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Feature - Taking back a sense of place

Green mapping helps orient a community and its values

You’ve just arrived in town and you’re staring at the map you’ve been handed, eyes scanning across the grid-lines, the street-names, the blots of green space, the stark relief of blue, for the magic words, "YOU ARE HERE."

Once you have this point of reference, ground zero, the map will unfold the terrain for you, explain where you are in relation to a hundred, a thousand reference points. Chart the thoroughfares, all respectfully graded as freeway, main artery, subsidiary artery. But it’s unlikely, this map, with its broad strokes, its most basic information, will include the side alleys and shortcuts, the fish habitat, the bear corridors, the berry patches, the paddling streams.

What it will mark is what the mapmaker thought was important. Important for you to know. Important to them.

Maps are notoriously subjective. In that, they are one of the most powerful tools.

The hot political agendas of the 13th to 19th centuries have been over who had the maps. Whomever mapped the Northwest passage, the mythical Great Southern Land, the route to the west of the American continent, had control. Control of the region and the resources it yielded to the conqueror.

The early maps were instruments of power in the hands of the controlling colonial or commercial interests – the Portuguese, the British Empire, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Explorers and cartographers often used indigenous knowledge, but never credited the providers of that knowledge. Alexander Mackenzie made his way to the west coast with information that came from First Nations people, who had no written culture, but an oral knowledge of territory, an uncannily accurate "mental map".

This oral knowledge, the mental mapping of place, of home, is what a new trend of cartography is trying to honour. It’s called green mapping.

Maeve Lydon of Victoria’s Common Ground Green Mapping project states: "Maps provide unique modes of manipulation and control. They can decide whose worldview and reality count. If maps do express our relation to place then community and ecological recovery depends on re-mapping and re-presenting the worlds around us."

Which is why, around the globe, in urban and rural centres, at every grid reference, at every longitude and latitude, people are embarking on community mapping projects – to define what is important to them, and what is important to share. What their planet, their eco-system, their place, looks like.

Until something is on the map, it is hard to prove its existence. Trails built but without legal status don’t make it to provincial agency maps – their existence is jeopardized by future development. A major hurdle for indigenous land claims has been the challenge of proving a continuous connection with the land – if the indigenous oral knowledge had been committed to parchment, Native claims would be unassailable. Land use planners make decisions based on the maps they have at hand, often made years ago – providing broad zoning, lot parcel designations, and very little else.

The Sea to Sky Habitat Atlas is being created by the Community Mapping Network, and aims to fill this knowledge gap. Its goal is to combine local, government and community information with agency-based maps to facilitate planning sustainable communities. The Community Mapping Network is a working example of a PPP – a public/private partnership. Its funding is provided through the British Columbia Conservation Foundation (in part from the Real Estate Foundation of B.C.), and seed money put up by the Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection.

The Atlas is in development, and combines map layers from provincial agencies, Crown corporations like BC Rail and BC Hydro, local government data, and community stewardship groups, like the Squamish River Estuary Committee.

Land, Water and Air Protection Fisheries Biologist, Rob Knight, is a co-leader of the Community Mapping Network project. "I really feel what we’re trying to do is collate the data of the commons," he says. "No one provincial group is doing this. Information is being compiled from across agencies."

The Community Mapping Network started publishing Sensitive Habitat Inventory Material (SHIM) data in the fall of 2000. They built the interface that enables data sharing across government agencies.

"None of the information we’re dealing with is confidential," explains Knight. "It’s just not very accessible. We recently held a community outreach seminar in Prince George and folks there wanted to be able to access surface water licensing information. That data is available, but there’s no map interface. So CMN set up, over the course of a couple of days, an interface, where you can turn on water license points for the whole province. You can click on the point and find out whether the license is active and what the license number is."

The Sea to Sky Sensitive Habitat Atlas will eventually run from Bowen Island to D’Arcy, but primarily it aims to cover the settled areas within the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District. The Atlas, which will be produced in a hard copy format and on CD ROM at the end of the calendar year, is an edited and smaller scale print version of an interactive Web site and data clearinghouse.

