What's the Word?
Great Videos and Podcasts
Enjoy a delightful and touching photo journey of Cordova Bay United Church's Stream of Dreams project.
Seaview Elementary in Lantzville is covered by Shaw.
Still current is GVTV's video on Still Creek. It features both the 2004 Still Creek Stream of Dreams project and the Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival by Still Moon Arts Society. Be sure also to check out other terrific Metro Vancouver Videos.
Watch Velvet Pumpkin's video What is Public Art - Stream of Dreams.
Columbia Elementary's Stream of Dreams featured by the Bellingham Herald, Bellingham, WA.
The Encyclopedia of Life features Chinook Salmon and the Stream of Dreams.
News and Blogs
The Alberni Valley Times reports on Maquinna and other Elementary School's "New Murals Have a Message."
Students Honor Ray Bentley with mural at "Cheslakees Elementary School."
Stream of Dreams joins Burnaby's "Culture Blast" Feb. 20 at Deer Lake.
Byrne Creek Secondary School "Leo Club" volunteers share what they have learned while helping the Stream of Dreams Murals Society.
Blacklock Fine Arts School in Langley Dreams of Healthy Streams in the Ash-Cache Journal.
RBC Blue Water Project is supporting Port Alberni Stream of Dreams projects this spring.
Proceeds of Robert Bateman presentation at Albert College to go to support Quinte Conservation Stream of Dreams projects.
Flowers and Weeds blog.
The Stream of Dreams story is told at Waterbucket, a site focused on sustainable approaches to integrated water management.
Port Alberni schools are already looking forward to next year's city wide Stream of Dreams project.
The Ecole des Deux Mondes Stream of Dreams in Campbell River is covered two articles in the Courier-Islander and here.
Bayview Elementary in Vancouver featured Stream of Dreams watershed education program on its blog.
Stream Winds along Sidney Elementary in the Peninsula News Review.
Roberta Bondar School's project is featured in the Brampton News.
Check out the article on Stream of Dreams at George R. Allan School Hamilton, ON, in the Ainslie Wood/Westdale Community Association of Resident Homeowners Inc. Spring 2010 News & Views.
Read about how Castle Rock Elementary becomes school of fish , May 7, 2010.
Earth Day in Red Deer, AB was celebrated at Bower Place Shopping Centre. Red Deer Advocate, April 29, 2010.
Sts. Peter & Paul Elementary's Stream of Dreams is featured in Mississauga, ON News.
Streams Feeding Student Dreams , Cowichan News Leader April 6 2010.
If wishes were fishes , Inside Halton April 1 2010.
Stream of Dreams at Kente School , in the Belleville Intellegencer April 6 2010.
Vancouver Oral Centre family members say, "keep our water clean" , in May 2009.
BC streamkeepers paint concrete salmon , at 2009 Streamkeepers Workshop in Maple Ridge.
Salmon Dreams , in the Vancouver Courier - January 30, 2009 issue.
Queen Victoria School anticipates their Stream of Dream as Quinte Conservation launches the first Stream of Dreams in Belleville, Ontario.
Hamilton Wentworth School District features the Bennetto Stream of Dreams the Hamilton Spectator writes about the Holy Name of Jesus Stream of Dreams in Hamilton, Ontario.
Adam, a 2008 Stream of Dreams participant from Coquitlam, shares his story about the impact the Stream of Dreams program has had on him and his family at Think Salmon
Photo Conversations
Conversations continue at Flickr sites one and two , as people play 'identify the location of the pictured Stream of Dreams'.
Photographers , more and more and more and more and more discover and talk about Stream of Dreams.
VIP's join the fun
BC Minister of the Environment, Mr. Penner, shared the vision of healthy streams, rivers and oceans with students at Oaklands Elementary School in Victoria on November 28. 
