The ThunderBlogs

Last Saturday evening, while students were at the bars or in the books, a lecture hall at UBC was packed with grey and white haired citizens to hear Gwynne Dyer speak about climate change. The talk entitled, “Geopolitics in a Hotter World,” was the fall kickoff to a series of free public lectures hosted by The Vancouver Institute. Of the 800 people there to hear Dyer speak about the younger generation’s upcoming crises, a majority were senior citizens. About 100 were under 50.

Dressed in a dark brown, worn-out-looking leather jacket, over a forest green button up shirt, Dyer began his talk quietly, almost muttering. With the deep gruffness of a military general, the seriousness of his voice was mixed with moments of jaded sarcasm. He took turns leaning forward with his hands on the table, walking around waving his arms, and bouncing with crescendoing exasperation when he got excited.

“This thing is moving much faster than what the public debate acknowledges,” he said. “Everywhere else in the world, climate change is not a left-wing versus right-wing issue.”

After travelling the world and talking to leading climate scientists like James Hansen, and military officials from the Pentagon, Britain, and the EU, Dyer learned that scientists predict a 10 per cent loss in global food production with every one degree of warming. Militaries are planning for how to deal with ensuing refugees, failed states and water wars. “These are the kinds of conversations that are going on,” he said. “We’re in serious trouble. I have children. I have grandchildren. I am not particularly pleased by this news.”

The drama of the content gripped the bodies in the audience, pulling them forward in their chairs. With elbows resting on their knees, people with furrowed eyebrows clasped their hands in front of their mouths. Some, however, were not awake to hear the bad news. One older gentleman fell asleep five minutes into the talk, his head hung down in deep breathing.

The young, however, were definitely awake. During the question period, two young men in the back row eager to represent their generation, stood up while furiously waving their hands to get Dyer’s attention. The one chosen, Jonathan Maingot, asked Dyer advice on starting an organization that would spread awareness on climate change. After Dyer answered, and the crowd started spilling out, a young girl approached Maingot and said she wanted to be involved.

The wooden double doors were closed Wednesday afternoon at St. Mark’s College Chapel. Father John McCarthy preached inside the concrete walls to his student congregation attending the weekly 12:10 p.m. mass.

Plato’s Cave, the student run café to the right, had its single wooden door propped open. The laughter and chatter of the volunteers inside carried into the outdoor square. They worked together to set up the free soup lunch.

Catholic Campus Ministry co-ordinator, Maureen Wicken, organized the event. She said Catholics are responsible for taking care of everyone in the world, which can be partially achieved through hospitality. “I can’t do their laundry. I can’t tuck these kids in at night. But I can feed them,” said Wicken.

Mass was over. The doors opened. The congregation filed out into the square. A group of students claimed the lone picnic table. Some lingered in the sun conversing with other patrons. Many walked inside Plato’s Cave and relaxed on their couches and chairs. Everybody waited for soup.

Wicken said the weekly student soup lunch is just part of the ministry’s hospitality work and they perform a lot of community service. They run frequent food drives for the AMS Food Bank, which startled some people in the community who did not realize that students were going hungry, she said.

The soup arrived. A thick cream of mushroom and a spicy Thai curry were served to the crowd. The sound of silver spoons clinking against glass bowls filled the student space.

The picnic table outside was cramped with people dining. A student intern for the ministry, Anna Francia, said she knows some people who have lunch do not go to mass. “Students are starving too though, ’cause they have to pay for tuition,” she said.

Sydney Thorne sat at a table inside the café with fellow students Matthew Richardson and Peter Vetter. They came to socialize and connect with others. Only one of the three attended mass earlier. Thorne said going to mass is not a requirement to participate in the lunch. “I’ve never seen anyone turned away,” said Richardson.

The ministry’s mission of hospitality allows anyone to take part in the event, although going to mass is encouraged. “Mass and soup is always a nice combination,” said Thorne as her empty bowl sat on the table in front of her.

