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Sections cover Events, General Interest, and a Feature.
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SGI Greens (Green Party of Canada) news and events:
TBA: The federal election
The election may be announced in March, with Election Day in May.
Volunteers are already starting Elizabeth’s re-election campaign. Our goal is not only to re-elect our amazing Elizabeth, but to re-elect her resoundingly!
We need your help! You can support Elizabeth’s campaign now, in two ways:
- Request a Lawn Sign We want to blanket the riding in Green on the first day of the election. We will install it and remove it after the election.
- Volunteer It takes many volunteers to call supporters, knock on doors, enter data, host Kitchen Table Talks, help with signs, and many other actions.
Thank you for your support!
February Community Meetings
At these non-partisan events, Elizabeth brings constituents up to date on activities in Ottawa and listens to constituents’ concerns. They’re a great opportunity to meet Elizabeth, get better informed, and hear others’ concerns.
Mayne Island Community Meeting
Saturday, Feb 22, 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Mayne Island Community Centre, 493 Felix Jack Rd.
Pender Islands Community Meeting
Sunday, Feb 23, 4 pm – 5:30 pm
Pender Islands Community Hall, 4418 Bedwell Harbour Rd.
Saturna Island Community Meeting
Tuesday, Feb 25, 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Saturna Community Hall, 105 E Point Rd.
Galiano Island Community Meeting
Wednesday, Feb 26, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Galiano Community Hall, 141 Sturdies Bay Rd.
March 2, 4pm — Film and Discussion Panel
SGI Greens and the BC Environmental Film Festival are presenting a film, “Flight of the Swans,” at the Star Cinema. Tickets: $13 at the door.
BC Greens news and events: (because we’re friends)
February 18, 7:00 pm – The Voices of Saanich
This speaker series will resume with a moving presentation, “The Art of Reconciliation,” by Dr. Andrea Walsh, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria. Dr. Walsh will recount the story of the discovery of children’s artworks created at the Alberni Indian Residential School and their return to Survivors and their families. Further description and registration is here.
February 22, 4:00 – 5:00 pm – Coldest Night of the Year
Saanich North and the Islands (SAN), Saanich South, and Saanich–Gulf Islands Greens are invited as the “Saanich and Peninsula Greens” team for Coldest Night of the Year.
This is a family friendly walk to raise money for Our Place Society to support people experiencing hurt, hunger, and homelessness. SAN Greens have walked for CNOY in Saanichton for the past three years, and it’s been a wonderful community experience.
We have, once again, been welcomed to join the Central Saanich United Church and others to walk in friendship in Saanichton. Are you able to make a donation? No amount is too small!
Will you walk with us? Please let us know here. CNOY wishes all walkers to sign their waiver, listed on the same page as the donation page – you can do so on the “join a team” button.
Community Information:
February – various dates
The folks at Creatively United have an excellent online calendar of local events.
February 16, 11:45 am – Stolen Sisters March
Supporters will march in memory of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQIA+ people. Participants will gather at Centennial Square before marching to the B.C. legislature. Organizers from Stolen Sisters encourage all to participate.
General interest:
Good news snippets
- China’s CO2 emissions have plateaued since February 2024. (Carbon Brief)
Climate (and other) solutions
- The EU’s growth of solar and wind power has pushed fossil fuels to a 40 year low, with solar power exceeding coal, and wind power exceeding gas in 2024.(Carbon Brief)
Is this greenwashing?
- The Liberal’s Chrystia Freeland promised not to spend any more public money on the TMX pipeline, loaned it another $20 billion (total ~$50 billion)! (National Observer)
Feature:
An Interview with Tory Stevens, Retired Biologist and Urban Farmer
Early Life, Education and Immigration
Tory was born in Seattle in 1951 and received her basic schooling there, after which she went to Oberlin College in Ohio for a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, but finding herself increasingly drawn to the scientific side of the field, physical as opposed to cultural anthropology (“hard science, things you could hang your hat on”), she returned to Seattle and pursued a PhD in forest zoology at the University of Washington. She chose that subject because she wanted to spend time in the field. The second of three sisters, she developed a love of nature at an early age, spending countless hours of her childhood playing outside and going on hiking and camping trips with her family. She remembers wearing “hideously uncomfortable” Trapper Nelson backpacks on these family hikes driven by her mother, an avid hiker until the day she died at the age of 95, having gone on her last overnight family backpacking trip at 85 and sleeping soundly on a thin foam pad with no complaints. (Tory shares her intrepid mother’s mental and physical toughness, going on 10-day kayaking trips on the remote northwest coast of Vancouver Island every summer, rain or shine, backpacking regularly with her daughters in wilderness parks, riding her bicycle from Campbell River to Victoria every September to raise money for the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign for African grandmothers raising their grandchildren orphaned by AIDS, and going on weekly 50-kilometre training rides all year round.)
