Our election results are in and we have a new Council for Bowen Island.

This is the fourth Council for our Island Municipality, since we incorporated in 1999. It shows a fairly typical pattern in Bowen Island voting which has emerged over the years. First of all, Bowen Islanders vote in droves; our turnout is always in the high 70% and I'd be surprised if it was any less than that this year. Second, Bowen Islanders seems to prefer keeping a certain amount of experience on Council. Third, an incumbent mayor has never lost. And fourth, the high turnout results in a Council that reflects the will of the population, and as much as this has changed over the years, Bowen Islanders seem to favour a mix of people who campaign on fiscal responsibility, preserving the natural environment and getting things done. If you are an aspiring municipal politician you'd be well advised to think about adopting one of these three perspectives in your campaign.

So who got elected? Three Councillors got returned: Alison Morse, Peter Frinton and David Wrinch. All three have served multiple terms on Council. Three new Councilors were elected, Cro Lucas, Doug Hooper and Nerys Poole. Doug and Nerys are well known environmental campaigners, deeply involved in the Cape Roger Curtis Trust. Cro was very involved in the golf course and campaigned strongly on the "getting things done" ticket. Finally Mayor Bob Turner was returned with a strong majority mandate.

Outgoing were the two Lisas, Barret and Shatsky, both of them friends of mine. Lisa Barret was our first mayor, and has sat on the last three Councils as mayor and Councillor. She has been deeply involved in our community's relations with the GVRD (now Metro Vancouver) and was especially involved with the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Committee. I think we owe her a debt of thanks for nine years of public service, undertaken with a fierce commitment to social justice, peace and the environment. She has always seen municipal politics as a microcosm of a bigger picture, and while lots of people felt that her perspective was too broad, I think that in an interdependent world, you cannot simply pretend that what is going on elsewhere doesn't affect you.

Lisa Shatsky wasn't returned to office either. Lisa is a poet and a therapist and she wears her heart on her sleeve. She talks beautifully about her commitment to Bowen, her care for the place and for the preservation of its character. I don't think we are missing that perspective on the current council, but I especially respect Lisa's stance in bringing care and passion to her public service. I know that she won't be shy about reminding Islanders about the essential character of this place.

The third non-returning Councilor was David Hocking, who declined to run again. Again, we owe him a debt of thanks for his hard work and for bringing a deeply informed green way of thinking to municipal issues. It is not an easy road to hoe, especially when you are holding down a full time job and making decisions that puts you on the receiving end of blistering criticism. But David was a good Councillor, and brought a very important skill set to Council, and his contribution is appreciated.

So our new Council has a very full plate. There are huge public process challenges emerging in this term, including development concerns, Snug Cove planning and the granddaddy of them all, the Official Community Plan process. I have been musing rather openly that now might be the time to get involved again in this kind of thing, building on some of the work we did with the Bowen Island Life Long Learning Society back in 2002 and 2003. I'm especially interested in how we can create ongoing containers for community conversation that invites creative, generative and involved community participation in an ongoing way and that has the effect of creating capacity in our community for this kind of conversation so that we don't default to positional debate.

So if you are interested pursuing this with me, let's get together soon and talk about how we might do this. Initially I'm conceiving of something of a citizen led initiative in support of our decision makers on Council and on the various committees that do the big work of caring for life on our island. Let's see what we can do together.

Good luck to the new Council, and big thanks to those retiring and those who ran, and to those who continue to be involved on committees, task forces and community groups. There are no "special interests" on Bowen...just associations of citizens trying to make this place the best it can be. We are luck to have so many that care.

It feels like it could snow today.

I have been watching the pattern that last few days. A warm and wet Pineapple Express followed by northwesterly gales yesterday that blew the moisture and cloud from the skies and gave us bright and sunny fall day. At night, with no cloud cover, the temperature dropped to near freezing and at the same time condensed the mopisture in the air. By 9pm there was a ring around the lately full moon. This morning the sky is an even grey tone, with a yellow rime along the horizon, and it feels like it could snow.

And, the nuthatches are back. I hadn't heard nuthatches since the summer, which is strange considering that they are ubiquitous around here. They seemed to have all disappeared until this morning. As I awoke outside, they were the first birds of the muted fall dawn chorus, meeping together all around me as the sky brightened.

Kelli Turner and the folks at Granville Island Water Taxi are not the first people to try and make a go of a foot passenger ferry to Bowen Island from downtown Vancouver. Others have tried and found the operating costs prohibitive and the price just too high. Last night, I tasted a little of what they have to offer though and it worked well for me.

