ADIMS 21ST Annual Denman Island Community Beach Cleanup will be held during Earth Week April 19th -25th, 2026
ADIMS 21ST Annual Denman Island Community Beach Cleanup
will be held during Earth Week April 19th -25th, 2026
- Our goal is to clean every shoreline on Denman Island to protect our ocean life from the negative impacts of plastic and marine debris.
Please join us by signing up at our registration table or contacting our Cleanup Coordinator.
REGISTRATION -ADIMS will have a registration table Saturday April 18th at the Old School Market where volunteers can register and sign the participation form. You can choose to clean a specific area of shoreline or join one of our trucking, sorting or other teams. We will have some gloves, sacks, and flagging material available for volunteers as needed. (See contact information below if you are unable to attend on Saturday.)
DROP OFF – Volunteers can drop off debris anytime during the week of April 19th (Sunday) until April 24th (Friday) at a designated area at the Old School. Contact Lisa, our Beach Cleanup Coordinator if you need pickup assistance or information.
THE BIG SORT – The final drop-off and sorting event will be held on Saturday, April 25th starting at 9:30am. All items will be sorted and loaded into a trucking container that will be going to the Ocean Legacy recycling plant.
ADIMS Beach Cleanup Coordinator
Contact: Lisa Pierce downtoearth27@gmail.com or (250) 218-0799 call/text
DICAN Reports Another Exceptionally Successful Repair Café on March 15th.
DICAN Reports Another Exceptionally Successful Repair Café on March 15th.
Despite the forecast for a wet, windy Sunday the rain was quite kind to the Repair Café. With the help of tents, tarps and being able to work inside the Recycling Centre, everyone stayed dry.
Our volunteer experts are so amazing: Graham Hayman, Peter Marshall, David Scruton, Michael Rapati, Mits Narusawa, Clark Siferd and Remi Skolney are our repeat contributors. This year we also had Ron Smith, (Lisa’s uncle) a certified mechanic. Ron had such a great time that he plans to start a Repair Café in Red Deer, Alberta.
Joy Bockman brought some much appreciated gluten-free muffins. Coffee and tea were delivered to our intrepid volunteers to help keep them warm.
The event statistics do not tell the real story of how information from the event is taken home and amplified; even more items are maintained and repaired thus preventing or delaying that trip to the landfill. We would like to expand the number and range of events we do on Denman but we are limited by funds and volunteer capacity. The event every year has been sponsored by the Denman Island Climate Action Network (DICAN). We have a small budget and we give each expert a gift certificate to the local hardware store with a thank you card.
This year saw:
- 9 or more chainsaws fixed
- 2 weed whackers restored
- 30 tools sharpened
- 1 computer keyboard cleaned
- 1 barbeque taken apart and fixed
- 1 handle installed
- 2 wheelbarrows assembled
- 1 typewriter case opened
Overheard quote for the day: “Why haven’t I come to this before?”
Many thanks to everyone who came and made the day so much fun.
Heather McLean/Denman Island Climate action Network
Local aquifers: What Our Data Reveal
Fanny Bay Community Centre
7793 Island Highway South, Vancouver Island
2-4 pm, doors open at 1:30 pm
The Beaufort Watershed Stewards (BWS) is pleased to present a town hall to discuss “Local aquifers: What Our Data Reveal.” On Vancouver Island, aquifers provide over 70% of drinking water. As with much of BC, our local aquifers are poorly characterized due to their small size, complex geology, and limited funding for study. This leaves many communities without essential information about their only water source. Our hope is that this town hall will give a ‘deeper’ understanding of local groundwater basics.
There will be four guest speakers. Mike Wei, a retired Physical Hydrologist. With 40 years’ work on groundwater management in BC, Mike will use a physical model to demonstrate aquifer function and explain what variables affect water levels within aquifers.
Mark Lake, retired Geophysicist, is responsible for Beaufort Watershed Stewards’ Aquifer Mapping Program. He will present a summary of the group’s findings to date.
Kate MacMillan is a current Honours student at the University of Victoria, School of Earth & Ocean Sciences. In September 2025 she collected data from 40 wells in Fanny Bay, all of which are associated with Aquifer 419. Under Mike Wei’s supervision, she used these data points to estimate the extractable groundwater limits of the aquifer and the risk of stream flow depletion from well pumping. She will be presenting the results of that project.
Mike Mesford, who is responsible for our Ground Water and Surface Water programs, will discuss the cumulative implications of the presentations, and what the next steps are for Beaufort Watershed Stewards.
For more information visit us at: www.beaufortwater.org.
Because Water is Critical
Shucking Oysters: Timber!
Shucking Oysters: Timber!
