Category Archives: Sherry Marr

earthweal weekly challenge: WHAT HAPPENS TO ONE, HAPPENS TO US ALL

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by Sherry Marr

I was fascinated when I first learned about the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, after an absence of seventy years, and how this impacted, in what is called a trophic cascade, everything in the ecosystem, ultimately actually changing the course of the river.

Nature is amazing!

A trophic cascade is a series of consequences, starting at the top of the food chain, that affects all the species lower down.

Yellowstone Park was created in 1872. Poachers, hunters, tourists and park rangers were free to kill wolves, who were considered a nuisance and given no protection at all. By 1926, wolves had vanished from Yellowstone.

The park began to suffer from the absence of wolves. There was an increase in grazing populations, and human efforts to cull the herds weren’t successful. Areas along riverbanks were denuded, soil erosion occurred, and small species withdrew.

Scientists argued for the re-introduction of wolves into the park, but park rangers were opposed. In 1967, wolves were classified as endangered. But it wasn’t until 1973 that U.S. Fish and Wildlife were required to do something about it. Years of studies were begun, working towards a restoration program.

Paul Nicklen, National Geographic photo

  

Finally, in 1995, fourteen wolves were captured in Alberta, Canada, and introduced into Yellowstone.  The results were astonishing. Grazing herds moved away from the riverbank to less open locations. With less grazing, forest regeneration stabilized the slopes; there was less soil erosion. Pools started forming; rivers became narrower. The wolves had impacted the physical geography of the entire park.

This all blows my mind. They say the increase in songbirds, beaver, and small animals like gophers and ground squirrels, which fed eagles and hawks, was amazing. Landscape that had been grazed bare became lush and green once more. Willows grew and spread. The area healed and grew into a paradise.

Best news of all, to me, is that wolves were removed from the endangered species list in 2009, as their numbers had become sustainable.

This is all marvelous to contemplate, and makes me ponder how every species has its important role to play in the working of whole ecosystems. The participation of each impacts the health of the whole. Or, as my Nuu chah nulth neighbours teach: Everything Is One. What happens to one, happens to us all.

Here is a little-known fact: salmon change forests too! One doesn’t think of salmon as having a connection to the forest. But eagle, bears and wolves all eat salmon. Fish carcasses and the droppings of the animals that eat salmon are compost, adding necessary nitrogen to the trees and the forest floor. They keep forests thriving. Here on the West Coast, our salmon stocks are dying out, because of climate change, warming seas, over-fishing, and, especially, pollution and disease from the open-pen fish farms in the area.  First Nations have been advising of this danger for decades, yet governments are slow to act in legislating fish farms into contained land-based locations. I fear our salmon will go the way of the cod stocks of the eastern seaboard before long.

The Nuu chah nulth people have lived off salmon for ten thousand years. It only took greedy settlers a couple of hundred years to plunder everything into near-extinction. I can’t imagine, as outraged as I am by environmental degradation, what it must be like for the original people of this land  – its caretakers and guardians – to watch everything being destroyed: salmon dying out, forests being clearcut, everything being paved over in an accelerating rush to grab it all before it all is gone. I am astounded by how patient the First People are, and how willing, still, to talk to us and try to help us learn.

It saddens me to reflect on the outrageously heavy and disproportionate impact our human species has, the harsh toll it is taking on the non-human realm – who have as important and necessary a role to play as we do in an interdependent ecosystem, and as much right to life.

“Mother Nature provides for our need,” a local Chief often repeats, “but not our greed.”

Let’s think about this for our challenge: Share any example you wish of a human or non-human being, and the impact it has on its surrounding ecosystem. Share your wonder, your despair, your hope, your respect: whatever this challenge brings up for you. I look forward to being amazed.

weekly challenge: MESSAGES FROM THE WILD

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Port Alberni owl

 

guest post by Sherry Marr

The heart that breaks open
can contain the whole universe.

—Joanna Macy

Mother Earth is sending us urgent messages in wildfire, floods, tornadoes, the CO2 index, and record-breaking temperatures. The wild ones, too, are speaking. I think of Tahlequah, the mother orca who carried her dead calf on her nose, in grief, for seventeen days and could not let her go. The Tla-o-quiaht people, here in Clayoquot Sound, teach that every creature is a being, as worthy of life and respect as we are. They tell of an orca who accompanied the boat carrying a dead chief all the way to his island home. They believed the orca was the chief’s brother, come to accompany him on his final passage.

