Montreal Serai

               Unpaved paths have been part of human activity for at least 12,000 years, and the histories of roads and cities are deeply linked. Together with waterways, rutways or tracked-roads ( ancient “railways”) were  key arteries for commerce and social interaction in the ancient world, as well as for warfare within and between human settlements. The port city of Ur on the Lower Euphrates river in Sumeria (now Iraq) was where the first stone paved streets were recorded some 4,000 years ago. Two millennia later, during the Bronze Age, Ur was the birthplace of the biblical Abraham who spread Monotheistic traditions far and wide via the roads system. At that time, indeed, all roads led to Ur…

               Toll roads, too, have an ancient history, dating at least from the 7^th century B.C. with the construction of the Susa-Babylon highway. Shortly after, the Persian Empire became famous for its Royal Road Highway (500 B.C.), which the Roman Empire integrated in its transport network, while also constructing an additional 53,000 miles of bricked roads. Foreshadowing the predominance of oil as a fuel in the modern period, black top or tar-based roads began to appear in the 8^th century AD during the expansion of the Arab empire.  Although water transportation was cheaper and easier, road building soon spread throughout the Mediterranean basin and in Asia, mainly for military reasons connected to the need to maintain hegemony by transporting armies and waging war.

               The modern story of transport continues, in a strange way, the tale of the imperial highway.  It also involves the age-old question of state subsidies – Which mode of transport do they favor? Where do they go? Are they visible or invisible?  How many Americans have heard of the United States Highway Trust Fund? That is a crucial cash repository, a “dedicated trust fund,” created by legislators in 1956 to finance the U.S. Interstate Highway System, with money raised indirectly by excise taxes and a federal fuel tax of 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel fuel. This levy is a consumption tax built upon circular, morbid logic: burn petroleum, to drive cars, to finance highways, to service cars, to burn petroleum.

               Perhaps it is not surprising that limited access highways first opened in the 1920s in Germany. When the Nazis took over, they pressed ahead and expanded the Autobahn. Then, in the post World War II era, the U.S. Interstate Highway System was created under the auspices of the military industrial complex and in the name of security and defence.

               By the 1950s, North American governments were stressing oil, highways and cars to the detriment of more efficient, less disruptive electric traction systems (streetcars/tramways/interurbans), which in the past had often been privately owned, as they were in Montreal 100 years ago. And, of course, the highway mania helped kill railroads, with more than 100,000 miles of railroad disappearing in the U.S.

               Many extensive streetcar systems in North America were eventually replaced by plodding diesel buses, and roads called “parkways” were made popular by the urban planner and “master builder” Robert Moses whose ideas contributed to the destruction of rail infrastructure, including the famous Third Avenue Elevated subway in New York City – the “El” as it was known.

               Of course, the petroleum and oil industries profited greatly. In The Streetcar Conspiracy, Bradford Snell describes how “General Motors deliberately destroyed public transit.” Snell argues, as do many others, that the intent in the post-war period was to encourage the growth of the single occupancy vehicle and sow the seeds of the ultimate demise of half of America’s railway lines by the 1990s. In truth, it is a miracle that there are any railroads left, and it is only because of the intrinsic efficiency of rail that it has been able to eke out an existence. A long-haul freight train is at least 3 times more efficient than a truck. This over-riding fact has been obscured and hidden from the tax-paying public in order to promote two major industries: big oil and the automobile manufacturers.

               But now a crunch is coming. For nearly a century, most roads and highways throughout the Western world have been nationalized and “socialized,” though the public is barely aware of this fact. Furthermore, the “dedicated trusts” in the United States are not segregated from general government funds and it is apparent that the Highway/Transit Trust Fund is running out of money. So massive state subsidies now flow to the highway system.  A Pew study states that American motorists pay only about 50% of the costs for constructing and maintaining highways and roads. The Texas Department of Transportation says that the figure is even lower: about 20% of costs financed by users. Furthermore, new energy-efficient vehicles, and crumbling infrastructure, mean that tax inflow is falling ever further behind and  not keeping pace with needs. Chants for electronic tolling and distance charging are becoming louder every day. Yet railroads have been abandoned, left, right, and center. How often has a road been abandoned?

               Freedom is falsely equated with the automobile even though it is the source, often, of self-destructive dependence. Public policy driven by the car has entailed pollution, global climate change, huge ecological footprints, loss of biodiversity, and individual costs incurred to operate “personal transportation.” The British Petroleum volcano along the Gulf Coast is a raging symbol of catastrophe for wildlife, for the fishery, coastal marshes, biodiversity, and the local economy. This is the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island of the oil industry, and this tragedy is intimately connected to the car culture which demands a steady, “secure” supply of petrol.   Although U.S. politicians are criticizing BP, and the government is reeling from the consequences of decades long de-regulation, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are suggesting that the “drill baby, drill!” offshore exploration policy be reversed. It is a race to the bottom. We privatize the profits and socialize the costs!

               Notwithstanding all the hype, talk, and dire warnings of the negative externalities associated with our transportation system, we have not advanced very far in the last 30 years. Since the Reagan Revolution, and his administration’s cancellation of Jimmy Carter’s National Energy Program for alternative sources, North America has stagnated. Even centrist and left-of-centre parties are very sensitive to the needs of the motorist and the price of fuel,  otherwise they end paying their own big price at the polls. Former Liberal leader Stephane Dion lost a Canadian federal election because he wanted a carbon tax to confront climate change. He was villified by the opposition, while even his own party members only went along half-heartedly.  

                Here in Quebec and Montreal the transportation impasse is evident and the sprawl agenda is incessant.  The Quebec government is driving exurbanization by the financing of  new shovel-ready infrastructure like roads, highways, schools, daycare facilities in the far-flung extremities of metropolitan Montreal. When Quebec wants to build a highway it does not ask municipalities to pay for it, but it forces the same municipalities to share the capital costs for transit. The old model is stale, yet it is very seductive and is very much in vogue at the Quebec Ministry of Transport.

            Clearly, we must change. A reliable, flexible, extensive public transit alternative to counter the post-World-War II dispensation for the highway is needed as a solution. And no matter what is said by political leaders, provincially or federally, the current reality will not change unless mass transit is made to be frequent and comfortable, as well as being integrated with all other modes of transport in order to have smooth and consistent transfers from one mode to another. A return to rail, and to water crafts, fairer costing of transport, and sustainable patterns of urban living are all essential ingredients. Granted this type of policy shift is difficult to accomplish politically, but it is necessary if we seriously wish to counter our civilization’s absurd addiction to oil and the automobile.

                        Possible Solutions To The Transportation Crisis

1. Change The Basic Reality

               The present reality is a vicious circle: more highways and roads, equal more cars, and even more gridlock. By-passes/circumferential highways, or beltways, do not solve congestion problems. They are just band-aid and patchwork deferments, similar to heart by-pass surgery, a reprieve and a hinderance to true cure. Wisconsin’s Secretary of transportation, Frank Basalucchi, put the case clearly for the U.S., and the same judgement applies to Canada:  “A solution to the nation’s congested transportation system must be multi-modal” (Railfan and Railroad, Oct. 2006).

2. Government Intervention and Financing is Needed to Create a Level Field for Transportation.

               At the present time, government-funded roads represent a subsidy to truckers, car companies, paving and construction concerns, and especially to developers. State funding must be re-directed from heavily subsidized roads and airways to fund and encourage more mass transit, rail, bicycles, ferries, ships, waterways, and other environmentally friendly and less invasive alternatives.

3. Bring Railways Up To A State of Good Repair.  The Bleeding and Erosion of Railways Must Stop

            A. Property tax concessions, a regional and cross-country concern,  should come from the province or state. Stop downloading these costs to municipalities.

            B.  Continued funding of rail renewal programs for short-line operators is essential.

            C. Introduction of a Federal rail infrastructure tax credit to encourage new lines and discourage neglect and abandonment.  Negligent railway management must become responsible and alert. Common carrier passenger or freight railway service must be in good repair. Better track maintenance increases the possibility of passenger rail.

            D. Create a roll on/roll off railway of the Rolling Highways type, with intermodal nodes or terminals to divert truck and container traffic onto trains.

            E. Rail-banking or conservation of rights-of-way is key if there is to be any passenger service on many threatened lines in the future.

4. Develop dedicated, reserved, and separated light rail/ high frequency passenger lines and streetcars

               Surface, electric, light rail metro lines with good service levels are efficient and feasible. Paris’ surface RER system and New York City’s subway and suburban train network show what is possible and are superior to buses.

5. Encourage Transit-oriented Developments, Both Residential and Commercial, To Promote Transit Use

               Build new communities by integrating them with and along transit corridors to reinforce the improvement of commuter railways. Discourage short-haul car use. Alleviate pressure to develop outwards.

6. Develop Sustainable Living Patterns

               Locate more goods, services, and food sources next to residential developments and work places. Promote locally based food production and less synthetically produced foods. Keep people close to work and amenities with bicycle access ways, walking paths, and telecommuting to replace needles car trips.  For a few brave souls – off-grid homesteading outside city centres.

7. Conservation of Prime Farmland With Local Sourcing of Food Supply

               The price of food has been held artificially down since the early 20^th century. Now, however, it is clear that current methods of food production require huge quantities of oil and the food supply will be under intense pressure in the near to mid-term. We assume that our current array of techniques is permanent – delivery by 3-day Warehouse-On-Wheels/ Just-in-Time Delivery, petro-chemical fertilizers, pesticides, redundantly mechanised tools. But trade routes can change on a dime because of economic distress, natural disaster, spread of disease, political uncertainty, and war. In the meantime, Detroit – the former car manufacturing capital of the world – has initiated the Urban Agriculture and Community Garden Programmes on vast stretches of vacant and derelict industrial land to make way for farms and natural spaces. Flint, Michigan, Michael Moore’s home town, is following Detroit’s lead. So should the rest of us.

8. Stop Addiction To Destructive and Dangerous Energy Sources – Oil, Coal, and Nuclear Energy

               Notwithstanding the current economic slowdown, the peak oil era is approaching sooner rather than later,  with declining production and reserves supplying increasing demand.  There is an immediate need for alternative energy sources to drive the economy and its handmaiden: transportation.

            The Winds of Change

            Humankind now faces massive and concurrent existential struggles. The “Petromotive” economy is intimately linked with the worldwide race to urbanize at all costs and with the political struggle in the Middle East. Cataclysmic events may be inevitable if we do not change our ways, and both as individuals and as a global civilization we must overcome major obstacles if we are to avoid entropy. We are at one of those critical junctions in the river of time when we have to decide which path to take. Action to remedy this situation requires – a leap of faith.

With apologies to Bill Clinton and Jean Charest

      
      The word is in: we are now deep into the world’s Sixth Great Extinction. Over the 543 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, that vast period in which life made itself abundantly evident in the fossil record, there have previously been five events that have effected an enormous change in the composition of life on Earth.

       The best known of these, the asteroid collision that brought down the terrestrial dinosaurs 65 million years ago, is as rooted in our imaginations as a science fiction thriller. It has been estimated that up to 50% of animal species were extinguished at that time

       The most serious, the Permian extinction of 250 millions years ago, wiped out 96% of marine species and  over 70% of land vertebrates. It is the only known mass extinction of insects, which are critical today in the proper functioning of ecosystems (yet ever targeted in our economic cross-hairs).

       In the end, the extinction we face now may well rank up there with those two, if there is anyone left to do the ranking.

       The causes of the other three of these extraordinary transformations are the subjects of considerable scientific debate, even while paleontologists work to fill in the details. Severe glaciation, super-volcanism, bolide or “large body” impacts, gamma ray bursts from supernovas, destabilized methane hydrates (clathrates) — all factor among the plausible explanations for what seems on the face of it implausible: the eradication of vast swathes of life across our planet. That these events could possibly have taken place in the distant past, whether due to the reasons hypothesized or to others not yet imagined, is in itself incredible. That human activities could be responsible for something of comparable scale is in the minds of most members of the public, and the politicians they elect, inconceivable.

       And yet the great global winking out of life, at the hands of mankind, is forcing itself into consciousness. It is real and it will impose itself upon us, in the years ahead, as a waking nightmare.

