Sierra Quadra: How shall we proceed?

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Sierra Quadra has been educating Quadra Islanders about the unfolding environmental crisis for close to 25 years, but they have been relatively quiet since COVID. 

This is changing. On September 28 they joined with the Council of Canadians, in Campbell River, to protest the provincial governments failure to implement its strategy to preserve old growth forests. On October 21 they will be sponsoring the world premiere of Robert Bringhurst’s poem ‘The Ridge‘ at the Quadra Community Centre. They will be bringing two widely recognized films to Quadra this winter and plan to host a forum on environmental issues in March 2024. 


Cortes Currents recently asked Ray Grigg, one Sierra Quadra’s principle Directors, for an update on their vision for the future. 


“We got disoriented and stopped by COVID, like everybody. In the time that's transpired, we've been evaluating who we are, what we're trying to do, how successful it's been, and exactly how we should proceed.”


“We're not quite sure what to do and that has partly been the explanation for the quietude that's been us on Quadra for the last three years, actually.”


“We know we have an environmental problem on the planet. We know we produce too much CO2. We know we have too many children. We know we're consuming too much. We know we're in overshoot, but It's not registering deep enough for us to actually change.” 


“I remember An Inconvenient Truth, which we showed, that should have awakened some people. Things haven't changed very much in any regard with respect to environmental emissions. With respect to forestry practices, Mosaic still is busy on the island.” 


“How much information do you need before it's actually internalized into you and you change your behavior? It's almost as if we're confronted with a Zen koan and we have to reflect and think and wrestle with that koan for sometimes years and a whole lifetime until it actually changes us. It almost seems like that's the state in which we're in. We have this koan that we're confronting. We know what the koan is.”

“This leaves us Sierra Quadra in a bit of a bind.  Do we keep plodding forward with more information? We're not perfectly clear what we're going to do and what we should do. I'm not sure we know as a society, as a civilization, what we're going to do and what we should do. It almost feels like we've stepped over the precipice and we're losing control of the environmental agenda.”


“I think there is a great deal of angst out there.” 


“There's hope in the sense that we're shifting to green energies. There's potential there. My concern is that we've waited too long. As we start losing control, that loss of control impairs our ability to function preemptively.”


“The more money we spend dealing with forest fires, repairing from floods, typhoons and hurricanes,  the less money we have and the less energy we have and the less attention we can give to actually preventing those things from happening.  It works in both ways against us. We get the disasters, but the disasters impair our ability to prevent further disasters.”


“If you think of the number of homes that are destroyed by a hurricane in Florida, for example, those homes have to be rebuilt. This  means more wood for houses, it means,  there's now more demand, which creates more of the problem, which caused the problem.”