InFocus Magazine — Sharing the Ride

Dec/Jan ‘08
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Environment
Sharing the Ride
Island RideShare website provides a way for people to reduce their carbon footprint

By Laura Busheikin • December & January 2008

“What you’re looking at is an old guy doing something he’s never done before,” he says with a smile. “Maybe that’s why he’s as healthy as he is. He doesn’t have the brains to know he can’t do it so he just goes ahead and does it!”

Ralph Shaw in his workshop. Photo by Boomer Jerritt
Shaw leads me upstairs to his living room, which is slightly less cluttered than his workshop and decorated with wildlife paintings, certificates of achievement and shelves overflowing with books on fishing and natural sciences, to many of which he’s contributed chapters.
He removes a small item from a glass bookshelf next to the fireplace and hands it to me. It’s his Order of Canada medal, given to him in 1984 for his work with the McQueen Lake Centre. Next he presents his Confederation medal, for outstanding citizenship and then another medal from Fly-Fishing Canada for establishing a fly-fishing championship symposium. “There’s a whole bunch more of this stuff downstairs,” he says nonchalantly, as if it were so much scrap metal.
Medals, certificates and other trinkets aren’t what matters to Shaw. What matters are actions, and more specifically how our collective actions are affecting the environment and the sustainability of life as we know it.
He cites the works of Dr. Andrew Weaver, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Keeping Our Cool (in which Shaw is thanked in the acknowledgements), and Dr. Wallace Broecker, author of Fixing Climate. “These people, who I think are among the best brains on the planet, certainly in their field, are telling us that we have two generations to make some changes in the production of greenhouse gasses in order to stabilize things,” Shaw says.
“In two generations, the planet will be less able to support our lifestyle and our way of using the planet.”
Shaw has written a weekly outdoors newspaper column since pitching the idea to the now-defunct Comox District Free Press not long after retiring to the Valley with his wife, Elaine, in 1983. His column now appears in the Comox Valley Record, and to date he has written more than 1,100. In his most recent he uses a colorful fable about a squirrel parliament in the middle of a pine-beetle devastated BC forest as a metaphor for our current environmental situation.
Shaw’s “morality tale” highlights the terrible toll that the pine beetle epidemic has taken on the squirrel population in just 10 years—two squirrel generations. Warnings from the squirrel parliamentarians of Tweedsmuir Park—the epicentre of the epidemic—are repeatedly ignored, until eventually there are too few pine trees producing too few pine cones to feed the squirrel population. Disintegrating hand-in-hand with squirrel society is the parliament that refused to take the threats seriously, which presumably mirrors Shaw’s opinion of our own leaders.
“We hear, read and watch on television a growing volume of concern about the effects of climate change,” writes Shaw. “As a life-long outdoors person I have seen much that suggests to me there is considerable change taking place in wild places that convinces me we should be concerned about the future… We have about two generations to bring about some serious moderation in the production of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide or we will face a greatly altered planet from the perspective of how we produce our food, live in lowland areas and survive violent storms.”
While the idea of a squirrel parliament is fantastical, Shaw chose squirrels deliberately because, as he says, squirrels can teach us a lot about the state of our forests if we only take the time to listen to them. And if anyone has taken the time to listen, it’s Shaw. After the Second World War, he tells me, he raised money for a couple of years of university by trapping red squirrels, a luxury fur at the time, along the continental divide in southern Alberta.
As I digest this latest bit of trivia on the life and times of Ralph Shaw, I take a moment to appreciate the living legend that’s regaling me of tales of hunting squirrels, preserving nature and saving the world.
Clad in blue jeans and a green fleece vest with “Outdoor Edge Magazine” embroidered on the left breast, Shaw carries himself casually and seems the embodiment of “easy-going.” Nonetheless, he speaks carefully and deliberately, as if consulting his vast wealth of experience and knowledge before delivering each word. His tone turns to outright solemnity when he speaks again.
“I think that the planet is beyond the care and capacity of the humans we have on it,” he states.