Great Commentary
From teachers at Crescent Park Elementary School asked if the Stream of Dreams program was successful in raising watershed awareness in their class: "Absolutely! The presenters engaged the students using a variety of questioning techniques. Very well planned presentation. The presenters were passionate about this topic, most ably presented their information and students learned a lot." "The Stream is awesome!" "Wonderful class presentation, thank you. Very enjoyable, educational, and productive!" "It has spawned (no pun intended) a year-long theme. We will be studying water-related issues for the remainder of the year."
Other Comments from the Public: "Louise Towell and Joan Carne, housewives, mothers, artists, environmental advocates, fish lovers are initiators of the Stream of Dreams- Environmental Community Art. The Stream of Dreams is a mosaic of 2,400 [now nearly 3000] wooden fish that swim along a fence on the corner of Kingsway and Edmonds in Burnaby to remind us of the watersheds that lie beneath our city streets. Louise and Joan use the visual art to introduce discussions about and awareness of water systems that underlie our concrete cities. What is happening to your wastewater, fish and streams? The 5,000 fish killed when a toxic chemical flowed into Burnaby's Byrne Creek in 1998 can not be revived, but through The Stream of Dreams- Environmental Community Art, communities are discovering their local creeks, watersheds and how to maintain a healthy fish population. Louise and Joan mix environmental education, colour and magic together to revive our interconnectedness with nature." Sherrard Bostwick, City of Burnaby Community Arts Program Development Programmer, July 2001
Letter to the Editor from a resident of Mission, BC after installation of a Stream of Dreams mural at E.S. Richards Elementary school in Mission)
"My fellow Missionites! Had any joy in your life lately? Want some? Take a stroll up to E.S. Richards school on Cherry Ave.Fish!
Hundreds and hundreds of them! Joyous, exuberant, brilliantly-coloured fish of many sizes, many shapes, swarming and swirling and thrusting their way eastward along the fence, just as their real-life counterparts are now doing in the Fraser River down below.
Every fish is different, every fish is individually painted according to the lights of each individual painter, and yet, all of them are artfully arranged into a community with a single interest - by colour groups, or according to whether they have hearts on them, or sunsplashes, or bones.
There's even a school of fish on this fish fence beside a school! All praise to the children who painted them, to the teachers and other adults who conceived this brilliant idea and inspired the children to execute it, and even to any of the rest of us capable, in this grim time of pollution and corruption and murder and war, of slowing down, taking in this stunning art exhibits and allowing our spirits to soar.
I was a teacher myself once, so allow me an academic moment. One of the saddest and most beautiful poems in English is Coleridge's, Dejection: An Ode.
My genial spirits fail, he says, and the reason is that he has lost this capacity to feel joy - this beautiful and beauty-making power. He can't feel beauty any more, and therefore, he can't make beauty. Well, what these kids and teachers at ESR have done is make beauty, on a plain old chain-link fence, and we have to thank them for it.
Coleridge also provided the best definition of beauty I have ever come across: the simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each, and of all to a whole. Or, more plainly, the beautiful is that in which the many, still seen as the many, becomes one.
That may sound abstruse and academic, but I am not aware of any challenges more pressing than our society's need to honour individuals and individualism and individuality, while at the same time recognizing that whatever it is that we are all in these days, we are all in it together.
And if we want to get out of it (as, for example, we want to get out from under the dark shadow of SE2), we all have to pull together to do so. And here are all these kids, every one of them doing his or her own thing, and yet every one of them working towards a common purpose - the fish project!
I heard there was an attempt to vandalize the fish fence, almost as soon as it was put up, but when I went down there the next day, I could see no signs of damage. It had been fixed.
So there's a lesson for the kids too: there's a cult of ugliness out there, people who for whatever reason seem to be threatened by beauty and beautiful things. So what's the appropriate response? Well, you could get angry, or discouraged, or you could fall into dejection. But what they did at ESR was give them more beauty.
There's a municipal election coming up in a few days, and arguably Mission has fallen prey to a sort of cult of civic ugliness too. We could do worse than to ask of our candidates, especially when residential development seems to high on everyone's list of priorities, where they stand on the question of civic beauty. "Graham Dowden, Mission Copyright 2002 Mission City Record. Reprinted with permission.