THE ISSUE:  This summer  Montreal Serai focuses on the environment through a variety of viewpoints. Jacqueline Fortson, who has moved to Canada from Mexico, gives us a contemporary photo-essay “Montreal – Nature and the City: What makes Montreal a liveable place?” The Quebec city socialist writer, Malcolm Reid, looks at the relation between the environment and social movements, describing the global biosphere as “the new proletariat.” Reid says nature is the oppressed voice which activists must learn to hear. The Montreal environmental leader, David Fletcher, in his striking  essay, “It’s about ecology, stupid!” draws a comprehensive, stark portrait of the current bio-diversity crisis. It is, he warns, a “global winking out of life,” a “waking nightmare” – unless we rouse ourselves. The transport critic of the Quebec’s Green Coalition, Avrom Shtern, writes about car-mad transport, and the urgent need for mass transit of a different kind, while Maria Worton looks through her center-city window and sees a world that is “Living in Traffic.” Rana Bose comments on the BP spill and Subir Das tells us about California politics. And there is much more writing, prose and poetry, in this issue, with more “pushes” to come later this summer.

Amid the varied views presented here though, there is a common theme: we need new vision to break what the poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” of what was once his London and now our world. 

THE EDITORIAL: While Patrick Barnard has acted as general editor for this issue, the editorial board has decided to use four short comments from some of its members as an introduction.

Susan Dubrofsky

I grew up with Strontium-90, the threat of nuclear devastation, fall-out shelters and Coppertone. I was not allowed to suck the tasty marrow from chicken bones and for a few summers even milk was considered suspect. Fifty odd years later, we live with global warming, ozone depletion and traffic pollution, bees disappearing, increasing numbers of cancers, species extinction, deforestation, resource exhaustion, ad infinitum. When googling news about the latest oil spill, not only do I read about it being a massive disaster but how lawyers are making money on it, how politicians are waffling and scuffling and worse, that leaks and spills are more common than we realize. The Gulf of Mexico environmental catastrophe is the elephant in the living room as I recycle my plastics even though I know that only about seven percent is actually reused, as I buy organic food that still uses insecticides, as I bike in city traffic with high UV levels and carbon dioxide emissions, as I use deodorant without aluminum and as I eat genetically modified foods. My dilemma is that, bombarded by media information of videos depicting oil spills, of photos of ocean garbage patches and of daily predictions that climate change will cause massive disappearance of plant and animal species, I cannot comprehend how my recycling will help. But nuclear armageddon did not happen and the new generation is informed and active. And when I ask my friends, what do you think about our planet, one says, do you know that the water around Montreal is cleaner than it used to be twenty years ago, and another, what about the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement to protect our forests, and another, all those companies going carbon neutral, like the airlines, movie studios, the World Bank and you can too. And perhaps I can, in conjunction with the small and the big, contribute.

Maria Worton

Oil slick-sick, more of us than ever before must be asking, “How can we do this differently?”   We know we’re getting down to the wire.  Johann Hari, reporting in The Independent, asks how anyone will deal with accelerating climate change when, “The most powerful country on earth can’t stop a single leaking pipe.”   And what else can we do when the earth’s remaining oil is beneath the ocean floor, in the Arctic or in risky conflict zones.   Must we really go nuclear?  Sure, it’s non-fossil, more climate, plant, animal friendly.  Trouble is it’s killed a lot of people, and threatens everyone else.  

I was ready for good news when I recently happened upon this wonderful report, http://www.offshorevaluation.org/downloads/offshore_vaulation_full.pdf, an evaluation of how Britain can get 150% of its energy needs through off shore energy production using tidal and wind technologies and an international electricity grid system, creating 145,000 jobs in the bargain.  All of which would come at a fraction of the cost of committing to nuclear energy.  Every country on earth needs such a report that scientifically evaluates new energy technologies and their geographical application.

How does one get there?!  It seems that only public assembly, debate, demand, democracy by any other name, will deliver a movement with the critical mass to incline kleptocratic government to agree energy policy for the planet that does not sacrifice nature or its people. 

Patrick Barnard

I believe that human beings do indeed now face a dire threat to our own existence as a species because of our very own activity, and I think that we have probably reached the extinction threshold. Without radical change we will not survive. State socialism, as we have known it, has been a threat to the capitalist oligarchies that rule the world. However, “existing socialism” has failed dismally on the environment, in part because it is actually a form of state capitalism run by managerial redistributors who have the same misguided ideas about nature as their capitalist counterparts.