       From the beginnings of the environmental movement nearly a half century ago, we have been bombarded with apocalyptic visions of what might become of us, our planet and the civilization we believe sustains us. Rooted deeply in our cold war preoccupations was a fear of a different sort of global heating than what dominates our thinking now, a thermo-nuclear cataclysm of our own making. It was assumed to be  a consequence far more dreadful than any that might have emerged from the global hot-war that preceded it. Then, there came Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to layer upon that a whole new problem to harrow ourselves with, a horrific vision made manifest in peregrine falcons, brown pelicans and other sensitive wildlife being threatened with oblivion. Atomic and chemical onslaughts, potential and real, presented us with the prospects of a world emptied of life as we knew it, including our own. The civilized world tried to fit these matters into its political social and economic reckoning. Then, as now, admonition was met with denial. “We are not that powerful. Nature is resourceful and always bounces back.”

       With the older threats lingering in the background, we moved on to new ones: phosphates and pollution of lakes, rivers and seas; acid rain and the destruction of lakes and forests; nuclear power plant meltdowns, aka the China Syndrome; depletion of the protective ozone layer by CFCs and harmful exposure to ultraviolet radiation; overexploitation and contamination of freshwater sources; soil erosion and desertification; and, of course, Climate Change.

       Always there has been the reassurance given that “With a bit of ingenuity, and a percentage point taken off the top of GDP, we can work the fixes needed.”

       There has been, forever, it seems, the layering of new dangers upon old and the eliciting of fears that with time appear unfounded. We are still here, of course, and we have the comforting reassurances from such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of  The Skeptical Environmentalist, that life has never been longer, nor healthier, nor more prosperous than it is right now. We eat a rich variety of foods brought from the four corners of the planet, drive the latest model cars, use the latest iGadgets and fly to some exotic holiday location, all the while paying down the mortgage and those credit card balances. Yes, there are the periodic global financial blips, but they have proved to be manageable and transitory. The environmental “crises” will prove the same. Technology and human ingenuity will always step forward to bail us out. What’s to worry?

       Planetary morbidity, that’s what. And each of the eponymous crises contributes, in its own way, to the regression. The real significance of each  lies in how they impact the biosphere. It is a far from comprehensive listing.

       Since the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens, and especially since the rise of our civilization after the last ice age, mankind has sought willfully to have dominion, as a divinely sanctioned birthright, “over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.” The more we humans have succeeded in transforming the globe to our own ends, the more we have felt justified in doing so. And so today, even in extremis, we continue to believe that we ought “be fruitful and multiply.” The Earth remains, in our thinking, ours to subdue, its riches ours for the taking.  There are very few pristine places left on Earth, virtually nowhere to escape the   dreadful spoor of our kind. Our ecological footprint is enormous and growing and jeopardizes the economic resource bases of all other living things (see www.rprogress.org/ecological_footprint/about_ecological_footprint.htm) — except, of course those whose needs are compatible with our own and happily keep our company, notably Norway rats, fast-food gulls, houseflies and dandelions. Economic growth still dominates our present mindset, the words repeated mantra-like by our political, corporate and financial pundits. Yet, take note, unconstrained growth is what characterizes cancer, which untreated, as we know, is terminal.

       Our association with species loss is not something recent, rather something that appears to have been ongoing since we migrated out of Africa 100,000 years ago. The paleontological record is replete with the extinctions of many extraordinary species concurrent with our progress across the planet. Certainly, periodic climate change could factor in as a major stressor for large animal species, or megafauna, through that timespan, but there is more than a reasonable likelihood that humans were present to push animal populations past the tipping point into extinction. We entered Europe, Asia and from there Australia and the “New World” as an alien species with which indigenous species were ill-equipped to cope. As E.O. Wilson writes in The Future of Life:

“Like the rats, pigs, and assorted diseases they carried with them, they [human beings] met few co-evolved prey and enemies. Adapting to the new environments by culture at a rate thousands of times faster than possible with genes alone, they outpaced any defense that the resident biotas could raise.”

So, then, the great slaughter, of creatures ill-prepared to cope with us interlopers, began. The cave paintings at Lascaux and other sites in France and Spain reveal our hunters’ fascination with such game as aurochs (precursors of domestic cattle), bison, mammoths, horses, lions, hyenas, cave bears and other large animals now long since gone from the wild. Modern man’s arrivals in Australia, New Zealand, North and South America all appear as smoking guns in the case for megafauna exterminations in those places. Our history, going back to the exit from our African cradle, is filled with unhappy examples of our rapacity, behaviour that continues unabated even now in 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity.

       Says Wilson “Among the lessons learned is that the decline of any particular species rarely has a single cause. Typically, multiple forces entrained by human activity reinforce one another and either simultaneously or in sequence force the species down.” Wilson, and other conservation biologists, looking to represent the discrete forces at work that reduce the diversity of species and ecological systems, use the acronym HIPPO which stands in for: Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Population and Overharvesting. Wilson posits that these forces, other than human population growth, descend in order of importance in the same sequence as the letters HIPPO, with Habitat Destruction having the most devastating effect. He claims that, in the time of our primeval ancestors, the sequence would be the reverse, OPPIH, with overharvesting being the main culprit.

       The troubling mechanics of  habitat destruction are summed up best in the area-species principle. Simply put, a 90 percent reduction in habitat area allows half of the species to hang on while the other half is eliminated. We might be beguiled by the tenacity of half the species to cling on while most of their habitat is gone, but the loss of the last ten percent, of course, takes all the species with it. Clearly the species losses at the beginning of this accelerative process are not as severe as they are towards the end. As Wilson points out, “The clearcutting of a remnant patch of mountain rainforest can eliminate scores of species in one stroke.” And he reminds us that, globally, the number of habitat fragments at ten percent or less of their original extent is growing rapidly.

       If the depredations of invasive species are given second billing, they surely can’t be far from the top in the severity of their impacts. Consider well that the scale of destruction just mentioned has been the handiwork of the preeminent invasive species — us. The devastation we wreak derives from “intelligent” choice, and if we can see the light in time, we might wisely choose to mitigate our impacts. By avoiding the most sensitive ecosystems remaining, while rehabilitating those we have savaged, we might yet save a significant proportion of the species and habitats we have brought to the brink. However, we, the ultimate invasive, will bear witness, hour by hour and day by day as species losses continue to mount. And the passing of many species will go unknown.

       While we humans have uniquely sensitive, though far from infallible, powers of prognostication, not so the many alien kind we have drawn in our wake to the World’s further reaches. The species we have introduced to new frontiers, from the great landmasses to the tiniest islands and from the great oceans to inland seas and rivers, number in their inestimable thousands. Even though introduced species compete for space and resources with native ones, most are relatively benign and may coexist in peace. But the ecological record is replete with horror stories of invasives that have proliferated wildly and driven indigenous species into extinction.

       Problematic species that we have, sometimes purposefully and other times unwittingly, relocated to new homes simply obey the directives written into their genomes. They are in this respect innocent — something to which we cannot make claim. Yet they nonetheless work their harm by aggressively out-competing native species for food and habitat or by preying upon them. They may also be major transmitters of deadly diseases. On all counts, the ship rat, which stowed away in the holds of our ships, qualifies. Its impact on sensitive ecosystems worldwide, and particularly on small islands with unique flora and fauna, has been extreme. Feral dogs and cats, our erstwhile companions, also hunt to devastating effect on birds and mammals. Garlic mustard and common buckthorn are two common problematic invasives, among others, in Quebec, and other parts of North America, that have the power to transform forest ecosystems by supplanting native plants and denying food for forest animals to which they are unpalatable. Both are allelopathic, which means they release chemicals to the soil that discourage the germination and growth of native competitors. Proliferation of aggressive organisms of any kind puts in train an inexorable process of ecological simplification, that will run its course in its own time. It takes on a life of its own, its imperative to lead, not follow, until it is done.

       Pollution is something that human kind is particularly good at. Our ingenuity has allowed us to create synthetic compounds that have now dispersed themselves pole to pole and throughout the Earth’s biomes. We have only to consider the chlorofluorocarbon crisis of the early 1980s that thinned out, and opened up two vast polar holes in, the atmospheric ozone layer that shields all life from the deadly menace of ultraviolet exposure. Our purposeful chemical assault on insects and other “pests” has had many unanticipated and counterproductive consequences. Here, with Rachel Carson’s indictment of pesticides 48 years ago, was the genesis of the environmental movement. But the toxic war on nature continues. A modern case in point — Dr. Tyrone Hayes’ revelations about the hormonal impacts of  atrazine, an herbicide of choice, on frogs. He is a target of the corporate denial machine just as Carson had been. Add to this that our artificial world of throwaway plastics has become a planet-wide death machine.

       As the human population continues to burgeon, so, too, will our impacts magnify. By mid-century we will add 2 billion people to our current population approaching 7 billion, all with rising expectations. Our numbers now are approaching 1000 times what they were at the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago.

       A single biome, the oceans, illustrates how desperately impoverished we can render the natural systems that sustain us, through overharvesting. Since the turn of the twentieth century, humanity has depleted fisheries stocks by up to a staggering 90%. And our rising population will be vying to eat the rest. Top of the food chain predators such as oceanic white tip sharks are hunted for their fins while the rest of the animal is dumped back into the sea. Their numbers, once estimated to be the greatest among sharks, have been decimated by 70% during the last four decades, and they are now listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IUCN, Red List as Vulnerable. Other sharks also face precipitous declines. It is predicted that breeding populations of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, a top predator and favourite in Japanese sushi restaurants, will be extinct by 2012. Jellyfish are now rising in rank to that of dominant predator in many seas as overfishing eliminates competitors. The last time they occupied this niche uncontested was  half a billion years ago. Meanwhile, small lower food chain species like menhaiden are vacuumed up by factory ships to be used as pet food and fertilizer.

       The web of relationships among living things within is complex and dynamic. Species within webs exercise, at once, mutual control and support, all the while undergoing evolutionary renewal and submission to the normal rate of extinction. It would appear that species loss in the intimately woven fabric of the biosphere has accelerated alarmingly to 1,000 to 10,000 times normal, according to the IUCN, in recent decades. The plight of the remarkable migratory shore bird, the red knot, pushed overnight to the edge of oblivion, illustrates brilliantly how fragile the links of interdependency among species can be.

       James Lovelock speaks about the close-coupling of the biosphere with the lithosphere, Earth’s rocky crust; with the hydrosphere, that fills the abyss and washes over and through the land; and with the atmosphere, the gaseous envelope that has most recently consumed our attentions. This vital, bio-physical entity Lovelock, a serious scientist and no New Age hippy, has lovingly dubbed Gaia, after the Greek Earth Mother.

       He reminds us that through 3 to 4 billion years she has given rise to all the life forms we now know. That she, at each stage of her maturation, tailored the atmosphere to her liking. She has managed the land and the waters and the air to optimize the flourishing of increasingly diverse life, never richer than it has been now. She has had sufficient vigour to bring life back from the most severe of deadly insults, restoring and maintaining temperatures within life’s comfort zone.

       But now Gaia is deathly ill. It is to her that we must direct our attentions. The climate change, over which we now fret, is both symptom and driver of  the morbidity. The causative pathogen is us, and if we wish to survive the fate we are beginning to foresee, then we must turn our focus away from us and towards the patient. As in the old chestnut, if it hurts, we must stop doing it.

       We must seek to reduce the fever of global warming where we can — just listen to the pathogen talking —  but it must be Gaia herself who will effect the cure in the end. We must find ways to be her benign accomplice not her antagonist. First up, we must put the C for Climate Change in its proper place at the end of the HIPPO acronym. This may have some resonance, producing after all the first two sounds in the word hypocrisy, a not unknown quantity in our dealings, political and economic. Take note Bill, Jean and others.

       In his recent book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben records that ecological economists have assigned ecosystem services a “worth” of $33 trillion per annum, far larger than that of the entire human economy. In truth, the value of the biosphere is inestimable, even more so than that of human life itself. After all it is Gaia that got us here. It’s time we gave her some generous payback and the loving care she deserves.

       I will give the last word to another Earth mother, an admonition for an unrepentant future:

“No witch craft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”  

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.

    When I was a boy, my parents often reminded me of the reality of the working class. Its work, the big tasks it accomplished from day to day. Its trade-union action.     And its yearning for dignity.

     For my parents, this yearning of working people for dignity was what the trade-union movement was all about.

     They weren’t all that clearly from the working class themselves.  My mother’s father was a farmer and a Conservative Party organizer in the town of Saint Andrews, in Manitoba. My father’s father had been an administrator of a department store in Montreal, and later he wrote essays and political reportage.

