The road less cycled

No, I’m not making a zombie movie.

I am bringing back spawner surveys for Stoney Creek, together, of course, with the Stoney Creek Salmon Stalkers. In 2007 we definitively counted 31 spawning coho salmon returning to east Abbotsford’s Stoney Creek, and quite likely several more that we couldn’t verify. In 2008, we were AWOL. MIA. Showing gross dereliction of duty. Clean and dry.

This year, the Stalkers are back. Weekly, or semi-weekly, we’ll be tramping up Stoney Creek, counting how many spawning chum, coho, and chinook (now there’s a pipe dream) have made it all the way upriver to Stoney. To speak no more of this, a la Peter Donaldson. To mate. To die.

You’re welcome to join us. Requested in fact, even if it’s only for one session, or two, that would help. Will you see salmon? No guarantee of that, unfortunately, but there are guarantees. Fresh, crisp Autumn air. Exercise. Getting to know one of your local creeks. Seeing other wildlife. So join us. Tramp up and down Stoney Creek a few times. Write down what you see, and we’ll get a second year of salmon data for Stoney Creek.

You might have heard that our salmon stocks aren’t doing so well. 9/10ths of our sockeye disappeared this summer. It’s true that coho and chum aren’t sockeye. But they’re still important. They teach us about the cycle of life. Our large predators, bears, eagle, and the small ones too, the larvae and insects, feed on them. Even the trees and plants are nourished by our salmon. They tell us how our ocean is doing. Whether it’s able to produce food for our priceless salmon stocks, or whether we’re overfishing it, or trashing it. In this circle of life, the Stoney Creek Salmon Stalkers will play a small role. One that hopefully enhances community awareness of fragile salmon stocks, and encourages responsible lifestyle choices that both strengthen the community and are salmon-friendly.

We’re working under the auspices of the Abbotsford Ravine Park Salmonid Enhancement Society, in close collaboration with the Fraser Valley Regional Watersheds Coalition. The ARPSES actually started when a guy who had grown up in the Clayburn Watershed, of which Stoney Creek is a part, returned from military service, and noticed that the creek didn’t play host to nearly as many salmon as it had when he was a child. So he started a salmon hatchery to reverse this trend, and every year the hatchery now releases thousands of salmon fry into fragile, urbanized Stoney Creek. Is it working?

We won’t know unless you join us and help us find out.

Leaving behind for a minute the question of what is money, how do we make it, who makes it, and what is it really worth, let’s accept for a minute that money as we know it is currently the way in all things are valued, and let’s face it, is an unequivocal bottom line, the determining factor for so many of the things that matter. We instinctively recoil at that thought – I know I do, at least – but it’s very difficult if not impossible to get around the fact that without access to funds, it’s going to be very difficult to acquire the things that we need, or establish something of a safety net so that when shit does hit the fan in our lives, we have something to fall back on. Without money, we can’t buy health care, we can’t buy natural health products, transportation is next to impossible, post-secondary is out of the question, and the list goes on, and on a little bit of a larger scale, corporations and extractive industries continue to be able to wield the “job provision” stick in justifying the pillaging of our wilderness.

Now, money is central in our lives, but even more so for regions far more poverty -stricken than here.  Often, just a small sum, is enough to make a start at a business that can mean the difference between continuing to live in poverty and creating some flow of income so that there is hope for the future. That’s what micro-credit finance is all about. Pioneering it is what won Mohammed Yunus the Nobel Prize. The high re-payment rates of loans made on the micro-credit principle speak strongly for its success. It should even make the hardline right-wingers who decry what in my economics class they call, “transfer payments” – social benefits, employment insurance, welfare, GST rebates, child benefits, and the like – happy, ’cause what microcredit is undeniably doing is giving a leg up to those just don’t have a means to get a start otherwise, and not doing so in perpetuity or extended periods so as to create dependence, but just providing a start-up amount so that people can put their ideas and skills to the test.

So that’s just micro-credit off the top of my head. As with everything these days, there is a wealth of information about it online. At Dr. Google. Or…fine…I’ll do some research. Go here: http://www.globalafc.org/blog/press/microcredit-an-agent-of-change/

So micro-credit fits perfectly with my belief in a need for far-reaching reform, but that only a massive shift in how we use money is practical right now. We can use small sums to fight poverty. We can donate small amounts to non-profit groups doing work that we believe in. We can make small sacrifices in the monetary sense so that there’s still some money at the end of the month, and we can contribute to something we feel good about. It’s the path I was on back in 2006, and got away from in a big way since then, and would like to re-capture.

Even better, there’s a program I’m going to do next summer called the Global Agents for Change, in which money is raised by participants who cycle together for weeks at a time. Three rides are available in 2010: Vancouver to Tijuana; Amsterdam to Istanbul, and a Cambodia ride. Now I ask you, was anything ever designed that was more suitable for me? A 2-3 month bike ride, an extremely low-carbon and pro-fitness way of travelling, while raising money to lessen the income gap between rich and poor nations? I was intrigued from the moment I heard about this, so it didn’t take me long to make up my mind that I was going to do this. It’s going to happen. Summer 2010, and I’ll do what it takes to get there. I’ve been throwing around ideas for long distance bike rides or walks for a while now, and this totally fits the bill.

So what do I need? Well, $3000 bucks and a good bike. Not that I don’t have  a good bike. Right now I have an old Raleigh, probably from the ’80’s somewhere. Bright blue. A little faded. No gear slippage. Sturdy, if a little heavy. A good touring bike? Not really. Too heavy, considering I’ll probably want to carry 60lbs of gear. Not customized for my body, and for a 9 week ride, that’s essential. So a new (used?) touring bike is probably essential for this trip.

