A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the nuthatches have disappeared from my home island this year and how I was missing their little calls.
Today,fromt he other side of the world a friend shared with me a watercolour he made inspired by that post. And so, through relationship and connection across time and space, one nuthatch has re-appeared on Bowen Island, , early on a holiday morning.
I live at the open end of a fjord called Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, on the south coast of British Columbia. It is a broad mouthed inlet that narrows as you head 45 kilometers up towards Squamish. It is home to a small archipelago of islands and some small villages and towns. The inlet has been recovering from massive industrial abuse for most of the last 100 years, mostly from horrendas mining and logging practices, and now we have herring, sea lions, seals, whales, dolphins and porpoises and even more important sea life, like extremely rare glass sponge reefs and healthy plankton blooms. showing up in ever increasing numbers. You can read more about this amazing place and its citizen-led recovery at the Howe Sound Marine Guide Átl’?a7tsem/Howe Sound Marine Stewardship Initiative website. This place is so special that last year the inlet was named Canada 19th UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
The inlet forms most of the southern half of Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíxw and the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation Government) is playing an increasingly important role in the jurisdiction and stewardship of this place, as is right. The Nation is the only government whose jurisdiction maps most precisely on the whole of the ecosystem, from mountain tops to the ocean floor from the source to the Strait of Georgia, and they are the government with by far the longest tenure in this place, dating back tens of thousands of years, into time immemorial. The deepest stories about this place extend into the Squamish period of history that was dominated by the Transformer brothers Xaay Xaays and the supernatural beings that formed and transformed the earth.
Next week, the proponents of Woodfibre LNG will be presenting to our Council on Bowen Island. I’m not sure what they will say, but I do know that it is important to be on the record opposing the project. This blog post will be my submission to Council.
I am opposed to any new fossil fuel infrastructure development. Anything that helps add to the amount of fossils fuels being burned is a contribution towards the increasingly likely potential that we will propagate an extinction level event on our home planet.
The Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw has entered into a benefits agreement with Woodfibre LNG and the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw environmental review process has approved the construction of the project. The company has worked with the Nation to mitigate the impact of the development at Swiyát, which is an especially significant place for herring spawning. I want to go on record as saying that I don’t blame the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw one bit for this decision. They have been clear from the beginning taht development in the territories needs to to meet their standards, and this development has done that. They have been transparent about their process and they have made decisions in the best interests of the Nation.
Since European contact, the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw and its constituent communities and leaders have been systemically and deliberately denied the opportunity to benefit from economic activity within the territory. The fact that they have asserted this right and signed an impact agreement worth more than $1 billion is good. In fact, it is surprising and shocking that ANY economic activity at all happens within Squamish Nation territories without some benefit accruing to the Nation.
Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw. is entirely within its rights to review and approve the project from the perspective of their. environmental and economic interests. This is a key part of the principle of free prior and informed consent recognized under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and it stand as an example to all of us who operate in these territories. If you aren’t already contributing something to the Nation as a person who “lives, works and plays” here, then it might be time to consider how you too can share your benefits with the traditional and historic owners of this territory.
The major objection I have to Woodfibre LNG is the fact that it introduces new fossil fuels into the earth’s atmosphere, at a time when we are confronting an existential crises on this planet. Woodfibre LNG will tell you that this is a clean project because it uses hydroelectricity for its operations. However, it fails to take any responsibility for the amount of LNG being shipped through the facility and burned in the world. This is like saying there has never been a fatality in a bomb factory, and therefore there has never been a more benign bomb factory. It fails to take into account the cumulative effect of the burning of new amounts of liquid natural gas over the lifetime of the project. I have asked the company what the estimates are for the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere from the gas shipped through Woodfibre, and if they reply I will update this post to reflect that. At the very least, the facility is intended to ship 2.7 million tons of LNG a year which, when burned, will produce about 2.76 times that amount, or 7,452,000 tons of CO2 without taking into consideration the supply chain emissions, or more importantly direct leaks and emissions of methane into the atmosphere. That Woodfibre is run on electricity is merely one dent an overall supply chain that uses and emits the gas that it mines.
We should not be building new fossil fuel infrastructure at all at this point in time. We have long since passed the the time when we should have stopped. All of us now need to stand in the face of our descendents and the future impacts of life on the planet and admit that at the very least, we didn’t do enough in a timely manner to address this issue. But some of us will need to say more. That even when we knew what negative impact we could expect from the short term gain we championed, we did it anyway.
This morning the wind and rain continue here in the islands of the south coast of British Columbia. It has been a wet fall and winter – perhaps the wettest since the time of the Flood stories – and this is the coldest May we’ve had for a long time, which brings its own hazards. It’s all down to an extended La Nina event that pipes cool water into the north Pacific and keeps the air masses cold and turbulent, resulting in reliable patterns of convection, instability and therefore precipitation and windy weather weather.
I live in a very rainy part of the world, and so to really love living here, one has to love the rain. This morning as I took my coffee to sit by the sea, I was struck by just how immersed I was in water. The sea of course, which bathes the shoreline and brings all kind of nutrients into our inlet. The creek beside me, channelling the rain from the mountain into the bay, delivering different nutrients back to the shore line. The rain that was falling into my coffee cup, spattering against my hood. And my breath, precipitating in small clouds that echoed their larger cousins across the channel, covering the mountains on the mainland. An entire symphony of sound all played on the same instrument.
