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A beautiful meditation on salmonberries

June 8, 2022 By Bowen, Featured, First Nations 2 Comments

One of son’s first solid foods was salmonberries, which start to ripen just now. When we first moved to this island in 2001 it was late June and the salmonberries were just finishing their run. He would pop them off the bushes as we walked by with him on my back. They are such an important plant on the coast, not only for their shoots, berries, and leaves, but also for the way they embody the mutuality and interdependence of forest and sea on this coast.

This is uch a gorgeous piece from Cúagilákv which will appear this year in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. It is well worth your time to read or listen to. There is so much to savour in this piece about the relationships between salmonberries, salmon, ancestors, family, and land. But this paragraph stands out for me:

All flourishing is mutual. Thriving salmon can be read, in context, to predict thriving salmonberries, and thriving salmonberries can be read, in context, to predict thriving salmon. One key to reading the patterns lies in the kind of intimate knowledge that comes through careful observation and the tenderness of ancestral stewardship practices.

That is beautiful. All flourishing is mutual. All abundance is mutual. If one is getting all the riches at the expense of others, there is no abundance and there is no flourishing. Reciprocity is life.

Congrats Cúagilákv!

Facepalm

June 7, 2022 By Bowen, Featured, Uncategorized 3 Comments

I live in a small island which is a part of the Islands Trust, a level of governance that ensures that the unique character and ecosystems of our islands our protected and preserved on behalf of all British Columbians. I happen to like the Islands Trust and consider it a useful level of governance, not without its need to reform and change, but in general we live in a unique place and we need to unique form of stewardship.

Not everyone feels the way I do.

There is a tiny but extremely vocal group of anti-government fear mongers who go by different names and handles. Mostly they remain anonymous hiding behind titles like “Concerned Island Residents.” Their leaflets are transparent attempts to stoke outrage, promising that the rapacious appetite of the Island Trust is coming to eat all of your wealth,or that a tree policy “Is putting your home at risk of forest fire.” and that it’s an archaic and dysfunctional organization that is bloated and dictatorial. The usual libertarian talking points. Their communications are often handled by Bill Tielmann, a notorious freelance political muckraker who never seems to say no to lighting dumpsters on fire for pay.

Today in my mailbox I got a leaflet from the Gulf islands Coalitions (or the Southern Gulf Islands Coalition, or the Concerned Island Residents or the Southern Gulf Island Resident and Business Coalition, its hard to tell because every one of these groups is listed randomly throughout the leaflet as the contact or sponsor or organizer.) At any rate, the leaflet contained this pie chart used to show the results of a survey of 189 people.

Along with the fact that their listed social media handles are wrong and their email address is either misspelled, or they misspelled it when they signed up at gmail, makes me almost think that this is a parody.

There’s not much more to say about this kind of thing. Every couple of months before the Islands Trust quarterly Council meeting, something like this gets mailed out and honestly, it leaves me wondering if they know anything about the issues they purport to be outraged about. They seem to be mostly interested in raising anger, pointing fingers, and endlessly whining about their right to have bigger houses, more docs, and lower taxes.

There are issues to discuss about how we are governed in the world, and how we need to change things – especially in fragile social and environmental contexts like the Gulf Islands. Climate change, the financialization of property and land, reconciliation, development and population growth pressures, increasing needs for social services in remote and small communities, food security and local economic sustainability are all issues that require us to constantly engage in meaningful and real policy issues.

We need a mature conversation about the policy implications of these issues and how to address these challenges. I know why anonymous groups send out these kinds of pamphlets. I know that they think they are coalescing a righteous movement towards a bright future.

But honestly? An elementary school child will tell you what is wrong with that chart. So, sheesh. Let’s stop this nonsense and have some proper, informed conversations about our common future.

48 hours in the life of a football supporter

June 6, 2022 By Being, Community, Culture, Featured One Comment

You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love.