     But in the 1930s, my father and mother, Ewart and Charlotte, were at McGill, and mentalities were changing.  Both of them were captured by the socialist ideas of James Shaver Woodsworth,  the Methodist preacher  become labour organizer in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.   They were democratic socialists, hence, not Communists.  They courted in this atmosphere.  They married in the church of another progressive preacher  (though they’d both moved from being Protestants to being atheists), and settled in Ottawa.    My Dad had found a job as an economist in Canada’s Ministry of Agriculture.

     Because of this, the philosophy of Karl Marx was of only marginal interest to them.  The Soviet Union, also, was not at the centre of their ideas.  Tommy Douglas and  his government in Saskatchewan was an experiment which interested them more.

     My mother, during the Cold War, was for a greater meeting of Communist and democratic minds.  She had some sympathy for Russia.  “In the War, they were our allies,”  she would tell my brother Ian and me.  “You know, back then the American magazines were full of praise for them.”  This willingness to see the Soviets as humans, aiming for some sort of social utopia, she’d have liked to see continue into the Atomic era.  My father was more inclined to put down the dictatorial aspect of Communism.  “No use trying to find excuses for Joe Stalin,”  he’d say.

       The word proletariat was not used by them.  It was the name for the working class among Marxists.  But Ewart and Charlotte preferred:   “workers” . . .   “working people” . . .  “blue collar.”  They were Canadian socialists, “CCFers”; then, when their party changed and broadened, followers of the New Democrats.  The idea was that workers meant mostly manual workers.  They both felt, though, that they themselves were workers, and the term should apply to most of the people in society.  Everyone but big businessmen.  Small business they saw mostly as people of small means fooled into supporting big business.

     And so, my own political education could serve to show how, well beyond the ranks of Marxists, the better part of the of the Twentieth-Century push for social change saw the working class as the entity it was defending.

      This feeling spread beyond cultural boundaries, too.  For example, my parents read the novels of Morley Callaghan, the Toronto writer of somewhat reluctantly progressive views.  Callaghan frequently made working men and working women his heroes –  It’s  Never Over  would be an example — and showed thereby, I would say, that he saw workers as central to an intellectual’s concerns in his century.  They also followed the work of John Steinbeck in the United States.  Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men:  these iconic books had working people at their centre, and a broad feeling that the fate of working people was the fate of the world.  Their breakthrough to freedom would be humanity’s breakthrough to freedom.

     In Europe, André Malraux was a novelist they admired.  He too was a socialist in the Thirties, and placed Spanish workers at the centre of L’Espoir, as he had placed Chinese workers at the centre of La Condition humaine.  And Ewart and Charlotte, when they looked across the inner cultural boundary of Canada, to French-Canadian literature, found Gratien Gélinas, with his worker heroes Fridolin,  Tit-Coq and Bousille.

     In the century we’re in now, it’s become harder to see the working class as the entity to defend and idealize.  It’s hard to see that the rise of the working class will, in itself, create a world of social equality and humane values.  Workers’ rights continue to be an important part of a well-organized society with justice on its mind.  But they’re a part, not the whole.  Workers are one group who can change things, they’re not the group.

     There are several reasons for this. Several ways of seeing it.

     One is the pulling apart of the idea of organized labour from the idea of labour.  As unions have settled in and become part of society, they’ve improved the lot of their members, and they’ve recruited people of middle-class work traditions, like government employees. They’ve remained only partially present in the working class.  The poorest, most fragile workers have tended not to join the unionized sector.  So unionized labour still strives to have socialist values, but it speaks more and more for a middle-level part of the population.  Hard for it to continue to speak for the poor.

     The poor are spoken for more by social movements of a new type, community movements, consumers’ leagues, welfare fronts, prisoners’ defence committees.  The idea of the proletariat as one big bloc has been knocked out by this new layout of forces.

     The rise of women’s consciousness has shaken the proletarian idea up, too.   Women’s struggles are central to the social justice movement of today, and females are in all classes, not just the working class.

     The anti-racist idea has become a key element in social justice now.   This has happened because the most powerful capitalist nation, the United States, had a harsh colour bar. The Black and Amerindian peoples’ fights against this bar inspired the Left of every country in the world.  It happened, too, because the African and Asian continents fought white colonialism in the mid-Twentieth Century, most famously in South Africa.  This put the cause of black and brown people in the place where the cause of working people had been in Karl Marx’s time.

     Most of all, the awakening of humanity to nature, to its fragility, to the threat that human technology poses, has made the proletariat no longer the centre of social justice.  But only one of its elements.  I feel that the outlook of Karl Marx did not stress man’s co-operation with nature.  It much more stressed man’s conquest of nature.  When, as a young man in the Sixties, I read the Communist Manifesto, one of the proposals that most intrigued me was “the disappearance of the distinction between city and country.”   I believe I imagined grassy and green cities, cottages in the city.  But now I reflect anew on the question:  Is it probable that Marx wanted this to take place by the invasion of wheatfields and meadows into cityscapes?  It seems to me much more likely that he was envisioning the settlement of humans everywhere on the planet.  As a humanist he did not see this as bad, as a danger, as an overloading of nature’s capacity.  He saw it as an achievement of humanity, which would be done gently and wisely.  The conquest of nature was seen through the humanist tradition he came out of.  The tradition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, with its pages of diagrams of techniques and machinery.  Nature, in this view, was not asked to answer or to criticize humanity’s plans:  Humanity knew best, humanity was in charge.  Humanity imagined itself as outside nature, making use of nature.  And we’ve seen the Communist countries, inspired by Marx, battering nature with heavy industry and war production even more than the capitalist nations.  We’ve sometimes seen unions of industrial workers in the West reject ecological restraints on the industries they work in.  In this kind of tradition, the green world has no voice.

     In Upton Sinclair’s novel from the early days of industrialism, The Jungle (1906), the meat packers of Chicago, in their quest for profit, pollute the meat they sell and the environment around their factories.  Sinclair is a socialist humanist, and he implies (though he does not say it dogmatically) that the exploited workers, once freed and placed in control, would know how to be natural-food lovers and stewards of the environment.  (Over-optimism, perhaps? And yet people do have the capacity to be food-lovers and stewards, so his optimism could be included and re-cycled in a more nature-oriented vision.)  He uses a nature image — the jungle — as the image not of a healthy planet, but of the destructive capitalist city.   Yet Sinclair and other early socialists can sometimes be seen to be working through to a larger vision in which nature is valued.

      All these things have led to a new generation of social justice fighters, those who emerged in Chiapas in the 1990s, in Seattle at the turn of the century, and in my city of Quebec at the Sommet des Amériques, 2001. This new generation often chooses another reality than the working class as the reality it is going into battle for. 

         I don’t feel, though, that they are rejecting a century of battles for the working class.  They are trying to extend the philosophy of social justice, of community, to include human AND non-human nature.  They are trying to form a larger common front than the common fronts built by labour in the 1970s.  This front would be the alliance of humans and non-human nature within the biosphere. The working class is part of the biosphere.  The aim is for it to meet the other parts.

         In this vision, heard more and more in alter-mondialiste demonstrations, the biosphere has, in a sense, become the new proletariat.  It is the larger unity to which people feel they belong.  It is the unity which they’d like to see triumph.

     Il y a quelque chose que j’ai envie de dire ici, et j’ai envie de le dire en français.  Les  femmes et les hommes qui ont travaillé pour changer le monde ont toujours tiré plaisir du fait de savoir pour qui ils combattaient.  Ceux du vingtième siècle qui ont senti qu’ils faisaient partie des travailleurs, qu’ils défendaient les travailleurs, ont tiré une grande satisfaction de cela, et je pense que ça fait partie de l’être humain de ressentir cette solidarité.  Le même plaisir va s’attacher au sentiment de combattre pour la biosphère — pour la terre et pour tous les plantes et animaux qui y habitent, et pour nous-mêmes en même temps.  Et ce plaisir prend sa racine dans l’enfance de chacun, il me semble.  Je me souviens de mes premiers regards  jetés vers la cour en arrière de notre maison, à Ottawa.  Des arbres que j’ai appris à aimer, de l’herbe où j’aimais m’étendre, de la patinoire que mon père arrosait pour nous en hiver.  Je me souviens des premiers voyages de camping avec mes cousins, autour du Lac Bevan, dans les Laurentides.  Je me souviens d’avoir lavé ma cantine dans un ruisseau, sans savon, frottant du sable contre le métal.  La planète est chère pour moi, et elle  était déjà chère avant que je réfléchisse à sa place dans mes idées politiques.  Nous sommes des milliards à avoir appris à aimer la terre de cette façon, je pense, au début de notre vie.  Il est tout naturel d’en faire la chose pour laquelle on se bat, dans la phase de la gauche mondiale qui s’en vient.

     What might be the implications of this?

     First let’s try to understand how this change compares to the changes by which the working class first came to be the centre of social justice.  In Marx’s vision, and broader than that, in the Twentieth Century’s vision.

     In the age of the Encyclopédistes, the idea of freeing humanity takes hold.  Freeing it from kings and tyrants, freeing it to be its own sovereign.  Louis the 16th dies, the French Republic is born.  It defines its keynotes as Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité.

     Very soon it becomes clear that though poor people, working people, did the fighting to create this republic . . .it is rich people who are in control in the new society.  Capitalists, not sans-culottes, not workers, not the proletariat  (as Marx and Engels are beginning to call it).  In the French Republic, and other similar republican movements, the omission of economic aims from the charters of rights and freedoms makes it possible for big business to accept that the vote be given to ordinary people (women too, eventually).  They’ll buy and manipulate the vote. And they’ll keep their industries free of regulation by the governments the voters elect.  Thus they hoard huge power over daily life, and the enfranchisement of the working class then becomes a hollow form.  There’s no real liberté if you’re not rich.  There’s  no sense of fraternité for the poor, in the hearts of the rich.  There’s no égalité except on election day.  The factory system runs the show, the workers incline.  Owners are citizens;  workers are citizens.  But they are not equals.

     The biggest revolts for this French style of republicanism are in 1848, in Paris, Rome, Budapest . . . And 1848 is also the year the Communist Manifesto  points out this bourgeois monopoly on freedom.

     So the radical imagination looks for the excluded who were supposed to be included.  It discovers the working class, names it, listens to it, organizes it, hurls it against the bourgeoisie.  Workers set out to find their liberté, their fraternité, their égalité.  This quest is the theme of the years from 1900 to 2000.  The quest is both new and old:  new in the vocabulary brought to it by Saint-Simon, Robert Owen,  Marx,  Engels,  Jean Jaurès,  Rosa Luxemburg,  Bernard Shaw,  Gandhi,  Woodsworth,  Debs.  Old in that it continues the quest of the Encyclopédistes and the sans-culottes of the 1700s.

     Similarly, the green imagination of today is in search of the elements of the good life  that were left out in the libertarian utopias of the century just past.  It finds that it is most of all the non-human realities of nature that have been left out.  Other animals, other plants, inanimate forces that are very important, rocks, water, air, chemicals, molecules.  A vision is being forged in which humans share power with these, and do not try to occupy the whole space of the biosphere.

     And the question which opens up is: How will humans communicate with their non-human fellow-citizens of this new polity?  How will the needs of deer, fish, minerals, winds, bacteria, heat, cold, enter the discussion of the biosphere’s future?

      When radicals sought to bring working people into the discussion, it perhaps seemed as mysterious how they could possibly participate.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw unions, co-operatives, parties, committees, publications, schools, clubs, arts and letters, arts and crafts, spring up to make it possible.

     And the defenders of the biosphere are similarly listening for the voices of their fellow-citizens of nature, today.   The mystery is for the moment very great, but it is our mystery to sound out.  I hear David Suzuki speak of the sacred balance.  I hear of Theodore Roszack (he who developed the idea of the counter-culture) developing the idea that humans are nerve endings whose job is to sense the coming of danger to the planet they belong to.  We are in an early stage of this reflection.  We don’t have our Marx yet, we don’t have our Engels.                                                                                                                        

      Keep on.

      I keep my ears pricked for the voice of the new forces that must be part of tomorrow’s discussion, And new methods of living the biosphere.

     The mystery is great.  The seeming silence, the seeming non-discourse of non-human nature, is what makes some ecologists fear an éco-fascisme.  In this feared development, certain dominant humans would define what nature’s voice has said and will say, what nature’s needs are, and impose a way of life  on other humans “in defence of nature.”