One of our online poets had a three-day visitation from an owl, recently, who chose her yard in which to do her dying. I believed at the time the owl carried a message for her. The poet, sadly, was diagnosed with cancer soon after. It sounds like it has been caught in time, perhaps thanks to the owl, who gazed at her intently, soul to soul, for the days she visited.

Two weeks after my mother died, I was driving towards her farm when, (it felt like in slow motion), an owl flew across my windshield, so close I could see every feather. Her head was turned towards me and our eyes met as she made her passage into the forest, still looking back at me. It felt like time had slowed. Somehow the car was still moving and on the road, yet I can still feel the slow suspension of those moments, our eyes locked. I knew an oracle had been, with a message for me from my mother.

I have a poet friend who is visited often by wild creatures. She has dreams filled with the cries of the wild ones, who bring her messages because she is a seer, a woman of the drum, who can carry their voices to the rest of us.

I worked for many years at a First Nations healing centre where families came to heal from addiction issues. We had a ceremony called the Healing of Memories, where we gathered in circle around an outdoors fire, and people wept as they threw their written messages of pain into the fire, to lessen their burdens. Eagles never failed to show up and circle slowly overhead  till we were finished.

I lived with my own wild one for fourteen years. Pup was a wolf-dog, found at the healing centre, close to death, as a tiny puppy. I took him home and fed him and he grew. He was a wild one, and he led me a merry chase! He did not want to leave me when he died. The next morning, right around the time his body was going into the flames, I woke up feeling his snout on the edge of my mattress, and heard his gentle whuff, the way he had woken me for all those years. He had come one last time to say goodbye. This still makes me cry.

These days I am hearing of rivers being given the status of personhood, to protect their rights. Our opportunity now is to recognize what indigenous people have always known, that everything has consciousness: the sea, rivers, trees, animals. We need to save the wild, not just for ourselves, but for all the wild ones of every kind: animals, birds, sea creatures. All our relations.

We have seen the photos of starving polar bears in the melting north, sometimes only skin and bone by the time they expire. We heard the cries of the burning koalas and kangaroos of Australia. But then another crisis came, and another.  The pangolin and the barbecued monkeys and dogs from the wet markets of Wuhan have brought us a profoundly life-altering message in the corona virus. We did not heed earlier warnings, so the lessons are being repeated more strongly.

For today’s challenge, let’s contemplate messages from the wild.

Have you had an encounter with or a visitation from a wild creature? Do you have a totem animal with whom you identify? Or do you share life with a less-wild creature, and have a story to tell about communicating with another species? For we do communicate with them, and they with us, as any dog or cat or horse-lover understands very well.

Write whatever comes up for you. There is sadness in how the wild ones are suffering. But there is also such wonder and privilege in sharing this world with them; such gifts given us by the animals who honour us with their trust. Since their messages are non-verbal, we have the opportunity to speak for them. You might wish to relate an encounter. Or you might speak as a particular wild creature, as we do in the Council for All Beings, giving voice to what the animals wish and need us to understand.

The animals hold my heart, always, so, whatever you write, I will read your poems with such delight.

weekly challenge: CONNECTING HUMANS, WILDLIFE AND THE CORONA VIRUS

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Typical Wet Market in China (Getty Images)

 

By Sherry Marr

As you know, my heart is always with the animals, wild and domestic. Anderson Cooper of CNN recently interviewed Dr. Jane Goodall, who said she hoped the corona virus pandemic would soon be over. Then she added, “I hope and pray that the nightmare will soon be over for the wild animals who are captured and kept in horrible conditions for food. Our too-close relationship with wild animals in the markets, or when we use them for entertainment, has unleashed the terror and misery of new viruses, viruses that live in them without harming them, but mutate into other forms to infect us.

“We have amazing brains,” she continued. “We are capable of love and compassion for each other. Let us also show love and compassion for the animals who are with us on this planet.”

Music to my ears. But will humankind listen? Have we learned anything from this? Stay tuned. I have a discouraging answer to that question farther down in this feature.