I arrived home on a flight from Prince George that got in at 7:45. Ordinarily, I would take a cab from the airport to Horseshoe Bay (at a cost of $70) and wait for the 9:30 ferry (at a cost of $6.50, or whatever BC Ferries is charging today). Last night though, I called from Prince George and booked myself on the Bowen Express which left at 9:00pm from Granville Island. Jumping in a cab, I ended up at Granville Island with 40 minutes to spare at a cost of only $30. I had a piece of pizza for supper and them headed over to the water taxi, paying $10 (the price of a commuter ticket on the Express) and arriving at Snug Cove at 9:30. We were ten minutes late because the driver misplaced the tickets. I was at home about the time the ferry I SHOULD have been on left Horseshoe Bay and I did it for about half the price. My client will be happy.

The crossing itself, in calm seas like last night, is scheduled to be 22 minutes, and the Bowen Express is running a pretty ambitious schedule. I don't think I want to be on it in a Squamish or a strong inflow, and indeed the story from two nights ago about taking air as they ploughed through five foot swells sets my stomach churning a little. So if you're planning on doing it, check the winds warnings and make sure there is no gale blowing. Winds in Howe Sound are very local and can come up very fast, with swells building quickly depending on the tide and other factors. You can start across Howe Sound in calm seas and get blasted before you get to Snug Cove.

But last night the water was fine and the three of us steamed out of English Bay and home with no hitches at all. It was surprisingly, scarily fast. If they keep it going, it will change the way people visit Bowen and the way we visit the mainland, and if it really takes off, BC Ferries will have to pay some attention. As it is the price doesn't make it the preferred way to travel, but when circumstances warrant, like last night when I'm travelling on someone else's dime and cabbing all around the lower mainland, it will be the way I get home.

So good luck to Kelli and the crew and thanks for the great ride last night.

Went down to the causeway to gaze upon the waters and see if any salmon had returned yet. Alas none to be seen, and no seals in the bay either. I don't think we've had enough rain yet, although we had a good dump last night, the spray coming deep onto the deck where I was sleeping.

I worry for our salmon. Hoping to see them soon. News is that the killer whales are starving in the Strait of Georgia and I haven't seen seals for ages.

Snow on the mountains...the season has begun, and the fish are welcome back any time.

Things change all the time in communities. Sometimes you don't notice them at all - the ferry seems more overloaded than it was before, the salmon seem to come back later and later, there are kids at the beach you've never seen before. Sometimes the change comes fast, like this week at our house when two 75 year old douglas-firs on our neighbours property were cut down. Our neighbour was worried that these tress posed a threat to her house, and she had them taken apart by Dave Affleck's very capable logging crew. We lament these gentle beasts, but we know too that things change and that every time something significant changes, it can be a chance to come together and do something new.

That's kind of how it is with things on the island at the moment. I was reading Peter Frinton's excellent post on what we are facing and it got me thinking. We're in the midst of an election campaign that will choose the council that will embark on a formal review of our Official Community Plan. The OCP is the document that outlines all of the tools a municipality has for guiding it's growth and change and protecting its character. It's a tremendously complex task and is often greeted with the groans of a painful process to come.

I certainly don't see it that way though. I think the OCP could be a unique opportunity to bring our community together in an unprecedented way, to invite everyone who lives here now to have a hand in shaping the future and to emerge with a vibrant sense of co-ownership and pride in who we are and what we are becoming. All of us who moved here after 1996 inherited a Bowen Island that was shaped by a previous generation, and everything I love about this place was the result of those who came before me. We have a chance now to make an immediate future that will create and maintain that character of the island that we love so much. Rather than dread the OCP, we can look forward to the process and for the unity that it brings.

This is by no means a slam dunk. We have a choice in how to approach this work. If we as a community approach it from a place of dividing the community into discrete interests and agendas, then we will get a plan that is mired in divisions that focuses on the parts rather than the whole. The OCP review, being as significant as it is, has the chance to cleave us apart. So I have a number of ideas that I'd like to share with the candidates running for council and with the citizens of our island. These come from my years doing community planning and engagement in many contexts around North America:

1. Remember what community is. I recommend that everyone running for council read Peter Block's new book Community: the Structure of Belonging. Communities are not problems to be solved. They are places in which people live and grow and in which individual achievement and health is supported by a fabric of neighbours, and relationships. However we do the OCP review, it should be a problem solving approach. You can find a summary of Block's inspiration here.
   