How am I going to get the bike and the money? Scrounging. Not eating out. Buying and re-selling. Re-developing the focus I haven’t had a semblance of since I had a concussion at the behest of a giant, moving, chunk of steel in March, and leveraging that into having a job while going to school. That, for me, is hard. I’m not a great saver. I tend to say, “screw it, when I decide what I want to do with my life I’ll save. For now? No way Jose.” But to cycle from Amsterdam to Istanbul, it’s worth it. No question. So I’ll do that, with a little help from my good buddies who read this blog who have my permission to give me a good kick in the ass whenever I spend too much…

Speaking of getting some money together, if you like and believe in micro-credit and want to see what it can do, feel free to send some cash in the direction of this important cause – from now until June saving to donate money to this is what I’ll be doing, that much is certain. Although….probably best to wait until I’m accepted before you decide to contribute

Post-secondary,  as it stands today, has at least one major flaw, and that is that since virtually no student has enough time to properly dedicate to his/her studies, the quality of their work goes down, as they cut corners to save time. Often, this is not evidence of the student being uneducated or unskilled; merely that he or she has run out of time to do the work that they are capable of.

As a result, instructors end up teaching concepts and practices that many students already know, but simply don’t have the time to implement because they are scrambling to get to work on time. Then they go to class, where they are told to do better what they already know perfectly well how to do, which wastes  time – both theirs and the instructors. Students end up paying just to be made busy, instead of paying to learn new things, akin to flushing their hard earned (or not yet earned) dollars down the drain, while their abilities and skills remain unchanged.

This is not at all to say that university is always a waste of time; it obviously isn’t, as it bestows the freedom to pursue higher level learning without being too concerned (yet) with being part of the work-force. Lots of valuable things are taught at the post-secondary level, but too often poor performance due to busyness dumbs down the level of teaching.

This situation is just one more symptom of an economic system that’s failing its people. If we want to students to pursue learning to a higher level, we should then also make it so that they have the time for their studies. At one time, perhaps, this was so. As things currently stand, too many students simply go through the motions in exchange for a piece of paper stating that they’ve achieved a level of learning that in all honesty, may not be greatly more accomplished than could be achieved by being in the workforce, and pursuing self-directed learning in a disciplined way.

“You don’t date people” she observed, with characteristic abruptness, a few months ago now when the topic came up. It is an observation that is more or less true, though there are undoubtedly episodes she doesn’t know about. Generally though, I’m not the guy who shows up with a new girl in tow the night after a break-up, or even the one who’s never without a girlfriend for more than a few weeks. Though I’m not one to obsess over these things, since I mostly allow life to run its course, it is something that’s been eating away at me for a little bit now. So despite being something of a “non-interventionist” in the sense that I too often allow life to unfold as it will, rather than taking a “grab life by the horns approach,” as well as a technophobe (in the sense that I don’t particularly like technological gizmos rather than that they confound me) I  did decide recently to explore an online dating site, something I haven’t ever done in the past. But the question remains, why don’t I very often get around to dating people? Well yeah, there’s the classic  ”I have high standards line,” but I think that one’s a little bit too stock, too stereotypical of an explanation, but partially true nonetheless. I think the other part of the answer to that is two-fold, only one of which I’ll dwell on here.

I think it’s undeniable that I hold some rather odd opinions, that not a great many people share, and which put me at odds with a lot of the people I come across.  Like the time I was hanging out with my brother recently, and we were chatting with a friend of mine, and they shook hands in saying good-bye, and he complimented my bro on his handshake – a perfect opportunity for me to chime in (after he left) and say, “That’s BS – what does the firmness of your handshake matter?” after which a good 20 minute “animated discussion” ensued, not over whether or not it was important to have a strong handshake, but over whether that was something we should really value. I won’t get into the whole discussion, since I’m just using this as an example of where I had an opinion that runs counter to what I think is the predominant view in our culture, and if you’re really pressed and trying to carve out a niche for yourself in a pretty competitive economy, definitely the most practical viewpoint. I certainly won’t deny that practicality is definitely something I need to pay more attention to at some point, getting off this rollercoaster of academics interspersed with temporary jobs and sometimes rather aimless, drifting search for both the meaning behind why we do things the way we do, and a deeper meaning behind this oh-so-mysterious human experience.

Then there’s my scorn of the oh-so pervasive suburban lifestyle, of sacrosanct institutions and customs that we simply adhere to without questioning, and in Abbotsford, the particularly difficult one of spurning (for the most part) the use of an automobile, something my tailbone is all too aware of right now, not to mention I don’t currently have a bike to ride. I in fact disagree with so many people about so many things that I’ve taken to just listening, patiently, and not bothering to point out where I think their reasoning is off.

Because it’s not like I have a ton of solutions to offer at this point anyway. I often even offer a counter opinion to one of my best friends in Abbotsford, who, one time after we’d left a billiard hall, said he hadn’t really connected with anybody, and that when somebody asked him how he was, he just said, “Opinionated”……which was such a breath of fresh air. To end this piece on a solid note, some things I know I do like and want to be part of my future are the thrill of physical exertion after a run, bike ride, or hike, the satisfaction of being able to produce your own food or know the people who did so, and the knowledge that the natural systems, the streams and the rivers and forests, that ultimately are the source of life on this planet, are intact and not compromised by our presence. That’s been one of the guiding principles of my life to date, but one that’s taken a little bit of a backseat to Edward Abbey’s admonishment, which I’ll paraphrase since my innernet’s down: That it’s not enough to simply fight for the preservation of our wilderness areas; we have to take the time to enjoy them, to experience them, so that we can truly understand them.

Well, I now have the ‘Net again. Here’s what he really said (my paraphrase was SOOOO not worth it):

“It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
— Edward Abbey