ASK Salt Spring: Answered - EP 14 - Brian Young - Salt Spring Transition

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Damian is in conversation with Brian Young, chair of Transition Salt Spring, which is a climate action advocacy group. They discuss a number of climate action ideas for Salt Spring

Welcome to the Cheer.fm podcast, Ask Salt Spring Answered. After many Ask Salt Spring events, we sit down in our studio with Gail Baker's guest and review some of the key points discussed. Welcome to episode 14, where our Damien Inwood has a conversation with Brian Young, the chair of Transition Salt Spring. They are a climate action advocacy group. Okay, I'm here with Brian Young, who's the chair of Transition Salt Spring. We've just attended the Ask Salt Spring session. Welcome Brian. Thank you. Maybe you could start off by telling people who aren't familiar with Transition Salt Spring exactly what you do. Yeah thanks I really appreciate the invite to speak both at Ask Salt Spring which is an awesome institution

we have led by Gail Baker and it gives us a chance to have community discussions in a way that need to happen big time regarding climate change and the climate action we need to do. So essentially, Transition is, we're 26 years old now, and basically founded on the premise that we need to do work together to solve our climate crisis, which has become, since we formed 26 years ago, has become a lot more serious and a lot more visible to people, which in some ways is an awesome advertising tool to get people interested, but a very dire one from the point of view of how much closer it gets us to the red line

in terms of community sustainability. So what we do is we focus on action and advocacy. So basically bringing people together on projects that have a significant impact on reducing our climate risks, things like floods, fires, sea level rise, but also our emissions, but also advocating with our local and non-local levels of government to make significant changes that make our islands safer and make our ecosystems more tolerant of the changes that are already underway. Can you give us an example of one project that you've been involved in that's currently on the go? I think we talked about the Maxwell, Mount Maxwell project. Yeah, that's a really good one for many reasons. The work we're doing with North Salt Spring Waterworks District on their lands up in the Maxwell Creek watershed is wonderful because there's a very clear problem

there. One is we've got a very important source of drinking water that thousands of people rely on. And if there was a fire, for example, a forest fire upstream of the lake, it's quite possible that that lake would be taken offline for months and possibly years due to what they would need to do to put out the fire, but also the environmental damage that would make the water really cloudy and of poor quality such that it could not be provided to rate payers. So that's certainly North Salt Springs' key interest, as well as keeping people out of the watershed, because our number one cause of fire in this region are people, not lightning, unlike the interior. So what's also wonderful about it is

that we can achieve so many goals in working with North Salt Spring on this project by reducing fire risk in that watershed, by developing practices that we can actually use all over this island with other pieces of land just like that, and even using some of those practices on private land. I mean, let's be clear, the island is mostly private property, so we need to teach people the kinds of things we're doing on Mount Maxwell for people to implement on their own properties to keep themselves safe from fire, but our communities also safe from fire. So is the focus of this like cutting back on the underbrush and this kind of thing, or what actually is happening up there? Yeah, I love what you said, cutting back on the underbrush, because a lot of our understory actually is very fire resistant.

The problem is there isn't enough of it or enough of the right type. So, for example, we hear people talking about broom and gorse as being a really big problem. One of the reasons it's a big problem from a fire point of view is it contains stuff that makes those plants highly flammable. Salal, for example, and sword ferns are fire resistant. Likewise with trees. You've got, you cut a forest down, you replant it. Those are all trees that are homogenous in terms of their, not only their species,

but also their birth dates. So what you really want is a forest with mixed birthdays, where you've got grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles and cousins and kids all growing together in that forest so that you've got a diversity of fire vulnerabilities. For example, a lot of our forests are what one expert told me one time, our forests are at peak flammability because you've got all these young trees whose bark isn't thick enough yet, which are very susceptible to fire and also very susceptible to wind and heavy rainstorms that are eroding the land around them and and driving the rain off the land because of the frequency and severity of rains okay that's uh that's great and we didn't talk a lot about that at the meeting but um one thing that did come up was um minor

lee was talking about um asking i guess for a rideshare app to help reduce traffic on the island. And then we talked about the car stop program and stuff like that. But what's your view on her idea of a rideshare app? Is that something that is possible that Transition Salt Spring could take on? What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, actually, I loved mine and Lee's recommendation because it actually echoes one of the 250 recommendations in the Climate Action Plan that we published a couple of years ago. That plan was the result of the work of 30 plus people in developing sector by sector strategies that we need to tackle to lower emissions and adapt to the brave new world we're

facing in terms of climate. And a ride share app was actually one of the recommendations. It's challenging. I mean, I don't think Transition is in the position to develop that app. Those kinds of apps take a really huge amount of money to develop. But what it points out is we have a problem on this island, and it's what transit planners call the last mile problem. We've got a rural bus system, which is already challenging to serve. It does provide service along those main, you know, the main corridors, but it's challenging on the smaller. I live on Beaver Point Road and, you know, during the summer months, a couple of times a day, there's a bus.