Out of necessity, human beings, I believe, will rise to the challenge of preserving life for ourselves and our fellow creatures. But the danger of eco-fascism, both of the statist and corporate form, is very great. Hence, the fight for nature and democracy must go hand in hand.

Maya Khankhoje

Children are taught that birds do not foul their own nest. The irony is that those very same adults who admonish their children to respect the environment are the first ones to foul it when the lure of  filthy lucre rears its ugly head. As a species we seem to have forgotten that money is indeed dirty, literally and figuratively, and that it won’t replace  what we have been so diligently destroying. The Cree Indians have a prophecy: “Only after the last tree has been cut down/ Only after the last fish has been caught/ Only after the last river has been poisoned/ Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.” This issue of Montreal Serai is a nudge towards this simple truth.

Bio:

Sandra Levy, originally from Montreal, now resides in Victoria, B.C. She studied art at Concordia University, École des Beaux Arts de Montréal and Arizona State University.  She also did graduate work in biology at Concordia University.  She taught art for many years at Dawson College.  She has exhibited in Montreal, Ottawa, Drummondville and Victoria and has many works in private collections. 

Artist statement:

As a scientist, I recognize trees as the lungs of the earth, purifying the air and playing a large role in energy and nutrient cycling.  As an artist I am sensitive to the magnificence, grace and power expressed in their forms, even when they are reduced to stumps. 

The titles come from the location where these works were painted. Copsewood Pond is a small, natural area, part of a nature trail. The trees are remnants of Douglas Firs after the elements and insects have reduced them to skeletons.

Tanglewood Stump, 17 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches,Charcoal 2010

Tanglewood Stump, 27 x 27 inches, Oil 2010

Thistlewood Stump, 18 x 24 inches, Charcoal 2009

Carolwood Maple, 19 x 25 inches, Oil 2009

Garry Oak, 24 x 24 inches, Oil 2010

Copsewood Pond, 22 x 24 inches, Oil 2009

Copsewood Pond Stump, 27 x 30 inches, Oil 2009

Copsewood, 24 x 22 inches, Oil 2009

               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.

Note: At the bottom of this article you will find a powerful video version, best seen at full screen.

When I was first offered to opportunity of moving to Montreal, I deeply questioned myself, not knowing whether I would be able to tolerate living in a city anymore, especially after 15 years of having been in a very small rural Mexican town surrounded by corn fields, with a magnificent mountain chain as an horizon. In my early adulthood, I had fled from Mexico City, moving south of the huge metropolis to a small place that was till to some extent cosmopolitan. Now another change beckoned. I had already visited Montreal a couple of times before, and I had the feeling that it was a still altogether a human-scale city. An urban conglomerate—yes, but one that offered breathing spaces, open sights, the refreshing contact of water and plenty of choices here and there to escape from the “concrete jungle” even if one were still in the midst of it. So I took my chance. And here I am on this island, four years later, not regretting my decision at all, but rather enjoying a quality of life that I had thought impossible to find in a big city.

Of course, like any urban centre in the world, Montreal has many serious issues—expanding expressways, underfunded public transit, contaminated industrial sites (don’t forget Technoparc), waste management, the threat of growing built-up areas at the expense of green spaces, just to mention a few. Sure enough, we all have to deal with them to a greater or lesser extent, and ideally we will play an active role in their solution. Nonetheless, through this very short collection of images, rather than focusing on Montreal’s pressing environmental issues, I want to pay tribute to those aspects that from my perspective make this city so liveable, an environment for us to cherish, enhance and preserve.

1.  A mountain within the city

What would Montreal be without its Mount Royal?

Not many cities in the world have a mountain right in the middle of their urban core, with a wooded parkland that has been preserved to a large extent rather than having been swallowed up by built-up areas.

In spite of human intervention, Mount Royal still holds a fine tract of maple-hickory forest, right in the heart of the southwest of Quebec, that larger domain with the greatest biodiversity found in all the province. 

2.  Green landscapes (natural and urban parks)

Montreal stands out for the number of natural and urban parks of all sizes distributed across the island.

Many cities have a vestige of their original surroundings, but with a network of 17 sizeable parks, Montreal keeps an invaluable heritage of natural habitats within its urban fabric. These “islets of biodiversity” not only buffer the impact of land development, creating beneficial micro-climates and improving air quality, among other many beneficial effects, but also provide Montrealers with an improved quality of life and opportunities to reconnect with nature “just around the corner.”

3.  Water (the river and canals / fountains)

Coming from a semi-arid climate, I find water to be a most essential element of any urban environment. In addition to the St. Lawrence and its tributaries embracing the island and contributing to the uniqueness of Montreal’s lush landscape and shoreline areas of high ecological value, the city features any number of waterways, canals and fountains highly appreciated by Montrealers for their leisure and recreational potential.