     The fear is needed.  We are at an early phase of the reflection, we don’t have our Marx yet, we can’t yet picture the cause we want to fight in.  How is the Council of Nature to be formed?  Who’ll steer the Steering Committee of the Biosphere? 

     Many ecologists, of course, have seen that another source of inspiration is the Amerindian outlook in the Americas. This could be seen as a religion, or simply as an outlook.  But clearly, in it, humans converse with the cosmos. The First Nations in Canada converse with the universe as the nation-states in the UN building in Manhattan do not.

     The puzzle is very puzzling. But we all have to tackle it. Let’s share the discussions we have, the books we read, the actions we take.

 

I – Every Piece of Green on Earth

“Everything come up out of ground –language, people, emu,
kangaroo, grass. That’s Law.”

–Hobbles Danaiyarri, from Yarralin,

Northern Territory, Australia*

 

In September 2008, I was attending a conference on urban parks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sponsored in part by the The National Association for Olmsted Parks (Naop.org), a U.S. organization of which I am a member. Organizers had named the Pittsburgh meeting “Body and Soul: Parks and the Health of Great Cities.”

Temple of Hephaistos...Athens.

On the first day, clean-cut delegates assembled in a hotel convention room to hear the keynote speaker, Luis Garden Acosta, the 55-year-old founder of a community group in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called El Puente – “the bridge.” Acosta described how working on a small neighbourhood park in Brooklyn had created links between communities usually alienated from each other: Afro-Americans, Hassidim, white ethnic Americans, hipsters, Latinos.

Then, a surprise happened in the Pittsburgh room. Acosta said it was time to demand that access to nature be considered a human right, and he led his well-intentioned, English-speaking listeners in a chant: “El Pueblo Unido! Jamas Sera Vencido! The People United! Will Never Be Defeated!” As I stood by a side wall, I felt a thrill hearing a New York street accent among the tweedy crowd. And I thought with some sadness about the real origin of that slogan in another time and place where I had been reporting for radio — Santiago, Chile, 1970, the Allende election campaign, with hundreds of thousands from the Unidad Popular, marching along avenues chanting those same words…

What was Acosta doing exactly, this Heinz award winner for the Human Condition, rousing Pittsburgh folks circa 2009 in the pre-Obama land of George Bush?

Ziggurat...Sumer

He was using Brooklyn , Hispanic spin, I think, to stake an historical claim and encourage “park people” to see their work in a new light.

I managed to talk to Acosta the next day, as I pinned a microphone to a crisp white Cuban-style shirt he was wearing. Without missing a beat, he laid out his argument: “My mother always said that we are of the earth, the earth is in us” he began. “It’s an obvious truism that we grow from the planet. To the extent that we are connected to the earth, to that extent are we even more human. To the extent that we are not, I believe we are less human.”

Acosta drew a picture of what is essential to human beings, logically steering his thoughts to a larger project of reclamation: “If you take it from that perspective, you ought to be able to see that everyone needs a certain amount of sunlight, everyone needs a certain amount of open space, of green. The question is how much. And should some get way more and some way less?”

Then this convinced, and convincing, man proposed the notion of a required human rights minimum – not of food or work, but of green space: “Isn’t there a threshold to allow for the development of our human nature, a threshold that would absolutely protect us and enhance our well-being? If this is so, then obviously in the United States and in North America, in many places all over the world, there is an inequity – some people have the views, some people have green and open spaces, accessibility to nature, and so many, as the world becomes so urban, do not.”

Acosta looked straight into the small video camera: “And therefore,” he said, “I think we are really, as people who are committed to open spaces, really radicals because we are trying to get to the roots of our humanity, we’re trying to become revolutionaries, to reclaim our humanity, as every single force conspires to vie for every piece of green on earth.” [To see Acosta....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rikcdj5tg4o].

Later during that conference, in a wealthy house on a hill over-looking the evening lights of downtown Pittsburgh, Acosta sat on a couch talking. I wondered
in the comfort of that living-room whether it made sense to use radical language, from a Latin American tradition and shaped by a marxist perspective, to speak
to upper-crust conservationists.

And I decided that, yes, the language did make sense, and that the message of greenspace as a human right applies to everyone, everywhere, just as Acosta
said.

In fact, activists know that every type of green, open space – especially public or common land – is now the subject of increasing exploitation
and encroachment. Stretching all the way from small green places in city cores, to the coasts of national states, this endangered territory spans a broad continuum;
the public urban park, nature-parks, agricultural lands, park systems, state-owned or crown land, forests, uninhabited zones, coastlines. The backdrop of this
competition for “every piece of green on earth” is habitat reduction, not only for our fellow animals, but for us human beings as a species.

And, at the planetary level, all the signs agree: we are destroying the very eco-system which gives us life and playing with our own, self-induced extinction.

So, Acosta is right, a small park in Williamsburg is part of something deeper and profoundly radical: the separation of humanity from its own life-support
system, which is nature herself. First we become progressively “less human,” as Acosta indicates, then… we cease to be.

Edward O. Wilson, the entomologist, points out in his landmark book, The Diversity of Life, that by the end of the 20th century, 75% of the world’s original
forests had been destroyed, as have 50% of the rain forest in both temperate and tropical zones. Most of the grasslands, savannas and barrens of the U.S.
have been cut to 2% or less of their original cover.

Extinctions of species are probably running at rates 100 to 10,000 times the normal “background rate” (International Union for Conservation of
Nature; Wilson, data for rain forest), or even as high as 30,000 times, by some estimates (McGuire, Global Catastrophes). The “sixth great extinction”
now taking place simultaneously involves the existing bio-diversity–unparalleled in earth’s history–and unprecedented extinction rates caused by human
activity (see Evolutionary Biology, Douglas J. Futuyma). Little wonder that a number of scientists pay heed to the Astronomer Royal of the U.K., Martin
Rees, when he warns in his recent book Our Final Hour: “I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on earth will survive
to the end of the century.”

Seen in this larger context, Luis Garden Acosta’s description of alienation is direct and global. Alienation is not being “connected to the earth,”
since that connection defines our human essence, our very life as a species.

The formulation both echoes and reverses Karl Marx’s famous youthful essay “Alienated Labour” (1844). Marx, influenced by Hegel, believed that
human beings have created themselves through a dynamic, historical process, but one rooted in nature. However, for Marx nature was the “body”
of man, only given meaning by human work through our active species-life (a term taken from the philosopher Feuerbach) and the realization of our species-being.
Marx compared human beings to the social animals such as bees, beavers, and ants, stressing, however, that these animals only reproduce themselves, in one
direction, as it were. Humanity, he wrote, reproduces all of nature, and the natural world then becomes a mirror in which we see ourselves, what we have
created. By means of work, nature appears as humanity’s work and reality.

Acosta, like virtually every modern environmentalist, implies the opposite: that our work and reality, the development of our human nature, can only successfully
and enduringly “appear” as a result of nature working through us.

Let’s stand Marx upon his head. Humanity appears, and may disappear, as the work and reality of nature, not the other way around. To survive we need
to work with nature, not over it, or against it, or beyond it. 

Edward O. Wilson holds, I suspect, hold very different political views from Acosta , yet the two men agree on our essential connection to the environment.
Human beings are an emergent phenomenon, rooted in the natural world yet, in Wilson’s words (quoting the 1953 novel You Shall Know Them) “ we
have little grasp of our true nature” and our troubles “arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to
be.”

II—What We Are and What We Must Do

Many things are strange and wonderful

None more so than man.

(The Chorus, Antigone, Sophocles circa 440 BCE)

I see an animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but, taken
all together, organized more advantageously than all the others.

(Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité
parmi les hommes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754)

 

It is strange, but park advocacy eventually makes you think about the roots of human nature. El Puente and Luis Garden Acosta laboured very hard to help create Grand Ferry Park, a small site of only 1.5 hectares, looking out to the Manhattan skyline. The new area replaced one of the largest garbage facilities in all the northeast. An obviously beneficial change, one would think, yet that act of reclamation required tremendous work to fulfill.

In my own, brief experience here in Montreal as a park advocate, I have experienced the effort required to protect or enhance greenspace, both landscaped and natural. And I have learnt and felt something unknown to me before. Not only is modern capitalism relentlessly destroying our planet, but something deeper and older is also at work, a tremendous resistance to and, I would say at times, a fear and even hatred of nature. One day this spring, David Fletcher, Vice President of the Green Coalition, led a group of us through a newly acquired public woods in the west of Montreal. He stopped to show me a vernal pool full of small creatures going through their cycles of reproduction. Then Fletcher told me about a grove in a nearby jurisdiction where public officials, responsible for parkland, saw a similar pool and decided to pave it over, apparently because it looked like a sink-hole to them.

Of course, the commercial hunger for land means that natural spaces are always vulnerable. But psychologically, as well, we cannot leave them alone. Our instinct is to exploit, to cut, to level, to build, to pave, and ultimately – to destroy. Those benighted bureaucrats who killed the pond were undoubtedly unable to recognize what it was, nor did they know that such a system has its own natural economy in which a great deal occurs that is autonomous and invisible. Their oversight is typical: what has not been touched by human intervention, we do not see.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Eighteenth-century economics is to blame for much of our blindness, since classical theory views nature as a dead input which has no real value until it is transformed by human labour. But the denial of our connectedness with nature’s active processes lies further within us and comes from routines inherited from our deep history.

An impressive amount of recent environmental literature, much of it written by anthropologists, has described our current species-crisis by pointing to the far-reaching connections between three critical moments– our long period as Paleolithic hunters, the Neolithic Revolution, and modern capitalism.

More than a generation ago, the french sociologist, Edgar Morin, published a highly imaginative book that received little notice in the English-speaking world: Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine (Éditions du seuil, 1973). Morin’s essay is at once an attack on reductionism, a search for the roots of our complex organization , and an attempt to re-connect homo sapiens to the living system of nature from which we emerged. Morin used information theory to build his image of early humanity, and in his model “noise” and error are critical. As he puts it, the gap (la brèche) between human beings and their environment –first initiated by bi-pedalism and the shift from forests to the savanna– stimulated decision, choice, imagination. Because of this gap, he says, “the order of sapiens corresponds to a massive increase of error in the heart of the living system.” Mutation breaks the self-repeating structure of the gene to produce walking creatures, and error engenders creativity. Morin consciously echoes Rousseau’s beautiful, prescient picture of early human beings, presented in the Discours sur l’origine, in which weakness leads to the complexity of the human generalist.

Palanque...Maya Ruins

In 2004, the Canadian archaeologist and writer, Ronald Wright, delivered the Massey Lectures, available in print as A Short History of Progress. The book is important because Wright is one of a squadron of specialists who share his view that “the future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years.”

Wright reviews four past societies which experienced ecological collapse: ancient Sumer, Rome, the Maya, and Easter Island. The ruins that stand in jungles and deserts, Wright observes, “are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fall victim to their own success.” The asymmetry that Wright describes began in the Paleolithic. Archaeological evidence increasingly suggests that Ice Age hunters, as they migrated all over the world, brought megafauna to the edge of extinction, thereby destroying the host populations on which they depended. Consequently, “the perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life.” Early humans were creatures of their own culture since we “moved beyond the ecologies that had made us and began to make ourselves” and hence “became experimental creations of our own devising.”

The failure of hunting led to farming and the widespread domestication of plants and animals during the Neolithic Revolution, and this settlement in turn gave rise to the first great cities in Sumer. Just as Rousseau had argued, these new developments depended upon and produced radical inequality stemming from  property, slavery, militarism, and the further domination of women.

Ronald Wright points out that from its inception the invention of agriculture has been a “runaway train” with increasing populations repeatedly hitting the boundary limits of the food supply, and upward concentrations of wealth resulting in not enough food to go around. The Maya and the Romans operated “pyramid schemes” in which vertical hierarchies became unstable when they reached their “maximum demand on the ecology.” Ancient Sumer suffered from its enormous skill at irrigation which eventually resulted in extreme salinization of the soil, and the once rich, alluvial earth turned white. “Eden” was a Sumerian word and Wright sees the decline of Ur as the first in a series of similar patterns: “human beings drove themselves out of Eden, and they have done it again and again by fouling their nests.”