2. People in communities are citizens and they don't belong to special interest groups. What some people call special interest groups are simply groups to which they don't themselves belong. Associational life is a strong part of community, and groups are critical to the fabric of community. But social capital - the capital needed to grow community - is best served up BETWEEN groups. There are no enemies in this community. People are not divided into camps, and so us against them posturing doesn't work here. To engage in that kind of view of the world results in finding out down that road that people you need are not there for you. We are too small a community to suffer those kinds of divides.
3. Use participatory processes that build relationships between citizens.
4. Use citizens themselves to do the planning. While we have experts on staff in our municipality, we are a community of thoughtful and experienced people, and there are countless ways in which citizens of all ages can take responsibility for the planning process. After all it is we who will be responsible for implementing and living with the results. If the planning process is done by a small group of people who ultimately make the decisions about how it all unfolds, it will be a document that is not inclusive of the very community that it plans for.
   
5. Citizens themselves should be invited to participate in planning processes as contributors and co-creators, not as consultees in the process. This involves using processes that invite that contribution rather than simply filling in surveys or attending community meetings as passive consumers of the circus.

I could go on actually, and a lot of the blogging at my other weblog, Parking Lot is about the details of how to do this. Suffice to say that I'm interested in how this change will unfold, because I live here and I love this place and I'm not going anywhere.

And the trees next door? They are lying in the driveway at the moment, but in the next few days myself and two other neighbours will buck them up and split them and share the firewood between the three of us. Turning radical change into a chance to cement our friendships and keep each other warm.

We had a good old fashioned barn raising on Bowen last week.  The producer's of Harper's Island, an American horror TV show that is filming on Bowen, donated the materials and the community donated the labour and everyone put together a nice temporary ferry shelter on the south limb of the government dock.  

Today under rainy and blustery skies, we had our apple festival in the historic Davies Orchard in the Cove.  There were displays of all the varieties of apples grown on Bowen from the four historic orchards as well as music and food.  I had an apple chicken ginger sausage with pesto mayonnaise from Alderwood Farms, and I think it was the best thing I have tasted all year.  

All of the apples on display were from trees that were more than 100 years old, and some of them, such as the trees in the Davies Orchard right in the Cove are 130 years old, planted in the early 1880s and late 1870s.  I got a chance to talk with Marion Moore, one of the daughters of John Collins, who was himself an heir of one of Bowen's original settler families.  At the Collins Farm orchard there are a variety of apples grown to this day.  Marion gave me a tour of all of the varieties on display.  Here's what we have on Bowen:

• Yellow Belleflower (Sheep's Nose)
• Porter
• Gascone Scarlet (unique to Bowen now.  These apples were provided to John Collins by a Mr. Freshwater who lived on the salt water on the shore of Mannion Bay)
• King of Tompkins County
• Alexander King
• Kyslo crabapples
• Famuse
• Gravenstein
• Belle de Boscoup
• Rhode Island Greening
• Edward VII
• Russet and Winter Russet
• Davies Pippins

On Bowen we have five historic orchards.  In Snug Cove there are trees in the cottages planted by Mr. Davies in 1882.  On Collins Farm there are old orchards which Marion and her sister Jean look after.  Up on Hummingbird Lane, on the crest of Dorman Point is the remnants of the Dorman family orchard, now divided throughout several private lots.  Likewise, in Deep Bay the remains of a 200 tree orchard is now scattered among private lots.  This orchard was started by the Podavin family in the 1880s and later owned by the Terminal Steamship Company and later still, the Union Steamship Company.  Once the USSC broke up their lands in the 1960s, the lot was subdivided and many of the trees were cleared for housing.  Several remain however.  Finally on the west side of the island, the King Edward Bay orchard still produces apples.

It was a delight talking to Marion, who also filled me in on some questions that were lingering.  For example:

• There was a penstock and a generator at the base of Bridal Falls in Deep Bay which the USSC built in the early 1910s.  The penstock provided power to the resort and although several of the cabins were hooked up, the company turned off the power at 11:00pm every night.
• Mr. Malkin built the dam at the head of Kilarney Creek were it flows out of Kilarney Lake.  Malkin bought the land in 1912 from Marion's grandfather, who owned the whole of the lake and the lands that are now Crippen Regional Park.  The dam was built around 1915, which backed up the lake and flooded wetlands on the north end of the lake.  To this day, the trees that were flooded out in 1915 are standing in what is Bowen's largest wetland.  

A great day of community, history and food.