A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

It’s 2001 all over again in forestry news these days now that those nasty little mountain pine beetles have worked their way into Alberta. The story in the Edmonton Journal this week about the beetle infestation could have been lifted from any B.C. newspaper a decade ago, when the insidious insects first began upping their game in our own lodgepole-pine forests. More than 17 million hectares of B.C. pine forest have been affected since then. The province has spent more than $750 million so far trying to mitigate the damage. Here in the land of Douglas fir and cedar, the pine beetle invasion tends to feel like old news. But forestry-dependent communities elsewhere in B.C. are all too aware of the ongoing impact the ravenous bug is having. The province gave another $9 million this past spring to the three community coalitions set up to identify and fund mitigation strategies in the hardest-hit areas: Cariboo-Chilcotin; Omineca; and Southern Interior. The beetle explosion cr...

Here's a story to get you itching: A Sun piece on the $720,000 that BC Housing spent in a year fighting bed bugs in the buildings it owns. The story makes the point that having a bed bug infestation isn't a sign of poverty or poor housekeeping. The little critters are just everywhere now, and extremely hard to get rid of. My daughter came home covered with bed-bug bites after a stay in a three-star San Francisco hotel. I got bitten down the backs of my legs after sitting in a Mexican cab in shorts; the bugs had set up shop in a rip in the seat fabric. What's with the seeming epidemic of bed bugs? Turns out we'd all but eradicated the bug by the 1940s, but they came back with a vengeance in the mid-1990s and for all kinds of reasons have now become part of the hotel/housing landscape. Check out the Wikipedia entry on bed bugs for more info, although I'm already scratching just from having to write this.

One of the many "instant" cities that have sprung up since China flooded out communities for the Three Gorges Dam project. This is Feng Du, now located across the river from the original city.  For better or worse, I’m an experiential learner. I try to stay on top of the current events of the world, but it’s getting up close and personal with the issues of distant lands that really works for me. So it was that I could have a headful of knowledge about China’s massive Three Gorges dam project from years of hearing about it, yet still find myself gaping at the altered landscape along the Yangtze River from a cruise-ship window last week in the realization that I didn’t actually know a damn thing. I’d read the articles, of course. I’d seen the documentaries. Long before our family trip to China, I got that the Three Gorges project was a mighty big deal. At stake: The promise of 100 billion kilowatt hours of “clean” hydro power for a country still burning coal. The r...

Back from my travels in China (wow, what a place!), struggling with the muzzy-headed feeling of jet lag. If anyone knows of a cure for jet lag, please send it along. I try this, I try that, but no matter what I still come home to several days of cloudy thinking and weird sleeping habits. Must admit, I've enjoyed having a break from the news these past two weeks. I woke up to this morning's headlines in the Globe and remembered why I needed the break - so much of the news makes my blood boil, and who needs that first thing in the morning when they can't think straight to begin with? Here's the one that got me going,  detailing the bonuses federal civil servants stand to get if they can cut public services sufficiently.  How crazy is it for us to be paying our taxes to government so that they can give themselves handsome bonuses for cutting our services? We can presume this is some strategy taken from the books of the big corporations, but it makes no sense when you...

I'm off to China this morning for a family trip with my mother, her sister and six of us cousins. I don't think I can be counted on to keep my blog up-to-date while away, so please check back for more regular postings starting Oct. 10.