Ingmar Lee Online

Blog - Environment

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
 

Read more: Obstacles and debacles ongoing at Bear Mountain

Blog - Environment

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!

Read more: Shrooming in Vancouver Island’s Stumpfields

Blog - Warmonger’s Cabal

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?  

Read more: Canadas Cowardly Complicity

Blog - Environment

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.

Read more: Colleen McCrory: No Passion, Only Action

Blog - Environment

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?  

Read more: Vancouver Islands Marmot:

Blog - Environment

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
 

Read more: Tree Sit Established in Path of Bear Mountain Interchange