These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.
Zaida Schneider is spending his retirement protecting a sliver of the Salish Sea near his home in downtown Vancouver.
Tell us about your work.
I’m a retired journalist and I love to sail. I spend my days cleaning up and caring for the place where I’m “anchored” — False Creek. I have a vision of False Creek as an urban marine park with the legal rights of a person. While it’s an audacious act of imagination to give a natural entity legal status, it is also a growing movement in law. In Quebec, for example, the Muteshekau-shipu (Magpie River) enjoys that status.
How did you get into this work?
After retiring, I sailed for a few years and visited many small fishing villages. When I came into a bay and dropped anchor, inevitably someone came out to greet me — a park warden, a harbourmaster, a port captain. They would share information about the place and almost always explain how to keep the water clean. When I returned to False Creek, no one was there to fill that role and the marine environment had been neglected.
I co-founded the nonprofit, False Creek Friends with Tim Bray, to improve........