by hanspetermeyer
In October 2009 the 6th in the Gaining Ground Summit series attracted 600 people to Vancouver to learn, talk about, and build connections around the theme of "Resilient Cities." This transcribed interview with Jack Minard is the 3rd in a series of conversations between CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer and conference participants. CIT will continue to interview and post conversations in the coming months, tracking some of the medium-term impact of this significant collection of experience, ideas, and practice around sustainability.Jack Minard the Executive Director of the Comox Valley Land Trust. He attended Resilient Cities as a guest of the Real Estate Foundation of BC. Jack talked to CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer shortly after the conference about why the Foundation would want a land trust organization at a "cities" event, and what kinds of learnings he's bringing back to his work on stewardship and conservation in the Comox Valley. What follows is an edited version of this interview. An audio version is posted to the CITinfoResource blog here.
hanspetermeyer: Hi Jack. Now we've had many conversations about land use over the past couple of years, but today I want to talk to you about your recent experience at the Resilient Cities conference. I'm curious about this because your background is with the Comox Valley Land Trust, and you've done a lot of stewardship work in the Comox Valley – and yet you went to Vancouver to a conference about "cities." What is the connection between what you are doing and Resilient Cities?
Jack Minard: Well, I think that the level of discussion, and the international aspect of the conference was so far reaching, and in a way overwhelming, that what we gained by being there was a better understanding of where we fit, almost on a global level. That was really key for me. In a lot of ways the Comox Valley is not years ahead of other places; but we've certainly moved in a conservation direction that setting the path for a lot of communities. And the conference gave me a real sense of just where we fit in terms of some of the initiatives that have been suggested for solving some of the loss of biodiversity.
hpm: Was this a surprise for you? To see the Comox Valley where it is as somewhat of a leader in conservation planning? I live in the Comox Valley as well, and I know that for years there has been a sense of frustration around land use planning and the conservation agenda, and you're saying that the Valley is a little ahead of lots of places?
JM: Yes. That's all true. I think whatever leadership we've managed, well that's squarely on the shoulders of Nature Without Borders project, and local governments' endorsement of it.
hpm: Natures Without Borders is the project that you folks have been working on the last couple of years, with considerable support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. Is that right?
JM: Yes that's right. It's the concept I think the Foundation sees as very important, a concept for all communities: the idea that you start planning your settlement changes after you identify and protect critical ecological features. It's a transferable concept. I was sponsored to attend Resilient Cities by the Foundation, and I think part of that was the Foundation wanted was for me to be able to talk to people and tell them what we were up to in our community.
hpm: What kind of response did you get?
JM: It was amazing. In one of the break-out sessions I was in we went around and were doing a kind of analysis as a group of various projects we were undertaking in our communities. As we went around the table I was thinking: that's good, that's very interesting, taking little bits of each of them. Then it came to me talking about the Regional Conservation Strategy that's come out of NWB. And what I basically said was very simple: let's protect the environment first as we grow and develop so that when we grow 100% over the next 30-50 years we still have this beautiful and extraordinarily bio-diverse valley. As soon as I explained it, it literally took up the almost the rest of the session. People were just fascinated by such a simple concept. Of course if you do that, if you lay that kind of protection down first and then build up around it, and have that restoration part in it to as the built environment is being built, you are actually restoring lost ecosystems and lost natural systems. The energy at the table just went up considerably and people were just fascinated by it.
hpm: That's pretty significant because I think the energy at Resilient Cities was generally pretty high. It's a high energy, high principal event with lots of positive examples and you are telling me that the work of Nature Without Borders is being seen as "way up there."
JM: Yes, it's being seen as a very-easy-to-understand, simple and important concept as we develop and grow. It does tend to work better in this rural/urban land setting that we live in here in the Comox Valley. It's certainly not something that is going to work well inside an already established city.
hpm: The Communities in Transition program at the Foundation is concerned with non-metropolitan communities. Why, besides the networking opportunity and the opportunity to talk about the NWB experience, do you think CIT would want the Comox Valley Land Trust at Resilient Cities? What's the take-away value there for rural communities? Comox Valley is basically three very small urban areas and a lot of rural area. What do we get out of the idea of Resilient Cities?
JM: The idea that I put forward is that although we have our urban centres here in the Comox Valley, which are very small, there is this incredible rural contribution to those cores. If we live in a community, say the city of Courtenay with 18,000 people at any given time, there's probably 30,000 people in town because half the people again are using the facilities, roads, the services, and the shopping centres – people who live out in the country who are coming to town to do their daily or weekly shopping or doctor/dentist or whatever. The whole concept of inviting nature into our cores and inviting some urbanization into our rural areas puts us in their rural/urban interface. Instead of thinking of ourselves in the Valley as a city or as a country, we are an interface of the two, and that was an interesting concept that I was able to take to the conference which actually sparked some imagination particularly, from those people who come from smaller towns.
hpm: Were there many people from smaller communities from BC at the conference?