The Community Mapping Network aims for the Sea to Sky Habitat Atlas to be a primary tool for local government decision-making. When dealing with a development application, a planner can turn to the atlas and discover if there are any red flags raised regarding the application. At a 1:11,000 scale, the map doesn’t provide enough detail to make an informed decision, but it does enable a planner to know whether more investigation is needed or not.

And here’s the important part. Community groups and land stewards must ensure that they have done detailed comprehensive mapping of any sensitive areas within their communities, otherwise, the red flag may not be raised, further investigation may not be required, the sensitive habitat, technically, does not exist.

"Local knowledge is important," Knight says. Without a detailed contribution from local stewards, gaps will exist.

The Community Mapping Network has established a methodology and training standard that must be met before a group’s data can be contributed. So, in order for the process to work effectively, community stewardship groups must train in the methodology or seek funding from one of the handful of organizations that provide grant money for habitat protection, to hire a consultant. It’s an interesting twist on the user-pay system. If a group wants to protect the spotted frog, or a watershed, they need to pay for a Sensitive Habitat Inventory Mapping (SHIM) inventory, just as the Squamish River Estuary Group is currently doing for the Stawamus. Where the money will come from is unclear.

Local governments play an important role in the data gathering. In Whistler, the municipality has hired a consultant to map terrestrial habitat at a 1:5000 scale, in order to focus on building wildlife corridors, to build a protected area network by connecting habitat reserves.

But it’s the community-driven mapping that can really effect change. Change in the way a person relates to their community. Change in the way a person interacts with their ecosystem.

A map enables you to orient yourself. Wendy Brawer, the founder of Green Map Systems says, "Most people when they open a map, they look for themselves on it. And then – with the Green Maps – they start noticing all these things near them that they may have never thought about before. Maybe it's a bike trail. Maybe it's a farmer's market. So you start to see a fabric of sustainability, a whole network where you could change several things about your life."

The Green Map was a 1992 initiative of Brawer’s, an industrial designer who wanted to reconfigure the way people looked at New York City. Her map, the Green Map, contained unique icons to mark places of human interest, the interactions of an ecosystem, a guide to reading the place – dog-walking paths, vegetarian cafes, toxic sites, spots to stargaze.

A viral meme, the Green Map has spread. Support and software is provided by Green Map Systems, but Green Maps springing up in cities around the world are always local initiatives.

As Stephane Perron, of Whistler’s Community Habitat Resource Project (CHRP) – another community mapping project – says, "The Green Map icons have become the international standard in green mapping."

Across Canada, Green Map projects have been undertaken in major cities and broader regions – from Halifax and Toronto to Northern B.C. and Yellowknife. The map celebrates the living things in a city, as opposed to its concrete and bitumen.

Once a map is completed, once the data is gathered and represented spatially, in a way that is accessible to everyone, even the functionally illiterate, even those who speak a different language, things start happening.

Brawer recalls one success story.

"Kids in Brooklyn have charted the garbage crisis in New York by bike. It was a map called Are We Trashing the Apple? It showed where the proposed garbage transfer stations would be in low-income communities of colour along the waterfront. After the map was published, that proposal was dropped. I don't know if that map changed the plan, but it's no longer the plan."

Closer to home, the Victoria Fruit Tree Project celebrated its fifth season this year. Run by Lifecycles, the project involves volunteer fruit pickers harvesting fruit from neighbourhood backyard fruit trees. The trees have been mapped as part of the Common Ground community mapping project – property owners and tenants call up to have their trees included in the map. Volunteers pick the trees and the fruit is divided between the volunteers and homeowners, community kitchens and food banks, and a final third of the harvest is canned, juiced and sold by the Fruit Tree Project. The project is a community-focussed redistribution of food, and it also prevents the waste that often is inevitable when householders have old trees whose limbs can’t be reached from the kitchen ladder, or dangling from the roof. Without the map, the volunteers couldn’t be organized into such efficient harvest teams by a single paid project co-ordinator.