4.  Green neighbourhood alleys (ruelles vertes) and pedestrian streets

Today, Montrealers are creating new urban spaces by greening alleys, an initiative that started some ten years ago in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough.

In a “green alley,” cement is removed along both sides of the street to create planted corridors with perennial plants, bushes and trees (ideally native). The impacts of increased vegetation are immediate: better air quality and cooler neighbourhoods in the summer.

5.  Urban agriculture (community gardens, green roofs)

Montreal has been referred to as a “gardening Mecca.” Besides a longstanding and extensive municipal community garden program, many successful grassroots gardening efforts and urban agriculture projects have helped groups and individuals alike reclaim land—school yards or abandoned areas, rooftops, terraces and balconies—for beauty or for food production, encouraging active citizenship and collective ties: people doing something for themselves and for their community at the same time.

6.  Bike paths and public transport

Turn around and you’ll see a bike. Who would have thought that a city with a winter as long and hard as Montreal’s would become a major cycling centre? But the passion of Montrealers for their bicycles, and a wonderful, constantly expanding system of bike paths, is remarkable.

In fact, that’s one of the things that I’ve enjoyed most in Montreal—being able to live without a car. Eight months a year my loyal bike gets me around wherever I need to go, and the other four, a really good public system solves my transport needs. (I admire those brave enough to keep on biking through the winter; my tropical blood doesn’t take me that far.)

A new component of Montreal’s public transport system is the Bixi, a self-serve bicycle system, solar-powered, and available to Montrealers and tourists alike. Our city is the first with such a solar-powered system and its success, even after only one year of operation, has led other cities around the world to take Bixi as a model.

7.  Neighbourhood/social networks, community action for the environment

Behind all of these features that I so much appreciate in Montreal is—no doubt—community action and the persistent work of social networks.

It is for each of us to dare to dream of different, better and more sustainable ways of making the city our own. And with small, day-to-day actions, we all are making that change possible.

What is at stake right now — on our planet –is complexity at the highest level: intelligence, consciousness, artistic activity.

Hubert Reeves

    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?

At Red River’s Edge

I shed scales and
blood the slow water
at the river’s edge, the fish
gutted on some warming rock.
A wondering after
origins and wellsprings
rises with my standing
and squinting into the glare
of light broken upstream
at my vision’s limit.
What one source spills
up this river?  –
numberless puddles brimming
over as rain falls
to fill them, clear
water writhing
over slick dark rock
too hard to carve
a lasting path in,
waves of rainwater
draining in rippling sheets
of flat rock walling
a gleaming highway,
or running in rivulets
charging a careening stream
from a sudden height
in an opening spray of sparks
that scatter against one
mountain’s steep
lower rises. Upward,
glaciers moan and turn
themselves to fluid under
their own weight
for the sake of motion.
Lighter ice and snow
drop, overheavy
overhang, giving
the glitter of crystals
to the lift of winds
and the long swerve of descent
to dew on darting speargrass
leaves or on the grains
of the smallest antmounds
mining the glint
of sand mixed in the topmost soil
of swelling foothills.
Clouds shadow the climb
of rock, condensing
and losing themselves
in the strain
to come to nothing
but clearest light.
Everywhere, countless surges urge
one flow that fills
perfectly any particular
gap in every ground
in its scrambling run
to that ease of gravity
proper to the sea. This river
one route before me
and beyond me on
either side, never ebbing,
only ever changing course
to another.
I follow
some black bark carried free
on flashing rises of the current,
sometimes edging a shore, sometimes stilled
in the turning of
a darker random
swirl, but always
spiralling out again
to give with the slow measure
of the ocean’s deepest founding swells
or float on the light
lift of waves
and the chance of the wind
into some child’s quick
excitement in the seadrift.

Two

I know the aurora borealis
From before I knew there were nights without them.
Gazing up at them
Alone in the backseat November highway
All the way home
The cold I was wrapped against
Tingling cheeks
Nose cold
The Northern Lights
A veil
Draped
In lifting fingers of wind
Thundering the high air
Way over the howling at the window I sit by

Budapest Suites II

                   For Laszlo Gefin

“There is a god here!”
In wild strawberry entangling thistles,
In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,
In chestnut and cherry blooms over tree-line,
In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.

And there is a god who
Quarries slate for imperial highways,
Mines iron-ore out of greed,
Who would have Mount Ság again
Ash and rock.