By Alex Allen
If a tree falls do you hear it? I sure do, at least twice a day … But I digress. There is something awe-inspiring about being surrounded by a bunch of huge trees. You can feel the strength and smell the history. Forests are not only connected creatures they are social and cooperative. When a forest is clear cut we see it and all creatures great and small are paying for it. Marbled murrelets, western screech owls, and spotted owls are all endangered, to name a few. The replanting seedling programs are an insult to forests and nature – skinny tree factories. “Look mum, skinny trees! Can I hug them?” “No Jonah, don’t touch, you’ll hurt them.” And most contentious of all, BC is allowing logging of old-growth forests (old, as in 250 years and older).
In BC you are either a tree hugger or a tree cutter. On Hornby, some think trees are dangerous; others think trees are friendly. But when it comes to old-growth forests, why are we still cutting down these noble, ancient giants? Many of the remaining old-growth forests in BC continue to be logged – even though the provincial government promised to “protect” them. Wade Davis wrote in The Wayfinders: “The key indicator, the canary in the coal mine if you will is language loss … every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.”
In 2019 the province appointed a team of professional foresters to hear perspectives on BC’s old-growth forest management practices. In the report, A New Future for Old Forests, they wrote “many of these ecosystems and old forests are simply non-renewable within any reasonable time frame.” Despite being called a renewable resource, it would take 500 to 750 years for an ancient coastal forest to grow back after logging.
During the 2020 election campaign, the BC NDP promised to protect “more of BC’s old-growth forests” by implementing all 14 recommendations in the report. Instead, over 31,000 hectares of forest recommended for deferral in 2021 was destroyed. Old-growth forests should be viewed as ecosystems, not just a source of timber.
In 2021, author’s of BC’s Old Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity, mapped and recommended over two million hectares of at-risk old-growth forests to be deferred – a temporary status that would keep them from getting cut down until land use planning decisions took place. “It was intensely disappointing to see how badly they failed,” lead author and ecologist, Karen Price said. The report found that in four years, around 113,000 football fields worth of old-growth deferral zones were logged. In March authors of the report wrote to Eby that the proposed deferrals were meant to be an interim measure to reduce the risks of logging.
As we so often witness, government’s do not always see the forest for the trees. BC’s own logging agency continued to approve logging in old-growth forest zones that a government report flagged for protection. As Price noted, “Purposely causing extinction is not just a moral failure but also a high economic, ecological and social risk.”
The Special Tree Protection Regulation was also meant to sound good to the public while continuing to protect the interests of the logging industry. Trees above a certain size are protected from logging. But when two women from the Discovery Islands measured trees near their homes, they found “none of the few remaining giants, nor any of the first growth stumps, were big enough to qualify for provincial protection.” Even in Cathedral Grove only three of the iconic trees would meet the province’s threshold. If the grove wasn’t in a park, almost all of it could be logged, despite the regulation.
Last year, Premier David Eby told his forestry minister to raise BC logging levels 50% over the previous year. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, cautioned: “As the climate crisis deepens, allowing these irreplaceable forests to be logged is reckless and short-sighted.”
A report commissioned by Sierra Club BC last year showed BC forests were four times more likely to be logged inside the recommended deferral zones than outside. The report warned ominously that the “century-long feast on big old trees is approaching its end.” How many will be left?
Old-growth advocate Joshua Wright said he appreciates the regulations to save some of BC’s biggest trees, but it amounts to “green-washing” by the BC government as it continues to approve the logging of ancient forests while pledging to protect them. “I think the issue isn’t why are trees like this being cut down, it’s why are places like this being destroyed? That’s the bigger question.”
Phoenix Riting! – April 9th, 2026
Oh my, it’s been a minute! Let me catch you up.
A bunch of things are going on for me right now, unrelated but somehow all connected.
First, I feel wretchedly unwell, in the now in which I am writing this.
Second, I intend to be well by the time you read it, because when that now comes, it is my birthday. Happy birthday to me!
I will be (am) entering the final year of the decade I currently occupy, and have for the last nine years. It’s a big number. If you counted up to this birthday, starting at one and going all the way to the number of years I’ve been alive, it would take a while. I wouldn’t bother.
After all, it’s only a number. I am still the same person inside that I have always been, just a bit wiser, more experienced, more deliberate, I suppose. But not “old.” Oh no, never that.
To prove that I am not “old,” here comes the third thing.
I am breaking out of a mold I poured myself into when I first learned to play guitar at age 40. It has never felt completely natural. The truth is, I always feel slightly stressed when I perform with my instrument.
I love my guitar. I love playing it, we have a wonderful time. But put me in front of an audience, and my guitar gets in the way. I feel stressed. Unfree. Not flowing. Not the same. No matter how well practiced I am, no matter how thoroughly I prepare. I have tried for nearly thirty years.
