Rotten on Bowen: cidergate series POST 6

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The entire story of how Riley’s Cidery on Bowen Island came to be is a story of manipulation, half-truths, misdirection, and fantasy. It is a product of the collision of our social media age of illusion and faux-authenticity, the curation of dreamscapes, the nourishing of narcissism, with an island imaginary where feelings, self-interest and uninformed fantasies trump reality.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

Diderot

One speaker at the meeting of March 22, 2021, pointed to the fog of delusion that Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie created, that planner Daniel Martin amplified, and that Council exploited:

And there’s the agriculture question, should a cidery be seen as a farm or more like a winery? And I really appreciated our planner, Daniel Martin’s engagement with the OCP around agriculture in his report.

I can’t even summon the fig leaf of pretended respect for this.

It is not a real question. That well-meaning people were still posing it right before Council approved the TUP and the opening of Riley’s Cidery is an absolute indictment of this process, if any more were needed.

A cidery is a winery, in law and in fact, and the production process for cider, as for wine, is industrial and water polluting. Law, fact, science. Not fantasy, feeling, or sentimental imagination.

And not something that Bowen Island Municipality, in March of 2021, had any excuse for ignoring.

where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge

betraying biodiversity

One of the ugliest things about the whole of the Riley’s Cidery story is the exploitation and invocation of values by Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie – values like biodiversity and community and respect for heritage – that their actual practices and actions completely betray.

The literature on biodiversity, on the scale of the crisis, the pressures, the reasons for threat, all these, feature the centrality of the escalating threat to freshwater ecosystems. Searching the website of the UN Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for “freshwater” returns 10,300 results. They have been tracking and reporting on this for decades now. Their information page on inland water reports:

In my earlier post on the initial proposal for a Temporary Use Permit for Riley’s Cidery, I discussed why Murray Creek matters. I showed the mapping of the Cidery site with reference to the Development Permit areas:

“By far the largest DPA category, and the most articulated, is that related to water, for “Watershed, Aquifer & Streamside Protections” – protections for both the safety of human drinking water, and the preservation of wildlife and ecosystems”

while noting that, contrary to the explicit standards for a TUP, the site map, presentation and consideration offered by Manager of Planning and Development Daniel Martin did not mark or address this issue at all.

there is, literally, no excuse…

I can post map after map after map showing the trajectory of water from Murray Creek through a wetlands area, into Bowen Brook, flowing down to Grafton Lake. I can post a map showing just how many groundwater wells (40+) sit on that route. I can post a map showing how reliant for recharge the aquifer they draw from is on the water coming down through the cidery site. I can number the households and people reliant on the water from Grafton Lake. I can post bylaws, and OCP Principles, Objectives and Policies about the importance of freshwater protection, of ecosystem protection, and on. I can cite meeting and paper and record after meeting and paper and record about watersheds (1741 results), and wetlands (1443), and biodiversity (843), in the Bowen Municipal record:

I can cite provincial regulation and definition and consideration of Community Watersheds (the Grafton Lake watershed being just that legally). I can cite Act after Act after Act that promise the protection of water in BC. I can cite government document after document after document that talk about the primacy of water safety and protection.

But I can also show just how emphatically all these provisions, regulations, agencies, failed. And that the root of the problem can be found in Bowen’s Municipal hall.

appearance over reality…

Fun fact – if you have a perverse sense of humour.

Municipal staff are tomorrow presenting a proposal to Council to participate in an initiative based on the goal of “30 x 30” originating from the UN Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. As one of the project sponsors, Nature Canada, puts it:

Canada’s municipalities are home to some of the greatest biodiversity in our country, but also face large pressures that threaten biodiversity loss. Each city, town or region develops their own unique measures to protect their natural spaces. It’s now time for us to ensure these actions are leading to a national impact, through Canada’s target to protect 30% of our land, water, and oceans by 2030.

Five leading nature organizations in Canada are working together to support municipalities, land trusts, and conservation organizations to understand how their sites can contribute to a national movement to halt and reverse nature’s decline.

source: https://naturecanada.ca/defend-nature/municipal-protected-areas/, retrieved April 7, 2024

enough is too much…

The UN Secretariat (CBD) has been banging the biodiversity drum since 1993, and things have been – dramatically – getting ever worse since then.

We – the world and Bowen Island – don’t need more government pseudo-actions, and empty virtue signalling. We don’t need people who treat the climate crisis as a cosplay game, we don’t need corporate and philanthropic greenwashing, we don’t need neoliberal fantasists who continue to seek profit at our and the planet’s expense. We don’t need posing, and posturing, and empty environmental promises.

And on Bowen Island, nobody needs public servants who feel qualified to to “engage the community on biodiversity conservation and promote stewardship“, or, as is stated elsewhere in this document, “bring a national concept [biodiversity protection] to the local level“, but who fail to meet the actual responsibilities they have to protect biodiversity and our water.

What Bowen Island needs, first and above all else, are municipal staff who do their jobs competently, so things like this don’t happen:

What is unforgivable is that this didn’t need to happen. No-one involved lacked the knowledge, or the tools, or the opportunities, to prevent this. Quite the contrary.

a failed community?

Luna Leopold was a prominent and influential hydrologist, who saw clearly that

think globally, act locally…

In my next posts, I will look very concretely at the law, facts and science that Daniel Martin so manifestly failed to engage with in bringing the TUP proposal for Riley’s Cidery before Council, and at the subsequent failures of municipal staff to redress this in any way.