If you were popping around here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) over the past couple of days, you might have remarked to folks that the weather seems a bit weird. We’ve had a volatile week of spring weather, with heavy rain, different kinds of winds, a front of thunderstorms and clear skies.
It is interesting to listen to people talk about the weather. The patterns are different. The air is warmer, but has a bit of a chill on the breeze. The wind is coming from different angles and the trees are moving differently. In fact southerly and westerly winds on our part of the island blow against the trees’ natural leaning direction, and yesterday on a late afternoon walk, we hear a couple fall in the forest. The thunderstorms that passed over Vancouver Island were a clue to the weirdness.
Today, in our complexity inside and out course we taught a module on pattern spotting and working with constraints. Complexity workers know that all patterns in complex situations are held by constraints. Change the constraints and the pattern changes. So weather wise, in the last couple of days we had a strange set of constraints in the upper atmosphere that resulted in a lot of convection, meaning that warm air at the surface was mixing with cold air aloft and that is what drives thunderstorms and other volatility including strange winds.
These aren’t uncommon kinds of atmospheric conditions on the coast, but they are uncommon enough that folks sense that the weather is “weird.” And its gets to the point now where I can tell you that there is a lot of convection in the atmosphere by how many people are confused by the weather pattern. Forecasting weather using a mass perception of how people make meaning of the situation is exactly how we work in complexity.
The weather is indeed strange. a few days ago I made bunch of posts on my blog “private.” I have done this once before, when people I worked with in another country were detained in part because of work we had done together. In that case the ruler of that country is a known autocrat who had survived a coup attempt and was taking it out on his enemies and anyone he thought was organizing against him.
Here in Canada we have entered into a short election campaign and although the parties have not yet released their platforms I have already decided who I am voting for, and it is a party I have never voted for in my life. This is an election between two conservative parties. One, the Conservative Party of Canada, is the legacy of the old Progressive Conservative Party which merged with the populist western-based Reform Party (and lost “progressive” from it’s name) and then lost its most lunatic fringe to the further right People’s Party of Canada. Still, they are led by the populist Pierre Poilievre who is a career political party wonk, who has made his living off of immature name calling (a la the man to the south) and slogans like “Axe the Tax” which sound good when you chant them once or twice and then they start to get boring. Plus they are just covering up terrible policy.
The other conservative party is the Liberal Party of Canada which really hasn’t changed over the past 5 decades or so. They occasionally drift to the left on social policy, and we have just come out of a period of ten years where Justin Trudeau brought a Gen X approach to social policy and swung the party left on those issues. Everyone got tired of him though and after a fall of running on fumes with a hobbled House of Commons, he stepped down at the beginning of the year and made space for a short Liberal leadership campaign. The victor was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He is an economist, a pension fund manager, a banker and a technocrat. His landslide leadership victory (more than 85% of the party members voted for him) instantly moved the Liberal back to their more traditional centre right position. They now have a banker in charge, with a fairly intact social conscience and a lot of experience leading government institutions and economies through rapidly changing crises. He was the BoE chair during Brexit. He knows how to play a bad hand.
One of these two men will be Prime Minister on May 1. Neither of them are true progressives; their campaigns both began with announcement of tax cuts. Carney has been prime minister for less than two weeks during which time he made a trip to Europe to shore up trading support and defence options against the unpredictable chaos coming from our south and then he came home and dropped the writ. Poilievre has continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau (who is long gone), he continues to rail against the consumer carbon tax (which Carney has effectively repealed) and he continues to promote a tax cut for the lowest tax bracket (which Carney also did, although at a lower rate and more tied to a policy decision to replace the carbon tax rebate, ANYWAY…).
Poilievre was standing 25 percentage points ahead in most polls until Carney was chosen as leader of the Liberal Party. He now sits 5 points behind Carney. The progressive conservatives who could never vote for Trudeau’s Liberals seem to have come home to the only conservative party will to occupy the centre of the political spectrum: Mark Carney’s Liberals.
So we have an election, but it is not to be one contested on progressive ideas. It will be one that will elect a party and a prime minister that can best respond to the unprecedented volatility and existential threat of this strange time. That is not the bellicose and sloganeering Conservatives. That party will be the Liberal Party of Canada. There is a lot at stake in this election and a lot of strange political weather happening now. Call it volatility in the upper atmosphere, but it is about to hail some.
A report today from Bowen Island’s marine steward extraordinaire, Adam Taylor:
2025 Herring Spawn started today in Squamish accompanied by Whitesided Dolphins feeding.
Herring spawn in Snug Cove was last observed in the +/- 1960s but you never know when nature decides to return.
