“Smart growth” advocates have their heads in the sand

 

It’s only April and Graeme James is already running hard for city council. But instead of running against the incumbents, he seems to be running against me even though I have not yet decided if I will run myself. One campaign tactic that James appears ready to use is hyperbole, referring in a recent letter to my advocacy of keeping our growth within the limits of our environmental carrying capacity as “development [grinding] to a halt while we bury our heads in the sand and hope no more people move to Kelowna .” James then goes on to say “We must be prepared for our future,” but seems to have no idea of the kind of future that we face.  

 

The problem with people like James is that they are totally ignorant — frequently by choice — of the seriousness of the environmental challenges that we will encounter in the 21^st century. He and others like him think that it will be business as usual with just a few adjustments to make which can be neatly accomplished with band-aid techniques like developing to higher densities with “green” buildings.

 

I regret to inform James and others that this century will see unprecedented challenges posed by a scarcity of resources such as energy, water, food, and many important metals and minerals in the face of continuing population growth. Signs of such shortages are already beginning to appear and are reflected in recent price increases in oil and some grains. On top of that, these challenges will be compounded by the environmental threats resulting from global warming. To think that problems of such magnitude can be successfully dealt with by even more growth, albeit “smart growth,” is truly living with one’s head in the sand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keep population within the limits of our agricultural growing capacity

The focus was on sustainability and agriculture at the recent UBC-O sponsored forum “When urban meets rural: planning for sustainability in the Okanagan.” As most people are beginning to understand, sustainability means forever, and in regards to agriculture it means having enough food to feed all the people for the long term. Some well respected analysts on the future challenges posed by our growing global population and our diminishing resources such as James Howard Kunstler and Richard Heinberg paint a gloomy picture of what things will be like if we don’t immediately begin to address the growing imbalances between these two major factors.  In his latest book The Long Emergency, Kunstler states that the advent of peak oil and prohibitively expensive fuel prices and transportation costs in the decades ahead will make communities more dependent on local food production. In that regard Kunstler says the most viable communities in the future will be towns and small cities surrounded by good agriculture land and the least viable will be large cities whose ecological footprint extends far beyond their boundaries. 

As the population of the Okanagan, especially that of Kelowna, continues to grow at a record pace and the region threatens to expand to a size greater than what can be supported by its agricultural base, serious questions should be raised about the sustainability of this growth. As the future may involve significant resource shortages, perhaps it would be wise to plan for regional self-sufficiency and to opt for a more cautious approach to growth, being careful not to exceed a population than that which can be supported by the region’s available agricultural land.

Stop approving highrises until fire safety is assured

As published in the Kelowna Daily Courier, the warning from former L.A. fire captain Kurt Swan that the Kelowna fire department is ill-equipped to fight highrise fires should give city council pause when considering future highrise proposals. With 25 years of experience to his credit and having fought numerous highrise fires himself, Swan’s cautionary remarks deserve careful consideration. Although Fire Chief Rene Blanleil said that the type of fire that Swan was concerned about was a very low probability event, such an event nearly occurred with Assistant Chief Lou Wilde admitting that if the 2006 fire at the Landmark II office building had been on a different floor, the KFD would not have been able to deal with it on its own.  

At the heart of Swan’s concern is that the Kelowna fire department does not have the resources necessary to deal with a major highrise fire. But then, failure to adequately plan for the development that it has hastily approved has been par for the course for Kelowna city council. It has been all too easy for them to approve residences for the thousands of new people that move here every year without giving much thought to the infrastructure or services required for the extra population, such as the capacity of our roadways to handle the extra traffic or the capability of the emergency department at the KGH to deal with all the new cases. To these we can now add the failure to provide enough firefighters to fight a major highrise fire. In that regard, I would propose that there be an immediate moratorium on approving any new highrises until the staffing of the fire department is increased to a level that would guarantee the safety of its residents.