“People are very critical of climate change. They’re critical of the carbon tax, critical of the change of lifestyle. Part of it is because, as a society, I don’t think we understand what’s really happening.
“A society that no longer touches the earth, that no longer knows how the systems work, can’t begin to understand the moves that we have to make in order to meet the challenges of the future.”
I ask him how we’re doing in the Comox Valley in terms of sustainable living.
“This place is a paradise, that’s its problem,” he says with a smile. “We’re going to move beyond the limits of sustainability for the quality of life that we have if we continue this development pattern. If you don’t know what paradise is, then you don’t have to worry about losing it. But if you know what paradise is, and you know what a quality environment is, then you know what you’ve lost.”
What it all comes down to, Shaw stresses, is getting back in touch with nature and understanding the way our actions affect all of the organisms and habitats around us. That’s why it was so important to him to pass on his knowledge of the outdoors to his three daughters, why he goes hunting and fishing with his nine grandchildren and why he made a promise to do the same with his four great-grandchildren.
“When we go hunting,” he explains, “I try to explain to them what’s going on around us in the outdoors. You don’t just walk out and start banging away. If you’re going to be an outdoorsman you should understand what natural systems are all about. Eventually that kind of understanding, I believe, leads to responsible citizenship as a conservationist.”
Shaw picks up a giant block of gem-quality jade that sits in front of his fireplace. He explains an old First Nations legend passed on from the Lillooet area about a great hunter who used to carve his knives and arrowheads from the green stone. When the hunter died, goes the legend, his tools were shattered and the pieces shared among the tribe, effectively passing on his hunting skills to the entire community.
Every time a child is born into the family, Shaw ties a box of flies and gives it to the child with a small piece of jade.
“That’s a covenant between me and the child that I will take the child fishing when they want to go,” he says. “I also have pieces of jade that I give to the kids when they graduate. If you go anywhere in the world and you have a piece of jade in your pocket, you can feel British Columbia’s waters and fields and forests by feeling the jade. Jade is sacred to the first peoples of British Columbia, and it’s sacred to me.”
Regardless of what the future may hold, there’s no place that Ralph Shaw would rather be than right here in British Columbia. You may spot him fishing one day on Spider Lake, his favorite spot on Vancouver Island, or perhaps even tossing his line in the Puntledge or tracking deer in the forests of the Comox Valley.
If you do get the chance, I encourage you to say hello and engage him in conversation. Whether musing about the state of our society, describing his trademark Tom Thumb fly pattern or just reminiscing about his old fishing pal Jack Shaw, I guarantee that you’ll leave that conversation a better person.

The Vancouver Island launch of Shaw’s new book will take place on Sunday, December 14 at the Campbell River Museum.
For more information call 250-287-3103.
Ralph Shaw’s weekly outdoors column can be read every Friday in the Comox Valley Record.

Ralph Shaw leads me through a crowded basement, info
past shelves and fridges stocked with smoked salmon and untold other delicacies and underneath fishing rods balanced in dusty rafters. We emerge in a tiny room of indescribable clutter and boundless character that serves as workshop and home office for the author, environmentalist and avid outdoorsman who will prove to be one of the most interesting people I’ve met in recent years.
We’ve met to discuss Shaw’s new book, a compilation of the diaries of long-time friend and renowned fly fisherman Jack Shaw (no relation, although the two look like brothers). What emerges from our conversation, however, is a poignant, philosophical discussion of fly-fishing, ecology, and no less than the future of human existence.
A dynamic octogenarian who has spent a lifetime in the wilds of BC and Alberta, Shaw is about as engaging a man as one could hope to join in candid conversation. Born in Cold Lake, Alberta in 1926, he’s been a trapper and an elementary school principal, has contributed to countless books on fly-fishing and outdoor pursuits and has been appointed to the Order of Canada, our nation’s highest civilian honour, for his extensive conservation work.
In the early ’70s, Shaw was a driving force behind the establishment of the McQueen Lake Environmental Education Centre, 2.6 square kilometres of preserved wilderness northwest of Kamloops where people still go to experience nature and to learn about ecological systems.