The marketing relaunch of Olympic Village scheduled for Sept. 25 has been delayed until sometime next month, highlighting the rental and occupation problems that continue to plague the city’s former haven of international activity.

“If you’re looking for the lineup, it’s going to be a few months,” said Joseph Ciborowski, one of several painters wielding a brush to produce an upcoming BC Liquor Store at 138 Athletes Way. Standing atop a welded steel dock lift, he is among the few labourers still at work in a complex that was completed almost a year ago.

He is also one of the few people visible for blocks.

Across the street Creekside Community Recreation Centre, which opened Sept. 18, is the sole Village magnet.

Its interior smells of fresh plaster. The fitness centre exudes a rubbery odour of unused treadmills, not yet tainted by the sweat of community residents. This second-floor facility boasted a total of three exercisers, and overlooks an empty gym bisected by badminton nets hanging above a newly laid hardwood floor.

In the street below, freshly paved and litter-free, men unloaded a moving truck packed with cables and lighting equipment. Several days of shooting for the television show Fringe began the following day, and the fully constructed but virtually uninhabited site provided a perfect filming location.

Between May 15 and Sept. 1 only 26 Village housing deals had closed, said marketer Bob Rennie. In total, 254 of 727 market-rate suites have been sold, while just over half of the 120 rental units have tenants. A pending deal with BC Housing, a provincial crown agency, will eventually open the door to 252 non-market rate condos.

The Duplo-like buildings that contain these units, externally clad with panelled blocks of neon orange and fern green, invoke a certain PoMo-ism. Both the buildings and the movement have been accused of emptiness and estrangement from ordinary people. For Olympic Village, at least, these characterizations are, at the moment, difficult to deny.

A fledgling vegetable garden wrapping around a ground floor Athletes Way apartment proves some flora, as well as fauna, do live in the area. Indoors, the turquoise waters of a lap pool lay motionless as the tiles cladding its deck.

Tacked onto a former warehouse nearby, a rezoning application spelled out on yellow Bristol board the site’s future, and, inadvertently, the history of the area’s transition—“from: M-2 (Industrial) to: CD-1 (Comprehensive Development District).”

Now all it needs are the people.

The demolition of a Shell Gas Station at the corner of Burrard and Davie was of no surprise to West End residents, nearly two years ago. If any new word has been added to their vocabulary it is urban renewal.

What was peculiar, however, was that in a period of developing the West End by building a series of high-rise condominiums the gas station was replaced by a community garden.

“It is a initiative by the council. They weren’t ready to build their high-rise so they are temporarily using it as a park so that the corporate taxes are less,” said Chris Barber, one of the local gardeners.

Vitally alive today, the garden homes a wide array of flowers and plants while simultaneously encased by a series of towering high-rise buildings and the daily occurrences of downtown.

Outside the garden, cars rev their engines as they drive through the downtown streets while the sounds of hammering and clinking accompany the construction work being done nearby. Kneeling against the entrance sits a homeless man shuffling his jar of change in one hand and grasping a beer with the other.

“May I have some change,” he said, “I haven’t eaten today.”

Ironically, a mere few feet away from where he sits is the garden where food is plentiful and serene stillness monetarily seems possible on the busy streets of the West End.

“There are not a lot of issues considering where it is,” said Barber, “there is actually minimal damage and theft.”

On a recent weekday, tomatoes, not yet ripe, hang from the plant branches while a gardener bends over watering them. A young woman helps a frail elderly women sit down on a bench inside the garden and then continues to serve her lunch. Meanwhile, a tourist couple walks into the garden and stops to take a picture of the sunflowers.

“It’s nice, it builds a sense of community,” said Barber who then described how the gardeners recently got together for a potluck dinner using the vegetables they had grown.

“But also people often come by to just sit and read,” she added.

Sadly, the question still lingers as to when Chris Barber and her fellow gardeners will have to dig up their plants to move on elsewhere.

“They will give us notice when they are going to build and people will scramble to find other gardens,” she said.

