GTEC Reader Vol 3, Issue 3 - Climate Crisis Education

VOLUME 3 – ISSUE 3, Sep 2022

 

Feature article by Charles Scott
and much more…

Sea to Sky Highway, British Columbia

Forest Devotions

Earlier in my life, I spent a couple of year’s off-grid in contemplative solitude in the east Kootenay woods on the traditional, unceded territories of the Ktunaxa peoples. I lived in a small log cabin built circa 1860, in the depths of the forest, largely filled with lodgepole pine, firs, and tamaracks (larch), and an understory of kinnikinick, dwarf bilberry, pinegrass, soapberry, Birch-leaved spirea, Oregon grape, and omnipresent low bush and high bush huckleberry. Driven by curiosity and a desire to connect, literally, with the land upon which I was living, I once knelt down by a patch of ground in the depths of the forest. Looking intently, I could see, beneath the leaves of grass, kinnikinick and other growing plants, the decaying, old grass, the leaf and twig litter and beneath this, the duff and the forming, topmost humus…

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My time as a Rebel

Since the early seventies I had been an ecological and political activist. In 2000 I was Interim Leader of the Green Party of BC. So, I was aware and concerned….

Portents in the Wood

I pass through – Gate closing slowly Blessings uttered softly Leaves rustling gently Whispering pines sing Rambling mind pauses Heart so expands Sunlight casts forms On trunk, shadows Revealing playing…

Falling Boundaries

“A situated love of nature is not merely loving a place, but rather loving the Earth by loving a place.” – L. Candiotto “We accept that the protection of the…

Urban Forests

August 2022 was one of the hottest, driest months ever in Vancouver and those conditions are expected to worsen in the future. Regional climate models project an average increase of…

The Alders

The alders are the reoccupiers they come easily and quickly into skinned land rising like an ambush on raked ridges jabbing like whiskers up through the washed-out faces of neverused…

Comment: The Gorilla in the Room

The idea of “Selective Attention” was demonstrated in 1999 by two professors at Harvard University, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon, who performed an experiment in which three people in white shirts tossed a basketball to each other. At the same time three other people in black shirts did the same thing. This action was all filmed and shown to a group of students who were asked to watch the film and simultaneously to count the number of times the people in the white shirts passed the ball back and forth to each other. Following the film, the students were asked to report that number. After the students reported their findings, they were then asked how many of them saw the gorilla. The gorilla? Yes. A person in a gorilla costume entered the scene in the film for nine seconds, walked amongst the players and beat its chest, then walked out. Half the students did not see the gorilla. Whatever their reason for not seeing the gorilla, the students demonstrate a clear example of denial and ignoring. Like the students, some of us see the ongoing destruction of our forests, some simply don’t see it and some willfully ignore the situation. And as the Dalai Lama says, “Ignorance is the cause of suffering.” By August of this Tiger Year 199 wildfires raged into massive walls of flame devouring all in their paths – people’s homes and livestock, the animals of the forest, the magnificent trees and birds of all kinds. The…