A Chain of Hope

On Wednesday, our family gathered at my mother's home in Powell River to celebrate her 90th birthday. She's been here for over 80 years since her family moved from Shetland. Her house sits about two metres above sea level, and each day we watch sea lions, otters, summer ducks, and herons going about their daily routines. Powell River seems a long way from Kitimat, the proposed terminal for Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline project. After watching the changes in industrial forestry, pulp and paper production, the huge limestone quarry across the strait on Texada Island, it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency about yet another mega-project. 

People seem to survive the changes brought about by global economics; her family left Shetland because of a depressed economy. Since then the North Sea oil boom has given those islands a material wealth it never imagined. Here on the BC south coast, the near-collapse of forestry and fishery jobs has been hard for coastal communities to navigate. The most recent cuts to BC ferry schedules are signaling an end for some communities and will diminish many others as their links dwindle.

For people in difficult economic circumstances, any work looks good and there are those who think a project like Enbridge's will provide part of a solution. But standing beside the light beacon in my mother's front yard just a couple of metres above the ocean, two thoughts come to mind: climate change and oil spills. They both signal other kinds of finales - ones more devastating than the difficulties coastal communities already face. If we can't come up with a better economic strategy than shipping raw bitumen from the tar sands, we're better off without one. We're better off standing up and saying no. We'd be wise to join in spirit the wonderful women of Hartley Bay who have crocheted a Chain of Hope to symbolically block the passage of oil tankers past their village and up Douglas Channel to Kitimat:

On June 20, 2014 the women of the Gitga’at First Nation will lead a symbolic blockade against the Northern Gateway pipeline by stretching a crochet “Chain of Hope” across Douglas Channel to show their opposition to oil tankers and oil spills in BC’s coastal waters.

Made of multicolour yarn and decorated with family keepsakes and mementos including baby pictures and fishing floats with written messages on them, the chain will stretch from Hawkesbury Island to Hartley Bay, a distance of 11,544 feet. The Chain of Hope itself is over 20,382 feet long and was stitched by the women and children of the Gitga’at First Nation with their friends and family across BC and Canada.

We have stopped oil tankers on this coast for close to forty years - here's to fifty years more. Then we can celebrate another 90th anniversary. Or our children can. Here's hoping.

We're all in this together - join the National Day of Action

I had a wonderful few days on Gabriola Island this past week as a guest of Save Our Shores Gabriola (SOS) and the Gabriola Friends of the Library. Thanks very much to Kristin Miller for taking such good care of me. (Thanks also to The Writers Union of Canada for funding.)

Six creative souls came to the poetry workshop in the poetry yurt, run by Poetry Gabriola,  set in the trees beside The Commons. 

Photo: Viviann Kuehl

  

The workshop was meant to inspire people to express their anger, frustration, distress about events taking place in the world. We explored some darker themes and then lightened things up by writing limericks – it’s hard to write a limerick without laughing. There won’t be any Nobel Prizes forthcoming (whoopee, Alice Munro) but it was fun.

Photo: Viviann Kuehl

Photo: Viviann Kuehl

I also gave a reading at the library from my novel, The Taste of Ashes, with a focus on the ways in which activism propels and informs my writing. Over time it has become clear that an interest in, concern about and a sense of wanting to bear witness to people’s courage are fundamental issues in the work I admire most. It’s little wonder that those same values and concerns for social justice show up in my writing. 

Photo by Liz Ciocea

And what an audience! The collective knowledge and wisdom in the room was awe-inspiring. One woman had been to Afghanistan with Global Exchange – the amazing group that facilitated my trip to Guatemala when I was researching The Taste of Ashes. 

 

 

The visit ended with an SOS Gabriola dinner meeting – a group of Gabriolans committed to preventing oil pipelines and tankers in BC lands and waters. It was an honor to be a part of their month-long celebration of Art and Activism around the island. All around us hung quilts made for the Clayoquot Sound protests twenty years ago now. 

Bravo to SOS for calling it a celebration – all too often we are taught to think of this work as negative because we’re against what industry likes to call development. Exploitation is a more accurate term. 

As well as sharing a delicious meal, we talked about the ways in which people respond to the dangers posed by our ever-increasing use of fossil fuels. How do we motivate people to act? How do we support and value people who don’t feel able to stand up and speak up? How do we support all the differing ways community members contribute on the ground (creating and maintaining a place like the Commons, for example) and in the oh-so-impure corridors of power (MLAs, MPs, larger environmental organizations, for example)?  As Bill McGibben writes in Oil and Honey, the story of the rise of the 350.org movement, environmental activism is long-term – it’s not something that’s going to get done, like that deer fence you need to build around your garden. Jean McLaren was one of the first Raging Grannies, was arrested at Clayoquot Sound and is still taking part in events in her eighties. She and Heidi Brown shared dinner with us last week; twenty years ago they edited the Raging Granny Songbook.