I love it for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it is complexity practice embodied, that it is about community and belonging, that it is about accessibility and passion and love and activism and development. And you get to stand and sing with people in public, which is never a bad thing. It is a beautiful game and it truly is “life.” It is an expression of culture and place and time that embodies so much of the struggles that take place throughout society. And it has the capability to drive you into all kinds of emotional territory and gives us a chance to explore all of those topographies of being human.

So this past weekend was kind a distillation of all that and I just wanted to record it all for posterity to see what happens when 48 passes in life of a football supporter.

For me the weekend began on Friday night when TSS Rovers played two matches in the men’s and women’s divisions of League 1 BC. League 1 is a semi-professional tier in Canadian soccer and, on the men’s side, is the second tier. On the women’s side it is currently the highest level of women’s soccer as we don’t yet have a domestic professional league in Canada. We don’t have promotion or relegation in our soccer system at the moment, and so our teams exist so that we can develop players and move them into higher tiers of the professional game. They players get promoted not the teams.

TSS Rovers is a club I have been involved with since they fielded a team of all-Canadian men in the United Soccer League 2 which is the fourth tier of American soccer. We started a supporter group called The Swanguardians, which a radically inclusive group (anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic) inspired by similar groups in places like St. Pauli in Germany, and Detroit City FC in the USA. Over the pandemic years our support for the club developed into a few of us working with the club to create a supporters trust and this year we became the first club in Canada to offer up to 49% of it’s equity ownership to supporters. We have sold over 650 shares to 300 co-owners since December and our initial offer is still open.

One of the initiatives our Swanguardians supporter group has undertaken, is a a Prideraiser, which is an event done by North American supporters groups throughout Pride month. Pledge an amount per goal and every goal scored raises money for a charity. This year we are supporting Rainbow Refugee in Vancouver. The club is also raising money for its newly minted Foundation, to provide funds and scholarships to kids who want to play soccer and develop their game. We kicked off our Prideraiser campaign on Friday and our women’s team scored 7 goals right out of the gate. Subsequently they scored another 2 yesterday and the men’s team scored 3 yesterday to to bring our 48 hour total up to 12 goals with 8 matches left to play in June! Over $600 raised.

Saturday the Vancouver Whitecaps played at home and although I have been an active supporter of that team for 14 years, I gave up my season’s tickets over the way they have handled numerous sexual abuse scandals over the years. Until there is a leadership change there I won’t be attending live matches, but I still follow the team and have many many friends who are active in the various supporters groups. On Saturday the contracted security force at BC Place where the Whitecaps play, made a complete botchup of a situation and ended up ejecting one of my close friends who is the President and lead capo of the Southsiders on the basis of provably false accusations. BC Place security has been plagued with issues for many years now relating to general security theatre and under trained staff being given too much policing authority, and this event was a real nadir. Football and life collide in all the ways.

Yesterday I was excited to celebrate my birthday with my family by all going into Vancouver to watch our National Men’s Team play a World Cup preparation match against Panama. I started the day by watching Grimsby Town secure promotion to the English Football League (and there is a whole other story why that matters to me) and then went into the city to meet our kids and their partners for the game and a birthday dinner.

Our men’s team has been amazing in this World Cup qualifying cycle, ranked 38th in the world now after moving up from 119th. We won our Confederation qualification tournament and qualified for our first world cup since 1986. We have immense talent on the team right with the likes of Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Cyle Larin, Atiba Hutchinson, Stephen Eustaquio, and many others. This is our golden generation of men’s players, and they are finally starting to show their stuff on the world stage. I would argue they are beginning to reach to the levels that our women’s team have occupied over the past ten years!

Unfortunately our National Soccer Association has been dithering on negotiating a contract for them and after hoping for discussions to take place since March, the Canada Soccer Association finally met with them on June 2 and tabled an offer that was far below what the players considered fair. As a result the players refused to train and then at the last minute, without an acceptable contract in place for their service, refused to play the Panama friendly. There are a million nuances to this situation, but as always I back the players who have devoted their lives to this game and to representing Canada and growing the Canadian game. It is their bodies that do the work, their lifetime commitment that has secured history and while of course they are supported by lots of folks, ultimately in Canada we do a poor job of supporting our men’s and women’s teams. They have carried the country on their backs, have been willing to negotiate and did not deserve to be treated with so much disrespect.

