ROTHENBURGER — Things I learn from what people send me

COLUMN — People are always giving me things to read. I think they have high hopes that if I read enough I’ll smarten up.

Christopher Seguin, the VP Advancement at TRU, handed me an article recently about student debt, because I’m always bugging him about it — that, and high student fees.

Alex Usher, who writes for a group called Higher Education Strategies Associates, says in this article that Canadian student debt is down over a three-year period and “heading in the right direction.”

Students are borrowing substantially less from family, and a little less from banks. “The takeaway: as inconvenient as this may be for the hell-in-a-handbasket crowd, there is still no student debt crisis.”

And yet, I must point out, institutions like TRU struggle with caps on student fees and must diligently seek the community’s help in funding bursaries and scholarships so that students can afford to get an education. Meanwhile, the provincial government comes up with the brainy idea to take away students’ driver’s licences if they default on their loans.

Then there’s the ecological assessment plan for the Aberdeen area released seven years ago by the Grasslands Conservation Council of B.C. and sent around of late by various members of the Kamloops Area Preservation Association. Prepared for the City, it coincidentally analyses the 1,900-hectare area that will become a giant hole in the ground if Ajax is built.

It looks at soils, vegetation and wildlife in the area, counting 110 plant species, 45 birds species and several mammal species. The study encountered a number of confirmed species at risk, plus four likely and 27 possible species at risk.

“It is increasingly recognized that conservation of natural lands not only provide wildlife habitat, but they contribute to the quality of urban life, human experience and a healthy community,” the report says.

Among recommendations in the report are that the City should acquire and protect certain parts of the area for parkland, implement a weed-management strategy and protect wetlands.

The study was sent around basically without comment, but it’s another reminder that while the City’s position on Ajax is officially neutral, it has a huge stage in the outcome.

Walter Trkla, surely one of the most prolific writers in Kamloops on social, economic and political issues, sent me a fascinating and depressing article from The Guardian on the history of slave ownership, pointing out that while slavery in the U.S. is well-documented, slavery by Great Britain on plantations in the Caribbean is much less known.

“The history of British slavery has been buried,” it says.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans from slavery. Former slave owners were compensated by British taxpayers for the loss of their “property.” John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, was paid £106,769 for loss of the services of 2,508 slaves. That equates to about £80 million today. Which is $163 million plus change in Canadian loonies at today’s exchange rate.

While I think quite often about the plight of young people trying to get an education, I confess I probably knew about the grasslands study but would never have thought to pull it out for a quick read. Nor would I have, on my own, decided to research the role of British plantation owners in slavery. This is the beauty of sharing.

I’ve currently got several other such contributions in my email or on my desk that I haven’t gotten to yet. I feel duty-bound to read them all because people obviously care about issues enough to take the time to share them, besides which — as with the examples above — they expand one’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.

Mel Rothenburger can be reached at armchairmayor@gmail.com, @MelRothenburger on Twitter, or facebook.com/mrothenburger.7.