?

- Needed: “Integration of social graph.” To see what the people I know and trust every day think. The first few reviews on a site should be from people in my network, ie. my top facebook friends. FB tried this and there was a user uproar. Better implementations in the future will work very well. People are going to need that to sort through the relevance.

- Implement basic user profiles

- Recognize and reward the best contributors by engaging with them.

- Sites help you find the most relevant advice.

- Consumers, give sites a chance to prove they are trustworthy you can share your opinions/profiles with them seamlessly.

Talk finished. 11:27

Rees’s Thesis

What’s the best way to stump one of the greatest minds of the global sustainability movement? Kidnap him and take him to Wal-Mart. That’s what I did last November, when I took Bill Rees—the University of British Columbia professor who coined the term “ecological footprint”–into the belly of the consumer beast. I escorted him into big-box hell, gave him $50 cash, and asked him to shop.

It was a fascinating experiment, because it revealed that the professor is in one sense, just like the rest of us. But in many other senses, he is not. Rees is an intellectual rock-star, wandering alone in a world of Blue Light Specials, and his cart contains peer-reviewed science proving that everthing we have built our dreams around is leading us to “a collapse from which there will be no recovery.” Thank you for shopping. Have a nice day!

Check out my feature profile of Rees, in the March 09 edition of Vancouver magazine:

Web version, from vanmag.com:  Rees’s Thesis.

1.6 MB .PDF version of magazine layout:  Rees’s Thesis.

High Time for High-Speed Rail

If you believe the soothsayers at The Department of Energy, by about 2020 or so, America’s transportation sector will reach a dubious milestone. At that point it will be kicking out around two billion metric tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide per year.

Or not. There is another option, and President Obama again reaffirmed his support for it today at a town-hall meeting in Fort Meyers, Florida: Electrified high-speed rail, also known as HSR.

“Transportation is not just fixing our old transportation systems,” the president said. “It is also imagining new transportation systems. I would like to see high-speed rail, where it can be constructed.”

The president first pledged his support for HSR in his transportation plan, released a year ago on the campaign trail. “Providing passengers with safe high-speed rail will have significant environmental and metropolitan planning advantages and help diversify our nation’s transportation infrastructure,” he wrote.

They figured that out a long time ago in France, Germany, Spain, and Japan, and many other places, but in this country, there has always been something uncomfortably socialist about the idea. The official excuse was usually that America has too much geography without enough density.

It was more likely, though, that HSR didn’t have a voice inside the beltway, or a sympathetic ear in the White House. With the exception of Amtrak’s troubled Acela Express, for decades the country has shunted the concept onto the national passing track. The notion of comfortable and efficient 200 MPH+ Zephyrs and Flyers has proven a fringe crusade for a handful of academics and visionaries. You’d have about as much luck pitching a National Dirigible Fleet.

At least, until recently. The same day Obama swept to power, California voters passed Proposition 1a, which will establish a 220-mile-per-hour HSR system between Sacramento and San Diego. The state says the network, which it expects will be powered by renewable electricity, will reduce its dependence on foreign oil by more than 12 million barrels per year while heading off the annual release of 5.8 million metric tonnes of CO2.

Meanwhile, Amtrak ridership in the last federal fiscal year increased to 28.7 million, an 11 percent gain over 2007 — marking the sixth straight year of increases and the highest ridership since congress forged the company in 1971. Last fall, President Bush signed a bill that gave the railroad nearly $13 billion in new funding. The legislation encourages development of HSR corridors, and contains $2B in grants for states to establish or enhance service between cities.

There are other encouraging signs that HSR is inching closer to reality in the United States.

“Over the past few months, I have been hearing so much about it — like, ‘We have to do this’ — from places we haven’t heard it from before,” says Richard Harnish, director of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Association — a nonprofit that has long worked to knit the region’s cities together with welded steel.

“There are people coming into the conversation who have a lot more oomph behind them, private executives who are tired of taking their pants off to get on an airplane.”

