The Futurology Exchange by Okanagan Life Magazine

Manufactured Landscapes

I may be late to the game, but I recently watched the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. WOW! This was the first time I had seen the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Watching this film, I really came to realize that I never fully understood the sheer vastness, the enormous scale of the resource extraction and manufacturing that we all rely on for our daily existence and the impacts these activities have on our environment and other human lives. We might live in the beautiful Okanagan, but we all contribute to the creation of these man-made landscapes with how we live and what we buy. It's a small world, and as modern humans we are creating large scars upon it. Seeing is believing. I highly recommend watching this film. I've posted the opening shot of the film below. Also visit Burtynsky's website for galleries of his stunning, and sometimes shocking work.

When Community Growth Causes Personal Pain

This past Friday (February 8) I attended a forum in Kelowna co-sponsored by the City of Kelowna and the John Howard Society of the Central Okanagan. The program was titled: Crime Prevention and Sustaining Healthy Communities.

From that, I was inclined to expect something on the theme of law and order, so the message I heard was quite a surprise.

The keynote speaker Craig Jones, a Phd, criminologist, researcher and executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, worked from the premise that "rapid economic growth does not benefit everyone equally. Some people - for a complex variety of reasons - suffer severe psycho-social dislocation. Traditional criminal justice responses usually exacerbate such situations."

Well then, certainly Kelowna qualifies under the heading of rapid economic growth. And according to statistics presented in a pre-session handout by the Poverty and Homelessness Action Team of the Central Okanagan, nearly 300 people – men, women, families with children and seniors – sleep outside and in shelters; last year the Kelowna food bank distributed nearly 30,000 hampers to low income families helping nearly 10,000 children; close to 40 per cent of the city’s homeless people are over 50 years of age; and surprisingly, 27 per cent of homeless people work full or part time.

In a city where housing prices have doubled in the last five years, the action team’s figures indicate that 5,000 households spend more than half their income on housing and 22,000 people are at risk of becoming homeless. With a zero rental vacancy rate, the city needs an additional 8,000 affordable housing units.

So I could easily buy a case for severe psycho-social dislocation.