Chidambaram, Tanjore and Chettinad ~10 min slideshow

Somnathapura   ~5 min slideshow

Pondicherry Street Scenes  ~10 min slideshow

Mahabalipuram ~10 min slideshow

Delhi, Mathura, Agra ~12 min slideshow

Simla, Kinnaur Manali by motorbike ~12 min slideshow

Manali to Rupshu by motorbike ~13 min slideshow

Rupshu to Leh by motorbike ~11 min slideshow

Leh to Nubra by motorbike  ~15 min slideshow

Shakti, Pangong to Rumtse by motorbike ~10 min slideshow

  A walk around Yangon, Burma

~15 min. slideshow 

The sprawling Bear Mountain Resort at the north entrance to Greater Victoria is the largest planet-trashing, get-rich-quick development project currently underway on Vancouver Island. If you haven't seen Bear Mountain yet, hike up Mt. Finlayson from Goldstream Park and prepare to get grossed out. As far as the eye can see, the Highland hilltops which backdrop Victoria are being stripped of trees, blasted flat and squared off into staggered terraces. The entire top of Skirt Mountain has been decapitated, and now sports a massive concrete reservoir and pumping station which feeds a huge artificial waterfall installation above the golf course. The still-steaming stump fields are being plowed away, burnt, and replaced with a fluorescent green, chemical and water-sucking biological wasteland, specially designed by American golf fanatic Jack Nicklaus. Among the remaining stumps, an ancient Songhees lithic scatter site stands out, marked with fluttering orange flags. Nearby, a once-sacred cave has been demolished.  

                                      Another BC Developer
 

Every autumn I head out towards Jordan River to pick wild mushrooms. Years ago, having comprehended the scale of the industrial decimation of fish worldwide, I quit one of my favourite pastimes and channelled my predatory proclivities into the hunt for mushrooms instead. The delight of discovering a luscious patch of mushrooms easily compares with the thrill of catching fish. But these days it’s getting more and more difficult to find a forest where wild mushrooms grow.

Magnificent Matsutakes found near Sooke Potholes:

A rare treasure!

Our dreadful involvement in the American Afghanistan atrocity

Can there be anybody out there who is not sickened by the ongoing American attack, invasion, occupation, torture, rape and massacre of Iraq and Afghanistan? And can there be anyone who is not shocked by their repetitive ramp-up rhetoric for even more warmongering –and on an exponentially more dangerous scale- as can be heard in the current frantic tattoo on Iran? And is there anybody out there who is not totally ashamed and alarmed by Canada's grovelling complicity in this utter catastrophe?  

My Kayak Journey Down the Wild Pacific Coast

I set off alone from Klicktsoatli Harbour near Bella Bella on a foggy late-August morning, kayaking southbound for Port Hardy with three cruxes ahead. Myriad streams of destiny had interwoven to channel me into this most wondrous whelm of wilderness, -to wander at the speed of the world, world through these magnificent, storm-battered and intimate archipelagos of Heiltsuk territory, (for which I had permission), and to explore an unknown aspect of my being as well. Like most people today, I feel cast adrift from the pure and living Earth, -our tenuous and fragile home, -this place where our species has been evolving for 150,000 years until so recently, -since we have become nearly completely alienated from nature.                          

BC's most prominent environmental activist, Colleen McCrory's death came so shockingly, -even as I was still assimilating yesterday's bizarre news that she had been given just three days to live, today, suddenly she is gone. Being generally reconciled to the inevitability of human mortality, I hadn't anticipated being so overwhelmed and brought to tears by the death of another friend and mentor, an experience which thankfully, I'm not overly familiar with as yet. But I found myself wracked with sobbing this morning, and now, 12 hours later at midnight, I'm still overwhelmed and don't know quite how I may properly mourn for this most beloved, irreplaceable and inspiring person who passed across my life. Her death is just as sudden and shocking as the death of another hard-core activist friend, dear David White, whose recent passing also came just right out of the blue. The pain of this irreplaceable loss is similar to what one feels witnessing the felling of giant, veteran primaeval trees.

Not Out of the Woods Yet

Recently the Victoria Times Colonist announced the 'thumbs-up" news that Canada's most endangered species, the Vancouver Island marmot, has been brought back from the brink of extinction and now numbers more than 200 animals. Over the past few years the Vancouver Island Marmot Recovery Project, which is currently funded by tax-payers and the TimberWest and Island Timberlands logging companies, has received bad press for its clumsy efforts to save the marmot. These efforts have included the scapegoating of predators as the proximate cause of the marmot's extinction which resulted in years of controversial wolf and cougar culling and the scandalous shooting of Golden eagles (authorized by Nancy Wilkin, currently Deputy Minister in the Campbell governments farcical 'Ministry of the Environment who continues to sit on the BOD of the VIM Recovery Project) which embarrassed British Columbia before the world. So why not celebrate this news that Vancouver Island marmot populations are now finally on the increase?  

