"I fell into a burning Ring of Fire..."

 

The Cinderella Planet

I spent part of the morning reading a superb piece about yet another instance where corporate/industrial development and Indigenous land use are in conflict. The article concerned the “Ring of Fire,” a rich deposit of minerals, some of which are being sought for the manufacture of electric car batteries. Located in the James Bay Lowlands of Northwestern Ontario, the deposit can’t be developed without overland access infrastructure. Rivers will have to be bridged, bogs torn up, forests cut down, all those things northerners recognize from past experience of, for instance, building and maintaining a highway link from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg or from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan to Missinipi. Roads can exact tremendous ecological change, particularly to the delicate balance of land, water, plant and wildlife that has evolved since the last Ice Age in the harsh climate and conditions of the Canadian Shield.

In its pristine state, the Shield can be a paradise of clear, cool lakes and rivers and endless spruce forests.  The land teems with sturgeon, walleye, muskellunge, beaver, muskrat, moose and bear while providing an idyllic habitat for humans who have over many generations learned to live full, satisfying lives in harmony with nature’s largesse. They travel in canoes that leave no dent in the water, fish and hunt only what’s needed to survive, rely on roots and berries to supplement their diets. And in the wilderness where a meteorite deposited the Ring of Fire eons and eons ago, populations still experience that quiet life that is the north, they still dry sturgeon fillets, still hunt the mighty moose and lay in a winter’s supply of food. And the thought of “owning” any of this great north is still anathema to them,  knowing as they do that it all belongs to its creator. That they would wish to have a say into both the if and the how of development should come as no surprise.

Sturgeon Fishing on the Neskantaga First Nation (CBC News)

Shift to the national and international corporations salivating over the possibilities represented in extracting scarce minerals from the Ring of Fire. They will succeed; they have the backing of the Ford government for whom the sturgeon population, algae blooms, drained or flooded bogs and decimation of habitation doesn’t emotionally, personally register. Gross Domestic Product, profitability and jobs are the telling landmarks of progress in a settler colonialism that relies on ever-growing consumption. Settler colonialism that goes hand in hand with corporate capitalism evolves rapidly and decisively toward an end that won’t be pretty; on a limited planet, no system can keep growing indefinitely and the Ring of Fire is just one more example of consumerism’s attempt to stave off its inevitable end, at least for one more generation.

Electric cars and the batteries that they require represent one more attempt to kick the can down the road, to avert disaster without the inconvenience of reducing our wants.  

There may be only one sensible way to approach the looming climate change disaster, and it’s to reduce our consumption to match our needs instead of to our advertising-fed wants. Why, for instance, would we transport kiwi from New Zealand when our just-as-nutritious berries grow naturally where we live? Why would we fly halfway around the planet to attend a meeting on subjects that could be dealt with on the internet? Why would we holiday in places far away when creature-comfort venues can be created locally? Why would we tolerate built in obsolescence in our appliances when the means to manufacture longer-lasting ones are already in place and running? Why would we ship rice from Asia when oats, for instance, provides better nutrition than rice ever has?

Growing for export rather than for the local food market feeds into the consumption-growth-profit model. Much of Saskatchewan’s arable land is used to grow canola, from which the oil is extracted and shipped abroad for the most part. In principle, that same land could be growing oats for oatmeal, wheat for baking, potatoes for local consumption with surpluses marketed more broadly. Freight transportation is extremely unfriendly environmentally; more than profitability must eventually drive our priorities. For the population of the James Bay lowland, profit/loss motives simply weren’t considerations historically; only sustainability, conservation mattered.

Harping on the urgency of the need to shift to needs provision while reducing wants consumption may already be little more than a futile thundering against a lost cause. Breaking personal negative habits is hard enough; smoking, drinking, hamburger & bacon gorging, and lethargic living persist among many until their wants kill them. But that’s still nothing next to the breaking of bad habits in a global economy.

Localizing of economies is a must in a sustainable, renewable future on planet earth. For learning the how of this, the Ojibway of the James Bay lowlands might well serve us as teachers of Chapter One. 

For a more objective description of the Ring of Fire mineral-rich deposit and considerations for its development, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire_(Northern_Ontario) To read the article cited in paragraph 1, visit https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/a-divisive-road-to-ring-of-fire-ontario. 

P.S. I've borrowed the term "settler colonialism" from Enns/Myers Healing Haunted Histories. It refers to the relationship between those who historically gave something up through colonialism and those who continue to benefit from that historical fact. 

My grocer calls me George

'50s Rosthern - courtesy Jim Friesen

Where are the green lentils?? Anyway?

My grocer’s name is George.

For a time, there, he took to calling me Jake, and I called him Pete because with the Hi, George followed by Hi, George, it was hard to tell who was talking to whom . . . and it sounded kind of silly.

At a recent hospital fundraiser put on by the local Lions, I sat with my grocer’s father-in-law and we chatted between forkfuls (forksful?) of pasta.

None of this is conveyed as news. It’s just to illustrate that the person who stocks green lentils if I ask for them is also a friend, a food confidante who knows the needs and tastes of his customers and caters for them if he can.

Sadly, our relationship to our tailors, our haberdashers, our hardware suppliers and our grocers is more distant on the whole than it’s ever been. Walmart sells groceries, for Pete’s sake (no pun intended). And we—being the acquiescent, consuming sheep that we’ve become—flock there because they can sell peanut butter for 20 cents less a pop.

And our friend’s living potentially dries up and he leaves town and we have no choice anymore but the big box store 75 kilometers away or the internet, where the owners don’t know that we have colitis or a broccoli allergy or that we do our own painting . . . and couldn’t care less.

If I was really mad, I’d mention how this is all feeding into the corporate globalizing of citizens, their reduction to anonymous participants in the highly profitable production/consumption paradigm that serves CEOs, corporate boards and stock traders. But I won’t, because it’s a beautiful spring (late winter in Saskatchewan) morning and I still have my George . . . or Pete . . . and my hardware expert Jen and my librarian Pat and a host of others who call me George and not Sir.

So what brings on this lament? Walrus magazine’s short article about the takeover of Zeller’s locations by Target. (Walrus, May, 2013, p. 16) So Target will be cheaper than Valley Sports and Hardware, but will they know my name? I doubt it because I checked them out on Wikipedia, and here’s what I found:

“Target Corporation, originally the Dayton Dry Goods Company and later the Dayton Hudson Corporation, is an American retailing company, founded in 1902 and headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, preceded by Walmart. The company is ranked at number 38 on the Fortune 500 as of 2012 and is a component of the Standard & Poor's 500 index.”

The former Zeller’s location at Lawson Heights Mall—which traffic from Rosthern going into Saskatoon ordinarily passes—is being enlarged by Target. It will open soon and savers won’t have to go all the way to Walmart anymore. Think of the shortened driving distance as a green initiative!

I’m just saying.