by Eva van Loon

Last year’s column on the desirability of creating a Civic Forest from Lund to Saltery Bay (“Fish Need TLC, Too”) didn’t exactly rock the corporate boat. “Good idea,” people yawned, and went right back to working on problems they can more or less control. The last thing many of us want to contemplate is setting up yet another public campaign for something government should really figure out for itself.

A year later, the ecological apocalypse that a Civic Forest would somewhat guard against has taken a giant step closer to our little community, where we foolishly imagined ourselves immune from at least the worst of worldly ills. It’s now frightening to hear a newscast, sanitised as it probably is. Some of us are beginning to face reality: we may not live to be a hundred; our children and grandchildren are in for a rough time—if they get much time at all.

The future ain’t what it used to be. For those of us over forty, life is beginning to resemble a salvage operation instead of legacy-building.

James Lovelock, of the Gaia Hypothesis, says this time has the feel of Europe just before WW II. People were not depressed, he says. The prospect of disaster engaged them and fostered a lively team spirit. Everywhere in the darkness of collapse gleamed the lights of courage and ingenuity and—dare we say it?—love.

A big gleam in our local darkness in the past year is the birth of the Malaspina Land Conservancy Society, midwifed by farsighted realtor Janet Alred.

Land conservancies are hot. They are proliferating in BC and across the country as a way for people to preserve their land and control its use beyond their own lives. And we don’t have to wait for government to get a brain in order to leave this legacy.

You can use your local land conservancy in several ways to ensure that your bit of forest, farm, or history never falls to the corporate ax. Attend a public presentation or visit or visit malaspinaland.org for the basic information. However, a conservancy is something you need to get right the first time—this is part of learning to be dead—and the fine-tuning process can take time.

What to do meanwhile? You’ve heard it before, and you didn’t want to think about it, but now it’s not such a gloomy prospect. Your will can repay Mother Earth for the life she lent you, with interest, if it contains well thought-out instructions for a conservancy on your land.

Guess what? Another gleam of light from Powell River: according to the Wills and Trusts subsection of the Canadian Bar Association in BC: our little old town is the first to declare a need for creating effective will clauses to help clients create land conservancies.

If this news doesn’t make you clap your hands, it’s probably a good thing you skipped law school, but know this cool fact about wills: you can change your mind about your will as often as you change the bedsheets. You can re-write your will until you get the legal equivalent of those tricky hospital corners just right. You can practise being dead—what a concept! Meanwhile, a will with conservancy instructions gives you peace of mind. If there is a forever, your land will form a part of it, just as it is today.

Why wait for spring? Do it now, while land and law are available.