This virus has made clear as never before how interconnected we all are with the natural world and the other species we share the planet with. We know now, there is a direct connection between the wild animals in the wet markets of Wuhan and the corona virus. The pangolin (scaly anteater) and the civet are said to have played a part in transmitting it. Researchers say it likely originated in the Chinese horseshoe bat.

In wet markets, people buy and eat such things as barbecued bats, monkeys, cats and dogs, all kept in terrible conditions. They look out through the wire in terror, knowing they are about to die a horrible death. They are killed in ways too brutal for me to relate.  We don’t want to know this. It makes us uncomfortable. We prefer to look away.  We can easily imagine the distress of a single human in this world that we have made so difficult to live in. Each individual animal feels the exact same fear, pain and terror that we do. They haunt me.

Some of our North American practices in our factory “farms” are as brutal as anything we cluck about across the sea.

Because I know that animals feel everything we feel, because I have seen their tears and I hear their cries for help all over the world, I can’t turn away. I bear witness. I sing the song of their desperate lives, hoping enough of us will hear and come to their rescue.

We are now paying the price of wildlife trafficking. The bill has come due. The demand for apes, for bush meat and body parts, for elephants, rhinos, big cats, giraffes has brought us to this moment.  The pangolin is one of the most trafficked animals on earth. Who would have thought our fates would intertwine?  These are creatures that belong in the wild, whom we have interfered with terribly. Now seven tigers in captivity at the Bronx Zoo in the U.S.  have the virus, infected by their human handler.

As early as 2007, studies warned “wet markets are a time bomb for a virus outbreak”. And this week both the White House coronavirus expert Anthony Fauci and U.N. Biodiversity Chief Elizabeth Mrema called for a global shutdown of all wild animal markets, “to prevent the next pandemic.”  Oh my goodness.

Here is where my heart sinks. China did order the wet markets closed when the virus broke out. But they re-opened as soon as lockdown regulations were relaxed.

Let that sink in. How discouraging, that we learn nothing from what we live through. How frustrating that profit continues to be the driving force, above survival of the planet, its people, and the other beings whose survival is totally at our mercy. Mea culpa.

As citizens of our global village, the protection of our environment equals the protection of our future, and our grandchildren’s. The laws we create to protect wildlife will also protect human communities. A shift to restoring the earth to balance will create employment, through alternative sustainable livelihoods that do no harm. This will create more successful human communities.

Compliance will be a problem; the wild animal trade is peoples’ livelihoods. We need to develop artisan markets, tourism, wildlife protection and land stewarding jobs instead. The UN chief noted that the risk is of driving the trade underground, making it even more dangerous and less regulated.

In the short window of time remaining before we pass the tipping point (which feels ever nearer, to me), we need to make every effort, personally, nationally and globally, to heal the harm we have done to Mother Earth. We have seen how quickly the natural world responded, when we humans took our feet off the gas pedal and stayed indoors: she began to heal, skies cleared, waters grew cleaner. Mother Earth has been sending us messages in every voice she has, telling us she was in trouble. With this virus, perhaps she has finally gotten our attention. I hope so.

We have seen how governments at every level, faced with the global threat of the virus, have come together. Everything else was set aside to address the problem which threatens our lives. I hope they will do the same for the climate crisis, when the virus subsides, for it threatens us every bit as much. I think of wildfire season, not that far off, with foreboding. Governments and everyday people have shown we can step up with courage, determination, and with full and loving hearts, when the cause is urgent. I have to hope that on the other side of the crisis, we will address climate change, of which this virus, our global appetites, and the voracious maw of capitalism have all played their part.

For your challenge: as always, I keep it wide open. Write about whatever this sparks in you: our connection with the natural world and with the wild, your fear, anger, hope, love of animals, domestic and wild, or your frustration at humanity’s slowness to grasp our shared predicament. Never did we think we would be living through times like this. How is the virus affecting you?

Bring us your words, experiences and feelings about these difficult times we live in. Be assured, we will read them with deep respect.