High speed rail is more than just an smart next move that could enhance continental mobility and American competitiveness. It taps into bigger themes: Within a matter of years, petroleum-based travel is expected to become so expensive that only the most affluent members of society will be able to take advantage of it. Americans are entitled to comfortable and efficient continental mobility, with dignity, and they know it.

How might this nation fund such a system? Pulling out of Iraq would help. You could also put a price on carbon, and funnel the revenues into a green infrastructure fund. There are obviously no quick fixes, here — but ever-wider highways and sprawl are not answers.

“We have crossed the tipping point,” says Harnish. “The question is, are we going to continue to dig the hole we are in, or do something to get out of it? Bailing out GM… that is really the wrong approach. We have to start figuring out how to convert our trips to trains and bicycles.”

What might slow HSR? In the early 1990s, Southwest Airlines hired lobbyists to kill a proposed HSR project in Texas. Politically, there’s no way that company, or any other airline, could get away with that today — though short-haul air routes will be impacted the most.

Taiwan’s recently-completed HSR system, while enjoying spectacular growth, is presently strangling domestic carriers: Most air routes between Taipei City and the island’s western cities have been discontinued. The trains are simply easier and more comfortable that the planes, for about the same fare.

It’s inevitable that America will decarbonize its energy sector. But it’s vital that the country begin double-tracking the task by planning an efficient, low-carbon interstate transportation network. The proven technology exists. And we have the leadership to make Interstate 2.0 happen. Let’s do so.

First published on The Huffington Post, February  12 2009.

A Laptop and a Hammer

Blue Planet Green Living, a greener-living site based over in Iowa,  is presently running the transcript of a long-ish two-part interview conducted with me a couple weeks ago. The discussion covers the recession, President Obama, green building, Canada’s tar sands, transformational change, the challenges of living both rural and responsibly, and yes, everyone’s favorite topic, the mixed blessing of artificial turf soccer fields. Check it out.

Bowen Queen ferry photo by Chris Corrigan.

Grow Your Own Bread!

Making homemade bread has taken on a whole new meaning.

Brock McLeod and Heather Walker will teach you how to start your own wheat field. Even if you live in the heart of the city.

“We want to see a reintroduction of people growing grains for themselves in their backyards,” says McLeod who, together with Walker, has created Island Grains, a new participatory farming project on Vancouver Island.

“If we can start growing wheat locally, if there is enough demand for it, well, that could really help revise the food system.”

The idea is simple: Hand over $65, and McLeod and Walker will lease you a 200-square-foot slice of Makaria Farm, their 10-acre organic spread near the town of Duncan, in the fertile Cowichan Valley. They’ll also give you a grain seed of your choice, seminars with guest experts, and basic infrastructure support, including irrigation and tools. (“Yes, we have a scythe!” notes the website.)

You’ll attend a few guest-expert seminars, plant your crop, then show up for at least three subsequent days — two or more to tend (weed) your plot, and one to harvest and thresh, using a low-tech plywood threshing box and a standard household fan to separate the wheat from the chaff. You’ll leave the program, and your plot, with your own grains — which you can mill into flour as needed at home in your blender or food processor.

That includes your own back yard, which McLeod says offers more potential than you might imagine. Quoting tables provided in Gene Logsdon’s book, Small Scale Grain Raising, McLeod explains that 1,100 square feet — a 10 foot by 109 foot plantation — could produce about 60 pounds of wheat.

“You can probably get about two loaves of bread per pound,” he says, “so that would be up to 120 loaves of bread per harvest.”

That’s two loaves per week for a year. Out of what might presently be a lawn.

“It is a brilliant idea,” says Dan Jason, a longtime food activist and owner of Salt Spring Seeds, who will be supplying the project with red fife wheat, barley and other grain varieties. “It is neat way to introduce people to the whole concept of grain-raising without a lot of land.”

