Great video shot on Hallowe’en, October 31, 2013. Over 1000 dolphins swim alongside a BC Ferries vessel on its way to Vancouver through Georgia Strait.
CBC report confirms they’re Pacific white-sided dolphins which usually congregate farther out to sea.
This photo was taken by my colleague Ken Wu, an environmental advocate with BC’s Ancient Rainforest Alliance. The photo was actually taken in Washington State, not far from here. He says this is the Quinault Rainforest in Olympic National Park, “the mossiest temperate rainforest in existence with almost all the record-size trees of the region, just about my favourite place on the West Coast!”
As part of my other design job with a group called Commons BC, I was involved in the fight against Bill 8 which would have privatized vast areas of BC’s forests.
[Update: The Globe and Mail has finally run the story about our trip. Wilderness guide and Globe travel writer Bruce Kirkby came along on our leg of the ride.]
I just spent two weeks out of internet range, riding through the remote Northern Rockies on horseback.
Letter from my friend Dorothy to Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the question of his profoundly anti-democratic omnibus “budget bill” C-38. The bill’s major intent, among many nefarious minor intents, is to obliterate environmental groups and their opposition to the Alberta tar sands and its pipelines.
British Columbia student Sarah Dalziel, who regularly wins medals in Canadian science fairs, is working on hybridizing the woad plant for maximum yield in harsh climates. Woad, which as you probably know was used by Boadicea to paint herself blue in early Celtic times, is an important source of indigo dye.
I’ve always loved this building. It’s part of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and was built in 1966 to house the icebreaker St. Roch. You can just see the top of the mast through the upper window.
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This Blog
This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.
As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board."
As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more
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Book in Progress: Habitat
To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis.
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