Thinking about sustainable and affordable housing on Bowen…a Yale graduate student gives us a tour of her tiny home.

I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a new project being run off the side of the desk unofficially under the umbrella of the municipality’s Sustainable Framework Working Group. It’s called Bowen2020 and it’s a green-living wiki for islanders. Here’s a bit clipped from the main page:

Welcome to Bowen2020, a compendium of green-living ideas, advice, and resources written and edited by and for the people of Bowen Island, B.C. Canada.

It is our hope that you, the users and creators of this site, will share on these pages a little of what you know, a bit of what you have learned, and perhaps even a list of things you’d like to do when it comes to taking positive steps at the household, neighborhood, and community-wide level. Perhaps you have knowledge to share about conserving electricity, growing food, or getting around more sustainably on this jewel of an island that we are lucky enough to call home.

The greener life is a puzzle best solved together. Each of us holds a piece, and through this site, together we can hopefully compare notes, share experiences, orgnanize projects, and convey lessons learned. Ideally we can collectively transform this resource into a constantly-updated and hihgly localized “better living handbook,” and along the way make our corner of the world a brighter place. None of us individually has all the answers, but all of us have some sense of what the completed picture might look like: A community that is ecologically balanced, vibrant and complete, and resilient for present and future generations.

This thing will only work if people share what they know there. Please take a moment to write an article, or improve something already there. If you need help getting started, just give me a shout, leave a comment here or email me at james at glave dot com. Thanks!

A visit with Dominique Kluyskens, who harvests his home’s drinking water from the sky.

Last year, Bowen Island Municipality commissioned Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden, a Vancouver-based architectural and urban-planning firm, to take a look at Snug Cove. What might the village look like in 40 years, if the community adopted a range of sustainable-development best practices?

HBBH went away and did its homework, and after one or two dry runs, came out with the Snug Cove Master Plan. We’ve linked to the documents here. Even if you breeze over the mountains of research in Parts One and Two, we think you’ll find the document called “plans” fascinating. Click on the thumbnail exceprt here for a taste. It’s a high-res Acrobat file, and you can zoom in to an amazing level of detail. (Dig the electric-vehicle-co-op charging station at the corner of Village and Dorman!) Map geeks could easily lose an hour just mousing around this file and imagining what we might become.

Snug Cover Plan Part 1

Snug Cove Plan Part 2

Maps

Plans

What do you think of the plan? Please chime in with the “leave a comment” box below. You don’t need to be a OneDayBowen member to leave a comment. We’d love to hear your thoughts…

Curious to see what green building could actually look like on the rock? For the past six months, I have been building a sustainable studio in my front yard on Cates Hill. The “Eco-Shed” is a 260-square-foot building designed by island architect Dan Parke; it will require very little energy to heat and light, and have a minimal carbon footprint. We have constructed the so-called “passive solar” building almost entirely out of sustainably sourced lumber. It will include low-flow, water efficient plumbing fixtures, an energy efficient heating and ventilation system, and nontoxic finishes. The roof will harvest rainwater for a future adjacent edible garden.

I would like to invite fellow islanders to the first of two Eco-Shed open houses.
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