There is lots you can read about this evolving situation (and its wider implications for our fledgling national professional men’s league), but it is one more example of how fütbol is life. And in life I almost always support the workers in these situations, and especially where health, safety and long term injury and disability are the price of playing for your country.

People often say that sports and life should be separate. That there is no room for politics in sports or that it doesn’t matter. But not only is that not true at all, but football in particular is a broad canvas on which the entirety of the human experience is painted. In the last 48 hours, I’ve been amazed to witness just how varied that canvas can be, and so, that’s probably worth recording here for posterity.

The poetry of sense-making

June 1, 2022 By Complexity, Evaluation, Poetry, Uncategorized One Comment 

The difference between what's whole
and what's held, what's withheld
or revealed, what's real and what's
revelation - that's what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search
of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging
out of the brain during the clumsiest speech.
 - Allison Joseph
from Little Epiphanies

It feels like that, combing through stories, looking through graphs and charts and frameworks to find the little insights that spark the little actions that spark the little changes that might topple the biggest dragons. 

(Poem published today at whiskey river)

The symphony of the spring morning

June 1, 2022 By Being, Bowen, Featured, Uncategorized One Comment

I live about 60 meters above the sea, facing southeast on the side of a mountain that is covered in Douglas-fir trees. My mornings at this time of year begin with light in my windows by 5am and the air full of birdsong. Up here, we are perched in the canopy of the forest and if I look out towards the sea, I am looking through to tops of tree that are 40 or 50 meters tall.

As I have grown older, my eyes are not as good as they once were and while I can spot movement in the canopy, it is hard for me to see details on little birds that live there. But becasue I am a musician, my ear is very good and I can hear and discern the many types of birdsong that fill the morning air. I am a bird hearer now rather than a bird watcher.

My mornings often begin with a 1.5 kilometer walk down to the sea through my local neighbourhood. And this time of year there are three distinctive movements to this walk.

In our canopy, Swainson’s thrushes, chickadees, the Townsend, Wilsons and Yellow-Rumped Warblers, sing from the tree tops. Ravens and bald eagles soaring above and through the forest, often silent expect for the wing beats of the raves. Robins are everywhere, towhees and juncos scratch on the ground in the garden and Ana’s hummingbirds visit the flowers. Pileated woodpeckers,northern flickers and red-breasted sapsuckers drum their mating calls on the trees above us on the mountain.

On my walk down to the sea, I descend along a road that has houses on either side, large ornamental trees like chestnuts and dogwoods and more gardens. The birds change midway down, and there is a small flock of starlings and a very large flock of pine siskins drawn to the bird feeders. Stellar’s Jays, patrol the mid-layer, chattering between the calls of song sparrows and white-crowned sparrows. Black headed grosbeaks at this time of year sing their rapid, nervous ringing song. A Pacific-slope fly catcher can be heard catcalling from the thick deciduous bushes and from out of nowhere comes the powerful rollicking song of the Pacific wren.

The final stretch of my walk takes me on a gravel path down to a beach. This is the territory of bald eagles who call and whistle from ancient perches and nest sites. In the little cove where i sit, there have been eagles for generations and beyond, and the bald branches at the tops of their look out trees are worn smooth by their talons. By the water there are sea ducks like scoters and goldeneyes, mallards, cormorants, glaucous-winged and short-billed gulls, and a crow that patrols the beaches and the cove and sometimes mimics the far off sounds of geese that softly honk as they forage around the rocks and beaches.

If I’m lucky here I might sea a seal of a sea lion coming up for air, or catch the call of oyster catchers moving around the rocks.

In a month or so, once the nesting is done and the warblers have begun to head south again, the sound will change and soften. Songs become calls, the resident birds (except, this year, the nuthatches) take over and the mornings are quieter with robins, towhees, juncos and chickadees providing most of the music.