“As an educator,” he says, “all my life I’ve wanted to teach people about how natural systems work. We wanted a place where we could take children to study a natural system.”
From an entirely undeveloped parcel of forest, Shaw and his cohorts created a full-fledged environmental education centre where students could come from all over British Columbia to learn about nature. More than 30 years later, the centre is still fully operational and now boasts a modern science centre and, as Shaw enthusiastically points out, an “amazing” composting toilet that can handle 60 to 70 people a day.
Ushering me gently back to the subject, Shaw gestures toward a framed photograph of Jack Shaw sitting atop a workbench that’s obviously a well-used fly-tying station. The photo is barely visible beyond the brightly colored feathers and other fly-tying materials that blanket the entire workbench like a Technicolor fungus.
“What that man knew about systems,” he says reverently, “well, he’s forgotten more than most of us will ever know in terms of ecology, climate change and things like that.”
Jack Shaw’s story began in 1925, when his family moved to BC from Montreal when Jack was nine years old. Although he left school to join the workforce just two years later, Jack’s innate curiosity and his passion for fishing drove him to experiment with new techniques that would change the face of fly-fishing.
By the time Ralph met him for the first time in 1956, Jack had already pioneered the art of tying imitator-pattern flies and had become an expert on the insects, especially chironomids, that he wanted to duplicate. He even learned to imitate their natural movements by the deft manipulation of his fly rod.
“He was a magician with a fly rod, there’s no other way to say it,” says Shaw. “He was the guru, and you couldn’t help but learn from him if you spent much time with him. His work changed the way we fly-fish.”
Shaw’s new book, The Pleasure of His Company – The Fishing Diaries of Jack Shaw, is set to be released on December 6 and is a tribute to his close friend, who passed away in February 2000.
The 232-page book is an edited version of more than 300,000 words that Jack penned during his many fishing trips, and it features beautiful paintings of Jack’s flies by Campbell River artist Larry Stefanyk, also the publisher of Island Fisherman magazine.
“This is a pretty significant book,” says Shaw, not without humility. “It impresses because it’s a big, thick tabletop book; it really is beautiful.”
A leather-bound limited edition of the book has already received lots of interest and advance orders, significant given the $135 price tag, and Shaw is confident that the 1,100 first edition hard covers will be equally successful at $39 a pop.
Never one to pass up an opportunity for ecological philanthropy, Shaw is donating all proceeds from the sale of his book to the McQueen Lake Environmental Education Centre, and to the Fisheries Association of BC to teach children how to fish.
While Shaw is optimistic about the book’s success based on the tremendous support from private donors that he’s received so far, to the tune of nearly $20,000 in production costs, he admits that he’s a wading into new territory when it comes to marketing his creation.
“What you’re looking at is an old guy doing something he’s never done before,” he says with a smile. “Maybe that’s why he’s as healthy as he is. He doesn’t have the brains to know he can’t do it so he just goes ahead and does it!”
Shaw leads me upstairs to his living room, which is slightly less cluttered than his workshop and decorated with wildlife paintings, certificates of achievement and shelves overflowing with books on fishing and natural sciences, to many of which he’s contributed chapters.
He removes a small item from a glass bookshelf next to the fireplace and hands it to me. It’s his Order of Canada medal, given to him in 1984 for his work with the McQueen Lake Centre. Next he presents his Confederation medal, for outstanding citizenship and then another medal from Fly-Fishing Canada for establishing a fly-fishing championship symposium. “There’s a whole bunch more of this stuff downstairs,” he says nonchalantly, as if it were so much scrap metal.
Medals, certificates and other trinkets aren’t what matters to Shaw. What matters are actions, and more specifically how our collective actions are affecting the environment and the sustainability of life as we know it.
He cites the works of Dr. Andrew Weaver, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Keeping Our Cool (in which Shaw is thanked in the acknowledgements), and Dr. Wallace Broecker, author of Fixing Climate. “These people, who I think are among the best brains on the planet, certainly in their field, are telling us that we have two generations to make some changes in the production of greenhouse gasses in order to stabilize things,” Shaw says.
