Cortes Currents

Kim Paulley/ CKTZ News - The Forest Trust for the Children of Cortes Island Society (FTCCIS) had its "best year ever” on Giving Tuesday last week, according to chair Chris Dragseth, with $20,000 fundraised.

FTCCIS was formed to "purchase Island Timberland forest land holdings immediately adjacent to Carrington Bay Park on Cortes Island," and that those lands will be "held in trust for all the children of Cortes Island, in perpetuity," according to its website. The organization adds that the lands will offer "educational, recreational, cultural and spiritual value for all our children."

CKTZ spoke to Dragseth about the $20,000 raised and what they hope to do with the funds.

“We are really quite hopeful that this ends up being a year that we can close some kind of a deal with Mosaic," stated Dragseth.

Dragseth stated that "the whole acquisition of the properties is going to require legal work - surveys, covenant creation...legalise type documents and work, and so we have the need for that to be supported and that's predominately where this year's funds are going to go towards."

On Cortes' Tideline website, https://www.cortesisland.com/cgi-bin/tideline/show_home.cgi Dragseth described the funds as providing "the necessary resources to complete the final groundwork in support of negotiations on purchase."

Dragseth talked about setting the fundraising target at $20,000 after a very generous donor came forward with the offer to match $10,000 of donations. They raised the initial $10,000 through the help of a fundraising email drive organized by Maureen Williams, coordinator of the fundraiser, and FTCCIS managed to meet the $20,000 goal on Giving Tuesday, Nov. 28.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - On Monday, Dec 11, the Strathcona Regional District will be holding an open house on updating Cortes Island’s zoning bylaws at Manson’s Hall. This is the first of a series of steps that will also include a revision of the island’s Official Community Plan. The Friends of Cortes Island has prepared a 22 page study of suggested recommendations for revisions to Cortes Island’s plan for the future. 

“It's really critically important at this moment in history that we make sure that every decision made in the community plan is made taking climate change and  climate adaptation into account,” said Forrest Berman-Hatch, author of the report.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - This Saturday,  December 9th, between 11 AM until 4 PM, the Cortes Island Museum will be holding Vintage Christmas.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Laurel Bohart and Donna Collins were the recipients of this year’s Jo Ann Green Award. 


"We thought they encapsulated what the Joanne Green Award is about. We had a number of nominations, but we considered their’s to be the best because of all the work that they've done for Wild Cortes. They put in a lot of unseen work in the background to make the Wild Cortes exhibit the success it's been, and they're doing that as volunteers," explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI).


Every year at their AGM, FOCI gives the Jo Ann Green award to a worthy Cortes Island resident in recognition of their contribution to the environmental wellbeing of the community.


Helen Hall: "They are both putting countless hours into displays and staffing of the World Cortes exhibit, the one satellite exhibit of the Cortes Museum and Archives. Laurel is entirely responsible for all the taxidermy mounts in the exhibit and is the sole curator of the Raven’s Relations exhibit.  Donna took over the much needed lead management of the Wild Cortes exhibit after Lynne Jordan moved off island. She offers administrative and creative energy into the new exhibits and the weekly operations of Wild Cortes, and jokes about this space being her home away from home." 


Cortes Currents: What do you think about receiving the Joanne Green Award? 


Donna Collins replied, "It was a real shock, but it was a real feather in our caps for all the work. More so for Laurel, because she's just done so much work. This is her life. All I've done is helped her showcase it a little bit better and get people out to see it.” 


"A big thank you to FOCI for even thinking of us. Helen told me that it was a unanimous decision by the FOCI board that we would be the winners. She said there were other nominees, but it just went straight to us and  that tells me something. It means a lot to us." 

Collins mentioned local biologist Sabina Leader-Mense, whose work is well respected in the wider scientific community.


Donna Collins: "I think Sabina got the honour before and I'm figuring: if we're up there with Sabina, we're doing well."


