This site is being rebuilt, and I have decided to do it in public. New work goes up when it is ready, rather than waiting until the whole thing is finished. A site 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, but they were formatted for a different theme and in places display badly. I will fix that if and when I can. It is not the priority.
The priority is the work, and at its heart is water. Water on Bowen Island is under threat. It is shared, it is limited, and all are vulnerable if it fails. What I want is for everyone to face that squarely and get on with dealing with it.
What I run into instead is responses that deflect, evade and equivocate, that use up time and move responsibility elsewhere, 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 beyond. Bowen is the place I know, and where I learned to see them. I grew up there: first at Evergreen Hall, on the Cove Bay system and its yellow water, then from the end of the 1980s on 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 Bowen taught me to take the water seriously, and to think of the island as something held in trust.
What I am doing now is building a durable, detailed record of how decisions about land and water are made on Bowen, and making it public, where decisions and actions can be measured against it. The blog is the most important part of that, but not the only part. Much of my time goes into two other things. One is 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. 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 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.
The same is true of the water. Much of what is missing on Bowen is not a sign that all is well. Often it is a sign that no one has looked. Monitoring never set up, studies never done, questions never followed through: the lack of evidence is partly the result of that inaction. No one can fairly say there is no demonstrated harm if the work that could show harm, or rule it out, has not been done. What is missing is the connecting tissue: the pieces that would join one decision to the next, and steady attention to the water itself. That is most true of groundwater and the aquifers. The risk there is not unknown. It has been deferred, and deferred, and deferred again. Deferred risk does not go away. Sooner or later it arrives, and the longer the wait, the harder it lands.
I have heard a great deal that this is just the way the world is, and there is no point in trying to change it, because the rich always get what they want. They may, very often. That is not a reason to give up before doing anything at all. At the risk of citing Marx, the point is not just to understand the world, but to change it. To accept things as they are would be to live by the counsel of despair. Bowen, and the people in it, deserve better than that.
Doing this has meant learning about water on Bowen, water in BC, and how the politics around it actually work. It has also meant unlearning: my trust in people and bodies who present themselves as defenders of water and the environment, and my confidence that the commitments in plans, policies and statements carry weight on their own. They can, but only when someone acts on them, checks them, and holds others to them. The same gaps turn up again and again, and they are there in the documents. Anyone facing something similar may find here that what is happening to them is not only about them.
This blog will always be a work in progress. 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. The facts come first. I did not start from a finished view and work backwards to the evidence. 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 is left to the reader, on purpose. The record is my part of the work, and the part I can 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.