“In two generations, the planet will be less able to support our lifestyle and our way of using the planet.”
Shaw has written a weekly outdoors newspaper column since pitching the idea to the now-defunct Comox District Free Press not long after retiring to the Valley with his wife, Elaine, in 1983. His column now appears in the Comox Valley Record, and to date he has written more than 1,100. In his most recent he uses a colorful fable about a squirrel parliament in the middle of a pine-beetle devastated BC forest as a metaphor for our current environmental situation.
Shaw’s “morality tale” highlights the terrible toll that the pine beetle epidemic has taken on the squirrel population in just 10 years—two squirrel generations. Warnings from the squirrel parliamentarians of Tweedsmuir Park—the epicentre of the epidemic—are repeatedly ignored, until eventually there are too few pine trees producing too few pine cones to feed the squirrel population. Disintegrating hand-in-hand with squirrel society is the parliament that refused to take the threats seriously, which presumably mirrors Shaw’s opinion of our own leaders.
“We hear, read and watch on television a growing volume of concern about the effects of climate change,” writes Shaw. “As a life-long outdoors person I have seen much that suggests to me there is considerable change taking place in wild places that convinces me we should be concerned about the future… We have about two generations to bring about some serious moderation in the production of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide or we will face a greatly altered planet from the perspective of how we produce our food, live in lowland areas and survive violent storms.”
While the idea of a squirrel parliament is fantastical, Shaw chose squirrels deliberately because, as he says, squirrels can teach us a lot about the state of our forests if we only take the time to listen to them. And if anyone has taken the time to listen, it’s Shaw. After the Second World War, he tells me, he raised money for a couple of years of university by trapping red squirrels, a luxury fur at the time, along the continental divide in southern Alberta.
As I digest this latest bit of trivia on the life and times of Ralph Shaw, I take a moment to appreciate the living legend that’s regaling me of tales of hunting squirrels, preserving nature and saving the world.
Clad in blue jeans and a green fleece vest with “Outdoor Edge Magazine” embroidered on the left breast, Shaw carries himself casually and seems the embodiment of “easy-going.” Nonetheless, he speaks carefully and deliberately, as if consulting his vast wealth of experience and knowledge before delivering each word. His tone turns to outright solemnity when he speaks again.
“I think that the planet is beyond the care and capacity of the humans we have on it,” he states.
“People are very critical of climate change. They’re critical of the carbon tax, critical of the change of lifestyle. Part of it is because, as a society, I don’t think we understand what’s really happening.
“A society that no longer touches the earth, that no longer knows how the systems work, can’t begin to understand the moves that we have to make in order to meet the challenges of the future.”
I ask him how we’re doing in the Comox Valley in terms of sustainable living.
“This place is a paradise, that’s its problem,” he says with a smile. “We’re going to move beyond the limits of sustainability for the quality of life that we have if we continue this development pattern. If you don’t know what paradise is, then you don’t have to worry about losing it. But if you know what paradise is, and you know what a quality environment is, then you know what you’ve lost.”
What it all comes down to, Shaw stresses, is getting back in touch with nature and understanding the way our actions affect all of the organisms and habitats around us. That’s why it was so important to him to pass on his knowledge of the outdoors to his three daughters, why he goes hunting and fishing with his nine grandchildren and why he made a promise to do the same with his four great-grandchildren.
“When we go hunting,” he explains, “I try to explain to them what’s going on around us in the outdoors. You don’t just walk out and start banging away. If you’re going to be an outdoorsman you should understand what natural systems are all about. Eventually that kind of understanding, I believe, leads to responsible citizenship as a conservationist.”
Shaw picks up a giant block of gem-quality jade that sits in front of his fireplace. He explains an old First Nations legend passed on from the Lillooet area about a great hunter who used to carve his knives and arrowheads from the green stone. When the hunter died, goes the legend, his tools were shattered and the pieces shared among the tribe, effectively passing on his hunting skills to the entire community.
Every time a child is born into the family, Shaw ties a box of flies and gives it to the child with a small piece of jade.
