Elissa Poole

Salt Spring Conservation Project: Crowdfunding Campaign Goal - $1.2M

Your donation will be doubled through a generous match. You can help preserve a threatened ecosystem and its species. BC Parks Foundation, in collaboration with a group of conservation-minded Salt Spring Island residents, is working to purchase and protect 31.2 acres of land on the south end of Salt Spring Island. You can be a part of ensuring this rare, pristine, mature coastal Douglas fir habitat is preserved forever. Thanks to these passionate individuals and a generous grant from the Salt Spring Island Foundation, we’ve already raised $350,000. We need to raise the remaining funds by May 15—please donate today! “The chance to save for posterity a large parcel of coastal Douglas fir forest and a wetland is an opportunity not to be missed. Close to 10% of the parcel is one of the most precious wildlife habitats on Salt Spring—a wetland with a boggy meadow, year-round swamps and ponds....In the face of hotter, drier summers and relentless development, the Lumley property…

Elissa Poole: What will I do?

Last week a writer to the Driftwood asked why so many of the candidates seem to have no platform. My platform is same one I’ve had all along—it hasn’t changed with the wind! I hope you’ve had access to my many contributions to the Exchange and in the various public forums, and that you’ve noted the detail in my answers to questions about the issues this island cares about. I’ve learned a lot listening to your concerns, and I’m aware that people want to see real progress. I also know that not all the promises you’ve heard from candidates are actually feasible. However, here’s what I intend to do if elected: Within the Trust mandate, I will use existing processes top protect the watersheds and forests so our water supplies are secure: first, update the maps, so that all current eco-sensitive acreages are represented. Start the process of implementing development permit areas for the coastal Douglas fir ecosystems, particularly for contiguous properties, which will involve zoni…

2022 General Local Election: Our climate emergency

When I first I came to Salt Spring in the late 1970s, I rented a hundred-year old farmhouse from Tom Bergerud, a caribou biologist who was away doing research in the field. Tom liked keeping track of the natural world around him, and for years he had been penciling the annual arrival of the rains in November and the swallows in spring on the rough planks of his kitchen wall. The dates were remarkably consistent. That’s no longer the case. November rains sometimes don’t arrive until January, and the summer drought can last four months, instead of four weeks. We now record summer temperatures previously thought impossible for the coast, and our forests—once green all year long—are full of parched arbutus, dead cedars, dying fir trees. Vulnerable, endangered, extinct: We read these words more and more often now, applied to frogs, bees, fish, birds, lichens, mosses, and the list goes on. Barn swallows rarely nest here now. The oystercatchers are gone from the Isabella Islands; t…

The seduction of sustainability

Words are powerful and fluid. We know that. Their meanings are subject to time, place, and situation, and they pick up and discard interpretive nuances in what sometimes seems like whimsy. This makes it possible to suggest that statements made even a generation ago mean something other than what they were originally intended to mean. Here’s an example close to home: The Trust Object lays out the mandate of the Islands Trust in this compact sentence: “The object of the Trust is to preserve and protect the Trust area and its unique amenities and environment for the benefit of the residents of the Trust area and of British Columbia generally, in cooperation with municipalities, regional districts, improvement districts, First Nations, other persons and organizations and the government of British Columbia.” One phrase in particular has been subject to intense scrutiny, to see if the mandate of the Trust might be reinterpreted to facilitate changes in policy. Supposedly these wor…

Incorporation: The Islands Trust - Saviour or Scapegoat?

The Islands Trust may seem both noble and necessary to one side of the incorporation debate, but it’s a scapegoat for all that ails us to the other. Perhaps the Trust does say no more often than it says yes, but the average person probably doesn’t know how many pressures there have been to develop our community in ways that would make it, essentially, a different island. We’ve talked to a number of people who understand those pressures intimately because they’ve had to visualize, in their minds’ eyes, exactly what these developments would have looked like. Linda Adams, a former community planner in the 1990s, recalls these development proposals. “Before we got our OCP into place in the late 1990s,” says Adams, “the pressure was so intense that the LTC limited new proposals to ten a week. They were coming from everywhere, not just across Canada. They included: a golf course and condominium complex in the Ford Lake area; a golf course, hotel and small-lot subdivision on Bedd…

Elissa Poole

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