The area’s regional agrologist agrees that small-scale grains make a lot of sense. “It sounds like a really good idea, especially for people to get together and learn from each other,” says Wayne Haddow, who works for the British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture and Lands.

“We have a lot of under-utilized land in smaller lots on Vancouver Island, and grains do store very well,” Haddow adds. “The opportunity is there.”

McLeod and Walker certainly hope so, too. After growing a successful trial crop of red fife and barley last summer — they threshed it by stuffing a pillowcase and hitting it with a shoe — they’re opening their gates to 50 would-be micro-farmers and advisors in the coming season. (“We’re not the experts,” McLeod stresses, “but we’re bringing in the experts.”)

After launching their website on Boxing Day, the couple sold out all 50 of this season’s memberships before the end of January. They are maintaining a wait list.

The couple have come a long way in just a few years.

Two years ago, McLeod, 29, and Walker, 28, were living in a rented Victoria condo and working nice, stable — albeit boring — civil service jobs. Life was good: They ate out a fair bit, enjoyed the city. “But we weren’t really happy,” recalls McLeod.

So one day McLeod said the words that many of us say when we dream of a better, simpler life. “Let’s get a farm.”

The couple took out a mortgage, and in June 2007 bought Makaria. As they figured out what worked and what didn’t, McLeod came across Logsdon’s book.

It proved an epiphany.

“I’d always imagined that growing grains requires acres and acres of prairie just to make it worth your while,” says McLeod. “But Logsdon shows that just 1/40th of an acre — the amount of space taken up by a single-car garage, is enough space to grow the wheat you need to enjoy a loaf of bread every week for a year.”

They cooked up the idea for Island Grains after listening to the Deconstructing Dinner podcast hosted in part by The Tyee. That program documented the Creston Grain CSA Pilot Project, a community supported agriculture program in British Columbia’s southern interior region that last year attracted international attention.

“We figured, if it is doable, and there’s this much interest,” says McLeod, who grew up on an organic farm, “then we would like to do it here and invite other people to join us.”

Their timing proved perfect. Don Jason reports that his customers have been asking for grain seeds in increasing numbers. “Since about October I have been getting so many orders for barley and wheat and spelt; it is phenomenal, every second order is asking for grain.”

“If you do something inspiring,” says Matt Lowe, cofounder of the Creston Grain CSA project, “it creates a chain reaction. I’m glad to hear that what is happening on the island is inspired by what we are doing.”

Originally published in The Tyee on February 11, 2009.

You’ll also have enough know-how to start your own micro-farm the following season anywhere you have soil and sun.

975 Green-Collar Layoffs Hit B.C.

British Columbia is about to lose 975 green collar jobs for the next eight weeks— and potentially longer. That’s because the only two industrial-scale Forest Stewardship Council sawmills in British Columbia—the same mills that sliced up the framing lumber for my Eco-Shed (see below)—are about to fall silent.

Tembec, the company in question, is shutting down its Elko and Canal Flats sawmills for two months as of early next week. When you factor in a third plant that will also spool down for the duration, 975 employees will be out of work.

The fact is, you don’t have to be a solar-panel installer to have a green-collar job. These mill workers were  processing lumber from just about the only industrial forestlands in all of British Columbia that are truly managed sustainably. The vast majority of the rest are clear-cuts—the standard-issue take-no-prisoners logging strategy that has, over decades, devastated thousands of square miles of ecosystem in this province.

Here’s a snippet from Almost Green that explains why FSC lumber is so important:

In a nutshell, the FSC tree logo does for lumber what the Energy Star label does for appliances and windows—it lets you know you’ve made the greener choice. An FSC stamp guarantees that the wood adheres to a set of ten principles of forest stewardship, including a set of kinder, gentler harvesting practices. FSC-certified foresters work selectively—leaving tracts of trees intact—and pay close attention to issues such as erosion, wildlife habitat, streams, and lakes. The program was set up to protect biodiversity long before greenhouse gas emissions really hit the radar screen, but it certainly advances carbon-conservative practices along the way.