But presently, the garden resides pleasantly in the West End without notice of construction, deepening the roots of the community everyday.

It was raining on Thursday at 8:15 p.m. when a man walked into the Happy Bloom Restaurant on Kingsway, shot one man in front of witnesses, and then left, according to reporters already at the scene.

An hour and a half after the shooting the Chinese restaurant was still cordoned off by crime scene investigators. There was an ambulance and a VPD squad car silently parked on the street. Two TV reporter vans were parked across the restaurant in the busy McDonalds parking lot.

Besides the police and the few reporters it was hard to tell anything significant had happened in the last few hours. Several 20-year-old Asian looking men waited under the bus stop shelter only three metres from police tape looking away in the direction of the bus. Vehicles continued to come and go from the McDonalds, and passersby navigated the blocked-off sidewalk and instead walked on Kingsway Street to continue down the block.

Police had not yet made a statement as to the motive or any details of the victim by 10:00 p.m. Three reporters stood between the bus shelter and the police tape, huddled under the building overhang to stay out of the rain. Kate Webb from The Province had been waiting to hear from police for over an hour, she said. Jon Woodward of CTV news was asking where his news van was, while holding a microphone, and water dripped off of the hood of his rain jacket.

A week before Const. Heather Brown, Community Collingwood Policing Centre, had said there was no gang crime in the area that she was aware of, and rarely any violent crime, when questioned about graffiti between the Nanaimo and 29^th Street SkyTrain stations.

The area of the shooting was just two blocks from the Collingwood policing ward. When approached at the policing centre the next night and asked about the shooting, volunteers there said they hadn’t heard of the news.  That section of the city was under the Cedar Cottage Policing Centre supervision.

Even though this is only the eighth murder of the year in Vancouver—reported by Kim Bolan, from The Vancouver Sun, who talked to Const. Lindsay Houghton at the scene—pedestrians in the area didn’t seem to be too concerned about their safety around the scene the night of the shooting.

The reporters were still standing under the overhang, joking with each other, waiting for a statement at 10:30 p.m. The rain wasn’t giving up. Crime scene investigators continued searching the restaurant and a gunman was off somewhere in the night.

An eye looked up from a large orange bin of slimy crushed ice— the eye of a sockeye salmon.

Stephanie Arnold, who works for Organic Ocean Seafood, stood under a blue canopy Sunday afternoon selling sockeye on the False Creek Harbour Authority fish sales dock. The long and silver fish sold for $20 each or three for $50. Arnold said this was the last of the sockeye because the sockeye season ended Saturday.

Small groups of people gathered near the canopy to discuss the fish as the sun succumbed to mist and cloud. Laughter flowed as Arnold joked with one man after he said he was going to give his fish a name. She told customers and potential customers how to store and cook the fish, and how the fish was caught.

“They’re all line and hook caught,” said Arnold, wearing a grey hoodie and capris. She said this is a sustainable method of fishing.

According to the Organic Ocean website, “To limit the catch to only targeted species (and to avoid the non-targeted bycatch of vulnerable stocks), we troll salmon by hook-and-line (with species-specific lures) and harvest in terminal net fisheries (directing the catch in areas where only the targeted species is present).”

“2010 is turning out to be a banner year for Fraser River sockeye salmon, with this year’s return currently set at just over 25 million fish, one of the highest returns in the last hundred years,” according to a statement released in late August from Gail Shea, minister of fisheries and oceans. While the number of sockeye was high this year, the government it would keep working on sustainability with the fishery, according to the statement.

Mark Jorgensen, one of the fishers of the sockeye, sat on the edge of the dock. Jorgensen, who was wearing shorts and a blue Seattle Mariners t-shirt, said the fish was caught just south of the Fraser River.

Arnold said people are starting to better understand sustainable fishing, but it just depends on who comes down to the dock.

“I’m going to a play. I don’t think I should take my fish with me,” said a woman with a gold and silver coloured bag on her arm

She said she’d be back.