For me, actually, water is my favourite image of God. If you are a spiritual or religious person, your engagement with the Divine is of course fraught with reductionist peril. As Lao Tzu wrote in the very first line of a book about the Tao, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a disclaimer. He says, “look, everything I am about to write here isn’t the things I am actually writing about, so take that under advisement.” One must be very cautious talking about images of God, the Creator, the Divine. Every name severly limits your experience of that which you are trying to talk about. Whatever name or image you have is like trying to watch Barcelona FC play through a tiny keyhole, in the outside door of the Camp Nou.
And yet, the image that works best for me is “water.” It brings life, and it can sweep it away. It can induce terror and soothe the soul. One can go for a hair raising boat trip from which you barely escape alive and then heal yourself with a soothing cup of tea and a bath. Water also has a characteristic of non-duality which gives it an important characteristic as it relates to my spiritual practice. As our atmosphere is made of water vapour, and so are we, it is true to say that “I am in the water and the water is in me.”
To end, here is a poem by William Stafford that I used in our fifth Complexity from the Inside Out course this morning, borrowed from a blog post by my buddy Tenneson. It points towards this non-dual whole I am talking about.
Being a Person
William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
One of the birds that lives on our island and can be heard almost year round is the red-breasted nuthatch. These little birds call out with a soft “meep-meep-meep’ and spend most of their time upside down on trees trucks and seed cones. Around here they are common all year round.
Except this year. I haven’t heard a nuthatch for months. On the back of a record wet autumn and winter with some record cold spells and a persistent Lan Niña effect keeping the ocean cool, I wonder what is going on. Red-breasted nuthatches are ubiquitous in our forest and now they are silent. I don’t know why. I’m a bit worried actually.
As I was out this morning listening for one, it occured to me that it isn’t easy to spot what is not there, and what has stopped happening. It’s easy to be seduced by the presence of the Townsend Warblers who have been singing in the morning for the last few weeks. But to notice things that aren’t there, you need to have a more deeply embedded sense of place, have lived through multiple repetitions and iterations and know the rhythms to be able to see what isn’t there and what has stopped. I’m not sure I can even remember the last time I heard a nuthatch.
As a consultant coming in to work with organizations and communities I have to remind myself that what I see in front of me isn’t the whole story. People often ask questions like “Who isn’t here?” and “What aren’t we doing?” but I can’t remember every asking, “What has stopped happening, or hasn’t happened in a while that surprises or concerns you?” I’ll have to start.
There is much that is unseen, much that has stopped. Am I talking to the people who are embedded enough in the context to notice that? Are we entranced by the latest creative initiative such that we don’t know when certain things stopped happening. In healthy organizations, does anyone remember when the painful interactions stopped? Does anyone remember why?
In a world that is transient with attention and rootedness in place, we lose the capacity to notice what is strangely absent. Make sure you work with people who can tell you both what is present and what is absent. We are losing many things that are important. Can we notice when they stopped and why?
My favourite places to walk are along coastal paths, preferably along cliff tops or wild shorelines. On my home island we have very few places where one can take an extended stroll along such a place as most of the shoreline is privatized and even though in Casnada all shore up to the high water mark is public right of way, much of the Nex?wlélex?wm/Bowen Island coast line is steep and rocky and access to the intertidal zone is restricted.
But there is a glorious walk along the shoreline at Cape Roger Curtis and it is my favourite place on the island. For about a kilometer and a half, the trail winds along the shoreline, part of it even crossing a cantilevered boardwalk, pinned into a sliff side maybe 20 meters about the rocky shore below. From that trail, it is common to see marine mammals such as seals and sea lions, and I have spotted harbour porpoises, killer whales and even a humpback whale from the trail.
in living systems the most important and interesting zones are the ecotones, the place where two ecosystems meet. This tends to be where the most life is. Where the forest meets the sea is a rich area of nutrition and growth. And Cape Roger Curtis is doubly special and edgy becasue it is the point where Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound meets the Strait of Georgia which makes up the half of the main body of water that is the Salish Sea. It is here that currents swirl and meet, with the salty ocean water meeting the fresher water that flows from the glacier and streams that rise above our inlet. The coastla trail winds down the west side of the island, around the Cape and along the south shore, which in the Squamish language is called Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, a name which captures the edges of the forest and the sea, which is also the edge of Squamish territory. From here on out is the big wide world.
Today that churning seas with its 4 meter tides is nurturing schools of anchovy and herring which have draw sea lions back for their annual feed. They have been hauling out in large number on one of the unused docks at the Cape over the past several years. At times there are as many as thirty around – especially when the Biggs Killer Whales are out hunting them – but today there where only four or five. Offshore there was a large raft of surf scoters, number 5-600, and gulls and cormorants were similarly hunting and diving into schools of these rich feed fish. In the nearby forest townsend warblers and song sparrows were calling, while in the skies above a battle was raging between a pair of ravens and an eagle. It appeared as if the eagle’s appetite had disrupted the ravens’ family plans and they were angry.
Much of my spiritual practice comes through a tradition of monastic and contemplative practice that was formed in places like this, on the edges of continents, on the edges of territories, on the ecotones between the known world and the mysterious beyond. It is a place where the heart is awakened and the senses sharpened, and the power of the natural world is so strong that it overwhelms the temporary intrusion of a human.