Community mapping has also been identified as an important tool for emergency services, as a way to chart the pool of local knowledge of a region, so out-of-region crews are not at risk when called in to assist.

Whistler’s CHRP map is aimed at being as interactive and accessible to the community and Whistler visitors as possible. Rather than being a tool primarily for land use planners, government and developers, the CHRP Web site is being geared towards the ordinary folk who are looking to engage with their home on a different level.

The map is compiled in layers. The base layers have been provided by the municipality. The CHRP partners, who include such groups as the Whistler Museum, the Naturalists and WORCA, will provide data specific to their interests and their skill-set. A user can then log onto the site, pull down the base map, and add whatever layers pertain to their needs. For example, a user could layer a transparency of the area’s bear dens over the base map, add another layer of the bike trails, and print out a detailed map that highlights potential bear/rider interaction.

A lot of the information being contributed to CHRP already exists. Some of it, such as a bird list from the Naturalists, is not yet in mappable form. Other information exists in people’s heads. This data is important, but if it’s not easily accessible, it could be lost. Some of the data still needs to be collated.

"One of the goals by which we’ll judge the success of the project," Perron states, "is if it helps identify gaps in the knowledge. There’s a bit of a myth out there that we know everything about the Whistler environment, but there actually are a lot of gaps. If CHRP is successful at identifying data gaps, it could help focus on where resources should be directed."

Callaghan Valley is unmapped in this sense of the word. The municipality and government agencies have charts that incorporate borders, tenures, official designations, licences. Those maps don’t necessarily chart the things we value, as a community, as residents, as land stewards. Callaghan is largely terra nullius. The potential for a land grab is huge. If the existing understandings of this area were charted – mapped to include the snowmobile trails, the view points, the watersheds, the bear habitat, the biggest trees, heritage sites, the bird life – the debate about what to do with it would be a lot more informed. Development wouldn’t be carte blanche; it would be informed by a collection of red flags.

Imagine. You’re going to map your world. You have the base map layer, and a database full of information that has been collated, contributed, uploaded. Now what to identify? What points of reference? Anything.

Okay, how about second hand stores, sources of free range eggs, swimming spots, cafes that serve good vegetarian chow and fair trade coffee, butterfly habitat, live music venues, public washrooms, magazine browsing spots, community gathering places. Welcome to your Whistler.

Pull the layers down, and create your own map, a personalized tool to orient yourself in a place. How about boulders and rock-climbs, perfect dog walks, running paths that accommodate a stroller, places you can see the stars at night, ridiculously overbuilt Whistler homes for the rainy day looky-loo tour? Welcome to your Whistler.

How about the closest natural spring, bear den, picnic spot, berry crop, avalanche path, disc golf course, local brewery, meditation spot, public art sculpture? How about good skateboarding hits, the cheapest fast food joints in town, out of the way places to light up a doob, your bike repair shop, best spots to pick up a lift ticket from someone who’s going home early?

Whatever. It’s your map.

All we need to do is gather the tools.

A map gives us a sense of place. It gives a voice to the landscape and the people who inhabit it. This is our web. We are entangled in it. Let’s make sure the maps we use, our decision makers use, the town’s visitors use, have the information that represents what’s important to us. Let’s learn to navigate this place better.

CHRP has recently announced a partnership with Natural Resources Canada. NRC recently assisted community and habitat mapping for Bowen Island, and their Web site provides some insight into what the CHRP project might look like.

For further information, browse through the following Web sites:

CHRP — www.whistlermuseum.org/WhistlerMap/CHRPHome.htm

Bowen Island Geo Library — www.bowenisland.info

Victoria’s Common Ground Community Mapping Project -www3.bc.sympatico.ca/cground/index.html

Green Map Systems — www.greenmap.org

Community Mapping Network — www.cmnbc.ca

Sea to Sky Sensitive Habitat Atlas — www.shim.bc.ca/sea2sky/main.htm



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