“Most people I tell them when they first come up [how the fish is caught] and they’re like ‘oh that’s interesting’ you know and then they want to buy it because it’s sustainable,” said Arnold.

Six giant dumpsters were slumped against the wall, just barely concealing the heaps of garbage that festered beneath them. A broken television was stacked atop some damp furniture and had empty coffee containers perched delicately on top of it. The alleyway was fraught with bits of paper, plastic, and cigarette butts, and reeked of mould and urine.

Robert Sutherland grabbed a broom, while Varouj Gumuchian, Travis Martin and Jasiriat Somjee busied themselves with moving the dumpsters. Under the co-ordination of Sutherland, the four had taken it upon themselves to transform the alley north of Broadway, alongside Main Street, into a “Liveable Laneway,” a public space that would encourage pedestrians to linger in the space rather than flee from it.

Coinciding with the Autumn Shift car-free festival on Main Street, Liveable Laneways is an event spearheaded by Sutherland to facilitate long term change that would make the area cleaner and more people-friendly, benefiting merchants, visitors and residents. “We need more people spaces in Mount Pleasant,” said Sutherland, “I want this to be a public place with green roofs, green cafes, arts and activity”

From noon till 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, the alleyway will be converted into a vibrant public space, with a farmers market, a BBQ, cottage industry stalls, art installations, food, a skate park, pony rides and a stage for music.

Raking bits of rubbish out from the grass, Somjee said “I’m here to make the city greener and more pedestrian friendly.” She had come to help out as part of the Environmental Youth Alliance.

Gumuchian wanted to contribute his art. “My thing is sculpture – installation art. People bring their culture to the place. Lanes become alive with trades, crafts, and that relates to sustainability. Symbiotically creating micro businesses in the alley, as opposed to Main Street, which is more store-front stuff.” Gumuchian said he felt positive about the event, but that there were always some challenges and obstacles. “Cleaning is horrific. This place has been unkempt and unclean for years. The city doesn’t co-operate, cleaners don’t show up, there is red tape around licensing for the event, everything costs money.”

Chindi Varadarajulu, owner of Chutney Villa, a restaurant adjacent to the alley, said “Everybody is so nasty with their garbage. Stacks of old mattresses, paint, gardening stuff, furniture, they use it as a toilet – I’ve seen a guy taking a dump there. It is the most abused space.” She hopes that this event will help keep the alley clean, while bringing a lot more life and attitude to the city.

It’s not every day that you come across a 22-year-old young man with a pet duck named Charlie stuffed tenderly under his sweatshirt. Then again, it’s not every day that you come across a young man like Jordan Maynard and a local farm like Southlands Heritage Farm.

General Manager and co-founder of the “magical oasis” that is Southlands Heritage Farm, Maynard is in his fourth year of studies at the University of British Columbia where he majors in Land and Food Systems. The Maynard family has lived and worked in Southlands for three generations and in July of 2009, they purchased the land at 6767 Balaclava St., combining a horse riding school, a therapeutic horse riding program and educational courses in urban farming. A new breed of farmers was born.

Maynard’s interest in farming first bore fruit in 2008 when he decided to clear land on his family’s acre to plant an orchard, some blueberries and some raspberries. Growing up on the fertile delta soil that composes Southlands, he was of course always aware that the area was a provincially protected Agricultural Land Reserve, where agriculture is recognized as the priority use and farming is encouraged.

As developers have continued buying plots of land in the hopes of someday being able to parcel off that land into sub-divisions, Maynard began to worry that they might one day get their wish of lifting the ALR status in Southlands. He set about to raise awareness of the importance of supporting local agriculture and when the plot of land on Balaclava Street went up for sale, Maynard and his parents seized the opportunity.

Maynard explained that he sees Southlands Heritage Farm as a learning facility, offering activities such as apple pressing, farm tours, pumpkin picking and a Young Farmers Summer Camp with a whole host of projects for kids. Having played a large role in helping to change the Vancouver bylaw that now enables residents to keep up to four backyard hens, it seems only right that Maynard’s farm also offer a course entitled, “Chickens 101: How to keep chickens in the city for complete beginners.”