The shutdowns shouldn’t surprise anyone, really: As I note in my book, I only managed to get my hands on the ultra-rare Tembec eco-studs by pure fluke. (It pretty much fell off the back of a truck.) Tembec has shipped almost every stick of the dimensional lumber produced at Elko and Canal flats exclusively into the States—in railcar quantities, and likely to big-box home-improvement chains—and people just aren’t building much of anything down that way these days.

The company has failed spectacularly to market its responsibly harvested lumber here in B.C.—the place where Tembec’s sustainably managed forests grow, the place where the logs are cut up, and the place where the green-collar workers have been punching the clock and making it all work. As I document in the book, none of the local Home Depots and lumber yards I called had even heard of the stuff. Consumers can’t ask for FSC lumber if they don’t even know it’s an option.

Now, it isn’t just the company’s product that is heading south this week, it’s their business, too. A damn shame. Does anyone else see a lesson here?

Combatting CO-Tuneout

Here’s my latest mini-essay on The Huffington Post, “Combatting CO-Tuneout“…

Do you know how much carbon that quick Google search just kicked up? Or the atmospheric price of that orange juice?

Me neither. In fact — even though I theoretically stay on top of this stuff for a living — I don’t care.

Evidently I’m an odd man out, though. It seems like every other week, another one of these “did you know” carbon-audit nuggets sweeps through the blogosphere. Unburdened by context, propelled and perpetuated via retweet and the Facebook share button, we read them and pass them along for the same reason that we like to pause to look at car wrecks; morbid pleasure.

These eco-snippets do little except underscore that we need to reinvent even the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Which explains why they generally lead to one of two reactions amongst those who receive them, neither of which are particularly productive.

The first response is temporary paralysis (“Damn, even YouTube is killing us!?”). The second is perhaps more dangerous: Apathy, which takes the form of a creeping climate-change ennui that I call “CO-Tuneout” — a mashup of “CO2″ and “tune-out.”

It’s the eye-roll reflex. “Oh, God, I’m so sick of hearing about carbon,” you might be muttering to yourself. “Can we please talk about something else?”

We can. And I have a few suggestions: How about values? Maybe ingenuity, and collaboration, and volunteerism? Maybe we can start planning a food garden for this year — where, I assure you, the low-hanging fruit tastes far sweeter than a defrosted can of Five Alive.

That said, some numbers are important to keep in the back of your mind: The mileage of your car is a useful one. And let’s not forget 350, perhaps the most important sum of them all.

But let’s stop rehashing disassociated noise that adds about as much value to the climate conversation as Tyra Banks.

We’ve already changed our leadership — and it was a long time coming. Now let’s change our attitudes to match the task that lies ahead. It’s crunch time, folks. Let’s stop seeing baggage in everything around us, and instead focus attention where it really matters: The big picture.

Orange juice photo by BettyBL.

Ready for Rurbanism?

We know that low-density suburban development is bad news for the atmosphere, for community, for taxpayers, and lots of other things. As I note in my book, Almost Green, I don’t think we’re  quite a suburb over here on Bowen Island, though we have some suburban housing forms and neighborhoods, including mine. But thanks to an outdated community plan and land use bylaw—documents designed to preserve and protect rural character, but which have in fact have set us down a path of vehicle dependence and unaffordability–we’re heading more that way all the time.

There’s been a lot of excellent work done on the “rural-urban interface.” I think that description fits this place nicely; we have our farms and wildlife, but the city is very close indeed. Last year’s Snug Cove Master Plan makes the case that we should focus our growth in our village as a way to preserve green open spaces for recreation, ecological health, and carbon sinks.