And there is a god
In the seared, scarred, spent, still,
For lichen, poppies and song
Here rise from the bared
And broken rock to the air!

from Grand Gnostic Central

Tonight, the world is simple and plain.
The earth is round and the sky two domes
Enclosing us, excluding nothing.

The stars are arranged in such a way
As to suggest an endless emptiness
Or heavens full of foreign deities.

And choosing to choose neither we lose
Ourselves, desiring only an end
To this plane enclosed around itself

That keeps us coming to ourselves again.

[First published in A. Rivista anarchica, anno 40, n.2 (352) aprile 2010, pp. 47-49, Milano, Italia. Translation  by Maya Khankhoje]

           Imperialism is a phenomenon which dates back all the way to antiquity, its epicenter having  changed throughout the centuries. When conditions have permitted it, it has matured in the West, with England standing out  amongst the most rapacious nations, which, before becoming  a model of democracy (a notion which is contested by many) had gone through long periods of expansionism. The so-called Commonwealth is nothing else but the heir of old colonialism.

            India  was one of the largest and oldest nations to free itself from the tutelage of the British lion and its independence was hailed by the United Nations Organization in 1947. But in fact,  the prevailing Mountbatten plan  did not satisfy Gandhi whose misgivings were confirmed by the events  that followed: the Indo-Pakistan war and the assassination of the Mahatma.

            Today, in spite of its instability, the country is slowly transforming itself into a modern democracy even though it is still torn by religious, political and linguistic intestinal wars.

            India has been the scenario of many violent confrontations of a repressive and irredentist nature and the struggle of its people against internal and external oppressors is full of episodes. Revolutionaries have devised  new methods of revolt and, for the first time in history, a very large collectivity has been able to avoid subservience to foreign powers  by adopting original mechanisms that date back to the nineteenth century  and which find their roots in non-violence.  Gandhi, the guru, was inspired  directly by the christian anarchism of Tolstoy,  who in turn was influenced by Proudhon, a libertarian federalist.

            Be it as it may, if the Indian people embraced the non-violent solution, it happened after a long journey of hesitations and not before having practiced other forms of struggle. Independence-seeking intellectuals experienced this slow evolutionary process and  wound up either  resigning themselves to it or enthusiastically adhering to the “Gandhian method.” Amongst these we have the fine example of Pandurang Khankhoje who typifies the conversion of the Indian people to the precepts of the Mahatma.

            The recent publication of I Shall Never Ask for Pardon: A Memoir of Pandurang Khankhoje (Penguin Books India, 2008) edited by Savitri Sawhney, daughter of the author who passed away long ago in 1967, is noteworthy. During my only trip to India, in 1987, I had the honour of being received  by the Khankhoje family and had the pleasure of meeting his widow (now deceased herself), his daughter Savitri (sister of my dear friend Maya who resides in Canada) and her husband and daughter. At that time this book was just a vague project.  After twenty years I am pleased to see that it has been realized  and authored by one of the daughters (both of them with a skilled pen). In order to avoid falling into panegyric, Sawhney has availed herself of  the hand-written memoirs of her father, her  family as well as official archives, ample collected correspondence, newspaper cuttings, testimony by third parties, personal reminiscences. In sum, it is a rich combination of elements that rely on news, direct observation, always supported by objective confirmation, primary and secondary sources, wisely interwoven. A vibrant portrait of humanity and wisdom becomes evident.

            The life of Khankhoje is rich in unusual events. Just to begin with, journeys that take him from India to Indochina, then to Hong Kong and Japan, the United States. Then again Asia, Afghanistan, Persia, Tashkent, then Mexico (where he gets married and where his two daughters are born).  During these shifts and long stays in various countries, he learns many languages and even acquires  scientific knowledge graduating in agronomy (a field in which he would become a great specialist). He meets outstanding personalities: Sun-Yat-Sen (to whom he would teach English), Lenin (who held him in high esteem), Pandit Nehru (who hailed him as a freedom fighter), Diego Rivera (who would paint him in a fresco and would become his close friend), Rajendra Prasad (to whom he would write a report on the agricultural problems of India), Tina Modotti (exiled Italian political figure who would become a great photographer in Mexico) and so on. He frequents Indian anarchists in exile, amongst whom is the well known M.P.T. Acharya (later editor of Indian Libertarian of Bombay) and the very active Har Dayal (expelled from the United States for his anarchist militancy) as well as American and Mexican  comrades amongst whom stand out the Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón brothers, as well as William C. Owen, editor  of the English  page of  Regeneración, sympathizing with the Mexican revolutionary cause which, by the way, was very similar to the Indian one. Pandurang Khankhoje even joined the Industrial Workers of the World who found him work as a lumberjack in Astoria, while he studied at Corvallis, in Oregon State University. Pandurang Khankhoje, even though he appreciated the anarchist point of view and sympathized a lot with the ideas of the Magón brothers, and above all, with those of Har Dayal  — who became his right-hand man within the Ghadar party  (founded by them in California and Portland in May 1913) –would not fully join the anarchist movement, just as he would not join the Communist Party even after 1917 and in spite of his enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution and for Lenin.

