David Tracey

One more clipping from the press glut on Earth Day about the TreeKeepers program that’s ramping up this week.

This one is from the Vancouver Province. One of the city’s two dailies. Not long after this story ran, a leaked memo from the new publisher of the Sun and the Province told staff the mainstream newspaper business may not be sustainable, and they should ask themselves if they’re really meant to be there, because if they didn’t have creative solutions maybe they were part of the problem.

Ouch! Hope this article wasn’t the back-breaking straw.

Affordable trees available as part of green city push.

More on the TreeKeepers program helping people grow the urban forest in Vancouver.

This clipping is from Vancouver 24 Hours, one of the daily giveaways that are crowding out the old traditional newspapers.

Did you get your tree yet? The choices are fabulous and the prices can’t be beat. Also, we’re giving away free cars.

Wait what? The car thing didn’t work out? OK never mind that part. But you can still get a tree if you hurry. Link to the TreeKeepers page is here.

Vancouver sells affordable trees to residents | Local | News | Vancouver 24 hrs.

Thanks Darah Hansen and the Vancouver Sun for the shout out on the TreeKeepers program.

Ball’s in your court, Vancouver residents (in our six pilot neighbourhoods). If you want to help grow the urban forest, and get a great deal on a fine tree at the same time, go here now.

Treekeepers program encourages Vancouver residents to help grow urban forest.

When Canada finally got around to choosing its first Poet Laureate, they skipped right past the high-falutin’ Ontario crowd and the Quebec other-solitude cadres to select one of us, BC’s own George Bowering.

He’s written dozens of books, not just poetry but also novels and non-fiction. He’s also taught thousands of writers at SFU and elsewhere. I’ve been a fan ever since he was kind (or dazed) enough to agree to appear as a guest on an early livestreaming show I hosted called The WritingLife. We filmed at 6am on Saturdays on a floating “cyber den” in Coal Harbour. I’m sure it was the novelty of livestreaming around the world that got guests out of bed; today I can’t even imagine having the gall to ask.

Bowering was an excellent guest. He’d just been named Poet Laureate, and when I asked him how he felt when he heard about the honour, he held up a clipping from a headline about a war tactic then being applied in Iraq: “Shock and Awe.”

One thing I didn’t ask him which always puzzled me was, as a good Canadian boy, why the big love for baseball? His autobiographical book Pinboy helps explain. Here’s my review of it for the British Columbian Quarterly.

BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly.

If there ever is a world government, I vote for Bhutan to lead it. The Himalayan country that gave us the Gross National Happiness index has just upped the ante on what it really means to be “sustainable” by becoming the first country in the world to go completely organic.

It’s still going to be a work in progress for a while. Climate change is getting to them too, bringing in new pests and altering the yield rates of traditional (largely organic anyway) farming practices. But they, unlike much of the blinkered developed world that aims to double down on the chemical fix solution to a widespread problem, figure the changing conditions are all the more reason for a wholistic, environmental method to feed the nation.

From the Guardian:

Bhutan set to plough lone furrow as world’s first wholly organic country | Global development | guardian.co.uk.