JM: I think so. I had a very, very busy schedule for the conference but I talked to two or three people who came from communities much like ours.
hpm: Was there any body else, maybe elected people or staff from this region?
JM: No staff from this region but one of our local architects was there, and we had a couple of the qualified environmental professionals who we are working with on proposals and developments. There were also a few individuals who came on their own just to see what it was like.
hpm: If you had a wish list, who would you like to see from Comox Valley at the next Gaining Ground summit?
JM: The planners, the engineers. I really think that the mind expansion of some of the things these people at Resilient Cities talked about would be really, really good to be heard by the people who are making these decisions in our local goverments.
hpm: When you go and talk about this event in the Comox Valley here, who are the 3 speakers you heard that you'd recommend we pay attention to? Which 3 people stood out for you at GGRC09?
JM: My dear friend Mark Harcourt stood out to me. The man has such a great sense of humour. It lightened the whole atmosphere when he spoke, and he basically was talking about things like making McMansion living uncool. Things like marketing green coolness. Using courage and vision and cunning to get our messages across. Mike was a huge stand out and largely because many of the speakers up until Harcourt spoke were very serious, right into their power points and progress. Whereas Mike got up and basically wung it. He ad-libbed and really did lighten the mood – yet came through with a really dramatic message.
Another person that people should follow is Bill Rees, the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Bill is difficult to listen to. He says it like it is: Folks we are in trouble; we don't have a good relationship with nature; and any relationship we do have with nature is fractured. He went on to say things like, "The only thing that counts is an absolute reduction in consumption. Everything else is delusional. You can't arrest by efficiency only. You have to reduce to footprint. You have to live on the resources of your own region." Bill was morose, just full of doom and gloom. But he comes out the other end of it saying, "Why aren't we living on the resources of our own regions?" – which of course is what we need to be doing. Reducing the amount of trucking is an example. Why is it that we expect that we can eat broccoli twelve months of the year and things like that?
The other speaker who absolutely blew me away was Majora Carter. She was talking about on the ground change and self interest and how self interest is tied completely to each other and then went on to talk about governance. Of course, governance is where the Nature Without Borders community partnership is basically starting to move now, towards governance on a watershed basis. Majora talked about this incredible resistance to change. Are we resilient? Can we govern to be resilient? And what is it about the system that creates barriers? You know, there is lots of time spent crafting plans, and we assume the plan will get implemented; but there is a structure and the government does not change and things – these plans and strategies – they continue to gather dust and it's really good work that's been done. So she talked about reforming the structure of the government and the bureaucracy. I'm absolutely aligned with that point of view. I think that is something we have to do in terms of our major barriers. I hear from our local planners often that we can't do something because we don't have the legislation from the province. So, one of the things we are doing through things like CAVI and the Learning Lunch series is talking about new policies and approaches.
hpm: CAVI is the Convening for Action on Vancouver Island series of learning lunches and things that are actually bringing local professional primarily and NGO's together to learn the same information. Is that right?
JM: That's right. But it's actually more to break down the silo's inside the regional and municipal district staff bureaucracies. There are lots of examples of planning and engineering not really working together well. Someone comes in to do the planning, the planners tell them to do this, the planning comes back and the engineers say no no no, you got to start over. Trying to break down those types of barriers, trying to break the silos, and trying to actually get those people to work together closely is the first part of integrating. We have a lot of initiatives going on inside the Valley. How are we going to integrate them all if we're not integrating ourselves inside our own work place?
hpm: Give me your 3 take-aways from Resilient Cities.
JM: Well, I think the number one take-away is trying to make my messaging more transformative and informational. Talking about emotions and feelings rather than science and logic. Trying to talk about moving from being exploiters of the natural world to stewards of the natural world. That's one of the big big take aways.
Another major take away came from Doug Makaroff who's doing a Living Forest Community. They've successfully sub-divided a 1000 acre parcel of land on the Malahat. He's put seventy seven homes on there, protected most of the forest, and made money. So that's a big take-away message: that these kinds of conservation developments are not only doable, but they can be profitable as well.
