Kelowna, one of B.C.’s fastest growing cities, is grappling with pressures to build more housing while preserving space for nature.
Photo: Aaron Hemens / The Narwhal
I bet you talked about housing this week. Whether you’re looking to find a way to get into the market, secure that rental or speculating about that new development up the street, the topic is hard to avoid. But here’s something you might have overlooked: humans aren’t the only ones looking for places to call home.
As urbanization expands, we’re pushing wildlife out of their habitats. Rare ecosystems that have existed for millennia are disappearing, and so are the plants and animals that depend on them. This spring, biodiversity reporter Ainslie Cruickshank travelled to Kelowna — one of the fastest growing cities in British Columbia — to see how the community is grappling with the pressure to accommodate more people while preserving enough space for nature.
Right now there’s a push to protect a 65-kilometre-long, one-kilometre-wide wildlife corridor between Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park, bordered by Kelowna to the south and k’nmalka or Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park to the north. It’s a “really grand idea,” Dixon Terbasket, a grandfather and experienced wildlife technician, told Ainslie. “People need to really start thinking about the future of their grandkids, their great-grandkids,” he added. “I’m not anti-development, just goddamn, let’s do it better, let’s make space for the animals.”
Alongside efforts to protect the corridor, city planners are prioritizing adding density to existing neighbourhoods over more sprawl, and some developers are working to limit the footprint of new housing. (On Wednesday, the federal and B.C. governments committed $8 million to protecting wildlife corridors in the province, as reported by Ainslie and IndigiNews journalist Aaron Hemens.)
It’s a delicate dance — one we’re going to continue to watch as part of our Habitat series. We’re digging into the idea that housing policy is climate policy, and highlighting the ways B.C. communities are addressing housing and environmental crises simultaneously.
“We take a building that’s older and has a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, move it to pretty close to net-zero and introduce cooling — that’s amazing,” William Azaroff, the CEO of Brightside Community Homes Foundation, told Shannon.
Projects like these demonstrate how non-profit housing can improve not only affordability but also health and safety, while at the same time contributing to broader climate policy goals.
It’s just the kind of solution we love to shine a light on at The Narwhal — stay tuned for more as we continue to dive into these issues.
Tree-planting is a seasonal job that offers a lot of freedom. The harder you work, the more money you make. But because most of the places getting planted every year are far-flung, companies often set up bush camps, where things can get pretty wild on days off.
“Some people are truly themselves when they’re out here and it’s really great to see them blossom,” a source The Narwhal is calling Anna told me on a call from a remote logging camp in B.C. “But the things that make this job beautiful are also the things someone can use as a gateway to be a piece of shit.”
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When you’re trying to balance housing and environmental concerns. Tell your pals to sign up for The Narwhal’s newsletter for a window into how the natural world meets their daily lives.
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
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We’re fighting for our right to report — and your right to know. Stay in the loop about our trial against the RCMP and get a weekly dose of The Narwhal’s independent journalism