When it was just me, my voice and my songs, on stage, I was free. Uplifted, I flew! I could do anything. I could make a crowd stop and listen. I toured. I sang in the city, on Co-op Radio, on other islands. The whole time, I told myself what I really needed was to play an instrument. What I did wasn’t “normal,” and I was told so often enough that I let it change what I knew about myself.
My peak moment was a big show at the Hall before I moved to Edmonton in 1995. It was my birthday. I called it, It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To. I stood on stage in front of a hall full of people and sang every song I’d written in the eight years I’d lived on Hornby, as a tribute to my time there.
(Note: that was a mistake. I included a couple of highly triggering songs. I shouldn’t have. I don’t do that anymore.)
I sang to a full house, received an enthusiastic standing ovation, and there was even a conga line after. I was showered with outrageous praise. My ego, and my hungry heart, loved that.
And yet, my guitar-playing self has never garnered much response.
It’s taken me a long time to understand what has been missing: my authentic self.
With the help of our Monday evening Songwriter Circle, I have come to accept that a cappella singing is not just something I do, it is a core part of who I am. It comes from my root, and it shows. Musicians I respect have told me, “You sound like a different person without the guitar.” It’s a whole new level.
I love singing again.
With trepidation, excitement, and great rejoicing, I am opening the door to my true self again, to come out in public. It is my birthday gift to myself this year.
People often say, “That’s so vulnerable, so naked, I could never!”
I feel the opposite. I feel powerful and whole when it is just me and my voice, singing the songs and stories that come from my heart.
I do know that nobody else does it quite like this. That’s why I tried so hard to stop, to pick up an instrument, to take it in a different direction. But it’s simply not who I am.
Friends, this is me.
I hope you will come out to hear me, to support this new direction. It is a return to the old, yes, but it is also new. I have improved as a singer, not a little, but a very great lot.
There will be art, too. I have been working on these pieces, each a blend of photography and digital painting, no AI whatsoever, I promise, for two years now. I have nearly 40 of them, and they will be shown on the big screen behind me. I haven’t been posting these on social media, except for the two or three that became posters for this event.
Denman Islanders are welcome, it will be a late ferry day. Here’s the info:
An intimate fusion of art, story and melody: Phoenix Bee
- at the Arts Centre, April 17
- Doors at 7:00 • Show at 7:30
- By donation (suggested $20)
- No one turned away for lack of funds
I welcome feedback and questions. Email me at phoenixonhornby@gmail.com
Letter to the Editor – Cylon2026 We/Us
Dear Editor,
I write today in a state of profound distress, bordering on literary whiplash, after encountering what your publication had the audacity to label as “satire.” I demand that something be done about the reckless and insufficiently signposted irony that has clearly been unleashed upon an unsuspecting and vulnerable readership.
First and foremost, the piece in question employed quotation marks around fictional statements. Fictional! And yet, these quotations were presented with such grammatical integrity and proper punctuation, that one could be forgiven for assuming that someone, somewhere, had actually said them. This is an outrageous breach of readerly trust. If a quotation is not real, it should be accompanied by flashing lights, klaxons, or at the very least a footnote reading: “DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BELIEVE THIS.”
Furthermore, the exaggeration was dangerously restrained. At no point did the author have a character declare themselves “Supreme Emperor of All That Is Absurd,” nor did anyone ride a flaming unicycle throughout the article. Instead, we were given mildly inflated scenarios and plausibly ridiculous dialogue, which is precisely the sort of thing that can be mistaken for reality in these confusing times. Satire, if it is to be practiced responsibly, must be so exaggerated that it collapses under its own weight like a soufflé made entirely of sarcasm.
Irony, too, was deployed with a subtlety that I can only describe as negligent. Where were the bold disclaimers? The italicized warnings? The helpful narrator stepping in every third paragraph to whisper, “Dear reader, this is a joke”? Must we now read between the lines like scholars? Are we expected to interpret tone? I did not read your paper to engage in interpretations.
Let me be clear: I am not opposed to satire. I simply believe it should be conducted in a manner that is unmistakable, unavoidable, and ideally accompanied by a large banner reading “THIS IS SATIRE” in a friendly but firm font. Anything less invites confusion, introspection, and most dangerously of all, the possibility that readers might momentarily question whether the absurdities presented are, in fact, reflections of reality.
I trust you will take immediate action to ensure that future satirical works meet the necessary standards of obviousness. Perhaps a rating system could be introduced, one to five exploding whoopee cushions, indicating the level of exaggeration. Or a certification seal guaranteeing “100% unmistakable irony.” I leave these solutions in your capable hands.
Yours in unwavering literalism,
a Concerned and Thoroughly Confused Reader,
Cylon2036. We/Us