Every Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment

Every Grain of Sand

Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment

Every Grain of Sand

Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment

edited by J.A.Wainwright

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Every grain of sand: Canadian perspectives on ecology and environment / edited by J.A. Wainwright.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-88920-453-5

1. Nature—effect of human beings on. 2. Human ecology. 3. Environmental degradation. I. Wainwright, Andy, 1946–

GF75.E94 2004                      304.2                    C2004-906532-7

© 2004 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Cover design by P.J. Woodland, using photography by Ken Madsen. Text design by P.J. Woodland.

The essay by Monte Hummel is reprinted from Wintergreen: Reflections from Loon Lake (Toronto: Key Porter, 1999) with permission of the publisher.

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada

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To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Keeps the Human Soul from Care.

—William Blake

I am hanging in the balance

of the reality of man.

Like every sparrow falling,

like every grain of sand.

—Bob Dylan

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

J.A. Wainwright

2 The World Is Your Body

Lionel Rubinoff

3 Growing Roots in Nature

Karen Krug

4 The Marginal World

Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands

5 Reflections of a Zealot

Elizabeth May

6 Going Home

Memories of the Natural World

J.A. Wainwright

7 Who Cares about the Meadow?

The Changing Conversation around Religion and Ecology

Anne Marie Dalton

8 Toward an Ecofeminist Phenomenology of Nature

Trish Glazebrook

9 Romantic Origins of Environmentalism

Wordsworth and Shelley

Onno Oerlemans

10 Wintergreen

Reflections from Loon Lake—Afterword

Monte Hummel

11 Listening to Our Ancestors

Rebuilding Indigenous Nations in the Face of Environmental Destruction

Leanne Simpson

12 Cutting a Deal with Attila

Confrontation, Capitulation, and Resolution in Environmental Conflict

Ehor Boyanowsky

13 Romancing Labrador

The Social Construction of Wilderness and the Labrador Frontier

Peter Armitage

14 Prey

Jarmo Jalava

Contributors

1

Introduction

J.A.Wainwrigh

In the first essay of this collection, The World Is Your Body, Lionel Rubinoff describes the extraordinarily life-affirming bond between humanity and nature for which humans are phylogenetically disposed [that is, in terms of their evolutionary history], and without which humans are not fully human. In other words, as Rubinoff points out, there exists an ingrained need and human affinity for nature. This need and affinity have a significant place in the works of all the contributors to this anthology, as critical aspects of people’s individual and collective experience on moral, spiritual, and ethical levels.

Unfortunately, there are also human-led forces of destruction and extinction that threaten the well-being of our planet, and it is almost impossible to remain unaware of the increasingly strained relationship between people and the natural world. Media stories report daily on the effects of environmental pollution and other elements of civilization’s unchecked progress on wildlife species, fish stocks, old-growth forests, safe drinking water, air quality, and even the protective ozone layer that absorbs radiation from the sun’s rays as they reach the earth. Today’s schoolchildren learn about the steady disappearance of insects, birds, and animals from the world around them; huge draggers scoop fish into oblivion along the Grand Banks and elsewhere; the Amazon rain forest, with its vital system of photosynthesis, is ravaged by mining operations, while British Columbia woodlands are scarred by clear-cutting; Ontario residents become ill or die because groundwater is infected with e-coli bacteria, and families in Cape Breton are apprehensive about long-term exposure to coke oven waste in their neigh-bourhoods; a giant hole in the sky opens over Antarctica as emissions from household products damage the stratosphere.

Of course, the argument can, and indeed should, be made that those same schoolchildren learn about the setting aside of land for national and provincial parks and wilderness areas; that governments have stepped in to prevent over-fishing and provide forest management; that legal and practical measures are taken to ensure uncontaminated water supplies; and that international agreements have been reached to lower the rate of anti-ozone emissions. But, even given the validity of such arguments, it is clear that not only has the human-natural world relationship become severely impaired, it has also been irrevocably changed by the sheer volume of attacks against living organisms and their habitats. At the very least, as Aldo Leopold suggested over thirty-five years ago, we seem to have outgrown the land.¹ Perhaps worse, as Bill McKibben stressed more recently, we have come to the end of nature.² While this does not mean there is no land left or that the natural world has vanished, it may be that the meaning of our connection to natural processes has been so diminished that we are faced with, according to Rubinoff, the eclipse ... of a humanity worthy of the human name.

