With a busy week behind us and much more to come in the weeks ahead, please check out last week’s newsletter sent to our membership. Scroll down the page for upcoming events of interest to the Transition-minded running locally through mid-May. If you’d like to sign up for our email list, please make a request to sooketransition@gmail.com. 
Uncategorized
Mushroom Workshop
April newsletter with updated events
After a comment about the events listing, I corrected the listing and added some upcoming events. Here is the new version of the April newsletter.
Kinder Morgan’s Pipeline Expansion Team in Sooke on April 7
A delegation from Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project will be addressing Sooke Council during a Committee of the Whole meeting this coming Tuesday night at 7 p.m. This is a rare regional appearance by representatives from the Texas-based multi-national corporation. We’re assuming they’ve chosen Sooke for this presentation because we’re a front-line seaside community and also because of our town’s two-thirds majority plebiscite vote in November opposing increased tanker traffic in coastal BC waters.
If Kinder Morgan’s proposal is approved by the National Energy Board, oil tanker traffic in the Strait of Juan de Fuca will increase from 60 to 408 supertankers a year. The already strong risk of a spill in our local waters – a danger identified by Transport Canada and numerous other groups and individuals, among them former Sooke Mayor Wendal Milne and JDF Director Mike Hicks – will become unacceptably high.
As a prelude to Tuesday night, please read the letter in this week’s Sooke News Mirror from Gail Armitage, coordinator of the Sooke chapter of the Dogwood Initiative. (Ms. Armitage also submitted a set of queries that council might like to ask KM’s representatives: KM_April 7_proposed questions).
As previewed by Sooke councillor Kerrie Reay at the Jan. 26 council meeting, KM will likely offer the following solutions to these dangers: i) Tug escort for tankers will be extended to the Swiftsure Bank and the Pacheedaht and Ditidaht food fishing grounds; ii) Two pilots will be on tankers when they traverse the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and iii) Kinder Morgan is prepared to invest $100 million in five emergency response sites in the region, namely in Delta, Nanaimo, the Saanich Peninsula, Race Rocks and Sooke. Ms. Reay, the immediate past-president of the Conservative Party of Canada’s Esquimalt Saanich Sooke Riding Association, was the one councillor to vote against the tanker plebiscite last fall.
With climate change rampant, Transition Sooke is part of a growing movement of groups and individuals who believe that now is the time to leave fossil fuels in the ground, work with current sources of energy and begin to dramatically escalate investments in clean energy. We insist that Supernatural BC, the Best Place on Earth TM, be treated with all due respect.
Please show your support for a sustainable green future by attending the council meeting. Seating is limited, and we expect a standing-room-only turnout. Following Mayor Tait’s introduction, the KM delegation will make its presentation and council members will be given the opportunity to ask questions. The public will then be granted time to make statements (but not directly question KM’s representatives, though it’s possible that queries can be redirected via the Mayor).
The good news is that Sooke’s new council has strongly renewed and restated its opposition to increased tanker traffic via a resolution that will be addressed at the annual convention of the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities, two weekends from now in Courtenay. You’ll find the Sooke resolution and one from Esquimalt (which calls for an independent pipeline review given inconsistencies in the NEB process) on pages 47/48 of the AVICC Annual Report and Resolution book, which can be downloaded here.
Inhabit. A Permaculture Perspective
Humanity is more than ever threatened by its own actions; we hear a lot about the need to minimize footprints and to reduce our impact. But what if our footprints were beneficial? What if we could meet human needs while increasing the health and well-being of our planet? This is the premise behind permaculture: a design process based on the replication of patterns found in nature.NHABIT explores the many environmental issues facing us today and examines solutions that are being applied using the ecological design lens of permaculture. Focused mostly on the Northeastern and Midwestern regions of the United States, Inhabit provides an intimate look at permaculture peoples and practices ranging from rural, suburban, and urban landscapes.
Check it out here! If you order or rent the movie through this link, part of the proceeds will support Transition Sooke!
BCSEA Speaker Series: Energy and the Next Federal Election
Heated debates over pipelines, heading both east and west, have prompted calls for a ‘National Energy Strategy’, with particular effort invested by the Council of the Federation to coordinate actions by provincial and territorial governments. While provinces like Ontario and Quebec are actively seeking to shift their provincial economies away from fossil fuels and to promote interprovincial trade in clean energy, Alberta is actively expanding production of oil and gas, and primarily seeking transit for fossil fuels to foreign markets. For its part, British Columbia is at a crossroads, seeking expansion of hydro-power but also of coal and LNG exports.
While the promise of consensus on a ‘national’ strategy may instinctively appeal to Canadians, we must confront the fundamental incompatibility between the energy goals of different provinces and the very different visions for our country implicit therein.
Join us for an evening of information & discussion with Kathryn Harrison, author, activist, engineering graduate and UBC professor of political science.