But we're not going to have a huge modal shift into bus transit until it's more frequent. So I think what we really need to do is focus on pushing our LCC and the BC government to more robustly fund that system. I know we have one of the best rates of at-the-box funding of our bus system, of small systems in British Columbia. So that tells me there's a lot of room for our local transit system to stretch a little beyond what it already does. So I think if we really make the timing, you have to wait two hours for some of these buses, and that just doesn't work for most people. So what I'd like to see as much bigger numbers I think a ride share app would be great would be awesome we also we're

talking about in the meeting that during kovat a lot of us stopped picking up passengers let's all pledge to start picking up passengers again I mean it's summers a really good time to do that. Open your windows if you're concerned about COVID, transmitting it or getting it. But I think that's a really good opportunity to exercise that muscle of caring for our neighbours by picking folks up again. We used to do it all the time, but like a lot of people, we stopped during COVID. And I think that we, that's one area where we can all work together to make our society better on our island. Now, you made one comment which jumped out at me,

and you said we're slaves to the tourism economy. What do you mean by that? Well, it's typical in communities where tourism is a driving factor. I mean, I need to walk back from that comment from one perspective only. We're actually slaves to the pension economy. I mean, one of our biggest drivers on this economy really is the income that comes in for people's pensions like my own to fund, you know, enterprise on this island. Another one is construction, housing construction, people like me who moved to the island and, you know, we happened to buy an older house, so that wasn't necessary, but we had an addition built. So tourism is definitely, definitely one of those drivers.

I have to question, however, what role it plays in an economy where we have tons of climate risks that we're not addressing. So one of the reasons we do tourism is for economic development. What are the other ways which we could diversify our economy to actually acknowledge the climate risks we face in our forests, for example? So having younger folks of working age, younger than me certainly, who are doing really good work in the forests, taking down trees, doing forest fire risk assessments for properties so that the landowners, be they public or private, can know what to do to help prevent their forests from actually

being vulnerable to fire. And to things like ecological remediation, like developing constructed wetlands or bioswales or anything that can collect the water from heading down what I call our expressways to the ocean, which are the ditches all alongside our roads and our driveways. That's an area where I see huge upside potential for economic growth. So should people actually be putting in some kind of like mini reservoir systems on their properties to collect that water, do you think? Absolutely. I mean, we do have a teeny tiny incentive program for rebates on rainwater catchment, up to $500 for rainwater tanks. I think we need to get more sophisticated than that. I think we need to bring the water

districts on board on this island with this type of program. We also need to look at more ecologically friendly ways of capturing water. It's great to collect the water, but I would love to see programs like they have in Victoria, where they provide incentives for temporary rainwater catchment ponds that basically slow down the water before it floods, literally floods the stormwater system. We need to be doing that here. We get a lot of rain like that, you know, November all the way through February is full of examples. And we get another atmospheric river. Those kinds of temporary holding ponds would be an awesome way for us to actually slow

the flow. Talking about water, Alexander from the Chamber of Commerce made a fairly controversial proposal that perhaps we should have water meters for everyone, including well users on the island. What do you think would be the reaction to that kind of suggestion? Oh, it would be horrible. I mean, I think that people love their private wells for all sorts of reasons. I love mine. I take really good care of it. It's a shallow dug well, and it keeps us hydrated for sure.

However, I have to acknowledge that in this changing world, we've got more and more people coming to this island. More and more straws are going into those aquifers. There are population pressures we need to talk about on this island that are happening at the same time as we're having climate change pressures. And we need that water around. So, you know, I frankly, I don't have a position on whether we should meter water. I know that meters as a thing, you know, you don't know what situation

you're in until you actually measure it. And meters, that's what they do. They measure. So if we were able to measure our flows and measure the rates, it actually helps policy folks come up with new rules or better yet incentives or programs to help people reduce the amount of water they consume. I would love to see us have more programs aimed at residents, whether they be rate payers in water districts or on their own wells, to do the right thing on their property. And a broad-based public education program, maybe even targeted through the pods, the emergency pods on the island, to raise awareness around what we could do. I know what I'm doing. I'm copying my

neighbors right now and I'm putting on basically eight inches of mulch where I used to put only you know a couple inches on a few crops. Now I'm doing that on everything because I'm really concerned like a lot of people about what the summer is going to bring. Right okay now I think you've mentioned that the climate action plan that came out, what, three years ago? Yeah, two and a half years ago. We completed it actually just before the whole wave of COVID broke over us. And so we actually delayed our launch. So it's really only been out two and a bit years, but it was definitely finished three years ago.