Please keep an eye out for enthusiastic seabird or marine mammal activity along Bowen’s shoreline.
Will report back when I hear from folks monitoring Coal Harbour as that’s a bit closer to us.
A sure sign of spring! Slhawt’/Herring spawning season is the first big ocean activity to take place after the winter. So although it is cold and there is an Arctic outflow blowing for another few days, spring is just around the corner.
I did hear reports of about 20 dolphins way up the inlet yesterday. The first thing I thought of was that they were after the herring. The herring population in our inlet has made a remarkable recovery over the past 25 years. Well worth paying attention to.
Bowen Island winter problems: strong winds and cancelled ferries.
It’s a snow day here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. After a couple of weeks of clear warms weather, winter seems to have finally gotten around to giving us a little blast of snow and cold. we’re looking at a week or so of colder than normal temperatures on the back of these squally snow events we’ve been having for the past twelve hours.
After shovelling and salting the driveway, wrapping my water pump in a blanket and checking the heat tape on the pipes, I settled in to watch soccer and catch up on local news. It’s been 24 hours of utter chaos at the continental level, so I turned to The Undercurrent, our local newspaper to see what’s happening.
I realize that had missed this story: “New names chosen for Bowen beaches“:
A pair of Bowen beaches will be receiving new names in the coming months.
The two destinations set to change names are Crayola Beach in the Bluewater neighbourhood and Pebble Beach at Cape Roger Curtis. They’ll be known as Xéla7an and Smí7mant Áyalhkw respectively going forward, drawing their new names from the Squamish language. The initiative is a result of a Bowen Island Parks Plan recommendation for collaboration with Squamish Nation, and a means to clear up some practical issues with the current names…
Aaron Williams, a language specialist with Squamish Nation, provided the guidance for the new names. Joined by his mother and cousin, the three came to Bowen last fall and met with manager of environment and parks planning Carla Skuce to explore the beaches in question.
This is fantastic. It follows on the heels of a ceremony held in 2020 to officially add “Nexwlelxwm” to the island’s welcome gateway, and I’m thrilled that Aaron and Vanessa came over to do this work. The two names came to Aaron and Vanessa on their visits to the beaches.
The first beach they visited is at Cape Roger Curtis and is known as “Pebble Beach” which confuses it with “Pebbly Beach” located on the opposite side of the island.
“One of the main things we noticed at this beach is that there were lots of little pebbles, it was like somebody went in there and dumped tons and tons of tiny little pebbles, and you could tell they were all rounded from the ocean… that was a very huge indicator for this name,” said Williams as he presented the new names to council last month.
“It was very striking to see that… this indicated this beach was very untouched and unscathed from development, which was very beautiful to see,” added Williams. As a result he felt Smí7mant Áyalhkw – translated to ‘place of pebbles’ – appropriately reflected the setting of the beach, a “reference to the wonderful state and condition that the beach is in.”
My best shot at providing a useful pronunciation of this name is “SMEH-munt EYE-alk.” In Squamish the “7” is a glottal stop and the “lh” sound is pronounced like the “tl” in the word “Atlanta” except a bit softer. The k in “Áyalhkw” is actually underlined, by that character doesn’t show up in my typeface. It’s sounded deep in the throat and the the w indicates that you make the sound with rounded lips. But “SMEH-munt EYE-alk” is a good starting point!
Further north on Bowen’s west side the group visited Crayola Beach, occasionally known as Bluewater Beach. Aaron’s mother Vanessa noticed red markings left by water tides on rock banks and bluffs. This brought forward memories of petroglyphs, a form of communication where messages are created through a technique of marking rocks.
“It was something that really stood out to her, and reminded her of our old way of educating the future through the petroglyphs,” explained Aaron. This led to the name Xéla7an, which means ‘marked/coloured on the cheek/side’.
That name – actually spelt with an underlined X – could be pronounced HEL-ah-un. The “HEL” should be pronounced with a guttural sound like you’re saying “Chutzpah” in Yiddish.
It’s amazing to have these two new names for features on our island. Great work and much appreciation to our Council, Carla, and to Aaron and Vanessa.
When I first moved to Bowen Island back in 2001, there was a very active discussion board of Bowen Island issues called the Bowen Island Phorum. This was a typical late 1990s bulletin board type website. Locals could join and make posts and sometimes the discussions would cascade over four or five pages with replies into the hundreds on especially contentious or important issues to our little community.
Although that place drove me crazy with frustration a lot of the time, and I used to issue earnest warnings about the tone of some of our debate, which, probably seemed like naive handwringing to the untrained eye, nevertheless, it was our place owned by one of our neighbours and supported by advertising from our local businesses, which is the only way that the host could afford the hosting fees.
