At first, there was capital investment to create a fruit growing industry in British Columbia that could supply England and such colonies as Hong Kong and Australia with a homesick-for-England product: apples and pears. With failing ranchland (built on free Indigenous land) distributed cheaply, and cheap labour in a period of immigration and low industrial development, apples and pears hit a sweet price point, too. 

The Stirling Orchard, Kelowna

Bankrupt Slender Spindle Orchard in Vernon

Labour and trees are the capital here. An approach that reverses that to make trees and labour costs instead, that is to make them loans from the state’s economic system rather than additions to it that are gifts from the earth, can’t work. One can live off the excess production created by skilled labour and its inventiveness, but not off a hypothetical slice of profit produced by unskilled labour on expensive land, with subsidies or other economic inputs designed to keep the system in place, a system that con only thrive on nearly free (and that includes subsidized) land and water. A new system would help: new land use parameters; new capital parameters, new approaches to labour, and new training systems. The capacity to think of them has been culturally paralyzed for two generations by subsidy and the mythology of capital intensity. What works in an urban environment, does not work out here. One might hope that universities would address this environmental issue. Instead, they tweak its set parameters. That’s an urban thing, and it looks like this: https://livinglabs.ubc.ca/news-events/six-new-projects-receive-campus-living-lab-funding-advance-sustainability-and-wellbeing. And, more horticulturally, like this:

https://botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/learn/horticulture-training-program/.

In other words, we have a university that teaches urban skills, for working with technologies and their interaction with pre-determined landscape uses. To put it another way: we have no university at all. And so, we begin again, starting with the light.

Blessings to you. Every day is getting brighter from here on in.