 

Sources:

https://www.facebook.com/AndersonCooperFullCircle/posts/1366604073527280

https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/jane-goodall-coronavirus-species.html?fbclid=IwAR0mUUBrGRcO0BhxjLqJF4rI_QBGmjeLhgHGQjWEOxsUbhwttnqzCjsHnYU

https://www.ccn.com/shockingly-chinas-wet-markets-are-reopening-will-we-ever-learn/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52177586

https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2020/apr/08/wet-markets-important-risk-factor-for-coronavirus-spread-un-biodiversity-chief-2127349.html

earthweal weekly challenge: FLATTENING THE CURVE

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Hi friends,

Sherry Marr here—Numbers of those affected by the coronavirus change by the hour, and are rising rapidly. As of my final edit at 9 a.m., Sunday, March 29, globally we have 685,913 known cases, with 32,239 deaths.

In Canada, we have a total of 5,886 with the virus, and 63 deaths. My province of B.C. has 884 current cases, with 17  deaths.

On Friday, I was shocked to hear that the United States already has more cases than China had, now documenting 120,000 infected, reporting 2100 deaths. Infectious disease specialists predict a very dire spread of this voracious virus in the U.S.

This is very alarming. I worry for my friends and neighbours to the south. I worry for us all. Stay in your two-metre bubbles, kids.

Clearly, self-isolation is the only way to flatten the curve and slow this voracious monster. But it took too long for enough people to get the message.  A week ago, Vancouver, B.C., parks and beaches showed up on the news with hordes of people out enjoying the sun, oblivious. It was outrageous. It has gotten better since. Officials were in tears on the news, begging people to stay home, fearing our health care system could well collapse under the weight of what is to come.

Prime Minister Trudeau himself is in self-isolation, working from home, as his wife Sophie has the virus. He appears outside his front door every morning for his daily briefing, and works on facetime the rest of the day. I am pleased that the Canadian government is doing its utmost to take care of us and help us through this time. Leadership is clear and active, with constant updates. (My sympathy is with my neighbours in the U.S. at this time. I am glad state leaders are taking the reins and doing what needs to be done.)

On the graphs, the curve is spiking steeply, with no sign of it leveling, and by the time this posts, the increase will be definitive. Officials exhort us to practice social and physical distancing, in a desperate effort to flatten the curve. (In Italy, cases went from a thousand in one week, to 40,000 the next week. Canada was at the thousand mark as I began writing this last weekend. It has since doubled.)

Tofino is, as always, taking a leadership role. Before mandates were issued, the mayor requested tourists to not travel here, to wait till this is over. Resorts and small businesses and restaurants voluntarily began closing their doors. Tourists already here were asked to leave.

Tla-o-qui-ahts took action early, meeting traffic coming through Sutton Pass, on our only highway in. Locals and essential traffic were allowed through; tourists (many of them from the U.S.) were asked to turn around and go home. They have closed off their communities to non-residents in order to protect their vulnerable population.

Tofino hospital (photo: Joseph Bob)

Our small Tofino Hospital has ten beds, two ambulances and ONE respirator. We service Tofino, Ucluelet and all of the Nuu chah nulth reserves on the West Coast and on outlying islands. Our front line workers will be stressed to the max and beyond with what they know is coming.

Our local representatives are doing a remarkable and reassuring job of keeping us informed. Local front line workers and essential businesses are doing a heroic job of taking care of us. But they are not allowed to tell us whether it is in our community or not. The head doctor at the hospital is requesting permission from the provincial health officials. Knowledge helps us look after ourselves even more pro-actively.

The Canadian government has earmarked a financial package totalling $82 billion dollars, to help individuals and small businesses survive the lack of income involved in work stoppages and business closures. Wow. The government has set aside $55 billion in tax deferrals for businesses and families.  Families will soon feel some assistance with increased monthly child benefit payments. Low income singles (me) and families will receive a higher GST payment in April. Further financial mortgage and housing relief measures are being taken, and workers who do not qualify for Employment Insurance benefits can apply for direct payments without a wait period. One MILLION Employment Insurance claims were filed this past week. That is a lot of households who don’t know how they’re going to pay the rent.

(The Credit Union where my sister is a small business manager immediately announced that all loan and mortgage payments are suspended for six months.)

Yesterday the streets of Victoria, down-Island, usually jammed with tourists, were empty. Two major hotels, including the famous Empress, closed their doors. So many hourly wage earners have been laid off in all sectors.

My own daughters are self-isolating, as am I. My son is an essential service worker.