A commenter on another blog posting on this site drew my attention to the District of Sechelt, her  hometown, located on B.C.’s famous Sunshine Coast. She characterizes Sechelt as a prime example of bad community choices:

It used to have a unique character and local products — now it is utterly swamped in big box stores, cineplexes, trinket kiosks and national franchises. I still try to appreciate it but it is so different and less than what it was… People want to enjoy an authentically local experience when they visit. Let’s see how we can achieve that while still providing the convenience of essential and necessary services on-island.

This is absolutely what we need to work toward. Since I haven’t been up that way in a while, out of curiosity I made a few calls to friends in the B.C. planning profession. “Problematic development pattern and terrible town councils made a lot of bad decisions,” explained one. The good news is that the district recently created a comprehensive Community Vision Plan that looks to be the key reference for an upcoming Official Community Plan review.

Here’s one neat bit, describing mixed-use neighborhoods known as the “Rurban Hamlet.” (I haven’t come across the term before — can anyone share its history?) Here’s what the plan says about it:

A rurban hamlet is density neutral and arranges the units in a mixed building type cluster … on only a small portion of the overall site.  For example, on a 10 acre site with an allowable density of six units per acre, or 60 units overall, it can locate all 60 units on four to six acres, saving or conserving six to four acres, respectively, in contiguous open space.  All with conventional building types using detached, attached and multiplex homes.

The section inclues several sketches to illustrate rurban hamlets, including this one.

Included in the above is “multiplex housing (single-entry with three to five units, a shared front porch and shared garage); single-family detached bungalows, including one with an attached in-law suite; attached cottages; a shared garage; and a studio/potting building. Each unit has a private yard that connects to shared open space.”

For those not still turning up their nose at the idea of four-storey apartments in the cove, perhaps a rurban hamlet like this might be more palatable? Scary thought for the 10-acre brigade: The houses are very close together. Five of them are — shudder — even in the same building!

Why I Say Yes to Turf

UPDATED: Readers of this blog may not all be familiar with a controversy that has swept my community in recent months. A plan is on the table to build a new artificial-turf sports field on the grounds of our community school. The proposal has sharply divided Bowen Island. For background, see the Bowen Island Municipality web site , and also the Vancouver magazine feature [.PDF File, 1MB] that I wrote about the project. Recently, someone asked on a public forum why someone who has so publicly identified himself as “green” is  supporting the project. I wrote this post in response.

Many say they oppose the proposed artificial-turf field because of its perceived health risks, or its cost, or its relatively limited life expectancy, or its proposed location in a schoolyard where trees now stand, or the ecological burdens associated with plastic, its primary constituent material.

A side of me wonders, though, if these concerns are in fact mere supporting bullet points on a larger slide. To many of these opponents, I suspect the field represents something bigger than all of these complaints put together: It is a high-profile symbolic attack on the community’s treasured ruralism. It is a nuclear bomb in freefall with “urbanism” painted on the nose cone.

I haven’t been here long—only a few years—but it’s been long enough to come to love this place and everything that makes it what it is: The “dog of the year” float in the Bowfest parade each August. The used clothing, toy, and sports-gear fundraisers that roll a year’s worth of craigslist haggling into single day or weekend event. The volunteers at our wonderful library who rubber-stamp ink butterflies onto my kids’ hands. The rhubarb Pat sells from a wheelbarrow in front of the building center. The metalworker who spot-welded my stainless-steel lunchbox set back together, for $5 (thanks again, Peter). The self-serve fresh eggs in the fridge at Shady Acres Farm. The annual salmon release at the hatchery. The apple festival. And on and on. These are people and experiences and relationships and transactions that you won’t likely find in any of our region’s tract-home and strip-mall hinterlands, where the nights echo with car alarms instead of owls. These experiences emerge from the mutual trust, respect, and accountability that you find in a smaller, more intimate community. They are what urban planners are working desperately to replicate in other places.