According to Maynard, the courses and activities on the farm are designed to engage people of all ages and to make them start thinking and caring about where they are getting their food. “If people don’t understand the value of farming and eating locally,” said Maynard, “then why should they care about a farm in Delta that is going to be paved over into a highway?”

Concerned parents and citizens plotted with community leaders and politicians in East Vancouver Thursday on actions to prevent the possible closure of two local schools. The schools are just two of nine in East Vancouver identified by the Vancouver School Board as likely to be shuttered in 2011 to offset an $18 million budget shortfall.

Thursday’s meeting followed the release earlier this week of a University of B.C. report that claimed East Vancouver children are already more vulnerable than others in the city. With East Vancouver slated to take a disproportionate hit for the citywide shortfall, many in attendance questioned the board’s wisdom.

The cuts would be an “attack on the most vulnerable kids in this city,” said Noel Herron, a former Vancouver principal and school trustee.

“Vulnerable families feel like they’re under attack,” said Grace Tait, a family coordinator with the Ray-Cam Co-operative Centre. She noted that schools are “the only places that those families access any kinds of supports.”

Local mother Andrea Esslemont spoke of the great efforts she took over the last year to ensure her daughter, who has special needs, would be able to attend a school close to her home that has the level of care and attention she needs. “I want her to have the best possible start so that she can be the best person she can be,” said Esslemont, who also said that adjusting to change is very difficult for her daughter. “I don’t want the school to close.”

The meeting, which attracted a small crowd of a few dozen, was held at the Strathcona Community Centre amid a backdrop of plunking piano keys and the thumping of active young feet.

“You close a school, you close the heart of the community,” said Herron, “you close a neighbourhood school, you shut the neighbourhood down.”

Organizer Jenny Kwan, MLA for Vancouver – Mount Pleasant, said the shortfall and anticipated cuts amount to “a crisis in our public education system.” She challenged those in attendance to take coordinated, ethnically inclusive action to demand that their schools remain open.

A committee was formed in response to Kwan’s challenge. It is expected to take action on a number of suggestions made in the meeting.

A steep road introduced a landscape of lavish cars around the bright green grass of the Marine Drive Golf Club. An air of power and wealth surrounded this plot. While people around the world still face a strong recession, this club contrasted the reality of many. Nevertheless, all the luxury at display could not disguise the fact that the Marine Drive Golf Club has been a place of passion and commitment to the sport above all.

The Marine Drive Golf Club is an exclusive organization formed by 200 members of both genders and various ages. As explained by Ron Pauls, Chief Operating Officer at the Marine Drive Golf Club, the institution rarely introduces new associates. However, when they have the capacity to accept new applicants, a very meticulous process is carried out due to the distinctiveness they so strongly guard.   As a continual condition, applicants need the support of two current members to be considered.

Affiliates partially own the club, and the high price paid for this organization’s membership has attracted only those who are genuinely passionate about the sport and are fully committed to its constant practice.

“Being a part of this club is a very expensive thing to do, and only the people who are truly committed and kin to the sport come here. Otherwise, they will practice golf in a public course,” said Pauls.

A great sense of pride for members’ accomplishments throughout national and international golf tournaments was palpable at the Marine Drive Golf Club.  Several trophies and plaques decorated the Clubhouse’s walls. “We have had many champions from different age-groups over the years, like for example Doug Roxburgh,” said Pauls.

Over two weekends each year, the club hosts an internal championship for its members as a mean to challenge these zealous golfers.  A wide board around the golf course exhibited the names and accomplishments of all the participants in the championship currently taking place, and people eagerly browsed them as they walked by. “Members here love these championships. Everybody tries to participate,” said Pauls.

Even though a high level of concentration was visible among golfers, members amicably greeted each other around these facilities. An atmosphere of tranquility and serenity escorted this club- making any visitor wish to have a similar getaway in the city.