The view across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island, on a calm and quiet New Year’s Day.
A beautiful, mild and glass-calm day to start the year. There was fog at the mouth of the Sound that lifted during the morning. We walked in a large loop around the Cape Roger Curtis lands, looping through the trails and the Conservancy lands, nature reserve, and the waterfront path. All told its about a 7 kilometre loop and it takes you through forest, down creeks, past waterfalls and along the cliff tops of Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, the edge of the world, the edge of Squamish territory, the southern edge of Atl’ka’7tsem/Howe Sound. It’s my favourite place on Bowen, looking out over the wide open Strait of Georgia and the Salish Sea. From the bluffs one can see, on a clear day, the islands of Puget Sound to the south and the norther Gulf Islands of Texada and Lasquiti to the north. Across the Strait the Mountains of Vancouver Island rise, and nearly all of the northern Coast Salish territories are visible. It’s an amazing place.
Today we saw 23 species of birds, including a pair of marbled murrelets, several hooded mergansers, buffleheads, red necked grebes, and a few of the hundreds of surf scoters that spend the winter around our islands. This is going to be a big year of birdwatching, with planned trips to Costa Rica and France and several trips to eastern Canada on the docket for this year. I’m wondering if I can make it to 365 birds for the year so we’ll see.
Back at home, Spurs drew Brentford 0-0 in an insipid draw, but in the hockey world, my Maple Leafs came back twice from being two goals down to win an 11 goal thriller 6-5. Auston Matthews scored a hat trick. Hopefully this signals a change in form for one of my blue and white teams. The other one may need to do some business in the January transfer window to regain some dignity.
Yes the World Junior hockey tournament is coming up (and that is a big end of year tradition in many Canadian homes ) but the African Cup of Nations is also on and that is the best continental tournament for the neutral. It’s unpredictable, features many top world players and you find yourself pulling for countries like Botswana who are currently holding their own against the powerhouse of Senegal. If you love underdog football, this is for you.
The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.
This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.
For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.
Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.
An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.
Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.
A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.
Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.
So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:
- We relay on human goodness.
- We depend on diversity.
- We treasure the power of community.
- We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
- We nourish our relationships and ourselves.
A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”
Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.
Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.
Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.
I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.