“That’s a covenant between me and the child that I will take the child fishing when they want to go,” he says. “I also have pieces of jade that I give to the kids when they graduate. If you go anywhere in the world and you have a piece of jade in your pocket, you can feel British Columbia’s waters and fields and forests by feeling the jade. Jade is sacred to the first peoples of British Columbia, and it’s sacred to me.”
Regardless of what the future may hold, there’s no place that Ralph Shaw would rather be than right here in British Columbia. You may spot him fishing one day on Spider Lake, his favorite spot on Vancouver Island, or perhaps even tossing his line in the Puntledge or tracking deer in the forests of the Comox Valley.
If you do get the chance, I encourage you to say hello and engage him in conversation. Whether musing about the state of our society, describing his trademark Tom Thumb fly pattern or just reminiscing about his old fishing pal Jack Shaw, I guarantee that you’ll leave that conversation a better person.

The Vancouver Island launch of Shaw’s new book will take place on Sunday, December 14 at the Campbell River Museum.
For more information call
250-287-3103.

READ InFocus Magazine — Not Just Horsing Around

Ralph Shaw’s weekly outdoors column can be read every Friday in the Comox Valley Record.
Ralph Shaw leads me through a crowded basement, cure
past shelves and fridges stocked with smoked salmon and untold other delicacies and underneath fishing rods balanced in dusty rafters. We emerge in a tiny room of indescribable clutter and boundless character that serves as workshop and home office for the author, symptoms
environmentalist and avid outdoorsman who will prove to be one of the most interesting people I’ve met in recent years.
We’ve met to discuss Shaw’s new book, resuscitation
a compilation of the diaries of long-time friend and renowned fly fisherman Jack Shaw (no relation, although the two look like brothers). What emerges from our conversation, however, is a poignant, philosophical discussion of fly-fishing, ecology, and no less than the future of human existence.
A dynamic octogenarian who has spent a lifetime in the wilds of BC and Alberta, Shaw is about as engaging a man as one could hope to join in candid conversation. Born in Cold Lake, Alberta in 1926, he’s been a trapper and an elementary school principal, has contributed to countless books on fly-fishing and outdoor pursuits and has been appointed to the Order of Canada, our nation’s highest civilian honour, for his extensive conservation work.
In the early ’70s, Shaw was a driving force behind the establishment of the McQueen Lake Environmental Education Centre, 2.6 square kilometres of preserved wilderness northwest of Kamloops where people still go to experience nature and to learn about ecological systems.
“As an educator,” he says, “all my life I’ve wanted to teach people about how natural systems work. We wanted a place where we could take children to study a natural system.”
From an entirely undeveloped parcel of forest, Shaw and his cohorts created a full-fledged environmental education centre where students could come from all over British Columbia to learn about nature. More than 30 years later, the centre is still fully operational and now boasts a modern science centre and, as Shaw enthusiastically points out, an “amazing” composting toilet that can handle 60 to 70 people a day.
Ushering me gently back to the subject, Shaw gestures toward a framed photograph of Jack Shaw sitting atop a workbench that’s obviously a well-used fly-tying station. The photo is barely visible beyond the brightly colored feathers and other fly-tying materials that blanket the entire workbench like a Technicolor fungus.
“What that man knew about systems,” he says reverently, “well, he’s forgotten more than most of us will ever know in terms of ecology, climate change and things like that.”
Jack Shaw’s story began in 1925, when his family moved to BC from Montreal when Jack was nine years old. Although he left school to join the workforce just two years later, Jack’s innate curiosity and his passion for fishing drove him to experiment with new techniques that would change the face of fly-fishing.
By the time Ralph met him for the first time in 1956, Jack had already pioneered the art of tying imitator-pattern flies and had become an expert on the insects, especially chironomids, that he wanted to duplicate. He even learned to imitate their natural movements by the deft manipulation of his fly rod.
“He was a magician with a fly rod, there’s no other way to say it,” says Shaw. “He was the guru, and you couldn’t help but learn from him if you spent much time with him. His work changed the way we fly-fish.”
