Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023 - Building a better urban forest

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 | Today: 🌦 High 17C

Me, I mourn.

The slaughter in Israel is designed to incite. Terrorism is designed to create anger that dominates and overwhelms and obscures and feeds upon itself until that is all that exists or should exist. It is designed to prompt a spiral of questions and furious responses about history, about politics, and about all else. It is designed to consume. In doing so it robs the humanity of the real people whose faces we see or don’t see on our screens.

So I retreat to mourn broadly and without reservation. I mourn people whose names I don’t know but whose lives were as real as mine. I mourn for the people who love them. I mourn people who are hostages. I mourn people huddled in fear. I mourn people who are, or were, children and students and adults and seniors. I mourn people from the past, future, and present.

As humans, maybe we’re built to forget the people. But I will choose to mourn.

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WORTH KNOWING

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

⚠️ Here’s the current smoke forecast / Check the BC Wildfire Dashboard here

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

NEWS

Can urban forests and denser housing co-exist?

Trees and vegetation are crucial to preventing the buildup of urban heat islands where temperatures rise beyond that of the broader environment.

That cooling process comes from “evapotranspiration,” wherein water moves from the ground, to a plant, and from a plant’s leaves to the environment. Its release into the air helps cool that air (since the water is inevitably cooler than the air).

But during drought and increasingly dry summer, the moisture and rain available to maintain plants and vegetation inevitably becomes scarce. So how can we create cities with vegetation that produces such evapotranspiration effects when water is so rare?

And how do we create the urban forests we need, while also building denser communities—with less private land devoted to yards and greenspace?

• The Current put those questions to UBC forestry professor Andrew Almas.

Need to know

🎃 A gourd named Walter won this weekend’s biggest-pumpkin contest in Langley [CityNews]

🚲 New bike racks in Chilliwack are also public art pieces—when the sun shines on them [City of Chilliwack]

🏒 The Abbotsford Canucks’ first two games this weekend will be streamed online for free [Abbotsford News]

🚔 An Abbotsford man received house arrest and a three-year gun ban for illegally firing a gun in 2018 [Abbotsford News]

👉 A Mission man killed in last week’s Highway 1 crash near Spences Bridge wasn’t at fault in the collision, police say [CTV]

🔊 Langley City is holding a neighbourhood meeting tonight for the Alice Brown & Uplands neighbourhood to discuss planning, SkyTrain, and more [City of Langley]

🗳 A Chilliwack gangster jailed since 2020 has died in custody [Chilliwack Progress]

👉 Foreign students are being lured to Canada and charged tuition rates only to have their dreams dashed, advocates say [Vancouver Sun]

🚧 A new ‘boutique’ industrial building in Langley is marketing itself to small businesses [RENX]

☺️ DAILY SMILE: You can watch a live video of the Vancouver Aquarium’s sea otters here.

The Agenda

Salt by the tonne

One thousand kilograms of anything for $145 sounds like a good deal.

And when it comes to salt, it’s as good as it gets for the City of Chilliwack, though it will need far, far more than a single tonne of road salt.

The city sealed the deal this week on another season of road salt with Lafarge, whose offer was a good $11.50/kilo cheaper than the one other competitor. The city will get $145 per tonne assuming it buys the amount of wholesale road salt it expects to need: 5,500 tonnes (or 5.5 million kilograms).

Lytton protest planned

More than two years after a fire burned their town, Lytton residents are planning to stage a protest next Wednesday.

In a statement shared Tuesday by the village’s mayor, organizers say they are unhappy that clean-up has been green-lighted in other BC communities while they continue to face costly obstacles.

“We feel like Lytton has become an archaeology project, not a rebuild project,” the organizers write.

Recently, one resident told council that they were told they would have to pay $1,600 a day for archaeological monitoring while a trench is being dug for an unknown number of days.

🤝 Now hiring

• Line cooks at Beatniks Bistro in Fort Langley

• Elementary school principals at Abbotsford School District

• Tire changer at Joe the Tire Guy Mobile Service in Mission

• Egg collector at Rustic Rooster Poultry in Chilliwack

• Director of community development at the District of Hope

Hiring in the Fraser Valley? Reply back and let us know!

📸 Current Cam

Each week we showcase a different photo from across the Valley and invite readers to share their best guesses about where it was taken.

Any guesses as to where this week’s Current Cam was taken? Fill out this form with your best guess—or with a picture we can use in a future edition.

Things to do

🗓 Blues at Bez: Blues Hoodoo return to the Bez Arts Hub in Langley Oct. 14 with original material and tasteful cover tunes of masters. Details online.

🗓 Anti-human-trafficking: Anti-human-trafficking advocate Cathy Peters will speak about strategies to prevent trafficking and exploitation Oct. 18 from 7 to 8:30pm at the Abbotsford Arts Centre. Details online.

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