April 11, 2007

LANGFORD, BC—Concerned citizens have erected a 'Tree Sit' adjacent to the 40-metre-long Langford Lake Cave, at the location of the proposed Bear Mountain Interchange on the Trans-Canada Highway. They are refusing to leave until the City of Langford abandons the controversial highway project. A press conference will take place Wednesday at 11AM at the Tree Sit (access from cul-de-sac at the end of Leigh Road, the first right off Goldstream Avenue after Spencer School).

  Blocking Bare Mountain Sprawl
 

BC Treeplanters Revolted

Amongst all the myriads of industrial horrors that treeplanters are exposed to in BC, nothing is more disgusting than the use of the Swedish-invented pigs blood product called "Plantskydd." Thanks to Gordo, the American pig-slaughtering industry has now found an eager destination to spew their offal by-product: into BC forests.

                                         "Baggin up the blood" Photo:  Sophia Joubarne             

Published on Counterpunch 

I arrived at 800 Smithe St, Vancouver, -the Supreme Court of BC at the designated hour of 8am on Monday, March 6th/07. I was there to support the redoubtable Betty Krawczyk, British Columbia's most famous and beloved 78-year-old, non-violent, civil-disobedient ancient forest protection activist as she was sentenced to jail, once again, for standing firm against the wanton destruction of rare, ancient forest ecosystems.

Harpo and Gordo blow $120,000,000


The entrenchment of environmental myopia and repression by government, industry and media being such, it has taken until 2007 for the political establishment to generate a trickle of interest in BC's maelstrom of tidal resources. Canada's consumption-economy politicians have long sneered at a growing diversity of alternative energy-production and conservation opportunities in favour of the enormous, centralized, capitalist, planet-killing fossil-fuel economy. But suddenly last week, there was "Canada's New Prime Minister," ~Bush-buddy "Steve" Harper, all self-inflated in his floater-suit and strutting against the back-drop of the pathetic little prototype lunar-power generator now keeping the lights on at Race Rocks lighthouse.

Published on Counterpunch

Pigs Can Fly

Hi Thomas,

My response embedded in your letter in Green

You say that you’re an “active environmentalist” so, given my concerns about a lack of environmentalist representation at your upcoming “BC Forum on Forest Economics and Policy” Symposium in Vancouver, and having never encountered you during my years of participation in BC’s environmental movement, I figured I had some research to do. But after an extensive Google search didn’t turn up anything, I wrote back to you to ask for something, anything to demonstrate your environmental activity.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Calling All Elephant Lovers!!

We are appealing for your immediate help to protect South India’s last significant herds of Wild Elephants! Please take a few moments to familiarize yourselves with the predicament of these magnificent animals!

(Please endorse the “Ecological Internet” action alert  following this report!)

Ash-trays for the Trophy Hunters Den

~GWB recently

Regretably, the big news across Canada at the moment is not that the Bush-lackey Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that the USraeli Ziocon Lebanon atrocity was “measured” and “reasonable.”

The BIG NEWS is that Harper’s Conservative government will will now proceed with legislation to implement an extremely controversial “sellout” Softwood Lumber agreement with the US.

Why should this be of interest to Bush-despisers everywhere??

Two Ziocon Pea-brains in a pod

The Indian military occupation is an insidious cultural, environmental and economic calamity of the worst order for the people of Ladakh and should be as widely condemned as the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the Pakistani occupation of the Karakoram.

"We’ve — you know, we’ve made it clear that we care about wanton destruction.” -George W. Bush Friday, July 29, 2006

published on Peace Earth and Justice News

The Decider and its Poodle debouched from discussions on Friday to divulge their diktat on the degenerate debacle in the Levant. The Decider’s vapid and vacillating vernacular was so utterly vacuous, that it devolved to its poor old Poodle to detail the dastardly do-nothing declaration. Poodle, in a pulsating pusillanimous pule, and visibly quaking with shame, duly pontificated the puerile, pompous and procumbent peace plan they had just produced.

Plumbing this dumber and dumbest duumvirate’s depths of depravity, their outstanding imbecilic announcement exposed, for all to see, how repulsive, ruthless and yet rudderless their GWOT fiasco has become. As the Zionist obliteration of Lebanon will surely yield the long sought-for pretext for the PNACian grand masterplan, the hair-trigger nukular Decider’s got his sights steadfastly set on Iran, while its short-leashed quisling wag Poodle gasped as he glimpsed his glorious Road to Damascus leading off to the brink of that unfathomable abyss beyond.

Message Sent…

Message Received

published on countercurrents

Enlightenment vs. Entitlement

When those two colossal structures representing the apogee of the human odyssey were exploded and reduced to a smouldering wreckage, the march of evolution reached an unequivocal turning point. The monumental structures that had stood sentinel at the gateway to the world’s pre-eminent civilization symbolized the sublime, consummate aspiration of the society that built them: ~that the supreme human attainment must be founded on universal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

published on dissident voice

Although Indian maps might say so, Ladakh is not India, in the same way that Tibet is not China. If the ever-homogenizing cultural diversity of India must be ensnared by an international boundary, then, in my opinion, India ends at the Rohtang Pass, 50 kms north of Manali.

Pangong Lake, 130 kms long, straddles the Ladakh/Tibet border (Photo, Ingmar Lee)

Ingmar, Desmond (age 8) & (Krista taking photo) at Rupshu