Shaw’s new book, The Pleasure of His Company – The Fishing Diaries of Jack Shaw, is set to be released on December 6 and is a tribute to his close friend, who passed away in February 2000.
The 232-page book is an edited version of more than 300,000 words that Jack penned during his many fishing trips, and it features beautiful paintings of Jack’s flies by Campbell River artist Larry Stefanyk, also the publisher of Island Fisherman magazine.
“This is a pretty significant book,” says Shaw, not without humility. “It impresses because it’s a big, thick tabletop book; it really is beautiful.”
A leather-bound limited edition of the book has already received lots of interest and advance orders, significant given the $135 price tag, and Shaw is confident that the 1,100 first edition hard covers will be equally successful at $39 a pop.
Never one to pass up an opportunity for ecological philanthropy, Shaw is donating all proceeds from the sale of his book to the McQueen Lake Environmental Education Centre, and to the Fisheries Association of BC to teach children how to fish.
While Shaw is optimistic about the book’s success based on the tremendous support from private donors that he’s received so far, to the tune of nearly $20,000 in production costs, he admits that he’s a wading into new territory when it comes to marketing his creation.
“What you’re looking at is an old guy doing something he’s never done before,” he says with a smile. “Maybe that’s why he’s as healthy as he is. He doesn’t have the brains to know he can’t do it so he just goes ahead and does it!”
Shaw leads me upstairs to his living room, which is slightly less cluttered than his workshop and decorated with wildlife paintings, certificates of achievement and shelves overflowing with books on fishing and natural sciences, to many of which he’s contributed chapters.
He removes a small item from a glass bookshelf next to the fireplace and hands it to me. It’s his Order of Canada medal, given to him in 1984 for his work with the McQueen Lake Centre. Next he presents his Confederation medal, for outstanding citizenship and then another medal from Fly-Fishing Canada for establishing a fly-fishing championship symposium. “There’s a whole bunch more of this stuff downstairs,” he says nonchalantly, as if it were so much scrap metal.
Medals, certificates and other trinkets aren’t what matters to Shaw. What matters are actions, and more specifically how our collective actions are affecting the environment and the sustainability of life as we know it.
He cites the works of Dr. Andrew Weaver, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Keeping Our Cool (in which Shaw is thanked in the acknowledgements), and Dr. Wallace Broecker, author of Fixing Climate. “These people, who I think are among the best brains on the planet, certainly in their field, are telling us that we have two generations to make some changes in the production of greenhouse gasses in order to stabilize things,” Shaw says.
“In two generations, the planet will be less able to support our lifestyle and our way of using the planet.”
Shaw has written a weekly outdoors newspaper column since pitching the idea to the now-defunct Comox District Free Press not long after retiring to the Valley with his wife, Elaine, in 1983. His column now appears in the Comox Valley Record, and to date he has written more than 1,100. In his most recent he uses a colorful fable about a squirrel parliament in the middle of a pine-beetle devastated BC forest as a metaphor for our current environmental situation.
Shaw’s “morality tale” highlights the terrible toll that the pine beetle epidemic has taken on the squirrel population in just 10 years—two squirrel generations. Warnings from the squirrel parliamentarians of Tweedsmuir Park—the epicentre of the epidemic—are repeatedly ignored, until eventually there are too few pine trees producing too few pine cones to feed the squirrel population. Disintegrating hand-in-hand with squirrel society is the parliament that refused to take the threats seriously, which presumably mirrors Shaw’s opinion of our own leaders.
“We hear, read and watch on television a growing volume of concern about the effects of climate change,” writes Shaw. “As a life-long outdoors person I have seen much that suggests to me there is considerable change taking place in wild places that convinces me we should be concerned about the future… We have about two generations to bring about some serious moderation in the production of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide or we will face a greatly altered planet from the perspective of how we produce our food, live in lowland areas and survive violent storms.”