Ancient Sumer is a good benchmark for measuring our ecological situation. In Maps of Time: An Introduction To Big History (2004), the historian David Christian examines human per capita energy consumption from 10,000 years ago until now. During that period “the total amount of energy controlled by our species has multiplied by at least 50,000 times” and the human population has increased 1,000 times, from 6 million in the time of Sumer to 6 billion now. Christian discusses “net primary productivity,” (NPP) or the energy entering the food chain via photosynthesis to feed all animals. And he estimates that homo sapiens now uses 25% to 40% of NPP: “Resources used by humans
are, by definition, unavailable to other species. So, as human numbers have risen, other species have felt the pinch.” The actual global per capita human energy consumption, measured in calories, has increased 200 times.

In the first recorded and magnificent Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, the civilizing hero must learn the fundamental lesson: human beings and their works are mortal. At the end of the poem, after he has lost the flower of immortality, Gilgamesh returns to his city of Uruk with the ferryman of death, Urshanabi. As the two approach the great city, Gilgamesh tells his visitor to look at its walls and architecture and proudly tells Urshanabl about the plan of Uruk – it is one third urban, one third fields, and one third orchard gardens! In other words, the Sumerians, with their intense intelligence, knew that they had to build themselves an “ecological city,” as we now call it – and yet they could not escape the failure wrought of their own success.

Maps of Time includes a fascinating chart ( taken from J.G. Simmons, Changing the Face of the Earth) of human per capita energy consumption in historical perspective. Calculating how many calories are used by each single person eating (food, including animal feed), by one person in home and business, and by one person in industry and agriculture – it appears that Sumerians consumed their energy in a balanced way across all three categories. City, fields, and garden – just as Gilgamesh tells Urshanabi, with virtually no transport energy consumption.

Since the time of Sumer, we are only consuming approximately twice as many calories in our re capita daily eating, although that consumption is distributed in a grossly unjust way.

The huge increases in modern energy consumption are in: 1. Home and Commerce; 2. Industry and Agriculture; 3. Transport. These are the three areas where we must carry out radical reductions in energy use.

Another imperative becomes obvious if we take the long view from Gilgamesh to now: we must radically reduce human economic inequality.

Also, we must preserve, and then increase all open greenspace throughout the world.

These changes are possible, I think. But as Luis Garden Acosta says, they are radical. I believe as well that a new dialogue is necessary because capitalism as we know it, and certainly American capitalism, cannot meet the required agenda. Environmentalists need to continue their work, but also to realize that they will have to examine their political ideas, especially regarding the issue of economic justice.

Sophocles’ exalting chorus in the first part of Antigone lyrically describes the evolution of human beings, from hunting, to farming, to the creation of cities. The word the chorus uses for anthropos, for homo sapiens, is the adjective deinos whose meanings are charged with ambivalence: formidable, dangerous, frightening, clever, powerful, extraordinary, and strange. In my view, this strangeness, this brèche, is actually a very deep part of nature as a whole. I hope that we have enough time to act wisely and to reach a greater understanding of nature which will allow us to more clearly see our strange place in it.

* Quoted in Christian, and taken from Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains

               One does not have to be a militant environmentalist. Neither does one have to be a duck, a penguin or a halibut to feel encrusted, choked and oxygen-less. One needs to be just an engineer and scientist here, in far away Montreal, Quebec with a minimal sense of social responsibility, to feel incensed by the outrageous and cynical behaviour of those corporate hoodlums who failed to take the prescribed preventative measures. Measures that would have easily pre-empted the blow-out that is ravaging the Gulf coast and now beyond.  By now, it has also pretty much been forgotten that eleven workers were blown to bits and of course their families were also destroyed.   

Sketch of a Cameron Blow out preventer from Wiki commons

                A bit of technical detail is in order, for a start. Preliminary evidence suggests that the explosion that destroyed the rig was caused by methane gas coming up from the explosion well. Drilling and well-capping are well established procedures in the oil industry, since methane is a highly explosive gas. Specific capping devices, blow-out preventers, have been in use for these specific situations for decades. When a well is drilled, it is also filled with “mud” or drilling fluid in order to prevent the gas from running up the pipes. Once drilling is completed, a process known as “cementation” follows. It is generally done in two stages, first around the drill casing, and then a “plug” is placed to seal the well. Evidence suggests that the explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig, and perhaps damaged the blow-out preventer on the seafloor, was caused by methane gas coming up from the well. There are suggestions that unusual procedures were used to place the final cement plug.  It is being suggested that instead of the “mud” that is normally used, sea-water was pumped in.   

                This is where the 3 finger-pointing companies step in and start their obscene “not me” routine. Halliburton (of Dick Cheney pedigree) says it was told to do so by Transocean. Transocean says it was told to do so by BP! And no one is willing to take responsibility. Tim Probert, Halliburton’s president of global business, says, with some degree of arrogance, that the company was “contractually bound to comply with the well owner’s instructions on all matters relating to the performance of all work‐related activities.” In other words, whether the instructions given by the well-owner were safe or not for its workers and the environment, Halliburton was going to comply with the contract.   

                Then there is the BP President for America, Lamar McKay, who is more concerned why the blow–out preventer did not work, more than why recommended Best Practice was not followed. In other words, an accident was spec’d in! The question for him is not why there was accident built in, but why the accident fallout preventer did not work after the accident!   

                Finally, there is the U.S. Federal agency charged with regulating drilling — the Minerals Management Service (MMS). It turns out that these folks who are charged with the responsibility of regulating drilling operations and the accompanying safety, while promoting explorations (that by itself being a conflict of interest), abrogated their responsibility by agreeing that “offshore operations have become so complicated that regulators ultimately must rely on the oil companies and drilling contractors to proceed safely.” Hello? Wasn’t there such a hullaballoo a couple of years ago about corporate governance —some device called the Sarbanes–Oxley Act that was going to set things right after the Enron-Wescom mega collapses?     

                Conservative estimates suggest that 2,500,000 gallons of crude a day is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.  Here is a link to a real time leak meter.    There is no point in repeating here the damage that has already happened to human-marine-biological life.  Never mind the food chain, which is now shot for the next few years at least. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is raking in windfall profits. According to the advocacy group Avaaz, “BP, which operated the sunken rig, more than doubled its first quarter profits in 2010 to $5.65 billion.” Oh! We must of course let the oil companies make obscene profits. That is a sacred right. After all, in 2005 BP’s Texas city refinery managed to kill 15 of its workers and it was determined that the company had a poor safety and quality record. A year later 4,800 barrels seeped out of a BP pipeline in the Alaskan North. In 2007 BP paid a fine of 300 million dollars for fixing propane gas prices. This company has become somewhat of an all-rounder it seems.  And they refer to themselves as BP-Beyond Petroleum! However, Beyond Perfidy would be a more appropriate moniker for them.       

                BP Engineers and their friends in Transoceanic and Halliburton will someday get to the bottom of why the Blow-out preventer did not work, why so much pressure built up and why after the catastrophe the blow out preventer was not actuated. There will be a tendency to blame individuals and not of course the invalid systems that these companies have deployed, based on mindless penny-pinching. All the spectacular attempts at lowering a coffer dam etc. are really band aid measures for public consumption. Unless a parallel horizontal bore is made into the main well to relieve the pressure and siphon out the oil to the surface, nothing will have been achieved and we know that it is going to take months to drill 18,000 feet below.     

                It will be sometime before we find out if this new buzz tech that BP is touting is going to pan out on the ocean floor.  As far as the extent of the damage goes, there are indications that even by conservative estimates, this spill will have exceeded the Exxon Valdez spill by a factor of four.    

                OK, we can all go home raving and ranting. And ask for reparations and BP will oblige with a couple of billion dollars out of their quarterly pirating. Here’s what I think should be happening now (never mind the long term issue of getting rid of cars).   

                What on earth is Barack Obama doing leaving BP in charge of the plugging of the well, even now? What are the mighty US defence forces doing? They mine the sea bottom in Korea, they scour the Pacific and Atlantic laying cables, they develop space planes that can launch attacks within two hours anywhere in the world. Why is the US government not plugging the well themselves and then sending the bill to BP? It would at least shave a couple of billion of the trillion dollar deficit. Why does the US government have such a knee-jerk reliance on Big Oil?  Why is BP still playing Big Dada, dishing out clean up jobs to the families whom they have devastated?  Why is it that sea foods, vegetables and other foods are already disappearing from North American grocery stores and meat and poultry prices are already jacked up? Will BP pay for that?

In 1996, legislation was passed in the state of California that deregulated the production and sale of electric power for the big three big power producers and retailers: San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), Southern California Edison, and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). These companies were state-regulated companies until they lobbied and made campaign contributions in support of deregulation.

A result of the deregulation was to create a partially open market (the California Power Exchange) to encourage independent energy producers to participate in California’s power market, and therefore increase the supply of energy offered and hence lower prices. The legislation was based on the expectation that the big three would cut their wholesale costs and increase their retail profit by selling off their old and expensive power production plants. And as well act as middlemen, purchasing electricity on the open market where newer companies with their new plants dominated.

The big three power companies started by first placing a ceiling on rates they could charge consumers until they sold off their capacity to produce electricity. They competed with an increased number of large out-of-state wholesale electricity producers and suppliers, including Enron and began the process of selling their productive assets so that they that they could lift the cap on their retail price. In all they sold off about 40 percent of their productive capacity.

Deregulation Jacks up Prices!

SDG&E completed divestment of its power plants, and thus began the first test of a deregulated market for selling retail power. Instead of wholesale prices decreasing, they skyrocketed statewide by 2000. The free market was working just the opposite of what its advocates had predicted.  Edison and PG&E still owned their plants and thus could not raise their rates. Their position was even worse than that of SDG&E because the wholesale cost of energy had risen to a price greater than the retail price at which they were allowed to sell, and they were not supposed to pass the increase along to consumers. As a result, they had to borrow heavily to fulfill their contracts. Instead of letting the deregulated market do its thing and let a more competitive company step in, PG&E lobbied California’s legislators for a 40% rate increase and two rounds of bailouts courtesy of PG&E customers. The utility’s ratepayers were to pay for the company’s mistake through mandatory fees while California legislators continued to guarantee the company 11% profit margin and therefore they didn’t have to divert any of that cash towards paying its own debt.

The energy crisis became very serious and very public in the summer of 2000 when California’s reserve supply fell to 5 percent of need and the following month PG&E instituted a number of planned rolling blackouts. This was occurring just as Sunlaw Energy Partners was preparing its application to build the 550-megawatt Nueva Azalea power plant in South Gate, a part of Los Angeles County which was already burdened with polluted air. Supplies were dangerously low in part because many out of state power companies had decided to close down plants for extended maintenance during a period of California’s peak demand. At the time, the power crisis was attributed to rapidly rising demand and inadequate supplies, therefore in the summer of 2000 when Sunlaw Energy Partners prepared to move forward with its plan it was the expert and popular opinion that more power plants were desperately needed. Environmentalists and advocates of clean and green sources of power were pretty well shut out.

Low-income, working class, Latina/o community take the first hit, always

In 2001, when California seemed to be in the midst of its worst electricity shortage ever, some three hundred high school students and their parents marched from South Gate High School in southeast Los Angeles County to a meeting of the city council to tell their city council to tell their elected representatives that they did not want the power plant built near their city. Their goal was to get the power plant onto the council’s agenda for discussion and to get the council to take a nonbinding vote on whether it supported the power plant. The city of South Gate was a predominantly low-income, working class, Latina/o community of largely new immigrants. One of their messages was corporations deliberately dumped and sited toxic industries in these low-income communities of color believing that  the residents couldn’t fight back. The council’s decision had no authority but several weeks later South Gate voters defeated by two to one a non-legally binding referendum supporting the power plant. The California Energy Commission decided to stop the project.

Direct democracy put to use by lobbyists!

On June 8th in a state wide ballot in California, voters faced an initiative called Proposition 16 officially described as: “Imposes New Two-Thirds Voter Approval Requirement for Local Electricity Providers”.  A ballot proposition is a proposed law that is submitted to the electorate for approval in a direct vote. It may take the form of a constitutional amendment or an ordinary statute. Direct democracy by way of a ballot proposition gave California’s citizens a way to bypass their representative government and restore absolute sovereignty to the people. Currently it is also giving a way for the rich and the corporates to write their wishes directly into the highest level of the law by convincing people into voting their way using massive amounts of cash on political strategists, lobbyists, professional signature gatherers, astroturfers and political ad campaigns. The initiative was sponsored and paid for solely by one company, Pacific Gas and Electric. In PG&E’s $35 million advertising campaign, they called it the “taxpayers Right to Vote”. If it had been enacted, the constitutional amendment would have required local governments to obtain the approval of two-thirds of their voters before providing electricity service to new customers or expanding such service to new territories. Proposition 16 would have sabotaged existing law allowing communities to choose alternatives to PG&E, including a movement to enable municipalities to offer renewable green power. It was defeated with 52.6% of the voters voting no.