What are some of the fundamental ways to oppose behaviour and policies of injury and extinguishment that stem from what Leanne Simpson calls greed [and] exploitation, Trish Glazebrook cites as a patriarchal logic of domination, and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands describes as the globalizing commodity fetishism [that] impoverishes nature; and that result for Anne Marie Dalton in a radical disjunction between human life and the rest of the natural world and for Jarmo Jalava in barbed wire... stretched between landscapes of divergent human belief?

One of the most potent forces of opposition to end-of-nature scenarios is positive human memory of the experience of nature. The origins of this anthology lie in my recollections of 1950s boyhood summers spent in the countryside of southern Ontario. For me, at that time, the natural world outside Toronto existed only for unprofaned pleasure that, like the water, trees, and sunlight, would surely go on forever. Without the strength of this retrospection, I would not now be able to consider the ironies of such an anthropocentric view; nor would I have been able to stand with my two young sons on a Black River bridge in Muskoka in the late 1980s, watching the sun’s rays open the current’s dark sheen below, and cry out my spontaneous pronouncement of thirty-five years before: It’s like a window!

Karen Krug, in her essay Growing Roots in Nature, writes of her childhood and youth on a Saskatchewan farm, working with her father in the fields, finding birds’ nests or abandoned young rabbits, and developing, unconsciously, a powerful sense of place. For her, decades later, the farm is still home, and she visits it more often in her mind’s eye than in actuality, only now comprehending the privilege of falling asleep in a silence broken solely by the sounds of night creatures and the elements. Her adult regard for the natural world is first provided by what she learns when she looks back at a self and an environment that have much to teach her. Passing on what she has learned to her daughters, she is convinced that their consideration of the effects of permaculture, resulting from observing, emulating, and improving upon natural systems (as opposed to the limited monculture of her youth), will lead to their comprehension and appreciation of ecological diversities beyond the farm.

Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, in The Marginal World, takes her young daughter to the ocean beach of her childhood to show her the transitional spaces or ecotones ... where cultures, natures, life worlds, experiences, and ideas collide and mingle. Mortimer-Sandilands insists we have a great deal to gain from understanding that we are all marginal creatures and that we should not be afraid of our hybridity or of the biodiversity that helps promote cultural diversity (and vice versa). If we have outgrown the land, then perhaps ecotones, where we have opportunities to engage in dialogue with other species and other disciplinary approaches to nature, can interfere with our power-based constructions of what we deem to be centres and margins. It is clear that Mortimer-Sandilands’s memories, with their fertile complexity of what was integral and pregnant with change, are rich borderland zones between past, present, and possible futures for her daughter.

In her Reflections of a Zealot, Elizabeth May recalls her childhood as the effective fountainhead of her lifelong activism. The memories of her mother’s struggles in the grassroots-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which contributed in 1963 to the signing by three major superpowers of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prompt her assertion that from my earliest years, I had no doubt that a single activist can change the world. The deeds of her own teenage years—such as reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, introducing returnable-bottle legislation in the Connecticut legislature and fighting the spraying of forests with fenitrothion to control the spruce budworm in Cape Breton—are part of a pattern of sustained activism that has led to her present position as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. As with Krug and Mortimer-Sandilands, her daughter’s possible futures motivate her efforts to convey and employ the remembered lessons of the past.

Our individual pasts are important in the struggle to maintain our humanity, but awareness of our collective cultural history matters just as much if we are to see ourselves as more than isolated beings in the earth’s ecosphere. We must read the ironies inherent in Sophocles’ Antigone, written over two thousand years ago:

Many the wonders but nothing more wondrous than man.

....

Language and thought like the wind

and the feelings that make the town

he has taught himself, and shelter against the cold,

refuge from rain. He can help himself.

He faces no future helpless.³

As Lionel Rubinoff suggests, humans will indeed face the future helpless if they do not understand their role as stewards and caregivers rather than as masters of the natural world.

