4 - Sunday, July 29, 1990 - North Shore News Bos HUNTER © Eco-Logic ¢ IT IS a lot easier to entertain negative thoughts than posi- tive ones, especially when you are up to your armpits in alligators. No surprise, therefore, that most environmental writings tend to fall into the doom-and-gloom school. Your correspondent has been known to fall prey to the apocalypse-is-around-the-corner tendency more than once. Back in the late ’60s, I recall. a headline writer at The Vancouver Sun had become so fed up with my incessant Cassandraesque out- pourings that he stuck the words DOOM LOOMS over one of my pieces and argued that the head could stand over anything and everthing I wrote. Allan Fotheringham, bless him, dubbed me the ‘‘Chicken Little’’ of Canadian journalism. We shall pass on the small fact that, lo these many years later, it turns out that f was correct in essence: the sky might not be literally fali- The eternal paradox of order emerging out of chaos is matched by chaos as the inevitable consequence of order.’’ ing, but it is indeed decaying and rotting before our very UV-resis- tant sunglasses. It was a relief, therefore, to come across some good news. On the eco-beat, there’s damn little of it. The news to which I refer is to be found in a book published by the Royal Society of Canada, edited by Constance Mungall and Digby McLaren, titled Planet Under Stress, The Challenge of Global Change. I'll be quoting from this book from time to time, since it has proven to be a gold mine of in- formation, the best compendium of up-to-date ecological thinking I’ve come across this year. Planet Under Stress is anything but lightweight; that’s not what I mean by good news. Its con- tributors are academics, scientists, professors emeritus, economists, and that sort of thing. It’s not’a book you read. You study it. Ac- cordingly, I have only digested a portion of it so far. One of the sections that has captured my imagination the most is written by C.S. Holling and Stephen Bocking. Prof. Holling is the much- respected former director of the Institute of Resource Ecology at UBC, and Bocking is a widely- published doctoral student at the UofT. Their article is titled Surprise and Opportunity: In Evolution, in Ecosystems, in Society. They begin by pointing out that the ancient Chinese ideogram for change, which also means ‘‘sur- prise,”” combines two characters: one meaning crisis, the other op- portunity. They argue that, con- trary to the hopes and wishes of bureaucrats, change itself is utter- ly unavoidable. ‘*The eternal paradcx of order emerging out of chaos is match- ed,’’ they write, ‘‘by chaos as the inevitable consequence of order.”’ An example is the effort we put into trying to protect our forests from fires and insects so that we can harvest the trees for ourselves later. In effect, what we are trying to do is freeze the forest ecosystem at one point in its natu- re’ evolution. The phrase Holling and Bocking use for natural evolution is ‘ac- cumulated ecological capital,’’ meaning all the interacting assemblages of animals and piants that are constantly being transformed — and are constantly transforming — the physical and chemical environment that sur- rounds them and of which they are an essential part. “When people today manage ecosystems for human benefit,” the authors write, ‘‘they try to in- crease the efficiency of capital ac- cumulation to maximize produc- tion, whether of trees or animals. Hence the normal abrupt changes in ecosystems (insect plagues, fires) are viewed as intrusions, and management considers itself to be succeeding where they are con- trolled or eliminated.” Yet when we try to eliminate fires, for instance, we simply allow fuel to accumulate, which makes the fire, when it comes all the more devastating, as the 1988 holocaust at Yellowstone National Park, where fires had been repressed for 86 years, proved. The result of success is the de- mand for more management, which unfortunately sooner or later means that the system becomes more fragile, more dependent at every turn on further management of every little detail, until the ‘‘ultimate pathogy’”’ is achieved: the management institu- tions become more rigid, the ecosystem more fragile. The good news in all this? First, the perception of the ac- tual nature of a problem is the beginning of the solution, and in this case we are looking at a uni- versal problem, an ecological paradox in which we are all ensnared. But secondly, the authors have identified at least two places in the world where this new cutting-edge perception has been successfully applied to redress grievous en- virom.ental dilemmas. The first place is in an alpine village in Austria, called Obergurgl, where a point came where population and economic growth collided at the very time when the resource base was col- lapsing: a microcosm of the global probiem. The solution was not to allow one faction or another to ‘‘win,’’ but to experiment with letting all the people involved become the architects of their own sustainable development, with the result that today Obergurgl is a model of balanced ecological, economic and social needs. The other example cited by Holling and Bocking is Kenya, where soil erosion in the ’60s and *70s had come close to destroying the country’s agricultural base. A geologist from Sweden, Carl-Gosta Wenner, was brought in to formulate a pian that in- volved strategies of soil conserva- tion based on traditional practices, requiring only simple tools, which could be applied in the dry season when farmers had time available. The key was to utilize the diverse abilities and knowledge of the local people, thereby re- establishing the critical element of social trust, acknowledging everyone’s interdependence. It worked. Today, two out of every five Kenyan farms are involved. In both eases, no effort was made to freeze management prac- tices, but to consciously precipi- tate the changes in the ecosystem which would lead to renewal; to get the jump, as it were, on what nature was going to do anyway. Beach closure continues PANORAMA BEACH © remains closed to swimming as the fecal coliform count in Deep Cove har- bor continues to rise. By ELIZABETH COLLINGS News Reporter The beach was first closed this year on July 4 when the fecal col- iform level reached 274 fecal col- iform parts per 100 millilitres of water, exceeding the maximum acceptable limit of 200. North Shore Health’s director of environmental health Bill Kimmett said samples since then show the coliform levels have risen to a high of 550. But the most recent samples for the Deep Cove area show the level has dropped to 380 fecal coliform parts. Senior public health inspector Rick Kwan said Deep Cove had had a week of good readings be- tween July 16 and 19 which had reduced the overall count’s loga- rithmic average. Coliform count readings are taken over a five-week period. North Vancouver District is continuing to take daily samples from the beach waters and creeks feeding into Deep Cove in an ef- fort to locate the harbor’s conti- nuing source of pollution. Kimmett said readings from Parkside Creek have been con- NURSING- & HOM _... HOME CARE... CARING EXPERIENCED STAFF * RNs . * LPNs * Aides * Homemakers & Live-ing 24 HOURS A DAY HEALTH SERVICES” — J. Collins is 685-8414 | 1080 Maintand Street at Helmeken Downtown Vancouver, BC. DRAKE | MEDOX 987-0861 | having a July furniture sale, sistently high and investigations are now focused on that creek. “That's the cue that may have implications for the collection of pollution,’’ he said. 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