The British, ever adroit in matters related to furry-four footed creatures (except perhaps for the English beaver that disappeared in the 1500s), report that there are forty to sixty thousand urban foxes in England. They’re everywhere. Church lawns. Looking at you from beside a wall.

At night

And here too, especially Montreal. You might say we’ve welcomed them with open arms. The postwar demographic shift from rural to urban entirely reversed the one-third’s two-third’s dichotomy of city and country people. So it’s natural, perhaps, that fox joined this influx to our expanding urban environment.

The fox has long represented the cultural trickster, a figure that breaks the rules and catalyzes change. Popularized in legends and stories. And there’s something special in the way in which the fox is attuned to humans. They understand our boundaries and know exactly how to co-exist.

Changing habitats: Moving to the city, of course, entails adaptation. And here, the fox is simply a hands-down winner. In the bucolic state, foxes are shy of one another. They need lots of room. Their rural profile is that of a loner. But in the city, for instance at the Mt. Royal Cemetery on the south-facing slope that yields to the northern vista of the U of M, there’s a rock haven one might call a fox hotel. They’ve learned to live ‘together’. In harmony!

Fox Snoozing

Adaptation:

Two years ago at the Cemetery, I was on a bird-watching tour with about 75 people. Right where the cannons are, a mother and her very curious older cub, became a star attraction. And they weren’t fussed. They know they’re safe.

Their other amazing adaptation – and here’s where humans can take note – they regulate their populations, in town, that is. They seem to know exactly what food supply to depend (and forecast), and how to go about exploiting an environment equitably.

From pictures taken of mothers with their cubs, there’s every evidence that the young get very good parenting. That’s true of all species. A mother duck and her raft of ducklings at any public ‘venue’ like the long Sulpician meditating pool (Sherbrooke & Atwater) or at Beaver Lake (Duck Lake, shurely!) the amount of dependency the female parent allows with humans and their food handouts is fascinating to watch, especially as the migratory season approaches. The mother plays a very strong role in calling her ducklings to order, even when they have morphed over the summer into what looks like a duck football team. Like a coach she will emit a growly quack and they swim away together.

Bonjour Montréal: Railway lines extend to the core of the city, and the vast railway yards that existed until recently at the Glen Yards (Westmount) with lots of brush and wildness, and the easy accessibility to the mountain – Mt. Royal & Westmount – are like a magnet for this four-footed migratory impulse, a phenomenon that includes coyotes, and on the west island, pockets that still have marten.

Hmmm

More than poutine:

Mt. Royal, with its peanut-fed squirrels, many more than could ever exist on their own without tourists like Parisians coming here and saying O! l’ecureuil! (It’s so funny seeing these sophisticates in an ecstasy over our ‘wildlife’ because the City of Light has no such blandishments.)

So: easy access, places to stay, and a natural squirrel larder. One might add, no game laws, no tiresome people unloading shotguns and 22s in town.

Habits, regular: Chances are, if you see a fox, you’ll see it again at the same time and place. One recent summer I often went at daybreak to the Cemetery. At six AM the same fox crossed Camilien Houde. The same pair of cubs are gamboling around the tombstones. The same siblings enjoying a sunny snooze at their summit perch. But the circumstances have to be right. They like a warm sun just breaking over the trees after a night on the prowl. And they all have their comfort zones, as to how close you may approach.

How smart? Very smart. Exceedingly so. Two examples:

It’s easy to get locked into a pattern with the same fox or foxes. Wintertime I went cross-country skiing at Meadowbrook with my old dog. And exactly at a juncture on the back nine holes, we would see a fox returning to the hedgerow. There’s a big dumping area for garden debris, broken branches and the like, about 80 feet square and six feet high (the ice storm added a lot). I call it the Brer Rabbit Exchanger.

Looking

See fox run. See dog take after fox. Fox enters exchanger, where there is a profusion of tracks and pee and whatever, that takes the fastest sniffer hound a few moments to figure out which is the freshest track. Meanwhile the fox has already emerged at the far side and is safely headed across the next fairway, to another, even denser wood lot.

I’m cross-country skiing in the Jura. It starts to snow thick heavy flakes. Open pasture, a solitary beautiful huge spruce in the middle of the slope. Along comes a fox, it wants comfy place. Goes under tree, but the comfort zone with me in the vicinity bothers him. Takes off. I follow. It’s perfect tracking conditions, and I have some speed. Somehow, this fox makes me feel competitive.

The nimble creature leads me to a bluff with big boulders. No problem. I’m not far behind. Suddenly, it’s gone. Vanished. Aha! It has doubled back on its tracks. It must’ve walked backwards placing each paw in its matching print, because I couldn’t discern any altered trace. And then it sprang into a convenient cleft. No, I didn’t hear any laughing from its den.

Old bones

The thrill

: There’s something about seeing an animal in the ‘wild’, there is that moment of contact, when they drill you with their eyes (this happened to me with a puma, once, outside of Geneva), and in the case of the fox (this is no fat raccoon), you sense that upon contact, all of its sensors whirr like a mental computer, during which, and in that split second or two, it is sizing you up with total and unerring instinct. The fox will forever have you pegged, what your job is, what kind of a car you drive, how fast you can accelerate.

The killing ground: Once a pattern is established, it’s great to ‘click’ with an animal.

Wintertime. on the north face of the summit woods, there’s a gully, and several times a week during February and March, every time I went past there, this fox’s tracks that had crossed the circle road and descended from the Summit Woods. To a spot with fresh blood in the snow, a well-satisfied pee, just the leftover of a squirrel tail, and the tracks leading away again.

There's someone home

Last summer, I noticed what looked like a lot of blackened banana peels, and it was later I realized they were squirrels eaten by foxes, likely that in the plentiful season, they eat only ‘the steak’ as it were. And leave the skin.

Habitats: This north face is very interesting. It has what is probably the last virgin cover of oak in the downtown. At the foot of the slope is a basalt outcropping. And what used to be, the best summertime blackberries. It was a place I visited for a decade, with this old dog, and we marveled at the fox dens. A huge foxhole, the local mogul presumably at the elbow of Belvedere heading down to Côte des Neiges. Year after year, fresh mounds of earth expelled in what must’ve been housecleaning.

And we also came across two snow dens, where a fox had spent the night in an igloo-type of shelter. And I also realized, that the foxes were using our trails that we maintained on snowshoe (at great effort). Talking to a friend of mine, a biologist, whose opinion was that they’re just as lazy as anyone when it comes to getting around.

But in all those years I never saw a fox there. All the consistent signs, but no fox. Then when my dog died and I went around alone, I saw the fox one spring dusk taking a snooze lying on the snow. They’re not big. The size of furry chickens with a long tail they wrap underneath themselves for warmth. It’s comfort zone was 18 feet. Closer than that and it flashed me a desultory look, like ‘give me a break’. I went back the next day, same time same place. Same fox walking along.

Beautiful: It’s always a thrill to see wildlife. For two years running a family of partridge lived on the upper slope of Villa Maria. There were seven, and in the evening, they would congregate to roost exposed on the brow. I realized this gave them a 360-degree unimpeded view of any predators.

And most days at dusk a fox came tripping in a south-north direction across the field. It’s funny to see them scurrying, they really do have that roadrunner padded whirr of their legs. But the most breathtaking, was on two occasions, under a blue sky in February on garbage pickup day on Sunnyside (la crème de Westmount), I chanced upon a fox, as saucy a creature if ever there was. And it’s coat in the snow and sunshine, was of a Vermeer chalky vermillion that dazzled my eyes.

Conclusion: The adaptation of the foxes to an urban environment is inspiring. There’s a sense that these animals are a perfection of nature, they find a balance that is intrinsic to the process of coexisting.

Not inspiring, is the loss of free passage between natural habitats in places as for instance in the upper slope of Villa Maria school, and Marianopolis, institutions that have gone ‘fence crazy’ insofar as the access is now choked in a chain-link prison. No easy fox ‘holes’ to let them through.

So if you see a fox in town, by the floral town clock or checking out your back yard, it’s probably a good thing. They are an addition, welcome I believe, to our ecosystem.

Truck and Trolley

I have a relationship to traffic, similar to the kind of relationship a goldfish has to the water in its bowl. It’s never just about the fish and the water.  Rather, it’s an ecology, and the ecology relates to an environment, the environment to a city, the city to a region the region to a continent, the continent to this earth.  So, it’s not quite as simple as Carassius Auratus Auratus and its DNA + the H20 in which it swims about.  The fish and the water have more dimensions than even Matisse’s representation of Red Fish.  In his fishbowl the water never needs changing…or filtering…the water is blue and the fish seem happy.

On this earth the traffic is a rushhhh…a contiguous web, a continuous ebb and flow, of rivers and streams. The rivers are tidal, reaching their peaks in the mornings and late afternoons.  Some people simply don’t appreciate their music, rhythms, and volumes. While others prick up their ears or let themselves be lulled to sleep. Most notice, sooner or later, the haze and the dust; they may wonder precisely what’s in it; its particular local, chemical composition, however, remaining something of a mystery to local dwellers.

Many, perhaps all, have adapted to the nature of traffic, tuning into the voices of traffic radio that are authoritative and reassuring.  They are there to keep everything moving; to prevent jams; to help us get to where we need to go.  They are more socialized, more cultural than anything I have to say.  And if these voices intrude in any way, they can be filtered out.  Filtration, indeed, goes hand in hand with adaptation and money, money perhaps being the paterfamilia of all filtration.  There are expensive windows for instance, like walls, that filter out most traffic noise yet allow sunlight in; and with air conditioning and air filters, air can be cleaned and blown about so that windows need never open. 

Others have moved their bedrooms to the back of their abodes, to facilitate sleep.  Still others filter out traffic by moving to the suburbs, to a gated community, to the country.  Blinds too are used to filter out what we don’t want to see; and there are all kinds of them, in all kinds of places…my remote control…my ear plugs…night mask… prescription…and so on. 

…This has become a very urban earth where new engines spin the planet ever hotter, faster. People live on traffic islands where speed has this magic habit of making things disappear and re-appear.  Even when you think the traffic isn’t there, in some form or another, it is, in the air. A busy street becomes, in some odd way, a place where people appear to disappear…a private place, where most people keep themselves to themselves…where nobody expects to see a child playing…where nobody asks where the children are. 

I imagine my street would be a very different place without traffic.  Nevertheless, I ask myself, where we would be without it.  Everyone wants to go elsewhere, and to go quickly enough; to leave here and go there, if only to enjoy returning to our various places.  In some ways, you could say, we have evolved to become part car.

This relationship of inhabitants to traffic certainly has its own distinctive ecology; its own particular character; its own vitality.  Not to mention, tragedy, even: millions of lives have been lost in traffic…going out…coming home. Traffic is a risky business.  It’s somewhat odd then that we think of this risk as an if even though every moment for humans and creatures in various places it turns out to be a when.   

If I stop filtering…start feeling…the heat…the physics and chemistry of a billion engines, a trillion combustions…the black carbon…particulates…pipes…lungs…choke…of rivers of heavy metal shells…of oil and bright lights…if I start imagining the numbers…divining the future …it’s a drama by any other name…surely…   

Am I foolish then to wonder, that if it’s easy enough to find art and science about life in the sea, say, or flora in the jungle, “where,” I ask myself, “where is all the art and science about people living in traffic?”

Exactly two decades ago I left the West Island to come and live in the United Kingdom.  Like many expatriates, in recent years I have started looking back on the place where I grew up with a certain degree of nostalgia. However, I am also an historian by vocation, and one of the projects I am currently working on is a study of the social and architectural history of the Square Mile of Montreal from 1840 to the present day.  In the course of my research I discovered that many of the individuals who built houses in the Square Mile also owned property in the West Island.  This realisation turned my nostalgic musings into a serious pursuit, and I am now also researching the period between 1870 to 1940, when dozens of wealthy Montrealers acquired summer residences along the shores of Rivière-des-Prairies, Lac des Deux-Montagnes, and Lac Saint-Louis. Their country estates varied considerably in size, but all of them provided a comfortable rustic setting for pursuits such as hunting, polo, gardening and farming.  The majority of these individuals were of Scottish, English and Irish extraction.  In settling in the West Island they came into direct contact with a rural population whose origins stretched back without interruption to the earliest days of French settlement on the island of Montreal.

