Editorial Notes: June issue of the Communities in Transition Information Resource

Welcome to the June posting of the CIT Information Resource! Our next posting will be in September. In the interim, many of you will be enjoying the lakes, rivers, and beaches of summer. As well as providing wonderful recreational opportunities, our BC waters are also the source of our ability to create and enjoy healthy communities.

Our "cover picture" comes to us courtesy of CIT's “Healthy Water, Healthy Communities – Lake Windemere Project" in the Invermere area. It's a view of the Lake Windemere wetlands. Wetlands provide a critical connection for wildlife between the terrestrial and aquatic habitats; they also provide very efficient and increasingly important water purification and carbon sequestration roles (see Climate Change 2: Re-Valuing Natural Systems from CIT December 2008). In our September post we'll be reviewing the Lake Windemere project. May your summer boating and water-recreational activities be enjoyable, and exercised with a mind to your impact on surrounding natural and human communities!

Since our last major posting in May there have been a lot of land-use related events and conversations taking place in BC. In early June we posted an interview with Tim Pringle on the Northern Sustainability Summit held in Smithers. The Summit was part of a series of events following up on last fall's Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George. We hope you have a look at this if you're interested in how the Real Estate Foundation is working on community transition issues in BC's north and northwest.

The end of May also marked the gathering of over 800 land use practitioners at the 2009 BC Land Summit in Whistler. This event, engaging individuals from across a broad spectrum of land use perspectives and professions, is an example of how the Foundation supports opportunities to deepen the conversation about land use and sustainability in BC. In an attempt to capture some of the energy of the event, CIT Information Resource interviewed a number of people while they were at the BC Land Summit. Some interviews will be posted in subsequent months, but in this issue we feature pre-conference comments from Sheila Harrington of the Land Trust Alliance of BC, who's organization released new research on conservation and climate change. We have some "first thoughts" from Brenda Southam of the Real Estate Institute of BC. The Real Estate Foundations' Director of Special Programs, Tim Pringle, talks about Robert F. Kennedy's perspective on social and economic change. In our final interview from the Summit in this issue, Mark Holland draws on Summit presenters like Kennedy, Sherry Kafka Wagner, and BC's Angus McAllister and David Zirnheldt to point us towards territory beyond "sustainability." We've been told by the organizers that more materials will be posted to the BC Land Summit website in the near future.

George Penfold came to BC about a dozen years ago after years of outstanding work in land use policy and research in Ontario. A couple of years ago he was named the Regional Innovation Chair for Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College. George has contributed to the CIT Information Resource in the past, and we're very happy to be publishing his current think-piece on the longer term impact of recent amenity migration related development on communities in the Kootenays. Our coverage of the rural economic development issues continues with a second conversation with Vernon-based Victor Cumming, a discussion that looks at some of the follow-up activities to the October '08 Reversing the Tide conference. Climate change is an ongoing concern for anyone working with the land, and Real Estate Foundation staffer Jen McCaffrey continues our coverage of the Climate Action Charter topic with her report on a recent legally-oriented workshop for local government. Finally, with a nod to the rapidly growing impact of virtual communities and online conversations we conclude this issue of the CIT Information Resource with a column on social media that attempts to connect the dots between virtual "community" and the kind that has conversations and takes action in real-time, real-space.

Land use. Climate change. The potential of social media. Rural economic development. These are all topics that are shaping change in BC's rural communities. We believe that the CIT Information Resource has a role to play in engaging land use practitioners in these conversations and in supporting informed dialogue about often difficult issues. We hope you like what you read – or at least find it stimulating to your practice in community. Share this material. Give us feedback. Use the social media tools available – email, comments on blogs, or the telephone – to tell us how we're doing.

We also encourage you to use this material in your own newsletters, blogs, facebook pages, groups, or profiles, and your twitter postings. We want to make our materials as widely available as possible. If you see an opportunity for republication, electronically or in print, for education or non-commercial uses, please feel free to do so. We hope that you, as readers and as practitioners in community transition, will take what you like here, reference it, and share it for educational and non-commercial purpose. We only ask that you let us know how you are using it, even if it’s just to circulate an article in the office or amongst friends. We also look forward to suggestions for opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and reprints of your articles related to CIT themes.

We look forward to hearing from you!

hans peter meyer
Editor, Communities in Transition Information Resource
editor@communitytransition.org