While the idea of a squirrel parliament is fantastical, Shaw chose squirrels deliberately because, as he says, squirrels can teach us a lot about the state of our forests if we only take the time to listen to them. And if anyone has taken the time to listen, it’s Shaw. After the Second World War, he tells me, he raised money for a couple of years of university by trapping red squirrels, a luxury fur at the time, along the continental divide in southern Alberta.
As I digest this latest bit of trivia on the life and times of Ralph Shaw, I take a moment to appreciate the living legend that’s regaling me of tales of hunting squirrels, preserving nature and saving the world.
Clad in blue jeans and a green fleece vest with “Outdoor Edge Magazine” embroidered on the left breast, Shaw carries himself casually and seems the embodiment of “easy-going.” Nonetheless, he speaks carefully and deliberately, as if consulting his vast wealth of experience and knowledge before delivering each word. His tone turns to outright solemnity when he speaks again.
“I think that the planet is beyond the care and capacity of the humans we have on it,” he states.
“People are very critical of climate change. They’re critical of the carbon tax, critical of the change of lifestyle. Part of it is because, as a society, I don’t think we understand what’s really happening.
“A society that no longer touches the earth, that no longer knows how the systems work, can’t begin to understand the moves that we have to make in order to meet the challenges of the future.”
I ask him how we’re doing in the Comox Valley in terms of sustainable living.
“This place is a paradise, that’s its problem,” he says with a smile. “We’re going to move beyond the limits of sustainability for the quality of life that we have if we continue this development pattern. If you don’t know what paradise is, then you don’t have to worry about losing it. But if you know what paradise is, and you know what a quality environment is, then you know what you’ve lost.”
What it all comes down to, Shaw stresses, is getting back in touch with nature and understanding the way our actions affect all of the organisms and habitats around us. That’s why it was so important to him to pass on his knowledge of the outdoors to his three daughters, why he goes hunting and fishing with his nine grandchildren and why he made a promise to do the same with his four great-grandchildren.
“When we go hunting,” he explains, “I try to explain to them what’s going on around us in the outdoors. You don’t just walk out and start banging away. If you’re going to be an outdoorsman you should understand what natural systems are all about. Eventually that kind of understanding, I believe, leads to responsible citizenship as a conservationist.”
Shaw picks up a giant block of gem-quality jade that sits in front of his fireplace. He explains an old First Nations legend passed on from the Lillooet area about a great hunter who used to carve his knives and arrowheads from the green stone. When the hunter died, goes the legend, his tools were shattered and the pieces shared among the tribe, effectively passing on his hunting skills to the entire community.
Every time a child is born into the family, Shaw ties a box of flies and gives it to the child with a small piece of jade.
“That’s a covenant between me and the child that I will take the child fishing when they want to go,” he says. “I also have pieces of jade that I give to the kids when they graduate. If you go anywhere in the world and you have a piece of jade in your pocket, you can feel British Columbia’s waters and fields and forests by feeling the jade. Jade is sacred to the first peoples of British Columbia, and it’s sacred to me.”
Regardless of what the future may hold, there’s no place that Ralph Shaw would rather be than right here in British Columbia. You may spot him fishing one day on Spider Lake, his favorite spot on Vancouver Island, or perhaps even tossing his line in the Puntledge or tracking deer in the forests of the Comox Valley.
If you do get the chance, I encourage you to say hello and engage him in conversation. Whether musing about the state of our society, describing his trademark Tom Thumb fly pattern or just reminiscing about his old fishing pal Jack Shaw, I guarantee that you’ll leave that conversation a better person.

The Vancouver Island launch of Shaw’s new book will take place on Sunday, December 14 at the Campbell River Museum.
For more information call
250-287-3103.

READ InFocus Magazine — Change is Brewing

Ralph Shaw’s weekly outdoors column can be read every Friday in the Comox Valley Record.
pharmacist
the average number of people travelling in a vehicle was 8.6; today’s average is 1.7. ” />Oh, generic
no, not another global warming article! Must we, yet again, read the depressing statistics and dire predictions about the future of the earth? Must we, yet again, feel our grey cloak of guilt get heavier? Must we again consider that, in order to be good enviro-citizens, we need to give up the things we love and rely on?
