Tuesday, May 23, 2006

New Brunswick

The past two weeks have flown as I finished up projects prior to heading to New Brunswick for a working retreat. Between tidying up matters to do with Real Estate Investing for Canadians for Dummies to teeing up some extra real estate columns for Business in Vancouver and lining up projects for when I return to Vancouver in June, it’s been a busy time. Highlights included contacting ice cider makers and others regarding the new apple variety Eden for an article in Good Fruit Grower and being published in Country Life.

For the next two weeks, I’ll be enjoying the Maritime spring (about two months behind the season in Vancouver, which saw temperatures nearing 30 degrees Celsius last week) and reflecting on various themes and projects I would like to pursue in my writing. More on happenings here in subsequent posts.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Recent reading

I’ve taken some time during the past few days to catch up on reading that accumulated over the past winter. It's been quite the luxury!

Between a 40th-anniversary history of Vancouver’s Alcuin Society, the latest issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada and various trade periodicals, I began reading Susan McCaslin, Conversing with Paradise (1986). It’s one of the books I picked up in Seattle earlier this year. McCaslin’s work echoes that of William Blake, in whose tradition she places herself, but it is also thoroughly contemporary. She achieves a spiritual language missing from the contemporary language liturgies developed for Canada’s mainline churches at the time Conversing appeared. And in doing so, her work seems to come that much closer to the voice of the psalms and early church anthems those liturgies sought to echo.

But the work that has prevented me from doing much leisure reading of this sort lately persists: This week, I continue to round out some major assignments as well as produce a new crop of stories for Business in Vancouver, Country Life in BC and Good Fruit Grower on the latest in the B.C. real estate market, the growing demand for migrant labour in B.C.'s agriculture sector, and news of interest to local greenhouse growers.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Sustainable land use

Discussions in these parts last week focused on the sustainable use of land in Greater Vancouver. A number of meetings I attended and stories I wrote had to do with how to develop sustainable communities, provide space for industrial land users to grow, and whether or not to remove farmland from B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve. The issues are neither new nor unique to this part of the world. I’ve written several stories on all three topics, and sustainable development has its champions in the U.S., where communities are also grappling with the loss of industrial land and the need to preserve farmland.

The latest twist in B.C. is that some industrial land users are urging creation of an industrial land reserve similar to the existing reserve for agricultural land. I’m not sure it will happen, but the call speaks to the pressures industrial and agricultural land users face in a region that undervalues the contribution large-scale users of land make to the economy.

For the record, May 1 here was toasted with some ice cider from Quebec’s Domaine Pinnacle. With tart apple flavours and just enough sweetness not to pucker the lips, it didn't disappoint!