I was happy to tell the folks from Gabriola that in the north we, too, have people with that long-term commitment. We have young people who are being mentored by those who have been doing this work for over thirty years (with many successes) and those same young people are bringing their amazing talents to the table. 

Eight community groups in eight communities across the north are working with First Nations to stop the Enbridge Gateway pipeline; others are springing up to try to unravel the “plate of spaghetti” of proposed LNG pipeline routes; all are committed to resisting the free-for-all that is both provincial and federal government policy around tar sands, fracking and coal. 

And artists – musicians, visual artists, poets, and dancers – are standing beside scientists, farmers, fisherpeople, and others who are beginning to understand the price tag attached to fossil fuels, tar sands expansion and climate change. Artists are reading scientific reports, carvers are putting up blockades, biologists are making quilts, and poets are running for city council. And fishermen like Guy Johnston will be joining thousands of people across the country on tomorrow's National Day of Action against fossil fuels expansion. 

Find an event and get there if you can. 

Irony

Sheila Peters

Between the tasks necessary to get a book ready for publication, wondering where our hummingbirds are hanging out this summer, and urging our reluctant garden to grow, we’ve been on the road a lot the past couple of months. And yesterday as I began writing on this posting, the washouts up Highway 97, just north of where Buttercup still waits in the willows for rescue, are beginning to make the Crooked River look like an efficient alternative to the haul around to Hinton and Whitecourt to get to Peace River country.

The book we’re working on. Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils by Vivien Lougheed, illustrates, in part, how concerns about erosion and sloughing put pressure on researchers trying to find the time and resources to examine the fossil record before it crumbles into the kind of rubble and silt that is blocking streams and road. Fossils, many of them found when geologists are looking in the landscapes for the carboniferous remains of ancient plants that give us coal and oil and gas. 

Whenever I close my eyes I see water pooling in hayfields, spreading through a tangle of willow scrub, flooding community beaches and leaving picnic tables to “float” on the water, their benches submerged.  At Beaumont Park on Fraser Lake, we watched a pickup drive out through the couple of feet of water flooding the boat ramp, drive out, back up, drive out, back up, the water spraying up and around his vehicle like a carwash. At McBride, the Fraser has risen over its banks to turn adjacent pastures into a lake. Turning south, we cross into the North Thompson watershed.  In the circuitous way of water, this spring’s rising star, a trickle can be deflected by a pebble into making a tiny turn that becomes, eventually, momentous. The North Thompson doesn’t join the Fraser until Lytton, hundreds of km south and west.

As we drive the rough road into Murtle Lake in Wells Grey Park, we cross mountain creeks that are white torrents. As we portage our kayak and gear down to the lake, the creeks we cross are in full flood. Several of the campsites are flooded, the park operator tells us. We’ve paddled up to Campsite #2 to find it a virtual island. On the map, he describes the options:  the fire pits are flooded here; you can’t get to the food caches here; the outhouse is across a small pond at this site. All the famous sandy beaches are awash. We stop at Sandy Point, where a tent is pitched on a tiny patch between the bush and the lake. 

We find room for our two tents at Arthur (#4) and spend three lovely days on North America’s largest non-motorized lake, watching, as all lake travellers do, how the wind can churn the lake into a wild ride in just a few minutes; how just as quickly the whitecaps can settle into a heavy liquid reflecting the grey clouds and patches of sun in a thousand pools of metallic light. The colour of iron.

Irony, an etymological reference tells me, has no connection with iron. It comes from the Greek and is used when “deliberately pretending  ignorance, particularly as a rhetorical device to get the better of one's opponent in argument.”   It has a more complicated meaning, of course.  It’s a kind of metaphor, really. Placing two things together in a way that questions the meaning each apparently has on its own. The road sign signaling danger that distracts a driver and causes an accident. The adulterous politician talking about family values.  The physician whose name is Butcher. Water and oil. 

And we use it to mean dissembling, that polite word for lying. Like oil producers saying they need to, they are obligated to, it is their duty to extract more oil to fill the world’s need for this product. 

As the Souris River rises yet again in Manitoba and thousands of people are evacuated, we watch water wash out much of the infrastructure we hold precious. Roads, water systems, power lines, homes, schools, bridges. After the fires that burned Slave Lake, the tornadoes that ravaged the US, it has become a tired cliché to talk about climate change. Extreme weather events.  How about pouring oil onto these troubled waters?

Speaking of irony, in Vancouver hundreds of youth rioted because of a hockey game, many of them wearing Canucks regalia. The price for jerseys starts at $85. They are made of 100% polyester, an oil product. They are all made in China. This is why Enbridge wants to build a pipeline to send crude oil to a port in Kitimat? So we can protect our right to work hard at lower and lower wages with no pension plans (“responsible labour settlements”) so we can buy our children plastic hockey jerseys? 

If you don’t get it, don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense. And we’re smarter than some folks think. The pipeline is not going to get built. Not for that. 

And now a mudslide has washed out the TransCanada highway down where the mountains close in around the Fraser River between Chilliwack and Hope…