ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep 20 Brian Young

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

We talk to Brian Young, chair of Transition Salt Spring about the latest on the climate action plan.

You're listening to episode 20 of Ask Salt Spring Answered, in which we talk to Brian Young, who is the chair of Transition Salt Spring, about the new Climate Action Report. Okay, I'm here with Brian Young, who is the chair of Transition Salt Spring, and we've just been in a two-hour session with Ask Salt Spring. So yeah, welcome, Brian. Thank you. And you were here today talking about your new Climate Action Report Card 2023-24, which, as I understand it, is an update basically based on a climate action plan that you put out two years ago. So tell me a bit about it.

You said there are successes and failures, and, you know and we should take, obviously, particularly for climate action, a lot of monitoring and tracking as to how we're doing against a whole bunch of targets. All great to be able to say, we have 250 goals to achieve in our community, but then what do you do as a follow-up? And we're in an interesting position as an NGO, a non-governmental organization in our community, in that this is the work of governments usually. And we're a small community, however. So I think there's a really interesting role that we can play on Salt Spring. And we're very familiar with that in that we have a lot of volunteer-based organizations that actually fill the kinds of gaps that exist in other communities that have different forms of local government, for example. I think in our community, we end up playing the

role of Department of the Environment or Department of Climate Action. And we're happy to do that. But we also need really strong relationships with local government. And those strong relationships get created when you're able to show local government, here's where we were on something, here's where, here's what's coming, and here's what we need to do to prepare. And what this report card is intended to do is to show our local elected officials primarily that we're not doing so great when it comes to actually protecting the island community from the risks we're facing like fire, like drought, like excessive rain and flooding in the winter months. So there's a lot we need to do to protect our ability to live here in the ways that we enjoy now. At the same

time, there are a whole bunch of things we need to do as a community with respect to our ecosystems on which we rely for a lot of services. Like, you know, a lot of our cooling services come from the ocean and from the forest that we have on this island. So we need to keep those systems healthy so that we can manage in the coming decades, which will be challenging. Yeah. So can you highlight some of the main successes and some of the main failures? Obviously, there's a lot to unpack here and um we can't cover everything that's in the report but um what are your what are your sort of favorite uh successes that you've given the green light to here yeah i mean one of my favorite successes is the uh the extent of uh pretty

precious ecologically precious forested land that we've been able to save in the past few years, starting with the Lamour lands on Bettis Road, ending only very recently with the Reginald Hill acquisition by the Nature Conservancy of Canada. These are important things for our island, not only recreationally, but in terms of creating carbon sinks and buffers against the kinds of change that are coming. There's some other great things that have happened. I was stuck behind a school bus the other day, coming back from town, and I noticed it was, oh, that's our second electric bus, I noticed. And it's just delightful to see the school board's initiative with the help from Salt Spring Community Energy to make that happen. And that's been a delight to see.

It's also been a delight to see the movement that's been made to publicize this thing called the Sailor Sea Trail Network, which is basically a potentially very large continuous loop that goes all the way from Swartz Bay up through Salt Spring and around to Chimayness and back down again with a gap. It has a 20 kilometer gap in it for bikes that it goes from Fulford to Vesuvius. If we could actually get the appropriate shoulders all the way up and down those roads, we would have safe cycling, safer cycling on Salt Spring. And we'd have a continuous loop going like a hundred and eighty kilometer loop going all the way around Vancouver Island and through Salt Spring. So that's something we're very excited to be working on with Island Pathways.

And fingers crossed, I'm hoping that we'll be able to do it because the BC government actually has a cycling policy such that every time a road is repaved, they need to include active transportation infrastructure, such as wider shoulders for bikes. And I'm really looking forward to seeing the paving that they do going from the bottom of Ganges Hill, which is a particularly dangerous stretch, all the way up to Cranberry. Next spring, we can look forward to some 1.2 meter shoulders there. So those are some of the kinds of things. There's also the Root Food Hub out on Bettis Road. Community groups have been pushing for a long time to get a community-based kitchen and storage facility and teaching center to help enhance food security on our island they really made big strides

