"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. 

The Seduction of the Inevitable, or Not a Damn Thing You Can Do About It!!



Ornamental Apple Tree after hoar frost



Stuffed Racoon for sale - What would you offer?

The conversation was about pipelines and tankers and the Alberta Oil Sands and such, and the apparent change of heart of Christie Clark, premier of British Columbia, on the construction of a pipeline through her province to carry heavy oil sands bitumen to be loaded onto tankers on her pristine coastline and shipped to Asia so a great deal of money could be made, etc., etc.

It was actually a refreshing change from the endless talk of Rob Ford.

A British Columbian colleague was not surprised by Clark's apparent about-face on the subject. She opined that there is no better choice than the pipeline to transport the oil; a slam dunk compared with rail or road tankers. I said that there is a real choice: leave the oil in the sands where it is, fix up the mess and go on to some cleaner enterprise.

That's not the way the world works, I was informed. Selling oil sands energy to Asia will happen; we're better off just making sure we choose the least dangerous way to move it.

It's inevitable. Like death and taxes, puberty and menopause, earthquakes and typhoons, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, so get used to it.

It's true of course. Many, many happenings are inevitable. They will happen, like it or not. But wait, shipping oil sands bitumen to Asia IS NOT ONE OF THEM. There are choices possible here, different routes to take, debates and decisions to be had that are different from the status quo.

Much that we have resigned ourselves to is NOT inevitable.

There's a seductiveness about resignation, though; if nothing can be done, then nothing is required of us.

We can rest calmly in the arms of the creator, who promises a better world when the final, inevitable chapter has been written. This world, in that case, is not my home anyway.

Truth is, we waste more energy than we use; we travel far more than is necessary, for instance. Way too much light, way too much wasted heat, way too many five-passenger-vehicles-with-one-occupant driving.

“I have a dream,” Martin Luther King might have said if he was presently a living Canadian. “I have a dream of the tar sands covered up and the area restored to be bird, fish and people-friendly again. I have a dream of many, many men and women employed making solar panels, wind generators, tidal generators. I dream of roofs made entirely of solar panels, of wind generators in every town, of cities where only electric golf carts, bicycles, pedestrians and public transportation are allowed on the streets.”

I have a dream. A dream of clean air, clean water, clean land.

Prince Charles speaks out.

Prince Charles farming . . . in a tie

Bonnie Prince Charlie takes on Monsanto and friends©

By George Epp

Bonnie Prince Charlie has spoken out again, this time on the evils of corporate farming and the rush to genetically modified food products. Apparently he was being interviewed by the Daily Telegraph recently when he was reported to have said of the corporations concerned that they are conducting a “gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong. Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?” (Saskatoon StarPhoenix, August 14, 2008)

I’m not sure you can trust completely a person who ends his opinion with “all these challenges, climate change and everything.” Seems to me that climate change and genetic manipulation (not to mention “everything”) are separated by enough distance to make lumping them together and laying them at the feet of one villain unacceptable, rhetorically.

Genetic modification has been with us for a long time. Here in Rosthern, a man by the name of Seeger Wheeler selected seed from different strains of wheat and mated them until he achieved a desired result: better, earlier maturing grain. Wheeler, however, took years to achieve a very small alteration in the genetic makeup of wheat, and furthermore, he was not aiming at control over the seed industry and the chemical inputs that go with it like modern corporations are. I admit that I share the Prince’s skepticism about the practices we’re currently seeing in the food industry, primarily because they’re profit driven, and if power corrupts, then so does profit. Profit begets power.

The debate gets quite heated. On the radio the other day, an industry person and an ecologist were exchanging pretty emotional viewpoints on the subject. From industry: the growing population requires that the tools of genetic modification be applied in order to achieve the production that will be needed to feed everyone. From environmentalists: the corporate takeover of the food industry is effectively driving farmers off the land all over the world and forcing them to subsist in the slums and ghettos of the big cities. From environmentalists: the introduction of genetically modified crops is doing way more damage than good. From industry: No it hasn’t; it’s working really well. From the environmentalist: No it’s not!

Charles cites the onslaught on the water tables in India as an overt manifestation of the problem. New, genetically modified plants being grown require far more water than their predecessors, he says, and the end of that process is drought and famine. He also talks about the issues arising from increasing herbicide, pesticide and fertilizer use, all of which are already familiar to most of us.

Prince Charles is frequently the butt of jokes. He’s an aging heir to the throne who may die of old age before his wiry mother is ready to hand the throne over to him. His estrangement from the divine Diana and simultaneous entanglement with Camilla Parker Bowles didn’t help his image much, and most of us are automatically skeptical when a man of wealth and influence—who farms as a hobby—speaks out on the subject of agriculture.

But today I’m with Charles. We dare not put the earth’s future in the hands of the corporate elite. They make a mess of everything. They exploit, they pollute, they manipulate people, and they simply are not the kind of global citizen that is needed to grapple with the big issues of the day.

Go Charles.