Industries are being asked to start producing health supplies, such as respirators and masks, that are in short supply across Canada. I am impressed by how government has stepped up to take care of those of us with the least resources. But I wonder what will happen as this continues long-term. They keep telling us this is a marathon, not a sprint.

How is it in your part of the world? How is your country doing at flattening the curve?

It has been heartening to watch world leaders come together to fight this common foe. (I only wish they would come together around the climate crisis with the same dedication and focus. Maybe after the virus abates, they will.) Most people are following directives around social distancing (staying home, avoiding crowds, keeping two metres between oneself and another person). It has been astonishing to note how many ignore the directives, putting others at risk.

We have become such an entitled species; it is disappointing to see how many All-About-Me examples we have heard about on the news: like the couple in Kelowna, B.C., who bought up the entire meat section of a chain store.  (There could be a whole other conversation about the connection between our meat-eating, the terrible lives of factory animals, and the climate crisis.) People were still gathering, so as of  March 22, malls, parks and beaches were being closed. There will be steep fines for noncompliance with physical distancing.

Because we have become such global travellers, all of the first instances of the virus in Canada were related to people coming back from travelling. But now travel has been restricted; ominously, more cases are now coming from community spread.

All over Vancouver Island, we are watching businesses closing, airline, bus and ferry service being reduced, only essential services continuing. People are working in solidarity to try to keep themselves and each other safe.

By the time this posts, I am wondering if the mandate will have advanced from social distancing to sheltering in place. I suspect that is not far off, judging by officials’ frustration at public noncompliance. But people are becoming more aware, as the days go on.

I have been staying home, since I have a compromised immune system. I have been out only twice, for groceries. I hope to not go out again for the next while. I take in the fresh air on my balcony.

Right now, our CoOp reserves the first hour of the day for seniors to shop, to minimize our exposure.  A guard stands at the door to let only we elderly through. (I don’t need to show I.D. LOL.) It’s peaceful with so few of us in the store. I am happy the cashiers, on the front lines and very exposed, wear rubber gloves. I am so grateful to them for coming to work when they are nervous. May they stay safe.  I bought extra groceries the last time I went, so I won’t have to go back, just in case we get to the point where our only grocery store gets closed. Right now, they are on reduced hours.

These times bring out the best and the worst in human nature.

The Italians were first to inspire us, singing from their balconies at six every evening. My heart lifted at the sight and sound of them, that first evening, so beautifully sharing songs and smiles with the world. It fell next morning, when I saw the long line of military trucks hauling away the bodies.

People in Greece and Spain and Vancouver, B.C.,  applaud on their balconies to thank the health care workers and front line people looking after us in this crisis. Some howls have even been heard in Tofino and Ucluelet. Our debt to the doctors, nurses and health care professionals has never been more clearly demonstrated, as they risk their own lives to keep us safe.  Some of them, sadly, world-wide, have succumbed to the virus.

On TV, health officials BEG us, sometimes in tears, to stay home, the only way to flatten the curve. The trajectory of how quickly and exponentially this virus moves is terrifying. From one day to the next, from one week to the next, this virus spreads in frightening leaps. Those who ignore this advice are risking other lives along with their own.

Of concern is the homeless population, who have nowhere to self-isolate. In Canada, the North West Territories, in the first weeks, had no incidences of the virus, and tried to prevent all non-essential travel to keep out the virus. Sadly, on March 21, the first case was documented. Around this time, the virus showed up in South Africa. The spread in both Africa and India will be difficult, if not impossible, to control, given how many people live closely together, lacking adequate shelter and resources.

Amazingly, China spiked and not only flattened, but conquered the curve in their country by enforcing very stern measures. This shows it can be stopped.

But in many of our countries, accustomed as we are to our “rights and freedoms,” governments are faced with a harder task, asking people to comply and trusting that we will be responsible. So it will take longer for them to take the next step, giving the virus more time to spread.

Of special concern are the homeless, as well as First Nations communities, many of which lack clean drinking water and access to medical care and basic medical supplies. These communities will be hit hard.

People are staying home here; the village is quiet. We writers are fortunate in these times. We have our poetry community online; we have a platform for sharing our feelings and thoughts; we have friends around the world to stay in touch with.

