Where eagles teach their young to soar

The cliffs that overlook Wreck Beach are a popular spot for eagles to teach their young to fly. There is concern among many beach-goers that the construction of two more high-rise towers that will overlook the beach will send the eagles away.

I have been quite remiss in my updates this past week and a half, and I really must apologize for that. I should also apologize for my last entry, which is brief and confusing. I think I now have enough emotional distance between last Friday to go into the events of the day, and the events leading up to it.

Some time ago, the University of British Columbia (UBC) announced its plans to build four student-housing highrises that would overlook Wreck Beach. The outcry was loud, but UBC managed to build one tower before being ordered by the GVRD to subject the rest of the development to a public consultation process and prove that to not build the towers as planned would present an extreme hardship to UBC.

This began two years ago, and in the time since, UBC has had a couple of public information sessions. Their last set of plans has eliminated one of the towers, but that still means three towers visible from the Beach known and loved for its natural backdrop, where no buildings are visible. Or were visible, before UBC decided that there was no place else on campus that they could possibly build student housing on.

Last year, my classmate Heidi and I wrote a report about the importance of green spaces on the physical and mental health of people. This report went to the GVRD, and it seems that they took my report to heart, because now they are going to conduct their own study on this topic. They are also going to do something about the bylaws surrounding Pacific Spirit Park, of which Wreck Beach is a small part, so that they don't have to face another 2-year battle between developers and nature lovers.

But UBC managed to prove their hardship case, and too many of the GVRD directors voted in favour of allowing UBC to proceed as planned. A few directors were completely against the whole thing, saying that UBC had strong-armed and bullied it's way to their claim of hardship: UBC threatened that if they could not go ahead as planned, then the whole project would be cancelled and no new student housing would be rebuilt. "Hog-wash," said one of the directors who was in the minority against UBC's proposal. I think she was being polite.

To learn more about Wreck Beach, visit the Wreck Beach Preservation Society's (WBPS) home page. It's a pretty basic site, but easy to navigate. It is updated fairly regularly, but not as regularly as it could be. The home page has more information about the Society's battle against UBC's towers.

But I can't just guide you to the WBPS for one half of the story without providing you with a link to UBC's side of the story. The Marine Drive Residences, as the towers are called, are sure to provide lots of distracting views to students occupying the upper levels of the towers. UBC's housing website is pretty generic.

And the GVRD, the poor guys stuck in the middle, most of whom voted in favour of UBC and ignored the fact that Wreck Beach has greater value to more people than that of those who will be affected by the new student residences. You can learn a lot of really interesting things on their website, but it contains some flaws with regards to the process of speaking to the Board of Directors. The site itself isn't the easiest to navigate around... sometimes I know what I'm looking for but can't find it unless I search within the site. Here's a link to the document that was influenced by the report Heidi and I wrote.