Content area
Full Text
Islands in the Salish Sea: A Community Atlas Sheila Harrington and Judi Stevenson, editors Victoria, Vancouver, and Calgary: TouchWood Editions, 2005. 160 pp. Maps, illus. $44.95 paper.
IN 1999 A SMALL GROUP of Salt Spring Island activists decided to mark the coming millennium by inventorying and mapping the unique resources of their island home. Inspired by bioregional writing and mapping projects in British Columbia, England, and elsewhere, and by new technologies such as geographical information systems (GIS), the activists began working not just with their fellow Salt Spring residents but also with activists, writers, and artists who lived on other islands in what is increasingly being referred to as the "Salish Sea." Over the next few years, more than 3,000 people participated in an effort that resulted in this "community atlas" of seventeen islands in the Strait of Georgia, a work of remarkable creativity and insight that is compelling and interesting on at least two levels: first, for what it tells us about the islands and, second, for what it tells us about the people who live on them.
The Islands in the Salish Sea project coordinators chose a total of seventeen Strait of Georgia islands for their study. They range from Saturna and the Fenders in the southeast to Cortes and Quadra in the northwest, and they include both "official" Gulf Islands like Salt Spring and outliers like Howe Sound's Bowen and Gambier. The editors chose to leave out smaller and mostly uninhabited islands as well as the intensely urbanized islands in the mouth of the Fraser - the latter an omission that raises interesting questions about the kinds of places that are deemed worthy of such investigations. While each island-based chapter includes a brief statistical profile - population in 1991 and 2001, the island's size, hectares of farmland, protected areas, and green space - there is little else that is standardized here. In fact, the island chapters are nothing if not idiosyncratic, each being...