Tofitians and Uclutians who attended the recent The Future is HERE community event were treated to a free screening of the award-winning documentary The Future of Energy: Lateral Power to the People, followed by scintillating conversation about how West Coasters can slow climate change.
Eating locally grown food, gathering rainwater in the winter months for summer, and sealing up cracks to cut home heating costs, were some green solutions brought forward by locals to help reduce the carbon footprint of the Coast.
“We need to shift our expectations of what a good life looks like. Happiness doesn’t need to involve a three-car garage in the suburbs,” said event host Larissa Stendie of the Sierra Club B.C.
Tofino-Ucluelet Transition Town member Robert Zurowski expressed the imminent need for the West Coast to switch from a high-carbon globalized economy to a low-carbon localized economy.
“The first step is to get the message out and mobilizing all these people who are doing all these alternative things in food and energy and housing; they need to be brought together,” Zurowski told the Westerly News.
Former mayor of Ucluelet Bill Irving stood up and spoke to the audience at the Ucluelet Community Centre on the probability of wave energy being deployed as an alternate option.
“Unless these companies are subsidized extensively, they are very reluctant to experiment. They have gone to Scotland and Australia and built their pilots there, not on the west coast. We have a better wave pattern here, but they chose to do it somewhere else,” Irving said.
“That doesn’t mean that it’s not an important issue to maintain. We have [former] council member Geoff Lyons dedicated to keep on that issue. He sees it as a tremendous opportunity, but it also requires the community to say this is what we want. Not what industry or government or PR wants. What do we want this place to look like?”
Anyone connecting with Transition Town Tofino-Ucluelet is encouraged to email Robert Zurowski at zuro@telus.net.