Well, actually, no. Not really.
To balance out the frightening facts, grim outlook and often uncomfortable sense of responsibility, it’s nice to know that there are other stories—stories of refreshingly simple, and yet meaningful, things that people, working together, can do to make a difference.
The story of Island RideShare is one of these.
Island RideShare is the Comox Valley manifestation of a North American movement that uses the Internet to facilitate carpooling. Begun as a Denman Island initiative, it has since grown to include Hornby Island and, with the help of a grant from the EcoAction Program of Environment Canada, is in the process of expansion. When it re-launches in January, the Island RideShare site will be designed for easy use for people anywhere in BC.
It’s simple to use: go to the site at www.islandrideshare.com, read the brief guidelines under Using RideShare and then, with one click, you can either look at a list of rides offered, or post your own ride for other participants to choose from.
If you find the ride or riders you want, you contact them directly and take it from there. The website offers suggestions for the negotiations. Typically, the driver picks up the rider or riders at a designated spot. Usually, the riders contribute to the costs of gas and vehicle wear-and-tear, although this is entirely up to the participants to work out. Sometimes, the riders will share driving. Participants are encouraged to share information ahead of time about music likes and dislikes, smoking or not, and whether it’s okay to make stops for errands.
The website can be used to organize regular commuting or occasional rides.
Ride sharing eases traffic, saves people money, enhances community, and promotes environmentally responsible thinking, says Herb Jones, the Denman Islander who instigated the local initiative.
“The project was motivated by global warming,” says Jones. “Also, we were inspired by the wisdom of using fewer resources to do what we need to do. We hope to change the mindset of fellow islanders so that this sort of thing would become popular.”
Changing mindsets is a slow business, so it was a good thing that a fair number of Denman Islanders took to the idea right away. Carol Freeman is one of those. Ride sharing is nothing new for her, but with the website, it has become far easier, she says.
“When we have people who come to visit, we often try to find rides for them across the [Denman] ferry,” she says. But anything more ambitious used to be very difficult. “For instance, our grandson was coming across on the long weekend and tried to find a ride on the big ferry but people had full cars or didn’t want to. It was impossible. So it’s much better to be able to organize it on the net ahead of time.”
She and her husband post offers of rides on the Island RideShare site whenever they travel to Vancouver or Victoria. Their main motivation is environmental—they drive a hybrid car but still welcome ways to reduce their carbon footprint. As well, there are social benefits to ridesharing, says Freeman, especially with our aging population.
“As you get older it’s a great way for people to remain mobile and get around. For instance, our neighbor lost her eyesight; this would be a way for her to get to Courtenay.”
deNeen Baldwin, another RideShare user, says she appreciates the help with her travelling costs. As well, she enjoys connecting with other people. For instance, the last person she gave a ride to had a specialized skill she needed for her business. “You can make connections,” she says.
Sharing rides can make trips easier and faster, she points out. “I went to Vancouver last week with a friend, and we were driving in the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane. There were hundreds of people next to us just sitting there, stuck in traffic, alone in their cars, and we were whizzing by. And of course, the main thing is it’s good for the planet.”
Jones got the idea to start a local RideShare when his daughter, who lives in Nelson, used a ride-sharing network from that community to get home after visiting him.
“It was great. She went onto the website and found a woman going from Victoria to Nelson. The woman was willing to meet her at Departure Bay. On the way, she stopped in Surrey and picked up another passenger. My daughter shared the driving. They paid $40 each and were driven to their door. The driver got her expenses paid. That made me think it was something worth trying here,” says Jones.
“People have always carpooled, but the internet makes this so much easier.”
Jones took his idea to a group called Renewable Energy Denman Island (REDI), which he helped found two years ago, along with other activists wanting to promote strategies for reducing our carbon footprint. Since its inception, REDI has presented workshops on renewable energy, sponsored an eco-tour of Denman homes that use renewable energy sources, and is sponsoring solar panels for the Denman Community Hall as a demonstration project. RideShare was a natural next step for the organization.

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