Not too long after Sophocles in the ancient world came Christianity. Anne Marie Dalton examines some crucial historical and contemporary connections between religion and ecological crisis in her essay, Who Cares about the Meadow? The Changing Conversation around Religion and Ecology. Dalton admits that certain interpretations of the Bible have encouraged the crisis, but also points out that various writings in Christian history, including parts of the Bible, provide guidance in regard to environmental issues past and present. It is crucial, for Dalton, that the radical be a method employed in programs of social justice leading to simultaneously better treatment of the land and peoples on it; that the integration of scientific and traditional religious accounts of the evolution of the universe be employed for the welfare of earth’s entire ecological community; and that there be rejection of essentialist approaches in dealing with the split between humans and the natural world. Only by seeing the small writ large, that is, a meadow as standing for other parts of the earth or for the earth itself, will we be able to move beyond solipsistic conversations and immediate concerns. We may not face the future helpless if we come to understand that some action in the 1920s to save a small meadow in North Carolina could well have repercussions in the rice paddies of Vietnam in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Lest we think the ancient Greeks were all of a kind in their approaches to the natural world, Trish Glazebrook, in her Toward an Ecofeminist Phenomenology of Nature, points out that Aristotle, born only a few decades after Sophocles’s death, believed the human relationship with the natural world existed in a constant state of flux, change, and adaptability and that nature ha[d] the first word. The subsequent Christian view, however, had God as the arch-artisan of the natural, which ultimately meant the natural was for human benefit, a view supported centuries later with Francis Bacon’s new science, Isaac Newton’s ideology of immutability, and the rigid patriarchal thought and action that drive so much of modern science and technology. In contrast, Goethe recognized that human truths were provisional, and always open to revision, something Glazebrook supports in her positing of a feminist erotics of nature. Such erotics connect individual love of nature to larger social and cultural activity and to a sustainable technology based on an alternative science and eco-logic that respect nature’s purposive process. For Glazebrook, as for Krug, Sandilands, and May, her child’s positive interaction with things natural is life-affirming and of vital importance.

In his essay Romantic Origins of Environmentalism: Wordsworth and Shelley, Onno Oerlemans provides a green reading of William Words-worth’s poem Lines: Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey to emphasize the Romantic version of phylogenetics that we are more perceptive, imaginative, and moral as a result of intimate contact with the natural world. Deep ecological response to this human-nature relationship is not a twentieth-century phenomenon, but one that was alive and well in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and that contained recognition of the natural environment not as objective and ‘other’ than our consciousness, but as itself inter-subjective, an idea present in a variety of ways in essays by Leanne Simpson and Monte Hummel.

Hummel, in his Afterword from Wintergreen: Reflections from Loon Lake, describes how, near his cabin by the lake, he munches on the same winter-green berries that small and larger birds and animals ingest: The beautiful small wintergreen (itself made up of tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and leptons) can exist only because it is nested in, and nourished by, an expanding series of interacting ecological envelopes which quite literally give it [and us] life. These envelopes are dependent on a healthy ecosphere, which humans can nurture through, among other things, understanding William Blake’s poetic adage on finding worlds and heavens in wildflowers and grains of sand.

But, as Oerlemans also emphasizes, Shelley in Mount Blanc presents us with a challenge and a warning. In this poem, nature and consciousness are not one and the same, and humans have no access to the deep history of the earth. The mountain has its own articulations that we cannot presume to comprehend, and what we are left with is an awful doubt about our assumed primary place in the chain of being, even if we are indeed part of the chain and have good intentions in regard to the natural world. This suggests a profound need to reassess our interaction with that world. Instead of being able to meet with nature in transitional spaces, as Sandilands advocates, we may merely be creatures in transition ourselves and alone in the process. The radical quality of Shelley’s romantic view is its anti-anthropocentric basis.

As a Native Canadian, Leanne Simpson might take issue with Dalton’s views of the progressive features of Christianity, given her focus in Listening to Our Ancestors: Rebuilding Indigenous Nations in the Face of Environmental Destruction on the role of Christian values in the colonization of North American indigenous peoples and environments. But we should compare Edna Manitowabi’s words in Simpson’s essay, And when I saw a crane or bulldozer digging into the Earth, it was like a form of rape, to Dalton’s quoting of Christian theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, Through the raped bodies the earth is raped. Neither is Simpson so far removed from Wordsworth when she emphasizes that Indigenous world views or philosophical traditions view humans as not only part of the environment or the complex web of life, but as the environment itself. She provides specific illustrations of the assault of clear-cutting and other ways of denigrating or even destroying landscapes and bodies of water, some of which were and are sacred Native sites. Her use of the term monoculture to describe the simplistic and damaging efforts to replace what has been lost recalls Karen Krug’s criticism of the same practice, and, in their different ways, they present a joint plea for the replacement of a colonial relationship with the land by a more complex, diverse, and self-sustaining system of growth and harvesting.