Cortes Currents: You're also on the board of the Cortes Island Museum.  How did they react to the news that  you and Laurel had been chosen for the Jo Ann Green ward?


Donna Collins: "The board was absolutely blown away. It's just such a big surprise to see Wild Cortes doing really well, it had stumbled along for quite a few years."  


“Wild Cortes is important because of our ability to put out information like:

What's happening with our wildlife? 

How our little island is doing as far as global warming?

And the science behind things.

“So that people can make good decisions about what to do and what not to do." 


Helen Hall: "We hope that people are not only learning about natural history, but also caring more about it and wanting to do something more about it too. So, Laurel and Donna were a really good fit for this award and we were delighted to give it to them." 


Laurel Bohart added, "We have choices to make, and we're trying to show people what the choices are. Maybe that's one reason we got the award." 


"If we can trigger a few people to understand and to start working with, say, putting in gardens instead of lawns, all the basic things we can do to help mitigate the issues we've got.  If everybody does a little bit, and there's a lot of people on this planet, then I think we can turn it around."

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - About 100 people came together for Cortes Island’s first Housing Forum on Saturday, December 2, in Mansons Hall.

There were break-out sessions devoted to tiny homes, rental housing, short term rentals, worker housing, empty homes, landlord-tenant relations, home upgrades and making land and home ownership more affordable. A session devoted to environmental issues was added at the last minute.

The Forum began with opening addresses by Regional Director Mark Vonesch and Sadhu Johnston, Executive Director of the Cortes Community Housing Society.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Thirteen projects applied to Cortes Island’s MicroGrants for Neighbours Program this year and received a total of $6,000 in funding. 


“This was the first year we ran it in partnership with Neighborhood Small Grants, which is actually  part of the Vancouver Foundation,” explained Isabella McKnight, Executive Administrator of the Cortes Island Community Foundation, which runs the local microgrants program.”'  


"I believe that having this seed money and the ability to then rent a space, or buy supplies, or hire facilitators really helped to kickstart these events. Without even just a couple hundred dollars to pay for somebody's time to run these events, I don't think all of them would have happened. I'm really hoping that after seeing the success of the programs and the events that ran this year, we'll have even more applications next year.”

“We're hoping to do more fundraising for the 'Microgrants for Neighbors’ as well because as little as $50 could run an entire project. It's about getting money into the hands of people who are doing important things in our community. People can apply from anywhere from $50 to $500.  It's non taxable and it's for running a cool project. So if somebody needed $50 to buy some pencils and some paper, and then wanted to do an outside poetry class, they could do that."

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - Michael Datura joined host Manda Aufochs Gillespie on November 17th to give a reading and lesson on existentialism, climate change, and bees. Michael is the new principal of the Cortes School and this episode was recorded live off-the-floor in the Cortes School portable. Join us for a conversation about bad faith, truth, goodness, and philosophy.

Folk U Radio is taking old school viral every Friday at 1 and Mondays at 6:30 p.m./Wednesday at 6 a.m. @CKTZ89.5FM or livestreamed at cortesradio.ca. Find repeats anytime at www.folku.ca/podcasts.

Kim Paulley/ CKTZ News - The 33rd annual general meeting (AGM) for the Friends of Cortes Island fell on Giving Tuesday which prompted the organization's plan to launch a fundraiser for $10,000.

The non-profit is hoping that the $10,000 can support core FOCI programs and the environmental work they do on the island.

At the AGM on Nov. 28, a video featured five FOCI Projects in action, out in the field, with a project overview by project leaders to contextualize the project.

CKTZ spoke with Helen Hall, executive director of FOCI, at the AGM and she described how in the past project leaders spoke about their project at the business meeting, but this year they wanted to do things differently, keep the meeting to an hour and serve up a meal along with a video showing the projects rather than just telling about them.

“Often we are out in the wilds and people aren’t seeing what we’re doing. We thought doing something visual would be a really good thing to do,” stated Hall.