My family moved to Dollard-des-Ormeaux in 1968 and I lived there for over twenty years.  From an early age I was fascinated by old buildings, and quite a few survived into the 1970s in the vicinity of where I grew up.  I especially remember the large wooden barn and small, one-storey stone building which stood at the corner of Sources Boulevard and Churchill Road.  Both disappeared during the 1980s, but the nineteenth century stone farmhouse almost directly opposite, later Dollard’s first town hall, still survives. Further up Sources, which in those early days was bordered on both sides with ditches where orange lilies and bull-rushes used to grow, there were more venerable farmhouses.  One, which occupied a small plot of land just north of the Rideau Gardens Cemetery, burnt down more than twenty years ago.  Speaking of Rideau Gardens, it is pleasing to reflect that both it and the neighbouring Kehal Israel Cemetery occupy, and thereby preserve for posterity, original strips of farmland granted to colonists by the priests of the Sulpician Order, who became seigneurs of Montreal in 1663.

Further north on Sources Boulevard, an imposing stone-built dwelling survives as a Greek restaurant.  Almost directly across the street, a pair of three-storey redbrick houses with ground-floor verandas and round attic windows stood a small distance from one another until the 1980s.  On the northwestern corner of Sources and Anselme-Lavigne there was an unusual interwar house faced with blocks of stone.  All of these structures have long since disappeared. I often wonder if anyone else remembers them.  Gouin Boulevard also fascinated me, and my father frequently gave in to requests for an evening drive to inspect the old buildings which dotted both sides of the road from Saraguay to Senneville.  Bourlon House, the imposing early twentieth century stone mansion of the Meighen family, was a particular favourite. Although it was no longer a private house, it still stood in splendid isolation on its river-front grounds near to where the CN train line crossed Gouin.  The mansion still survives, but almost every inch of its former grounds have been covered with residential buildings.

For the first few years after we moved into our new duplex on Spring Garden Road, the view across the street was of fields which had only recently ceased to be cultivated.  Even the tree-lined seigneurial property boundaries were still in place.  By the mid-1970s the fields had been replaced with houses.  Further down Spring Garden Road, near where it joined Brunswick Boulevard, there were expansive fields dotted with small trees and bushes.  I have a vivid memory of walking there one day with my grandparents when I was aged about four, and crossing a brook bridged with roughly hewn logs.  Little did I suspect that about fifteen years later my family would move into a new house built on almost exactly the same spot!  In the distance, above the thick line of trees we knew as “the woods,” Mount Royal and Saint Joseph’s Oratory were clearly visible.

The woods (now the Bois-de-Liesse Nature Park) were a favourite destination for family walks, above all in spring when the undulating ground was carpeted with trilliums.  If we felt adventurous we would cross the Bertrand Creek and continue walking in the direction of the future Highway 13.  The woods there were part of the Pitfield estate, which extended from Gouin Boulevard south to the road then known as Chemin de Petit Bois-Franc (now the western end of Henri-Bourassa).  A family friend kept her horse in Mrs Pitfield’s stables and we bought the pink and white peonies we planted in our garden at the farm shop on her estate.  The stables and shop are long gone, but Mrs Pitfield’s 1950s house and a large part of her estate have been incorporated into the Nature Park. It is sad to think that the future of the older stone-built Pitfield mansion set in riverfront grounds facing Gouin, which has been the property of a religious order for several decades, is now uncertain.

The historical boundaries of the rural West Island include all of present-day Pierrefonds, Senneville, Sainte Anne-de-Bellevue, Baie d’Urfé, Beaconsfield, Pointe-Claire, Dorval and Lachine, as well as Dollard-des-Ormeaux and Kirkland, the Saraguay district of Montreal and the part of Saint-Laurent west of Boulevard Toupin.  Although Île-Bizard and Île-Perrot do not strictly speaking fall within its limits, a number of smaller islands do. To appreciate the full extent of the rural patrimony that has been lost within these boundaries over the past fifty years, one simply has to glance at a chronological selection of maps, starting with the oldest surviving terrier or property register of the island of Montreal, compiled by the Sulpicians in 1702.  Following the lakeshore from Lachine to Senneville, we see that an almost continuous series of waterfront properties had already been granted to colonists. Three large rectangular blocks of land grants separated by common lands, upon which Boulevard Côte-Vertu and Chemin de la Cote-de-Liesse were later built, had also been granted in the centre of the island.  The remainder of the West Island was wild open country.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the villages of Sainte-Geneviève, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Pointe-Claire, Dorval, Lachine, and Saint-Laurent were all well-established, and most of land in their hinterland had been granted to colonists. As indicated on André Jobin’s map of the island dating to 1834, by that time almost all of the principal roadways of the West Island were in place, many of which are still in use today as major traffic arteries.  The most complete picture of the rural West Island by far is preserved in the remarkably detailed maps published by Henry W. Hopkins in 1879.  Each and every seigneurial land grant between Senneville and Saint-Laurent is painstakingly indicated, even those reduced to sliver-like thinness through inheritance and sale. The names of individual landowners are also recorded, providing historians with an invaluable register of West Island farming dynasties such as Robillard, Brunet, Meloche, Legault and Jasmin, to list but a few.

Hopkins’ maps reveal that by 1879, the Grand Trunk Railway had already sliced through the farms on the southern side of the island from Lachine to Saint Anne-de-Bellevue.  Indeed, construction of the railway began in 1853, the very same year in which the seigneurial system was abolished.  By 1855 it was complete, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Canadian Pacific Railway had installed a parallel track only a few yards away.  The arrival of the railway heralded a revolution in land use in the West Island.  In 1865, the Montreal lawyer and future prime minister John Abbott purchased a large estate at Senneville. There he built an imposing stone mansion called Boisbriant, after the nearby seigneurial fief of that name which dated back to the end of the seventeenth century.  Abbott appears to be the first wealthy Montrealer to acquire agricultural property in the West Island with the express intention of using it as a country residence during the summer.  The trend he established was slow to catch on, however, and fifteen years were to pass before another inhabitant of the Square Mile followed suit.

In 1880, Grace Brydges, wife of the Montreal stockbroker George Campbell MacDougall, purchased a plot of land on the shore of Rivière-des-Prairies (the Back River) near Cartierville.  Soon afterwards the MacDougalls, who were the grandparents of the Mrs Pitfield mentioned above, built a substantial frame house on their property, signalling the decisive establishment of the exclusive summer colony later known as Saraguay.  Within a decade, dozens of wealthy Montreal families had adopted the fashion of summering on the West Island lakeshore, with Saraguay, Dorval and Senneville being the most popular resorts.  Easy access provided by the railway also opened up places like Pointe-Claire, Beaurepaire and Baie d’Urfe to summer residents.  Perhaps the grandest estate of all was Huntlywood, which belonged to the Montreal industrialist Sir George Drummond.  It occupied 300 acres of former farmland to the west of St. Charles Boulevard in Beaconsfield.  After Sir George’s death in 1910 the property was acquired by Sir Hugh Montagu Allan, the Montreal shipowner, who used it as a dairy farm.  Renamed Allancroft, the estate survived intact until the 1930s, when the main house was destroyed by fire.  Soon afterwards Sir Hugh began disposing of the land.  By the middle of the 1950s almost all of it had been built over with suburban housing.

The spread of mass transit to the West Island was a decisive factor in the destruction of its rural character.  In 1913 the Canadian National Railway began ruthlessly cutting through the estates and farms of Saraguay and Pierrefonds to make way for its Deux-Montagnes line.  In the interwar period, Cartierville Airport was established near the private polo grounds maintained by the inhabitants of Saraguay.  At around the same time, construction began on Autoroute 20, just to the north of the former Grand Trunk and CPR tracks, with the intention of relieving the heavy traffic on the lakeshore road leading from Lachine to Sainte Anne-de-Bellevue. Finally, in the early 1940s Dorval Airport came into being, its runways radiating into the farmland of several adjacent parishes.

Suburbia had first made its appearance in the West Island as early as 1905, when the Canadian Nursery Company drew up plans for what is now known as the Bowling Green area of Pointe-Claire.  However, maps published by the government of Canada during the 1930s show that similar speculative housing developments were mainly limited to a few streets in Beaconsfield, Pointe-Claire and Dorval.  In the parish of Sainte Geneviève, an American speculator bought 408 acres of farmland in 1914, but construction of the first homes in what was to become Roxboro did not begin until many years later.  The gradual transformation of the grander summer houses of the West Island lakeshore into year-round homes also became common after World War II, when wealthy Montrealers could no longer afford to maintain multiple residences.  From the 1950s onwards, many country estates were sold off and subdivided, although the original houses often remained intact on greatly reduced grounds.  During the 1960s a wide ribbon of the rural West Island was sacrificed to make way for Highway 40 and the industrial parks which sprang up on its flanks.  Rampant suburbanisation followed soon afterwards, as farmers began selling large tracts of land to developers, and city-dwellers like my parents began flocking to the area.

There are some people who would characterize the transformation of the West Island from rural backwater to modern suburbia as progress.  Some would back up this viewpoint by saying that the lives of the people who toiled on the seigneurial farms that once carpeted the area were anything but idyllic.  Others would insist that the disappearance of the polo-playing elite and their elegant estates was a desirable by-product of the social revolution which swept Quebec during the second half of the twentieth century.  Such arguments are not entirely unfounded.  But at the same time it cannot be denied that the wanton destruction of the rural West Island between 1950 and the present day represents an irreversible environmental upheaval of massive proportions.  For those interested in the history of their surroundings, it is equivalent to the unceremonious sweeping away of three centuries of Montreal history.

Fortunately, a glance at Google Earth reveals a few significant outposts of green in the West Island of today, such as the Bois-de-Saraguay, the Bois-de-Liesse and Cap-Saint-Jacques, as well as large swathes of Senneville, Sainte Anne-de-Bellevue and Île-Bizard.  As is the case with the Angell Woods in Beaconsfield, the origins of many of the surviving green spaces in the West Island can be traced back to seigneurial times.  Without adequate official intervention and protection their future remains uncertain.  The recent history of the Bois-Franc district of Saint-Laurent is a case in point.  This sleepy enclave sandwiched between Cartierville Airport and Highway 13 preserved many traces of its agricultural heritage well into the 1980s.  Within the past two decades, however, farmhouses, fields and forests have all disappeared in the wake of intensive industrial and residential development.  Despite worrying precedents such as this, and the seeming indifference of the majority of the population, I sincerely hope that if enough people are made aware of the fascinating history of the West Island, and the obvious environmental importance of its remaining green spaces, then this precious rural patrimony will be saved for future generations.

 

Sodi Sambo

Why would one state government spend sleepless nights trying to provide maximum security to someone whose mere existence is a threat to its own? What threat could an illiterate tribal petite woman of 28, mother of four children, pose to a government such that it has to make special arrangements to keep her in a special VIP ward of the country’s most prominent hospital and prevent any ‘unruly’ elements from meeting her?

This is the story of one woman from the state of Chhattisgarh in Central India, whose every passing thought, and thereby action, is considered a double-edged sword for the state government. No, this is not a plot from a Sidney Sheldon novel with yet another alpha female character in the lead. This is real, and the woman is currently – as you read this – nowhere to be seen in public, in independent India. She is too famous today, yet she is forgotten.

This is the story of Sodi Sambo, who, when I saw her for the first time, had her eyes transfixed on the ground beneath her feet, as she would sit patiently for hours together in her chair. Perhaps her patience was born out of her inability to walk freely, thanks to a bullet that had mercilessly ripped through her leg and splintered her right tibia; metallic rods jutting out from it for all to see. A plastic walker always stood next to her chair. For someone who hardly spoke and remained strangely calm, she managed to independently walk every few hours, bask in the sun sitting in the chair, eat her meals in her chair which was fixed in one position, and then rest on her rickety cot. In the evenings, a small bonfire would be lit next to her chair so that she would not have to move the furniture to feel the warmth of the fire in the cold December air. Sometimes, tribal girls would suddenly break into a song-and-dance routine and then lovingly fight for having missed few steps. This wouldn’t amuse Sambo; her gaze would languidly move from one moving body to another.