Monday, March 16, 2015 at 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at the First Metropolitan United Church (932 Balmoral Road, Victoria)
ABOUT KATHRYN HARRISON
Dr. Kathryn Harrison is a professor of Political Science at UBC. She has a Bachelor’s degree in engineering (UWO), Master’s degrees in political science and chemical engineering (MIT), and a Ph.D. in political science (UBC). Before entering academia, she worked as a chemical engineer in the oil industry, and as a policy analyst for both Environment Canada and the United States Congress. Dr. Harrison is the author or editor of several volumes, the most recent of which is Global Commons, Domestic Decisions: The Comparative Politics of Climate Change, and has published widely on climate and environmental policy. Frustrated by policymakers’ rejection of both experts’ and voters’ advice, she has become increasingly active in two volunteer NGOs: UBCC350 and Voters Taking Action on Climate Change.
Transition Sooke AGM: Evening of Sat. Feb. 21 at the Little Vienna Bakery
Transition Sooke’s Annual General Meeting is set for 6:45 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 21st at the Little Vienna Bakery Cafe, 6726 West Coast Road in Sooke.
We anticipate a brief business meeting, then everyone’s invited to settle back and enjoy the fourth in Stephen Hindrichs’ evenings of short, inspiring, upbeat video clips that he’s presented over the last few years at the bakery.
All members are welcome to the AGM, and we invite individuals to nominate themselves for our board of directors (aka “core team”). We regularly meet on the second Tuesday of the month at a director’s home. Directors are responsible for attending as many meetings as possible, contributing to our consensus decision-making process, and also taking on various working-group responsibilities.
Sincere thanks to our 2014 board team: Jeff Bateman (president), Michael Tacon (treasurer and past president) and board directors Darren Alexander, Blake Barton, Yvonne Court, Sofie Hagens, Lee Hindrichs, Stephen Hindrichs and Andrew Moore. All directors will stand down at the AGM, and we’re pleased to report that most of these people along with Tony St. Pierre and Mark Ziegler are putting their names forward for the new board.
Attached please find our 2013 financial report and the minutes from last year’s AGM.
Thierry Vrain speaks up against GMO foods
We thought you might appreciate this:
a short report by Thierry Vrain on his position about the risks involved with GMO foods.
January Newsletter: Let’s Create Happiness
The Newsletter for January has arrived and is filled with tips and tricks on how to create your own happiness. Find it here!
Waste Not! Awareness Film Night & TS co-present The Clean Bin Project, Jan. 14 @ EMCS
Is it possible to live completely waste-free for a year? Can we do it at home, in businesses and throughout the District of Sooke? Get inspired and explore the possibilities at Transition Sooke’s co-presentation of the acclaimed documentary The Clean Bin Project at next week’s Awareness Film Night, Wed. Jan. 14th at EMCS.
Starting at 7 p.m., the evening will include a free store and displays in the EMCS lobby, the film itself and then a closing discussion featuring Sooke Mayor Maja Tait, Zero Waste Canada‘s Buddy Boyd and other guests. Our end goal is to sow the seeds and enlist volunteers for a Zero Waste Sooke committee that will take action in the months ahead.
The ban on food scraps from the Hartland landfill (effective Jan. 1) is one good reason for the evening as residents explore the options for backyard composers and roadside pick-up. The night is also a follow-up to the November, 2013 AFN screening of the documentary Trashed and a lively “talking trash” discussion that ensued afterwards. One highlight of the evening was a call by resident Sheila Wallace for Sooke to commit to becoming a “zero waste” community.
If you are thinking that Zero Waste sounds like a pie in the sky, know that over 400 communities in the world have committed to a zero waste process. According to a report in the Watershed Sentinel on the Zero Waste International Alliance Conference held in Nanaimo in October, speakers told of many success stories from Chilliwack to San Francisco to Salerno, Italy, (which went from 17% diversion to 70% in just 2 years) as well as presenting information about policies and ideas that are currently being implemented in cities and towns around the world to reduce waste.
Mayor Tait will join the post-screening discussion to discuss the District’s current waste management strategies, including Corporate Carbon Neutrality and the Corporate Energy & Emissions Plan. She’ll be joined by Transition core team member Tony St. Pierre (from Sooke’s Cast Iron Farm) and such local business people as SeaFlora‘s Diane Bernard and Tugwell Creek‘s Bob Liptrot (both of whom have launched their own workplace waste reduction strategies).
Another guest will be Zero Waste Canada‘s Buddy Boyd, co-founder of the Gibsons Recycling Depot (for a virtual tour of this award-winning site see www.gibsonsrecycling.ca). We’ve also invited a representative from Pacific Mobile Depot, the plastic and styrofoam recycling operation that collects throwaways from across southern Vancouver Island and processes it locally in Sooke.
Visit us at the Transition Sooke table to learn more about plastic waste and purchase some necessary tools for launching a personal waste-reduction regime, including reusable/washable produce and bulk bin bags for sale that have been made locally here in Sooke from recycled materials.
For more information on the evening along with guidelines for bringing items for the free store table, please check www.awarenessfilmnight.ca
Community, Resilience, Climate 