This was part of several new ideas at this year’s AGM, including a first ever annual report.

“I wanted to put things in numbers and step back a bit and look at what we do," Hall said. For example, every month of the year we are maintaining 19 kms of trails. We also have 150 people involved in our volunteer projects, from beach clean-ups to counting fish. And we have a 147 different monitoring activities!”

After Hall delivered the Financial Report, discussion ensued regarding Climate Action being under FOCI’s umbrella. Christine Robinson, one of the Streamkeeping project leaders, described climate action as being essential to FOCI’s work. Hunt responded that it all comes down to resources.

“I work four days a week but we could easily employ four more people. We are asking for $10,000 but we actually need another 50 or 60,000 dollars a year.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A new study found that a species of Sea Snails found on the beaches of Cortes, Quadra and neighbouring Discovery Islands is already experiencing ocean temperatures beyond their comfort zone. According to the associated UBC press release, oysters will survive as the oceans warm up, but the Nucella lamellosa might not. 


 “I conducted a research study using a combination of field and lab experimental methods to answer the big question: are marine ecosystems going to be able to keep up with the rate of environmental change that they're experiencing? We know that species can respond to ocean warming by moving, by genetically adapting, or by acclimatizing within generations. Every species is going to have a different ability to employ those strategies based on its traits,” explained Lead author Dr Fiona Beaty, from the University of British Columbia.


“A snail, which is the species I looked at, can't move very far quickly. So we're going to expect that as snails are experiencing ocean warming, they're going to have to genetically adapt or acclimatize to cope with warming conditions. We know that populations have different abilities to do that.”  


“I specifically chose this species of marine snail, Nucella lamellosa, because I anticipated that it would be vulnerable to ocean warming due to its life history traits. It lays egg capsules and the babies crawl away from the eggs, and it's a snail.  It's highly likely that the species' genetics are quite localized within the Salish Sea. This is one of the warmest parts of that species range. So we can expect that populations here are already among the most warm adapted out of the species.”

“I wanted to see how two populations along BC's coast are going to respond to future warming. I found that one population looks like it's going to probably be okay as its seawater warms because the temperatures that it's experiencing right now are quite far away from the upper maximum temperatures that it can tolerate and grow. Whereas another population in our beautiful Salish Sea is a lot more vulnerable because it's already experiencing seawater temperatures that are quite stressful, and the seawater here is warming at twice the global average rate of warming, so it's quite a different picture, even though these two populations are only 400 kilometres apart.” 

Cortes Currents: “Where was your study area?”

Fiona Beaty: “My field sites were just south of Departure Bay. Two sites, one at Cedar Boat Launch and one at Blue Heron Park, south of Nanaimo. And then my other field sites were up on the central coast of BC. My research was in partnership with the Hakai Institute and I worked at their research station on Calvert Island.”


“I didn't do any sampling around Cortes or Quadra, but Cortes and Quadra fall in the middle between my sites.  They are at the northern extent of the Salish Sea, so we can anticipate that species that live around those shorelines might very well have similar vulnerability to climate change, although I will note that there is a higher current around the Discovery Islands.”

Beaty directed Cortes Currents to a video depicting the expansion of warmer than normal ocean waters into our area, as well as the rest of the Salish Sea, every summer between 2016 and 2022. (Look under ‘Supporting Information’ at the bottom of the linked page.)

Fiona Beaty: “Even though snails in the Salish Sea can't just up and go to the central coast very easily, unlike a bird or a fish species,  they can move around in the intertidal, and they do.”

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - CCEDA continues its series of Cortes Conversation Cafés on Thursday December 7th from 4 to 6 pm, at Gorge Hall in Whaletown. The topic of discussion will be "Enhancing Food Security," and childcare will be provided on-site.

How can we support a vibrant local food system while allowing local growers and food processors to earn sufficient livelihoods?"

Currents interviewed organiser Kate Maddigan on November