SwiftWatch and AIRO’s birthday

This week, Heather has been participating in Maritimes SwiftWatch.

MTRI (Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute) and CARP (Clean Annapolis River project Society) are monitoring the roosting behaviour of chimney swifts at the new chimney at the old Bridgetown High School site. Every evening at dusk the chimney swifts circle and then dive into the chimney to roost for the night. On a clear Summer evening, this natural phenomenon attracts considerable interest from the residents of Bridgetown. It could be considered a tourist attraction. It is certainly an example of citizen science.

To catch up with the activities at AIRO (Annapolis Investments in Rural Opportunity), I arranged to meet with Jane Nicholson. I had not realized that it was their third birthday. In their latest newsletter, they describe the types of businesses that they have supported, in line with their 2017 report: Local Logic: how to get there from here. Examples include restaurants, brewery, marina, trades, experiential tourism, retail and many others. There is considerable interest in the AIRO model from other jurisdictions. Jane was also kind enough to loan me a new book by Michael von Hausen,  Small is Big: making the next great small to mid-size downtowns.

On CBC Writers and Company, Annie Proulx was Eleanor Wachtel’s guest. Proulx is best known for her books, The Shipping News and Barkskins. In the interview, she talks about ‘geographic determinism”.

‘I think that where you live dictates who you are, what you do, who you marry, your work, what you eat, how you die, what happens to you afterwards. It’s all place.’

Another item that crossed my desk was from May 24, 2019, The Guardian Weekly. It includes an extract from The Ministry of Truth: a biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey. The following two quotations caught my attention.

‘Orwell felt that he lived in cursed times. He fantasized about another life in which he could spend his days gardening and writing fiction instead of being ‘forced into becoming a pamphleteer’.

‘Central to his honesty was his commitment to constantly working out what he thought and why he thought it and never ceasing to reassess these opinions. To quote Christopher Hitchens, one of Orwell’s most eloquent admirers ‘It matters not what you think, but how you think’.

Acknowledgements

To Heather Stewart for sharing her swift monitoring duties. To Jane Nicholson for sharing the AIRO story. To Edward Wedler for the graphics.

References

Bird Studies Canada. Maritimes SwiftWatch. Check web site www.birdscanada.org/ai

AIRO Annapolis Investments in Rural Opportunities

Michael A. von Hausen. 2018. Small is Big. Making the next great Small to Mid-Size Downtowns. VIU Press.

CBC Writers and Company. From The Shipping News to BrokeBack Mountain, Annie Proulx on the importance of place in her fiction.

The Guardian Weekly. 24 May 2019. The Clock struck 13. p54-57. Extract from The Ministry of Truth: a Biography of George Orwell’s 1984. by Dorian Lynskey

Postscript.

Chronicle Herald. June 1, 2019 Page D2. Don Mills. ‘Regional hubs could cure rural malaise’. An alternative view on rural communities in Nova Scotia.