Bowen Island is a hotbed of ideas, thoughts and innovations. Just look at some of the links on the left, under "noosphere" to see what I mean.



One of the really interesting community wide processes we are engaged in here is around the issue of sustainability. The Bowen Island Sustainability Task Force and the Bowen Island Lifelong Learning Society (BILLS) are working with the Sustainable Development Research Institute at the University of British Columbia to try out a new way of approaching community decision making on these issues.



SDRI has developed a "game" called QUEST which allows people to make choices about a preferred future and then craft these into strategies to initiate sustainability practices today. We have combined QUEST with Open Space Technology to design a "made on Bowen" process. It began on Thanksgiving last year with an Open Space event on the future of Bowen Island in 2042, and then SDRI engaged the community in a couple of QUEST workshops. We will shortly be returning to Open Space to build on everything we have done and move more issues forward into action.



I mention all this only because today QUEST and SDRI was featured in the online version of the Utne Reader. Congrats to the folks at UBC for getting the recognition they deserve. The Utne piece mentions Whistler as a case study in the application of QUEST. I just wish the article might have mentioned the great work we are doing here as well...