last year in being able to move forward on on some on on that initiative and get the route open to the public so that's great but you know as you said that those are the those are the great things we must celebrate them but i think we also really have to roll up our sleeves and start paying attention to some other areas. Yeah, and there was quite a lot that needs work in all the five areas that you cover in here. Yes. Which are forest protection, water security, food security, transportation emissions, and food emissions. So what do you think is the most urgent one? It's tough. It's tough to choose between those because, you know, they're all flashing amber

right now or red in some cases. I think we need to look for areas where there are maximum synergies. So, you know, you look at forest protection and watershed protection as two that work together really beautifully that provide a whole bunch of services for our community. Also, you know, what's called ecosystem services as well. And as some of your listeners may know from the work we're doing up on Mount Maxwell for North Sol Spring Waterworks, we have a lot of ditching on this island. I mean, we all like to, you know, have areas where we can be, you know, free of water in the winter. But the downside of that is that it's degraded the ability of our land to absorb water and keep it on the land, particularly for those dry summer months, which are, as we know, becoming drier and hotter. So there are a whole bunch of things we can do with respect to our

watersheds. And one tangible thing that we can do is we need to work with the local community commission and the CRD to take the Salt Spring Island Watershed Protection Alliance from the Islands Trust so that we can actually have programs, policies, and initiatives coming out of an entity affiliated with the CRD to actually protect our watersheds. What they have in Nanaimo, for example, the regional district of Nanaimo has a really great integrated approach to watersheds in that they treat water services in with watershed management. We don't do that here. We don't, we have a more piecemeal approach to our watersheds and our water services. What would be really good is to bring those together and to start doing

planning for our water sets together so that we can prepare for the drier years that are coming. And there are lots of basic things we can do that would really actually be popular in the community, like encouraging the redevelopment of wetlands on our islands, on people's personal property, on public lands, so that we can start keeping more of that water around longer and let it infiltrate into the ground for later use. So those are some of the things that I think we could be doing that need a lot more work to keep our forests safe,

but to also keep our community safe from drought and from fire. All right. Now, there's a page about, you know, what can you do today, more for the individual, I suppose, than for governments. And, you know, some of those are things like growing your own food, you know, buying locally, and, you know, rainwater harvesting for irrigation, I guess, and that kind of thing. One of the things I noticed you did talk about was people transitioning to an efficient wood stove, but to use it only for power outages. On an island like Salt Spring, where so many of the homes have electric baseboard heating, they kind of rely on their

fireplaces to heat their homes in a more cost effective way. So how do you think that's going to go over in terms of phasing out the use of wood stoves? It's a big challenge, isn't it? It's a huge challenge. And we like to point, we have a wood stove rebate program. So basically, it's a bounty for the old clunkers to encourage people to buy a wood stove that's more efficient.

We've learned a lot about wood stoves and wood stove smoke in the past few years. And, you know, I love my fireplace insert in the winter as much as the next house, but I've learned a lot about the particulate matter that comes from that. So over time, we need to transition to a cleaner way of heating our homes. What's wonderful is that the provincial body that manages the wood stove program across British Columbia changed one of its rules in part because of salt spring. And the rule was that they wouldn't give the additional heat pump incentive unless people

got rid of their wood stoves, which, you know, does not make sense, as you know, in the case of power outages. So that's wonderful. And the response has been terrific in terms of people going, oh, okay, well, now I can participate. Now I can do this. And for tenants, for example, who don't really have a choice or people with limited incomes, we need to provide an off ramp. You know, government needs to provide an off ramp. If government's going to say, for example, no more wood stoves, if it ever did, they need to provide off ramps to consumers and residents to be able to do a different behavior. You can't just take something away. And that's certainly not what we're recommending. So I think that over time, we need to transition to other ways of doing things. In the discussion we talked about gas stoves

for example or propane stoves as they would be on the island. Lovely, they look awesome in the kitchen, do a great job, but the human health impacts of burning that propane or natural gas in an indoor environment are terrible. You just have to google it to know from particulate matter to other gases that are created. There's a great solution. It's induction. And that is affordable for some people. For a lot of people, it won't be. So what can we do to work with all strata of society to find ways to go to where people are so that they can do actions that they can afford. So I think folks can look forward to transition, talking to multiple audiences in the next couple of years to help folks understand what they can do based on their own budget and their own

abilities, but also us talking to government. They're the big change makers i mean we're a small ngo government holds the keys to the rules and that's where we really need to focus our attention yeah because i mean some of these measures are out of reach for certain people i mean heat pumps are not cheap absolutely i know there's an incentive program but uh you know despite that it's still you know there's an incentive program, but, you know, despite that, it's still, you know, it's out of reach for quite a few people. Absolutely. So, you know, maybe we need more government incentives. I don't know. Yeah, I think incentives play a powerful role.

