The Kootenay Tour: Invermere
SEPTEMBER 14, 2007 - With a few spare moments (but just a few), we can finally start to report on the Kootenay region tour, now in its fifth day. We started in Ivermere, a small town in the Rocky Mountain Trench of B.C., which just happened to be the home of Bill Swan - the person whose interest in the 100-Mile Diet book triggered more than a dozen Kootenay towns to band together and make Alisa and I an offer we couldn't refuse...
When we first met Bill at the Windermere Fall Fair (Windermere is next door to Invermere), he was wearing some kind of jester's costume topped with a baronial "crown of weiners" - hot dogs that jutted out at every angle. What had we signed up for? As it turns out, an incredible opportunity to meet with people in small and too-often forgotten towns who are changing things in ways that often wouldn't be possible in bigger cities.
Swan and a small community of activists, many of them grouped into the Columbia Valley Botanical Gardens, are facing off against second-home sprawl that is eliminating wild wetlands and bottomlands (home to a concentration of British Columbia's rarest plants and animals), as well as agricultural land. As Dave Zehnder of the CVBG said, "We're being asked how many acres of agricultural land should be cleared for houses. What we want to ask is how many houses should be cleared for agricultural land."
Zehnder, who raises cattle, is also bracing for the B.C. government's new hyper-regulation of local meat producers - expected to drive many small meat producers out of business. Zehnder has not ruled out a hunger strike against the new regulations. The government is planning to starve him, he says, so he might as well get started now...
But maybe a hunger strike won't be necessary. One great opportunity in our 100-mile touring is the chance to share ideas we've heard from the many small towns that are working to make local food systems work, and to let people know that they are far from alone. By the time we left Invermere, we had a sense that people might be getting ready to band together...
Inspiring times. Our thanks to Bill, Dave, and all the folks in Invermere - and we'll hope to hear about whatever happens next. We know how much people in Invermere value local food; after all, while we were there we saw a locally made apple pie sell at a charity auction for $200!-JBM