            Ever since he was young  Pandurang decided to devote his life to achieving India’s independence.  He plunged into politics  very early on and at the age of ten already founded a secret society: Bal Samaj which then became Bandhav Samaj. He created cells with four members who swore to fight for independence. It is a question, of course, of armed struggle, because this precedes the Gandhian period. When his father chose a bride for him (as was then the tradition in Indian society) he refused with the pretext of  wanting to offer his life to the imminent revolution. His father was indignant but shortly afterwards he tried again so his son was obliged to run away from home, turning down the money for expenses that his mother offered him. However, he did accept some sweets that she made for him just before leaving, with the warning to only eat them when suffering great penury or dearth. When the time arrived to resort to those snacks, Pandurang realized that  each one contained a gold coin. It sounds like a fable from other times…

            His journey would last decades during which he would not stop fighting for the independence of his country by any means. Side by side with his agricultural studies he would also develop a military career convinced  that the handling of weapons  was essential to achieve victory. In America he was able to register at the Mount Tamalpais Military Academy. During his student days he was active and founded in Berkley the league for Indian Independence. British authorities were keeping watch over him intercepting his correspondence (straightaway arresting the addressees of his letters). The Portland chapter of that League was very active and had 400 members. Pandurang envisaged disembarking with a thousand volunteers in a neighbouring country and from there initiating  armed struggle with a cross-border invasion, but the British counterespionage services were  well organized, thwarting  all attempts at revolt by means of intrigue, preventive arrests, systematic repression. In order to increase membership, Khankhoje became associated with Sikhs. To be able to communicate with other revolutionary and freedom fighting factions he learned other Indian languages. His mother tongue was Marathi (in which he wrote his memoirs), but he started studying Punjabi and Urdu while he had a smattering of  Afghani and Farsi, a bit of Chinese and Japanese, to which he later on added Spanish and French. But by then he had a high-profile and could not go about incognito under any circumstances even if he changed his address to hide. He was fighting powerful and astute enemies and all his movements were under surveillance, noted, foiled. He finally realized this and wound up embracing the Gandhian solution, the opposite of his own. The Mahatma faced his enemy head on. One must remember that every time Gandhi organized a protest demonstration he advised the British authorities. He would not ask for permission, he merely informed the enemy of his intentions.  Passive resistance was not for everybody, it requires a tremendous inner discipline, but when it is practiced seriously, systematically and stoically, it may end up in unexpected results.

            Khankhoje took to heart his extraordinary  and, perhaps even contradictory experiences: the violent revolution in Mexico in 1910 and the non-violent one in India about thirty years later. Too wise to settle for provisional and incomplete results he was able to foresee the drawbacks  of both  that might ensue from a  merely political victory.  It was necessary to intervene at an economic and social level. The conquest of power or the instauration of parliamentary democracy picked up  morale but did not, in and of themselves,  solve the practical problem of survival. It is no coincidence that he completed agricultural studies and wanted to put them to good use. Rivera precisely painted him  in his fresco surrounded by ears of corn. We can imagine Khankhoje followed in the work started by my acquaintance and fellow citizen Prof. Mario Calvino (father of Italo, the writer) who had understood that Mexico should develop its agriculture, be it to feed the population, be it to lead it in the right path towards self sufficiency and economic independence. They did not listen to Calvino so he went off to Cuba and Khankhoje would face the same situation decades later. Having returned to India in the fifties he would in fact try to apply his Mexican discoveries to local conditions but his efforts would be hindered by bureaucrats and politicians.

            Pandurang  reacquired his lost citizenship but he had by then reached retirement age, so he turned to writing his memoirs, proud of having left traces of his work in  Mexico and  in India and proud even of having  brought the two countries closer to each other politically. Mexico was, in fact, the first country to recognize the sovereignty of India, henceforth independent from British domination. He died in 1967 at the age of 81, leaving behind, like a true internationalist, a European wife (Jeanne Khankhoje was Belgian), an Indian daughter (Savitri) and a Mexican daughter (Maya). His heart and his mind, on the other hand, did not belong to any country, but rather to humanity.