Ehor Boyanowsky, in Cutting a Deal with Attila: Confrontation, Capitulation, and Resolution in Environmental Conflict, also underlines particular damage done by logging operations and by pulp mill and mining companies, especially in the form of siltation and pollution of rivers where his cherished steelhead spawn. It is important to oppose visibly such harmful practices and, like Elizabeth May, Boyanowksy underscores the impact of initial environmental endeavours on subsequent activism, placing the origins of the world-famous Greenpeace organization in the philosophy and actions of the three-member Don’t Make a Wave Committee in early 1970s British Columbia, and the roots of the Steelhead Society of British Columbia in the previously formed British Columbia Wildlife Federation. Perhaps Boyanowsky’s most startling and memorable point is that we must talk to the enemy in our environmental wars. Thus, he accentuates the role of British farmers in protecting rather than exterminating foxes when the hunt is allowed; he cites the conservation award from the Steelhead Society of British Columbia to logging giant Macmillan Bloedel when it ceased to log old-growth forest and halted clear-cutting on steep slopes; and he stresses so long as there are predators, there are those who care desperately about their prey.

If we are to understand and communicate our different views on environmental issues, we must acknowledge, as Peter Armitage insists in his essay, Romancing Labrador: The Social Construction of Wilderness and the Labrador Frontier, that public opinion is never a tabula rasa when it comes to undertaking advocacy work. We must become aware of the political and cultural origins of the multiple discourses that, for example in Labrador, have shaped human response to natural place. Armitage discusses the historical roles of the imagined and romanticized hinterlands of nineteenth-century Labrador and subsequent wasteland perceptions of wilderness that contributed to the industrialization of what many perceived to be a twentieth-century resource Eldorado. He also emphasizes the recent emergence of voices native to Labrador, be they Innu, Inuit, Settler (Metis), or landed immigrants, into debates about industrial vision versus environmental degradation, stressing especially their interference with simplistice divisions along lines of race and class. The abuse of power and the empowerment of those previously marginalized in relation to decisions about land and water use in Labrador need to be addressed through creative contemporary dialogue.

Talking with the enemy is something Jarmo Jalava does in his lyrical personal essay, Prey. As he and his family spend time at two different Ontario cottages, seeking the quiet space between thoughts where animals dwell and meditators go (very much an ecotone territory), they meet the human hunters whose trigger-pulling is ingrained in rural culture and the all-terrain vehicle riders who recklessly intrude into the wild anonymity of evolution. Although Jalava, like Krug, Mortimer-Sandilands, and Glaze-brook, puts the innocence of his child against experienced purveyors of destruction, and says that an appropriate rite of passage would be... six months of wilderness solitude, but not during hunting season, he is not prepared to damn completely the armed man who shoots grouse on his rented property. Indeed, in a remarkable, final metaphoric passage that closes this collection, he both appropriates human hunting consciousness and becomes one with natural-world integrity in necessary life-and-death situations.

Simply put, these essays indicate that the better we can understand and help to sustain the familiar ground at our feet or, perhaps more properly, at whose foot we reside, the better we will be able to comprehend and sustain the exchange between ourselves and our earthly neighbours, human and non-human, whose healthy, natural world habitats so contribute to the well-being of our own. As Trish Glazebrook writes, even rocks talk. We need to listen.

The politics of this anthology, then, are based on our ability to pay heed, appreciate, and act with empathy and wisdom. The essentially (but not essentialist) activist positions taken in Rubinoff’s, Dalton’s, and Oerlemans’s learned treatises support Simpson’s, Boyanowsky’s, and Armitage’s specifically grounded and inclusive advocacy of productive exchange between interest groups with different cultural and political platforms. While some readers might question the efficacy of aesthetic reflection in personal essays— such as those of Krug, Mortimer-Sandilands, and Hummel— in comparison to more direct political expression, such questioning should not last long. These latter writers, as well as Trish Glazebrook, Jarmo Jalava, and myself, through the individual’s stories they tell, reveal an outlook and practice of balanced involvement with natural-world issues that responds to the equilibrium inherent in untrammelled natural surroundings and in the best of human relations with them. Even Elizabeth May,