Pave or Protect? Community Demands Space for Nature
King’s Community Nature Space
The Bowker Creek Watershed, located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, supports a complex ecosystem of life and provides invaluable environmental, social, and economic benefits to the community. However, like many urbanized areas, prioritizing infrastructure over nature has significantly degraded the ecosystem and the species that depend on it for survival. Pressures to further develop and sell off this land are at odds with the essential need to preserve what ecological value is left within the area.
Historically, Bowker Creek was a meandering, low gradient stream with numerous small tributaries and wetland areas maintaining a diverse variety of fish and wildlife, including coho salmon and cutthroat trout (Watershed Info). The surrounding watershed supported extensive Garry Oak meadows and woodlands - now one of the most endangered in Canada-due to the complex interplay between climatic, edaphic, and/or cultural factors.
Chum Salmon (Oncorhynchus keta)
recovery
In February 2022, the Friends of Bowker Creek Society and its partners placed approximately 30,000 Chum Salmon eggs in Bowker Creek. Through this project, the Society hopes that Chum fry will emerge from the gravel this spring, swim out to sea, and return in 2024 as adult chum salmon to continue the cycle.
Today, just 2.9 km of the 7.9 km of Bowker Creek remain above ground as the vast majority of the creek is piped through underground culverts (Capital Regional District (CRD) Watershed Info). An estimated 50 percent of the watershed is covered by impervious surfaces such as parking lots, roofs, roads, and sidewalks (Dasanjh et al., 2009). As a result, stormwater washes pollutants including fertilizers, pesticides, car oils, and detergent directly into Bowker Creek. Compounding these impacts, a degraded riparian zone and stream bed does little to filter and inhibit fast flowing stormwaters. Additionally, increased speed and volume of water diverted from natural flood retention plains has further increased risks to wildlife habitat, homes, and businesses.
Despite these changes, natural areas and pathways along Bowker Creek are highly utilized and treasured by local communities for their high ecological value. These lands have become a symbol of health, well-being and urban wildlife protection in Greater Victoria. Recognizing the importance of restoring and preserving what little green space remains, citizens have been fighting ever increasing pressure on municipal leaders to sell public lands for development. In addition to reducing stormwater runoff into Bowker creek, these lands provide vital access to nature, urban refuge for wildlife and essential staging habitat for migratory birds. Once developed, numerous ecosystem services-climate mitigation and adaptation benefits, flood abatement, as well as enhanced reduction of noise pollution will be lost, and will make habitat restoration even more challenging.
While the Watershed will never be returned to its natural state, opportunities to restore and protect Bowker Creek are possible and have been exhaustively articulated within the framework of a Watershed Management Plan (2003), Blueprint (2011), and a number of related planning documents developed by the Bowker Creek Initiative (BCI)-a coalition of local and senior governments, residents, and nongovernmental organizations with a shared vision for the future:
“The varied human uses and natural areas in the Bowker Creek watershed are managed to minimize runoff and pollution, making Bowker Creek a healthy stream that supports habitat for native vegetation and wildlife, and provides a community greenway to connect neighborhoods.”
The goals, management objectives, and recommended key actions outlined in these documents are ambitious and intended to provide a framework for management and restoration of the watershed and creek corridor over the long term (100 years). Nonetheless, significant efforts to advance this initiative are already underway, including key planning and development tools such as a Daylighting Feasibility Study (2020) and Potential Stormwater Management Facility (SWMF) concepts.
However, the Bowker Creek Management Plan is not contractual, legislative, nor obligatory in any way. Instead, successful implementation relies entirely on commitment and collaboration proportional to that invested in the drafting of its terms and principles.
“To realize the vision for the Bowker Creek watershed, members of the community and local and senior governments need to maintain their commitment to the plan, and to see that the plan is implemented.”
The strength and resilience of these commitments appear to be unwavering. For example, the District of Saanich demonstrated outstanding leadership action in furtherance of the Watershed Management Plan by collaborating with citizen advocates and neighboring municipalities to purchase a beloved 5.5 acre nature space along Bowker Creek for conservation purposes. Thanks to extraordinary advocacy efforts by Mayor Fred Haynes and community members as well as an unprecedented fundraising campaign, the Kings Road Naturespace will be protected in perpetuity under a Conservation Easement guaranteeing development never occurs on the site.
Unfortunately, Saanich’s extraordinary move has been overshadowed by Victoria School District 61’s recent proposal to sell Lansdowne South, a similar, publicly-held parcel directly upstream from the King’s Community Nature Space. Citing the need for a new facility for “individual and system needs, and to ensure a good quality of life for people who are dying and their loved ones,” the Victoria Hospice Society (VHS) aims to develop a new “Center of Excellence” on the site along the west side of the creek. Promising to remediate the section of Bowker Creek that flows through this parcel, VHS asserts that its proposal meets the Initiative’s objectives by improving riparian habitat and increasing conveyance capacity.
Although VHS’s plan technically meets the minimum improvement objectives contemplated in the BCI Blueprint, it fails to account for the investigation, modeling, and planning that have occurred since that time and the unique importance of this site identified by the Daylighting Feasibility Study and Companion Report. Furthermore, it ignores the key role the Lansdowne South property plays in short term storage of rainfall to reduce downstream flooding and the ability of the watershed to adapt to the changing climate. Development of a building with associated parking on one of few viable sites remaining for a Stormwater Management Facility along Bowker creek would hamper restoration efforts at the King’s Community Nature Space and as a whole, increase the need for more sites throughout the watershed to achieve BCI goals.
The proposed sale of the Lansdowne South property has ignited an important debate about the values and priorities of the Bowker Creek Watershed community. Pressure to sell land for development within an area already working to minimize the consequences of rapid urbanization is inherently inconsistent with preservation of the ecological value and services that nature provides. It is unfathomable that a determination to protect and preserve a site important for water quality, wildlife habitat, and flood mitigation would be regretted, and as it stands, it is certainly within a community and it’s leadership’s ability to ensure this does not occur.
Over the past several months, stakeholders and community members have expressed adamant opposition to this sale by organizing a petition, holding rallies, and testifying publicly at several Board meetings. We commend and support efforts to protect this important land, Bowker Creek, and the wildlife that call it home.
The burden of this decision lies with School Board 61 and will occur on March 14, 2022.