Another big takeaway would be to ask: What is the essence of your community? Looking at that from a community level and what is the vision that essence starts to describe. Tim Pringle from the Real Estate Foundation and I have been working together on some concepts about that, to try and describe what the essence of the Comox Valley is, in a way that really is understandable, a way that would then colour all of the land use decisions being made.
hpm: Thank you very much Jack. I know the Gaining Ground summit has been very inspirational for lots of people I talk to. I get an even deeper sense of how different people respond to different aspects of it. It's a very rich learning experience and thanks for sharing that.
JM: I almost need a follow up session with everybody to talk it out!
hpm: Well I encourage you to keep talking it out in the community – and let's see if we can get some of those staff people at next years Gaining Ground.
JM: That's a great objective!
Jack Minard: Well, I think that the level of discussion, and the international aspect of the conference was so far reaching, and in a way overwhelming, that what we gained by being there was a better understanding of where we fit, almost on a global level. That was really key for me. In a lot of ways the Comox Valley is not years ahead of other places; but we've certainly moved in a conservation direction that setting the path for a lot of communities. And the conference gave me a real sense of just where we fit in terms of some of the initiatives that have been suggested for solving some of the loss of biodiversity.
hpm: Was this a surprise for you? To see the Comox Valley where it is as somewhat of a leader in conservation planning? I live in the Comox Valley as well, and I know that for years there has been a sense of frustration around land use planning and the conservation agenda, and you're saying that the Valley is a little ahead of lots of places?
JM: Yes. That's all true. I think whatever leadership we've managed, well that's squarely on the shoulders of Nature Without Borders project, and local governments' endorsement of it.
hpm: Natures Without Borders is the project that you folks have been working on the last couple of years, with considerable support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. Is that right?
JM: Yes that's right. It's the concept I think the Foundation sees as very important, a concept for all communities: the idea that you start planning your settlement changes after you identify and protect critical ecological features. It's a transferable concept. I was sponsored to attend Resilient Cities by the Foundation, and I think part of that was the Foundation wanted was for me to be able to talk to people and tell them what we were up to in our community.
hpm: What kind of response did you get?
JM: It was amazing. In one of the break-out sessions I was in we went around and were doing a kind of analysis as a group of various projects we were undertaking in our communities. As we went around the table I was thinking: that's good, that's very interesting, taking little bits of each of them. Then it came to me talking about the Regional Conservation Strategy that's come out of NWB. And what I basically said was very simple: let's protect the environment first as we grow and develop so that when we grow 100% over the next 30-50 years we still have this beautiful and extraordinarily bio-diverse valley. As soon as I explained it, it literally took up the almost the rest of the session. People were just fascinated by such a simple concept. Of course if you do that, if you lay that kind of protection down first and then build up around it, and have that restoration part in it to as the built environment is being built, you are actually restoring lost ecosystems and lost natural systems. The energy at the table just went up considerably and people were just fascinated by it.
hpm: That's pretty significant because I think the energy at Resilient Cities was generally pretty high. It's a high energy, high principal event with lots of positive examples and you are telling me that the work of Nature Without Borders is being seen as "way up there."
JM: Yes, it's being seen as a very-easy-to-understand, simple and important concept as we develop and grow. It does tend to work better in this rural/urban land setting that we live in here in the Comox Valley. It's certainly not something that is going to work well inside an already established city.
hpm: The Communities in Transition program at the Foundation is concerned with non-metropolitan communities. Why, besides the networking opportunity and the opportunity to talk about the NWB experience, do you think CIT would want the Comox Valley Land Trust at Resilient Cities? What's the take-away value there for rural communities? Comox Valley is basically three very small urban areas and a lot of rural area. What do we get out of the idea of Resilient Cities?
JM: The idea that I put forward is that although we have our urban centres here in the Comox Valley, which are very small, there is this incredible rural contribution to those cores. If we live in a community, say the city of Courtenay with 18,000 people at any given time, there's probably 30,000 people in town because half the people again are using the facilities, roads, the services, and the shopping centres – people who live out in the country who are coming to town to do their daily or weekly shopping or doctor/dentist or whatever. The whole concept of inviting nature into our cores and inviting some urbanization into our rural areas puts us in their rural/urban interface. Instead of thinking of ourselves in the Valley as a city or as a country, we are an interface of the two, and that was an interesting concept that I was able to take to the conference which actually sparked some imagination particularly, from those people who come from smaller towns.
hpm: Were there many people from smaller communities from BC at the conference?
JM: I think so. I had a very, very busy schedule for the conference but I talked to two or three people who came from communities much like ours.
hpm: Was there any body else, maybe elected people or staff from this region?