Bowen Island is a respite from the world across the channel that seems increasingly ruled by liability, populated with sterile franchises and canned experiences, and suffused with the kind of soul-draining manufactured authenticity that you order from a Restoration Hardware website. Our little touches—our commitment to self-sufficiency, volunteerism, and our admiration for small-town quirk—remind us what is real, and what matters. These things constitute the very core of our identity. They are why all of us call this place home.

But these qualities do not in my mind excuse us from our responsibility to do what we can to help avert the single greatest challenge that has ever faced humanity. Our rurality does not give us a “hall pass” to opt out of responding to a global emergency that I promise you will touch each one of our lives in the coming years.

I’m sorry if it seems like I keep sounding an alarm, but that’s what you’re supposed to do in an emergency. “When you talk to the people at the sharp end of the climate business, scientists and policy-makers alike,” writes Gwynne Dyer in the introduction to his new book, “there is an air of suppressed panic in many of the conversations.” It’s so far a mostly-invisible threat, but it’s right here in plain sight. Climate change is going to hit us in ways we can’t even yet imagine right here on our island—it’s going to force us into moral dilemmas for which there are no winners, only wrenching compromises.

As a community, we famously band together in times of crisis. We open our wallets wide when one of the school custodians is battling cancer, or when the seniors’ housing complex needs a new plumbing system, or when one of our family’s children suffers severe burns and needs special care. Many of us volunteer for the fire department, and drop the fork mid-bite when the pager sounds. We’re pretty good at responding like this, at taking care of our own. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do.

But I fear we are ignoring a crisis of staggering proportions that will eventually, inevitably reach our shores. We are ignoring it today because we believe that it’s someone else’s fault, or we feel that someone else is working on the problem. We are ignoring it because it doesn’t yet have a familiar face, like our smiling custodian. And perhaps also because we gather that some of the things we could be doing to help fix it don’t neatly jibe with the leafy milieu that we defend so passionately.

As much as I love our rurality and character, to me it is a decidedly mixed blessing. We space ourselves quite far apart in this Eden. In a perfectly honest effort to connect more closely with nature, we tuck our homes deep into the woods. It’s private and peaceful out here. Yet—while some of us do work from home—it also means the vast majority of us remain utterly dependent on often-heavy vehicles, and an even heavier ferry, to travel great distances to shop, work, learn, and play. Those vehicles will realistically not be electrified for many years to come. And so, when you look at the data, and compare it with similar communities, our contribution to the problem—by very dint of our rurality—is enormous. Though I haven’t seen an analysis, I suspect our forestlands do not come close to soaking up all the heat-trapping gases coming out of our tailpipes.

I feel in my heart that we need to own this one. I believe we need to take some responsibility that some of the aspects of our place that we hold dear are, in fact, fanning the flames. We are not “greener” than mainlanders just because we look that color to those peering our way from across the channel. When it comes to the challenge that looms largest overhead, the hue is a tragic illusion. Because in reality, we’re browner.

Let me say here that I’m just as complicit as anyone else here. I like privacy as much as the next person—my forested property is almost an acre. And yes, I drive. But I’ve since arrived at a place in my head where I am ready to take some responsibility for my choices. Most of my friends think I’m a Chicken Little. They’re just not there yet. They tolerate me—they admire my energy and enthusiasm—but they’re interested in other things. That’s fine, I  have other passions, too. I love to eat, for one thing. I love to kayak, to read with the kids, to hang out with my tolerant pals on games night with a bottle of wine, or three.

Some opponents have characterized the turf project as a failure of our collective imagination. If we work at it enough, they argue, we can come up with an alternate solution that is more in keeping with how we do things around here. One of the protest signs that went up last year near the proposed project site seemed to articulate this with the single word “hope.”

So let’s set aside the thousands hundreds of hours of work put in by volunteers and local professionals exploring the options, volunteers and professionals who love this community passionately. And permit me to do some hoping of my own for a moment. My dream for our island is that the more we grow—and the fact of the matter is that we will grow —that we also grow even more “local” and self-reliant along the way. That even with more people, we retain the connectedness that defines us.