Tory immigrated to Canada in 1981 after meeting her future husband, UVic philosophy professor Alan Drengson, while he was on a hiking holiday in Olympic National Park and she was working in the park as a Roving Biologist monitoring the introduced mountain goat population. They shared a life-long passion for the outdoors, environmental ethics, and “deep ecology,” a necessary paradigm shift in the way we perceive ourselves as just one species among many on the planet and no more important than others, a subject Professor Drengson taught and wrote extensively about until his death in 2022. She and Alan had three daughters, who grew up just as Tory had, hiking, camping and backpacking with their outdoorsy parents.
Career and Political Activism
After staying at home to raise her three daughters and working as a consultant to the “dirt” ministries for 18 years, Tory began full-time work in the Habitat Branch of the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection in 1999 until Gordon Campbell “blew it up and it disappeared altogether,” after which she worked as a Protected Areas Ecologist for B.C. Parks until her retirement in 2019. She set up a long-term ecological monitoring system for the entire province whose database is available to everyone. Some of the early protocols in that monitoring system have now been replaced by iNaturalist, which many hikers have on their phones to contribute their photos and observations to a park-specific database. Tory’s meticulous data collected every four years along her transects in the parks represent a baseline to which more recently collected data can be compared.
Tory has been politically active all her life. Having grown up in the Vietnam War era and studying in Ohio at the time of the 1970 Kent State student murders by the Ohio National Guard, she participated in the massive Vietnam War protest rally in Washington D.C. Oberlin’s contribution was a performance of the Mozart Requiem in the Washington Cathedral in memory not only of the dead students but of everyone who had died in the war. She also participated in the protest movement opposed to the nuclear submarine base in Puget Sound. Since moving to Canada, she has been a passionate advocate for environmental protection and public policies protecting biodiversity including chairing the Resilient Saanich Technical Committee tasked with creating a cohesive environmental policy framework for the district to follow when evaluating policies, strategies and bylaws. Tory is also a member of the Park Elders, a group of retired municipal, provincial and federal park employees who advise government on the multiple benefits of park. She votes Green at every opportunity, attends meetings and environmental rallies such as the Seniors’ Climate Rally last October 1st, writes letters to politicians and even strategically joined the provincial NDP hoping to elect climate activist Anjali Appaduri as the next leader of the party after Premier Horgan stepped down.
Tory’s House, Garden, and Communal Food Forest
Tory’s house and garden are an inspiring example of what we can do in our homes and backyards. She installed solar panels on her bungalow in south Saanich in 2015, from which she recharges her Nissan Leaf, runs all the electricity in the house and even sells electricity back to B.C. Hydro. She also installed a heat pump in 2023, taking advantage of government incentives to get people off fossil fuels, so it only cost her $1000. She keeps her thermostat low and does not use a clothes dryer. In her backyard she has a compost, chickens, an extensive vegetable garden and a small orchard, and (although torn between planting native plants or edible plants) she is converting a patch of grass to a native plant garden. Her vegetable garden has been so successful that she doesn’t need to buy vegetables, storing, freezing and eating them fresh all year round. She waters the garden with rainwater she collects and stores in a 4000-gallon tank she had installed when she moved in.
Her front yard is devoted to a deer-fenced food forest, a type of community garden where any member of the public is welcome to come in and harvest whatever they want, including walnuts, hazelnuts, apples, pears, artichokes, paw paws, blueberries, marionberries, grapes and rhubarb. It does not require watering as she covers the soil with arborist chips she gets free from Saanich. Interestingly, the main problem with the food forest has not been horticultural but cultural as she has found people have such an innate fear of stepping on somebody’s private property that they don’t come inside the fence to harvest the food. Tory finds this frustrating as it produces a lot of food and she wants to share it.
In the last year she has moved into a Garden Suite in her backyard and has turned over the house to one of her daughters and family. She is now even closer to her garden and can watch Chicken TV from her kitchen window.
A Deeply Committed Environmentalist
Tory doesn’t just talk the talk. She quit flying in 2019, finding we can no longer justify the carbon footprint it inflicts on the earth. However, although opposed to flying for tourism and recreation, she will make an exception to her refusal to fly for the sake of maintaining close family bonds. She highly recommends The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee as an excellent (and humorous!) guide to carbon awareness, as well as the carbon calculator on the District of Saanich website: https://www.saanich.ca/EN/main/community/sustainable-saanich/climate-change/carbon-fund-calculator.html. She encourages people to convert their lawns to native plant gardens friendly to insects and birds and to avoid plastic bags and packaging at the grocery store (she takes her own bags with her when buying in bulk). For her the key is to reduce consumption: she generates so little garbage that she only puts her bin out once a year and prefers to use Pacific Mobile Recycling rather than the Blue Box because all the plastic is processed into plastic lumber on the Island. She takes any styrofoam, hard and soft plastic and foil-lined plastic she has reluctantly accumulated to Pacific Recycling three times a year and is happy to pay the small fee to keep it local.
Lest you’re feeling utterly intimidated and guilt-stricken by now, you’ll be happy to know that Tory is not self-righteous or intolerant. She just loves the natural world so much that she doesn’t have the heart to add to its stress. Her environmentalism all stems from a simple decision she made years ago, “I need to live lightly, as lightly as I possibly can.”
– Interviewed by Katharine Odgers