JM: No staff from this region but one of our local architects was there, and we had a couple of the qualified environmental professionals who we are working with on proposals and developments. There were also a few individuals who came on their own just to see what it was like.
hpm: If you had a wish list, who would you like to see from Comox Valley at the next Gaining Ground summit?
JM: The planners, the engineers. I really think that the mind expansion of some of the things these people at Resilient Cities talked about would be really, really good to be heard by the people who are making these decisions in our local goverments.
hpm: When you go and talk about this event in the Comox Valley here, who are the 3 speakers you heard that you'd recommend we pay attention to? Which 3 people stood out for you at GGRC09?
JM: My dear friend Mark Harcourt stood out to me. The man has such a great sense of humour. It lightened the whole atmosphere when he spoke, and he basically was talking about things like making McMansion living uncool. Things like marketing green coolness. Using courage and vision and cunning to get our messages across. Mike was a huge stand out and largely because many of the speakers up until Harcourt spoke were very serious, right into their power points and progress. Whereas Mike got up and basically wung it. He ad-libbed and really did lighten the mood – yet came through with a really dramatic message.
Another person that people should follow is Bill Rees, the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Bill is difficult to listen to. He says it like it is: Folks we are in trouble; we don't have a good relationship with nature; and any relationship we do have with nature is fractured. He went on to say things like, "The only thing that counts is an absolute reduction in consumption. Everything else is delusional. You can't arrest by efficiency only. You have to reduce to footprint. You have to live on the resources of your own region." Bill was morose, just full of doom and gloom. But he comes out the other end of it saying, "Why aren't we living on the resources of our own regions?" – which of course is what we need to be doing. Reducing the amount of trucking is an example. Why is it that we expect that we can eat broccoli twelve months of the year and things like that?
The other speaker who absolutely blew me away was Majora Carter. She was talking about on the ground change and self interest and how self interest is tied completely to each other and then went on to talk about governance. Of course, governance is where the Nature Without Borders community partnership is basically starting to move now, towards governance on a watershed basis. Majora talked about this incredible resistance to change. Are we resilient? Can we govern to be resilient? And what is it about the system that creates barriers? You know, there is lots of time spent crafting plans, and we assume the plan will get implemented; but there is a structure and the government does not change and things – these plans and strategies – they continue to gather dust and it's really good work that's been done. So she talked about reforming the structure of the government and the bureaucracy. I'm absolutely aligned with that point of view. I think that is something we have to do in terms of our major barriers. I hear from our local planners often that we can't do something because we don't have the legislation from the province. So, one of the things we are doing through things like CAVI and the Learning Lunch series is talking about new policies and approaches.
hpm: CAVI is the Convening for Action on Vancouver Island series of learning lunches and things that are actually bringing local professional primarily and NGO's together to learn the same information. Is that right?
JM: That's right. But it's actually more to break down the silo's inside the regional and municipal district staff bureaucracies. There are lots of examples of planning and engineering not really working together well. Someone comes in to do the planning, the planners tell them to do this, the planning comes back and the engineers say no no no, you got to start over. Trying to break down those types of barriers, trying to break the silos, and trying to actually get those people to work together closely is the first part of integrating. We have a lot of initiatives going on inside the Valley. How are we going to integrate them all if we're not integrating ourselves inside our own work place?
hpm: Give me your 3 take-aways from Resilient Cities.
JM: Well, I think the number one take-away is trying to make my messaging more transformative and informational. Talking about emotions and feelings rather than science and logic. Trying to talk about moving from being exploiters of the natural world to stewards of the natural world. That's one of the big big take aways.
Another major take away came from Doug Makaroff who's doing a Living Forest Community. They've successfully sub-divided a 1000 acre parcel of land on the Malahat. He's put seventy seven homes on there, protected most of the forest, and made money. So that's a big take-away message: that these kinds of conservation developments are not only doable, but they can be profitable as well.
Another big takeaway would be to ask: What is the essence of your community? Looking at that from a community level and what is the vision that essence starts to describe. Tim Pringle from the Real Estate Foundation and I have been working together on some concepts about that, to try and describe what the essence of the Comox Valley is, in a way that really is understandable, a way that would then colour all of the land use decisions being made.
hpm: Thank you very much Jack. I know the Gaining Ground summit has been very inspirational for lots of people I talk to. I get an even deeper sense of how different people respond to different aspects of it. It's a very rich learning experience and thanks for sharing that.
JM: I almost need a follow up session with everybody to talk it out!
hpm: Well I encourage you to keep talking it out in the community – and let's see if we can get some of those staff people at next years Gaining Ground.
JM: That's a great objective!
©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2009
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