Okay. Okay, and now you have a report card that's coming out in the fall that's going to give us an update on how we're doing on all these various areas where we could improve our position on climate change. So can you give me any ideas at all about what's in the report? Obviously, you're going to be launching it later, but you did mention that there were some areas that we were successful in and some that we were less successful in. Yeah absolutely I mean we're really excited about this report card because talking about metering you know you can't change what you cannot you're not measuring so we need to measure how we're doing with a yardstick metric metric or not, against what our baseline is. And overall, I'll give you the headline.

We're not doing great. I mean, things in terms of climate change are accelerating far faster than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports say. Because guess what? Those are consensus documents. They're science blended with politics, sometimes a toxic mix. And so they tend to be on the bit of the lower side in terms of what's happening. However, there are some great things that we're doing on this island. I mean, I was behind the school bus the other day. I was marveling at its quiet and delighting in the fact that it's electric. Jim Stannin, who runs our EV working group and Transition

Salt Spring, is also delighted with the rate of change we're seeing. I feel like it's not an area that Transition Salt Spring really needs to work in anymore because I feel like market forces are taking over there and that allows us to focus on other areas where we need a lot more attention. And frankly, where you're going to see some of the reds in our report are things like BC Ferries. Their transition to electrified ferries is slow. And part of the slowness there is, guess what, COVID.

And any of the red, yellow, and green we're going to have in that report card is not there to shame anybody, shame any agency, but it's a clarion call for us to say, hey, we need to work on this more. And at the same time, we've got some yellows in there, like we've got some really, you know, some better indications that the Sailor Sea Trail Network, which is a network of multi-use bike lanes up and down this island that's been envisioned for decades, is actually, you know, we're heading towards some implementation. We're going to see some pavement built out on the Ganges Hill, which is an incredible trouble spot. We saw an accident just this past week where someone said, I'm never cycling again. That for me is a real tragedy along with the injury. And we need to show people that change is coming and that Ganges Hill is going to be a

really big one for helping to mobilize the Salt Spring community to support change along the rest of those routes, all the way from Fulford up to Vesuvius. And I really think that we've got some goodwill that's being developed at the multiple levels of government that's giving me hope that we'll be able to get that thing done. Great. Now, one thing, lastly, I think that Darlene talked about was the need for support in the way of donations from people on Salt Spring. It's a volunteer organization. It relies on donations and grants and things like that. What would you be looking for? I don't know how much you get on an average

in terms of donations, but what do you need? I mean, what's your budget annually? Can you give us some idea of how much money is involved and how much money you need to raise to keep going? Yeah, we have an annual budget of about $250,000 to $300,000 depending on the year, and that pays mostly for people. And I want to emphasize that, yes, we are volunteer run. As I was saying in the meeting somewhat facetiously, the only thing I ever got was the Microsoft Office package so I could edit the climate action plan without my computer crashing. But we do need funding to support the programs we develop. The incentives we provide actually come from the public purse,

but a lot of the money to actually manage those programs actually comes from us. So we get a small but growing amount of funding from local donors. I think it's really important to build that local donor stream because it builds the love locally for any organization that's working in the community. So at this point, I have to guess, but I think we're probably about 80% grant funding. But let's be clear, we don't have a Department of Climate Change in small rural communities, let alone most communities, unfortunately, even if they're big. But cities like Vancouver actually have staff. Cities like Victoria actually have staff. We don't have that. So what we have to do is we have to be creative.

And what that means is partnerships between nonprofits like ours and government and other groups. I mean, I want to emphasize that last part. Island Pathways, heroes in our community. They're also shoestring. We need to be working together across all of those mandates to basically turn that ship around and yes so donations are incredibly helpful monthly donations are the best way because they're more predictable for us if you can imagine trying to run your household not knowing what's coming in the door every month it's kind of the same at the non-governmental level so you know

monthly donation whatever you can afford think of what you do on an annual basis and then divide it up into 12. And that, you know, basically set and forget. And you have a chance to come to our annual general meeting once a year, and you get to see, you know, are these folks doing a good job with my money? And I guarantee you, we're providing a really good rate of return on that investment. And where would they go to make a donation? Easy. Just go to transitionsaltspring.com. There's a donation button up there. And before you donate, if you want to take a look at some of our initiatives, I invite our listeners to do that. But we'd be very grateful for your donations. It's a really simple process. Okay. Thanks very much for chatting, Brian. And this is Damien Inwood coming to you

from cheer.fm, the voice of the Gulf Islands.