This site is being rebuilt, and I have decided to do it in public. The plan is simple: put new work up when it is ready, rather than holding everything back until the whole thing is finished. A site that is visibly in progress is more useful than one that says nothing for months.
So some things will look unfinished for a while. The menus and navigation are being reorganised, and some pages may be hard to find. The old categories and keywords are being replaced, and the new ones are not in yet. The earlier posts, from 2021 and 2024, are staying. I am not removing them, but they were formatted for a different theme and in places they display badly. I will fix that if and when I can. It is not the priority.
The priority is the work, and at the heart of the work is water. Water on Bowen Island is under threat. It is shared, it is limited, and all are vulnerable if it fails. What I keep wanting is for everyone to face that plainly and just get on with dealing with it.
Much of what I run into instead is not a response to that reality. It is responses that deflect, and evade, and equivocate, that use up time and move responsibility somewhere else, while the problem stays exactly where it was. What good is that?
None of this is only about Bowen. The same pressures on water, and the same gaps in how they are handled, run across BC and well beyond it. Bowen is the place I know, and the place where I learned to see those pressures and gaps most clearly.
So what I am doing is building a durable, detailed record of how decisions about land and water are being made on Bowen, and making it public. The blog is the most important part of that, but not the only part. Much of my time right now goes into two other things. One is writing and sending submissions into live processes that move fast, where a date is fixed and the submission has to be in before it. You can see those submissions and the framing context here.
The other is freedom of information requests, which are slow and detailed. I have seven open, with six public bodies. The law gives a public body thirty working days to respond, and some of mine have been open for months. So far only one has produced anything: a release from the Liquor Distribution Branch, limited, largely not what I asked for, and now being redone. How and why that is, and how the FOI process itself works, is something I intend to write about.
Even so, each request, like each submission, puts something on the record that was not there before, even if what it records is how little comes back. A nil return, or a slow and partial one, is a finding too.
There is an irony in how I came to this work. I grew up on Bowen, taking what it taught seriously: the environment, the water, the idea that the island was something held in trust, and community. It was a small place, and I thought that mattered.
Our first decade was at Evergreen Hall, on the Cove Bay system and its yellow water. At the end of the 1980s we moved to Westside Road. The creek that runs past the cidery at 620 Laura Road and on through what was our land is Murray Creek, named for Murray Journeay, the geoscientist who lived at the top of the hill and mapped much of the island’s creeks and ground. That is the Bowen that taught me to care about any of this. It is also why what came later was so hard to understand.
What came has cost me a great deal already, and not in money. I have been cast as a problem and a troublemaker. I have been told my submissions are too long to read, and asked, in effect, why I don’t just get over it already. I keep being told I am non-compliant, that what I ask for is inappropriate, that I am asking too much. And I gave up a place I had called home since I was a child, once I understood that it could not, or would not, hold me safely. I am continuing anyway.
This is the harder route. It is not entirely a choice. In some ways it is just how I am made. There were easier routes. I could have posted opinions online and left it there. I could have let it turn inward, into bitterness, or simply walked away and tried to forget. Instead I looked to the facts, because the healthiest and most useful thing I can do is to take what I have learned and what the record shows, and use it to try to make things better. These questions belong in the public process, on the record, where decisions and actions can be measured against them. So that is where I am putting them, out on public view.
I have heard a great deal about how this is just the way the world is, just accept how things are. People we had counted as friends for decades told us there was no point in doing anything, because the rich always get what they want. They may, very often. That is not a reason to give up without or before doing anything at all. I’ll take the risk of citing Marx here, and say the point is not just to understand the world, but to change it. To accept things as they are would be to live ruled by the counsel of despair. The world, and Bowen, and the people in it, deserve better than that.
I have had to learn a great deal: about water on Bowen, about water in BC, and about how the politics around it actually work. I also had to unlearn things. I had to unlearn my trust in people and bodies who present themselves as defenders of water and the environment. And I had to unlearn my confidence that the words and commitments on the page, in plans and policies and statements, carry weight in the real world on their own. They can, but only when someone acts on them, checks them, and holds others to them. I had to learn about myself as well: my own limits, and my anger, which I do not disown. That learning, and that unlearning, were hard won. My larger hope is that they can be of use to others. At the very least, anyone facing something similar may find here that they are not alone, and that what is happening to them is not only about them. The same gaps turn up again and again, and they are there in the documents.
This blog will always be a work in progress, not only while it is being rebuilt. It is iterative. In E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, an old lady asks, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” That is true for me, with one difference: what I think takes shape as I meet the facts and work through them. The facts come first, and they matter. I did not start from a finished point of view and work backwards to find the evidence for it. I started from particulars and followed them, and I am still following them. The method is settled: documents, dates, and the public record. What it turns up keeps accumulating.
I will not always make every connection explicit. Some of that work is left to the reader, on purpose. The record is my part of the work, and the part I am able to do well. What anyone else does with it is up to them. There are other things that could be done. They are not mine to do.