Incentives help to spur activity by some, you know, the folks who are keeners, for example, it usually starts with the keeners as, you know, the early electric vehicle change shows. So now it's mainstream. And I bet your bottom dollar in 10 years, there won't be an EV incentive anymore. And we're going to move on to the next edge. So likewise, similarly with other things like wood stoves, we find better technologies that get supplanted or changed. And over time, we shift and change with the government playing the role as the regulator at the end.

Right. Now, I think you said that there'll be another update in a couple of years' time so we can actually see where we're going. Absolutely. Yeah. What do you hope to see then? Wow. You want me to paint a vision well one of the things i get super excited about i remember reading uh salt spring foundation's

vital signs report when it came out last year one of the things that really struck me about that uh report which basically kind of takes the pulse of salt Spring and tells you how it's doing, is that since COVID, our community connectivity as human beings relating to one another in our neighborhoods has gone down substantially. What I'd love to see in the next couple of years is neighborhoods really working together more to address some of these issues collectively with a bit of support from the CRD or the LCC, depending on where, say, our emergency program lives. We have a great emergency program that's gotten more resources in the past few years. And we have a map of the island that you've probably seen that shows all of the pods on the island. Some of those pods are not active at all.

Some of them are amazing in terms of the extent to which they've done things for their neighborhoods in terms of safety, working together, community gardens and the like. And that, I think we need to put a lot of effort there because it does a couple of things. It makes change. You actually get some real change and some real transformation. we need to put a lot of effort there because it does a couple of things. It makes change, you know, you actually get some real change and some real transformation, but it also brings people together across differences to talk. And I think COVID really hurt that, really hurt our

ability to talk to one another. And I think if we could rebuild that muscle more, we could actually supersize the kinds of changes we could be doing as a community together. So I think in a couple of years, if we see the dial move on the extent to which people are working with their neighbors to make some positive change happen, that would be amazing. I would also love to see our local community commission. You know, right now they're basically trying to find the light switch as they start to ramp up. But I'm looking forward to seeing them fire on all cylinders and that people in our community go, wow, we actually have a bit of more local control that we used to have over issues.

And they see the difference. That would be really great, particularly with respect to climate action. Yeah. Okay. So if people want to look at this report, they can find it on transitionsaltspring.com. Can they see the full report anywhere? Absolutely. We have, well, we have a couple of things. The report you're holding in your hand is the public version of it that's a little shorter. We have one for decision makers as well that we're circulating that's probably double the size. What folks probably can't see is the big database behind it that has all of the metrics. That's for the geek audience only. And we haven't made that

public at this point. But there are two flavors to the report, the little more in-depth version, which I think is still pretty readable. But I guess I'm in the geek category. But we've had some pretty good feedback from people. And just today at Salt Spring, the report card in its more slender public version was released. And I'm really looking forward to hearing feedback from folks out there who listen to this podcast. Take a look at it. Give us some feedback. We'd love to hear from you. Now, how many people do you have working with the organization right now we have uh seven part-timers working anywhere from 10 to 21 hours a week and a lot of volunteers including our board um so we probably have i'd say another 15

on top of that uh who are directors and and and and other volunteers working with us we had a couple of them at our event today as well so I work with six people on our advocacy committee which has really fired up in the past year particularly around this report card we're going to be a very active committee within transitionition in the next while. So if people want to get involved, can they contact you through the website? Absolutely. You can personally, brian at transitionsaltspring.com or just info at transitionsaltspring.com. Either way, we'd love to hear from you. Okay, great. Thanks for coming in, Brian. This has been Ask Saltspring Answered on cheer.fm.