I also dream that we will become increasingly resilient to the dramatic changes to our lifestyles that lie ahead. I think we can redefine what “rural” means, by owning the idea as much through the strength of our relationships as our rambling country lanes and 10-acre lots each dotted with a single-family home. The new information we now have about the mess we are all in compels us to revisit many of the patterns and entitlements that we hold sacred, things that we see as our “right.”

It also compels us to prepare and adapt, and we are already starting this by building a desperately-needed new fire station. This is critical infrastructure, as important as setting aside spaces to grow much of our own food, and putting in place systems to harvest potable rainwater from our rooftops. Given the sheer scale of this global crisis, and the speed at which it approaches us, we need to think more broadly about infrastructure to include a broad range of community amenities here on the island.

It’s understandable that many of us would feel affronted and offended by a turf field. Yes, you might find one in the city, or in a suburb. But it urbanization? No. God help us if we someday grow big enough to attract a fast-food outlet. New amenities represent change, and they are an admission that we are growing, and that perhaps new people are coming who want to do different things, and who don’t wish to travel to the mainland on manic errand-filled days because they’re stressful and hard on families. But in my mind these facilities—like the proposed field—and the people that will use them are not the thin edge of the wedge, they are not the beginning of the end. Rather, they are individual pieces that together will create a genuine new kind of complete community , one that sends less carbon into the atmosphere because we will have almost everything we need right here and wont need to turn a key in an ignition to reach.

We need to become more than a woodsy outpost in Howe Sound, where we get to enjoy the deer and herons, but still take regular spacewalks to the jobs and activities on the mainland. It is not only possible, it is inevitable. Not only is it “the right thing to do,” but as our car-and-ferry habit gets more and more expensive, as our food gets more and more expensive, it will also be the only thing to do.

We fancy ourselves as rugged and self-reliant because we have woodstoves, chainsaws, winches, and generators. But we’re kidding ourselves. True self-sufficiency means that we have a complete community, that we have a genuinely broad range of services on the island to support our diverse and growing population. It means we have more opportunities to stay, play, learn, shop, and age “in place.” It means affordable housing. It means low-energy buildings. It means investments in infrastructure that allow us to thrive.

I will probably never play on the artificial turf field; I’m not a team sports kind of guy, and my kids haven’t shown much interest either, despite my best efforts. And for what it’s worth, I have a very complicated relationship with plastic, something I’ve written about . But I also acknowledge that our lives are surrounded by the stuff. I work out on a petroleum-based surface twice a week at our island’s Tae Kwon Do studio. I am touching it to write this story. I know all about the seabirds with bellies full of Bic lighters .

But when I think about the investments that I feel we need to start putting in place to serve our community into the coming years, to create an atmosphere of responsible self-reliance, the benefits of the proposed illuminated turf field in my mind far outweigh its aesthetic, financial, and ecological costs.

Let’s continue to build on our strengths: our couples, our singles, our seniors, our families, our youth, our volunteers. And let’s stop excusing ourselves from a growing moral obligation because we’re a “different”  place blessed with an unique character. We have the same obligation to get off our asses and do something about this crisis as anyone else. The more pieces we put in place today—the richer the variety of offerings and opportunities we make available to our citizens—even if they aren’t perfect, even if some of them don’t align with our ideas of what we’re supposed to be “all about,” the stronger and more resilient we will be as we enter the coming storms.

Feb 9 Update: On January 26, Bowen Island Municipal Council voted four to three to proceed with the turf project as proposed, including roughed-in wiring and conduit for future lighting. The resolution comes with subjects concerning cost, but given the economic climate–contractors are, all of a sudden, desperate for projects–it seems likely that the turf field will actually be built. In the wake of the decision, a number of the project’s opponents have formed a fledgling grassroots organization called Rural Green. Its members “seek to live responsibly in a way that retains [their] community spirit and the natural rural lifestyle [they] cherish. “