Event Vision
The mission of Comox Valley Project Watershed Society:
"To promote community stewardship of Comox Valley Watersheds
through education, information and action"
has inspired the vision of:
"Heart of the Watershed: a Symposium on Restoring the Courtenay River Estuary".
If rivers are the veins and arteries of a watershed, and wetlands are the kidneys that cleanse the water, then the central element of the watershed must be the heart:
in the case of the Comox Valley, the heart of the watershed is the Courtenay River Estuary.
The vision of this event
is
to create a community action group with a plan to preserve and restore
the health of the Courtenay River Estuary ecosystem.
A healthy resilient ecosystem is the foundation of a healthy resilient community.
What is Ecosystem Health?
"A healthy ecosystem is one that is intact in its physical, chemical, and biological components and their interrelationships, such that it is resilient to withstand change and stressors. It is a system that is not experiencing the abnormal growth or decline of native species, the concentration of persistent contaminants, or drastic anthropogenic changes to its landscape or ecological processes. A healthy and diverse ecosystem is one that provides abundant and beneficial services to its constituents, such as food, water, shelter, economic livelihood, recreation, and natural beauty...
An ecosystem is composed of plant and animal communities and the physical environment in which they live. The practice of ecosystem health is the investigation of the components of an ecosystem which render it adaptable and resilient enough to withstand perturbation, and then both the transfer of that understanding to ecosystem stewards, who use the information to enact appropriate policies and actions, as well as the transfer of questions and needs for information from the stakeholders to the scientists. " http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/whc/seadoc/ehealth.html
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