When I first saw Sambo on December 25, 2009, she did not return the look. I often noticed her walking down the red earth with her walker, taking small steps. She would limp on her right leg, but in the process, the petite woman’s arms were becoming stronger. Indeed, Sambo wasn’t any ordinary woman – 28-years-old, no education, underweight, mother of four children all below the age of 10, no parents, a tribal farmer for a husband, and a petite and fragile frame. Yes, perhaps the wound on her leg may have made her distinct from the scores of Adivasi (aboriginal) women who can be profiled similarly. And it is the story of this wound that makes this ordinary woman – with curly frizzy hair, high cheekbones, small chin, small nose, honeyed skin, broad protruding clavicle, toned muscles – so different. She is someone whom the Chhattisgarh government dreads to keep alive, yet cannot afford to eliminate her.

On October 1, 2009, when the sun had just risen for the day in the quaint village of Gompad lying on the state border of Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Sodi Sambo was cleaning the courtyard of her twig-and-mud house, with her children by her side; her husband had gone out for some contract labour work. Suddenly, she heard cries of the people in her neighbourhood, and before she could fathom, she saw people in her village being massacred brutally by men “wearing clothes with floral patterns” (her way of describing military fatigues) and carrying guns. Suddenly, she saw herself being pulled over by two of the men in fatigues into her neigbour’s house, who was breastfeeding her child. One of them pointed the gun towards her neighbour, but the other deterred him, saying that the woman was breastfeeding. But the men wouldn’t leave with work undone – the man shot Sambo on her right leg. The liquid rust spurted out from that spot, she fell onto the ground, and her cries synchronized with those of her children. In her unbearable pain, she did not realize that she was luckier than the 13 others who had lost their lives in that village, barely a few minutes back.

For the next 20 days, the surviving terrified villagers administered herbs to her wounds. Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian activist based in the district of Dantewada, had heard about the massacre of 13 people. He managed to get his volunteers to convince the villagers to somehow bring Sambo to the town so that she could be treated, as well as to provide protection to her since she was the sole eyewitness to the massacre (the others had fled into the jungles; Sambo couldn’t even walk to save her life). He knew that there was no point in filing a police complaint – why would one officer write a complaint against his compatriot?

But before the story gets further murkier, let’s take a few steps back to understand why were the men “wearing clothes with floral patterns” gunning down innocent villagers. It begins with Sambo’s state of birth. Chhattisgarh accounts for over 13 per cent of India’s total mineral production, worth around Rs 4,000 crore (882 million CAD$) a year, as it has some of the largest reserves of minerals anywhere in the world of coal, iron ore (23 per cent of India’s deposit), limestone, dolomite, bauxite and cassiterite reserves being the largest in the country. Also abundant are gold, tin, diamonds, uranium, corundum and copper. Bastar, the southernmost part of the state, has the 32 km long and 4 km wide Bailadila hills, part of the Dandakaranya forest.

Tribals account for 70 per cent of Bastar’s population. The nearest cities to Dantewada, the largest district in Bastar – are Raipur, Vishakhapatnam, Hyderabad or Nagpur and they are over 10 hours away. In almost all villages, the only signs of government are the police station. No roads, no schools, no primary health centres. But people like Sodi Sambo somehow manage to be at peace with their frugal needs. She makes no demand; no minister has ever visited her village either. Villagers had to carry Sambo and walk 20 kms to the nearest town, thanks to the dirt patch roads leading to Gompad.

But mining companies are grabbing the ground beneath Sambo’s feet, and the government acquiesces to this, stating that this is for “development”. A government committed to such “development” is blind to see that 33 per cent of India’s populace has a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18.5, which pushes them into the category of severely malnourished. The WHO states that when 40 per cent of a region’s populace has a BMI of 40 per cent, that state can be declared to be a victim of a famine. India’s 33 per cent is less than the ascribed 40 per cent, yet it is not a congratulatory figure – it is the same people who have, for generations, been victims of chronic hunger and malnutrition. With such an understanding, and going by the Geneva Convention of the UN, such gross miscarriage of justice amounts to genocide. Desperate situations call for desperate measures. Not surprisingly, Chhattisgarh and neighbouring Jharkhand state together account for 65 per cent of the total Maoist or Left wing insurgency in the country.

Adding to the woes of these placid Adivasis were two significant Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) signed by the Chhattisgarh government with Tata Steel and Essar Group, in June 2005. Tata reportedly selected 10 villages (5,300 acres) to set up a steel plant, while Essar zeroed in on 3,097 acres in two villages near Dantewada. Of the vast land mass that Tata wants to acquire, 87 per cent is agricultural land. The government allowed its own people to become pawns in this game of profits and more profits. It all goes back to the source of the steel rods which are implanted in Sambo’s leg!

The Adivasis did not bother anyone – they were content with whatever nature provided them, as long as they had their little piece of land which provided them just about enough to keep from hunger. Suddenly they had to confront large bulldozers which threatened to mow down their crops, in exchange for a paltry compensation. They could not give up their land under any circumstances while time was running out for Tata and Essar, and several other mining companies who eyed the ground beneath Sambo’s feet. When requests and money wouldn’t yield results, the force of violence and coercion was exercised. The Adivasi was wrong to assume that his government would stand by him and protect him.

The Maoist violence was the perfect alibi for the Chhattisgarh government to ensure that the mining companies could ride into these villages amid the jungles of Dandakaranya. The government launched Salwa Judum (or ‘peace march’ in the tribal Gondi language) a day after the MoU was signed with Tata Steel in 2005, with an aim to eliminate Maoist violence. Young boys and girls were made SPOs or special police officers, in accordance with the Police Act which has laid down such a provision for conflict areas. But the haphazard recruitment of SPOs also meant a sea of lost childhood – young boys, who hardly bore the signs of manhood, were thrust with guns in their hands, whose length would be longer than their height. Suddenly, the newly-acquired power flowed from the barrel of the gun. Salwa Judum was responsible for the clearing of 644 villages in Bastar region – some Adivasis ran through the jungles into Andhra Pradesh, some others were made to march into the Salwa Judum camps which were devoid of human dignity. Homes were burnt, girls were raped, men were mutilated. And these horror crimes went unreported in the mainstream media, since it prefers to court mining companies which are its advertisers.

The idea of Salwa Judum backfired – what was initiated as a means to wipe out Maoist violence gave rise to the movement increasing by 22-fold. By 2009, the government bit its lip once again when it launched Operation Green Hunt – a unified paramilitary offense comprising the army, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the state police, the SPOs as well as the air force. They were mandated to eliminate Maoists. And exactly how could one identify a Maoist? Nobody knew the answer. Blindfolded with beliefs of the image of Moaists, Sambo’s village was attacked on the day Operation Green Hunt was announced.

While Sambo was being treated at the All India Institue of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, Kumar filed a petition in the Supreme Court about the massacre. But the Chhattisgarh government did not miss any chance to prove that Sambo will continue to be the pawn in this gory battle.

On January 3, 2010, I never fathomed that I was seeing Sambo for the last time. Her wound had healed considerably, but she had to board a train to Delhi for another surgery on her leg. The meagre communication between us women was through signs as I did not know the ancient Dorla dialect of Koya Mata, which she spoke. But she did not make it to the train station, as planned. To reach Delhi, she had to board a bus from Dantewada to Raipur, and then take the train to the capital. But as she boarded the bus along with two volunteers from Kumar’s ashram, the police stopped them and said that she could not go. She alighted from the bus, and was packed into the car from the ashram and sped through another interior route to the next bus stop, about 10 miles away. When the bus had arrived there few minutes later, there was an attempt to get her on to the bus once again, but the police managed to reach the spot once again, and then began to question the driver. Kumar intervened; and the police could not afford to override the questions of the activist who is too prominent to be attacked by the administration. Sambo had to return to the ashram that night. 

A plan was made to take her to Raipur by Kumar’s own vehicle instead of the bus the next day. The police entourage followed Kumar’s car, as was already expected (Kumar had been provided ‘police protection’ since December 2009 under the pretext that the tribals would attack him. The truth was far from that – the administration wanted to keep an eye on each of his movements and the people coming to meet him). But 400 miles close to Raipur, Sambo was detained at Kanker police station, where the officers said that the detention order had come in from Amresh Mishra, the Superintendent of Police (SP) of Dantewada district. Kumar said that he would not leave her for a moment, for he knew that doing so would mean her instant elimination. The duo was detained for eight hours, until it was decided that Sambo would be brought back to Dantewada in a separate jeep.

The next morning, along with about 20 activists, I went to meet Mishra to ask about Sambo’s whereabouts. He assured us that she was safe; he said, “Her parents had filed a missing complaint.” When we said that she did not have any parents, he said, “If not her parents, then they may have been her uncle and aunt who are her guardians.” When we asked him about the basis on which a person’s guardians were recognized, he said, “They seemed to be nice people when I spoke to them, and that’s how I was assured that they were her guardians.” When we asked him why was Sambo kept away at night in an undisclosed location, he said, “She told us that she wanted to rest, and we had to respect that.” We asked him which language did she communicate in, he replied, “Gondi.” The fact is that Sambo can speak only Dorla. The SP of any district in India is an officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) whose selection is done through the utmost stringent process, and candidates prepare for the examination for as long as five years. No wonder then they are among the brightest minds in the country. Our shock and dismay at Mishra’s asinine reply can be well imagined. He promised us that we would be able to meet her, and that promise is yet to be fulfilled.

Sodi Sambo's leg wound

Today as I write this, I hear that Sambo is in a jail in a town far from Gompad, and has still not recovered from her leg wound. Did she ever board the train to Delhi? Yes she did; but we learnt about it several days later. Was she operated upon? Yes, so says the police. Was there any proof of her well-being in the special VIP ward of the hospital which was surrounded by cops, and where she was ‘recuperating’? No, as people wanting to meet her, including Kumar himself – who had to later go underground to escape the wrath of the state police which alleged that he had ‘kidnapped’ Sambo – were shown a letter which bore Sambo and her husband’s thumb impressions (her husband was brought from Gompad by the police), mentioning that Sambo did not wish to meet anybody. This letter represents the tragic-comic games played by the Chhattisgarh government – the letter was written in Hindi; it bore the thumb impressions of two illiterate people who could speak only Dorla. The police manning their ‘security’ furnished the letter each time someone wanted to meet Sambo, even her lawyer for that matter. There were several demonstrations across the country, and even in the US, to protest this injustice towards a victim and eye-witness of a massacre. Booker Prize-winning author and activist Arundhati Roy also stood outside the gates of AIIMS, along with about a crowd of 100, holding placards and shouting out slogans to let Sambo free. Yet, when Roy attempted to meet Sambo, she was denied access. Inside the VIP ward, Sambo was unaware of the attempts that were being made by scores of people to get her freed. Sambo had become a famous pawn.

When the Supreme Court ordered the Chhattisgarh government to permit Sambo’s lawyer and Kumar to meet her, the joy was only momentary when it was soon learnt that Sambo was discharged from AIIMS, as “she wanted to go home”. The doctor operating on her gave different versions to the activists about the degree of Sambo’s recovery – he initially said that she was far from having recovered, but later said that she was an adult who had recovered from her injuries and her plea of going home had to be granted. He spoke as though she communicated to him her deepest fears. But none of the two knew each other’s language.

 Few weeks later, when the case came up for hearing in the Supreme Court, Sambo was brought in by the Chhattisgarh police and she was livid about being ‘abandoned’ by Kumar. She still walked with a limp, with the help of the walker. The judge issued an order to the Chhattisgarh government to investigate the massacre, while also ordering that Sambo should be well taken care of. Sambo was not taken back to the hospital, but she never went home either. The apex court was told that she would be sent to her ‘parents’ in Konta town; but Sambo had none. Just as stealthily she was brought in to New Delhi, she was taken back to Konta. Today, she is lodged in the jail there with her husband.

 Sodi Sambo is not any ordinary woman. Human rights activists across the world know her today – she is the living, breathing, wounded proof of a greedy corporate structure, a greedier bureaucracy, a government equally scared of her existence and the result of her elimination, an apathetic civil society, a barbaric police force, and the empty hopes of non-violence espousing activists who still believe in democracy. Sodi Sambo, 28, Gond tribe, mother of four, bullet injury on her leg – she is just another woman who will soon be forgotten.