Most of us knew each other, and there was the occasional Juventus evening at the pub or the Legion when we would get together with name tags showing our Phorum handles just so we could put a face to the bluster.
When Facebook became widely used around 2010 discussion at the Phorum dried up completely. The first Facebook group for Bowen Islanders was a buy and sell group which very quickly turned into discussions about other things. Another one of our neighbours then created a page called “Bowen Island Everything Else” mostly to take the pressure off the buy and sell page. In short order, that became our de facto community Facebook group. As far as I’m aware every small town and neighbourhood has one now.
Once this shift happened conversations at the Phorum shrank down to a handful of participants. Facebook was just too convenient for everyone to use. In the end, this meant that maintaining the Phorum was pointless. There was no reason for local advertisers to spend their money there and the discussions were faster and more modern over on Facebook. At the same time, of course, generational shifts in how we used discussion sites on the web had changed and those of us who began in the 90s were watching the next generation of users connect on the corporate owned social media sites. The Phorum is gone.
In the last few months, there has been a lot of conversation amongst my friends and neighbours about leaving social media but the one thing they say that will keep them on Facebook is the connection to our local community. While most have found it easy to leave the the gushing torrent of nonsense that now floods our Twitter timelines, with Facebook we still have connections to neighbors.
However, here in Canada, Facebook has refused to pay legacy media for publishing their content, something the other social media sites have done the result of this choice by Facebook is that news links cannot be shared in Canada on that platform. And that means that the conversations that happened on Facebook are almost exclusively rumour and opinion.
It’s also tragically clear to me that many people in our community who participate in Facebook use that site as their only interface to the worldwide web. When links are shared, often the discussion shows clearly that people haven’t read the posted article. People share things like weather alerts or emergency Information without understanding what it means or how it affects them. I realized last week that nothing I get from Facebook is unique to that site. Between our local emergency services app, news and updates from our municipality, buying the local newspaper, (yes we still have one) I get everything I need. If I want opinions, there’s a small group of people I often meet at a local coffee shop or at the pub with whom I can share wildly misinformed lies and speculations. As you do.
So it seems easy enough for me to leave. But as I’ve posted my intention to do so, friends have shared with me their worry that if they leave Facebook, where will they get their local news and stay connected to what’s happening in the community?
And this right here is the cost of us all buying the convenience of Facebook at the expense of the hard work of building community. What happens on Facebook is not community. It is an empty calories version of deliberation and belonging. It gives the illusion of connection and conversation while simultaneously acting the same way big box stores do in small towns: by crushing what is local through convenience and lower prices. The community bears the cost.
And now, there may legitimately be fewer ways for people to connect locally There is no social media platform as easy to use or widely distributed as Facebook. Starting a local mastodon instance might bring in 10 or 12 early adopters, which still might make it worthwhile to do. Resurrecting the Phorum seems unlikely and there are no alternatives to Facebook, thank God.
Upon reflection, I realized that most of the local people that bug me on Facebook I don’t know in real life. There are folks I have blocked over the years, and I couldn’t even tell you if they live here now. I don’t hear their opinions, I don’t know who they are in real life, and I realize now that any irritation they have given to me is basically spectral. They are ghosts in my life. If I were to run into them at the coffee shop or the pub, I would probably like them, because most people around here are likable, and funny and strange and when you meet them face-to-face, it doesn’t really matter what small part of them rages against one politician or another from time to time. When they’re helping you out out of a ditch or sharing a beer around a campfire at the beach, you get to see folks for who they really are. Each one different each one annoying in their own way, but, over time, most become likeable, if not downright loveable, familiars.
Losing these connections is what Facebook has done to us. And when those are gone, so too, are the raw materials of community. Those materials help us to build the connections that we need to rely on one another when disasters or emergencies like fires earthquakes or pandemics strike us. They also just make life worth living.
Thursday, for example, I was running some errands when I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. He invited me to walk with him and his dog and so we did, through the forests down to the sea, checking out some new public works and finally ending up at the pub taking a glass of whiskey together. It was two hours drifting spent in the company of a neighbour talking about whatever struck our fancy.
Building community is slow and inconvenient because it requires you to spend hours hanging out with people and talking about nothing in particular. That’s the point. That’s the feature.This is what awaits us in the other side of the decade and a half we have had of outsourcing our attention and hearts to people with malevolent interests who are working against a slow, delicious, deeply connected sense of belonging.
I’m close to shuttering my Facebook account now. If for some reason, you wanna find me, drop me a note and we’ll go for a beer.?