This is scarier than any science fiction book or movie predicted. We feel helpless in the onslaught, but we do what we can. I am being careful. But I live in an old apartment building. How many other residents will be as careful? How many germs are lurking on the railings going downstairs, on the door we all go in and out of, in the laundry room?

How are you weathering this threat? In your comments, tell us how things are in your area, in your country, state or province. How are you doing personally? What are you doing to get through self-isolation? Do you know anyone who has come down with the virus? How are they doing?

I told Brendan that he began this site at exactly the right moment, when we need to come together, to share experiences, fears, wisdom, hope – and our poems, as we write our way through the strange and frightening times we live in. Looking back at what I agonized over last year, I realize we were not as bad off then as we thought we were.

Sadly, it seems only when humans’ actual survival is threatened, do we wake up to the world we have made and the damage we have done. When Mother Earth’s message wasn’t heeded in wind and storm and fire, what is left is this terrible pandemic, in which the message is loud and clear: we are interconnected across all perceived boundaries of time and space and geography, with every other living being on the planet. What happens to one, happens to us all. The aboriginal people have known this for millennia, and have tried to tell us. We are suddenly hearing their wisdom now.

For your challenge, write about whatever aspect of this issue speaks to you: self-isolation, social distancing, fear of contagion. Or, conversely, you might write about our increased awareness of our interconnectedness, and how people are rising to the challenge, showing the best side of all we can be. There are many heroic stories we are not yet hearing. Maybe you know of some. I look forward to whatever you bring back to the communal fire.

Stay safe, my friends.

—Sherry

  

earthweal weekly challenge: BEATING THE DRUMS OF CHANGE

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Chief Howilhkat, Freda Huson, stands in ceremony while police arrive to enforce Coastal GasLink’s injunction at Unist’ot’en Healing Centre near Houston, B.C. on Monday, February 10, 2020.

Source: The Narwhal

 

The Rise of Indigenous People and their Allies Across Canada

By Sherry Marr

On February 10, 2020, RCMP invaded Unist’ot’en territory and arrested elder Freda Huson, in prayer, during ceremony, along with other land defenders, as they peacefully stood on their own road protecting their unceded lands and waters from a proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline that will threaten their traditional way of life. As a non-indigenous person, I observed this disrespect with outrage.

In support, blockades rose up across Canada. For two weeks railway lines, ports, bridges, intersections and commuter trains were shut down, as indigenous and non-indigenous people across Canada stood in solidarity with the Wet’sowet’en people. Canada’s commerce ground to a halt. Protests are still being held on the steps of the Government Building in Victoria, and outside the Parliament Building in Ottawa. Blockades are still occurring at significant points of entry to ports and at key intersections.

The blockade set up in solidarity by the Mohawk nation, in Tyendinaga territory, east of Belleville, Ontario, has been much in the news, echoing the Oka crisis in 1990. Wounds from that 78-day standoff have not healed. On February 24,2020, RCMP moved in and made arrests. More blockades sprang up. Land defenders and their allies plan to protest until the RCMP withdraw from Wet’sowet’en territory, and “until the demands of the Wet’sowet’en hereditary chiefs are met”.

Frustrations mount. Commuters feel “inconvenienced.”

“There is inconvenience. And then there is injustice,” a B.C. chief responded. For 300 years, First Nations have lived under oppressive colonial rule on land that had been theirs for thousands of years. Many reserves do not even have clean drinking water. Prime Minister Trudeau found billions to buy an old pipeline to carry oil, but can’t find money for pipelines to carry drinking water to the people, some of whom have had boil water advisories for 25 years. On some reserves, people can’t even use the water for bathing or washing dishes, it is so contaminated. This is unacceptable.

“Reconciliation is dead,” First Nations are saying. This has gone far beyond the issue of the pipeline. The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the rights of indigenous people to their land, stating they hold title and cannot be removed from it. The United Nations has told Canada to stop the pipeline, which will cause irreparable harm to indigenous peoples’ land, rights, and way of life.

First Nations are tired of oppression, of government-backed corporations taking resources from the land they have left. They wish to be regarded as the sovereign nations they are, and to make their own decisions about their traditional territories.

The hereditary chiefs remain willing to talk to government, on a nation to nation basis, but only after RCMP have withdrawn from their territory. And traditionally, it behooves the government to go to talk to them, not demand the hereditary chiefs come to Ottawa.

An environmental assessment of the proposed pipeline has rejected the project.

It makes neither economic nor environmental sense. But capitalism only knows one way to proceed: money and jobs, they keep saying. Money and jobs. The few temporary jobs created by the project won’t benefit very many, and the proposed route across northern Canada and along the B.C. coast will put entire ecosystems at risk. The gas will be shipped to China. Also, the government actually has to subsidize these projects. It seems insane, to me, to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize corporations flogging our fossil fuel dependency, the way of death, rather than to develop clean energy alternatives, providing jobs for people across the country. We need to turn away from fossil fuels and replace them with clean energy projects.

What isn’t being said on the news is that the hereditary chiefs offered an alternate route to GasLink, away from the river, but the company rejected it.

In an unexpected bit of good news in February, another giant, Teck, withdrew plans to expand the oil sands in Alberta. “Shareholders have little interest in investing money in a sunset industry,” they said. Light is beginning to dawn.

“The government only understands the language of money,” said one land defender. “So we are shutting down their avenues of commerce.” It definitely got everyone’s attention.

Civil disobedience is how we saved the old growth forests of Clayoquot Sound in 1993. When all other avenues fail, civil disobedience is what we have left. Our voices, in large numbers, have impact.

I spoke to a young woman yesterday who gave me hope. She said this is the shift we have been waiting for. It is a time of turmoil, unpleasant to live through, as the old systems are no longer working and are breaking down. In the upheaval, something new is being birthed. Never has support for and solidarity with the first peoples of this land been so strong. The environmental crisis has finally gone mainstream, and is spoken of daily on the news.

We have the knowledge, the science and the technology to make the leap away from fossil fuels and the ways of death of the past, to new clean energy sources and towards the healing and restoration of the land and people. The time is now to vote out leaders who do not hold visions of a clean and livable earth. It is time to join hands and voices across the land to insist on respect: for First Nations, and for the earth herself, who has given herself nearly to the point of extinction, and who is crying out through all of her systems and creatures for our help and healing.

The indigenous people of this land have lived on Turtle Island in harmony for thousands of years. It only took us a couple of hundred years to cause so much destruction. We can learn from their leadership, and stand in solidarity with them to protect Mother Earth. We must.

Indigenous elders say we humans must walk lightly on the earth, for we are treading on the faces (and the futures) of our children. Let’s envision the world we want, and add our energies to the shift happening across this land – and this planet.

FOR YOUR CHALLENGE:

Let’s beat the drums of change. Write whatever you are inspired to write by this situation or information, or about the need for social justice, especially for indigenous people, world-wide.

Or you might like to look back at the indigenous world, pre-contact. Or re-vision a future where non-indigenous folk have learned from the people of the land how to live on and with Mother Earth in a respectful sustainable way.

The Nuu-chah-nulth people, where I live on the West Coast of Canada, have no word for the wild world. “The only word for wilderness is Home” they say.

The challenge is wide open for you to write whatever comes. I look forward to reading your thoughts, in prose or poetry.

—All My Relations, Sherry

Update:

Since the time of writing, provincial and national government officials finally travelled up north to meet with Wet’suwet’en Chiefs. Word is Prime Minister Trudeau and B.C. Premier John Horgan will become involved after the preliminary talks. News anchors note “There is a fundamental shift in tone in the dialogues.” Perhaps Canada is finally recognizing they are dealing with sovereign nations, and accord them the measure of respect of any other governing body. We live in hope.

Work is paused on the GasLink pipeline, while talks continue. We have learned one valuable fact: in large numbers, united, we can bring the country to a halt and impact government. Good to know. Many of those joining the protest were taking a stand for the environment, as well as supporting the Wet’suwet’en people.

On Sunday, government officials left the north, saying they and Wet’suwet’en elected representatives have reached a proposed preliminary agreement with regard to Wet’suwet’en rights and title to their territory (rights that already had been established). This proposal will now be taken to the hereditary chiefs, and to the various clan houses for input.

But spokesperson for the Gidimt’en camp, Molly Wickham, says the agreement does not address the presence of GasLink and RCMP occupation of their territory, which is still a problem. And the hereditary chiefs continue to oppose the pipeline.

Solidarity protests continue.