Yippee!

Supreme Court rulings recognizing Treaty and inherent rights mean that First Nations must be consulted and their interests accommodated.

(For the record, the generic picture of a marginalized human being used for this cartoon was taken in eastern Europe.)

Nuclear waste in your backyard?

A recent CBC story

Nuclear waste in your backyard?

Freeda Peeble wrote:Posted 2009/08/20at 12:09 PM ET
I live in in the beautiful Shield country of Western Ontario. (For those who sometimes confuse self importance with actual geography, I'm refering to that enormous part of our Province located on the main Trans Canada economic corridor that is truly western, i.e. -closer to Edmonton than to Toronto.) The power that lights my city comes from cheap, renewable hydraulic sources. This region's power grid is not even connected to southern Ontario's expensive thermal and nuclear system, but thanks to Provincial pricing, my astronomical hydro bill (compared to my Manitoba neighbours who use the same water powers,) has been subsidizing the nuclear part of the people's power system for years. The paper mill that kept my community fed for the past century is being permanently dismantled because the artificially high cost of Ontario's electricity in this watershed has made it uncompetetive. So, those of you who have had the benefit of the nuclear power and the jobs and my subsidy can also keep the glow-in-the-dark leftovers. May you live happily together for a very, very long time.

Jon Thompson's a writer worth reading

Canada Day in Treasontown...

Facebook Jon Thompson's notes

Our region and our community thank you Jon.
Anything I might say would only detract.

A Place for Poet/Thinkers

Does this article from the Walrus Magazine resonate with anyone else?

Canadian Primal.

Here are some quotes from Tim Lilburn, one of the poet/thinkers mentioned in this piece:

"We [humans,] have this nostalgia for a homecoming, a yearning for a sense of being in the world as if it were home."

...and

"I sometimes think it's as if there's a singing in things that I am so far from being able to know that I'm only guessing that I can call it "singing." What I would very much like to do (why? I have no idea) is to come alongside that and sing with it."

A sense of 'home' is all about belonging and being connected. In reference to the sacred sites around Common Ground in Kenora, an elder described how the skin of the Life that is Mother Earth is thinner in certain places; that the connection to another way of knowing is easier in such places. There is something in me that understands this ...and that something is actually better able to understand it when I am present on that remarkable, gloriously beautiful intersection of water and land. Surely, this is a place where connection and singing are possible!




But relating to only the beautiful in our world is naive and romantic. Besides pretty sacred places, might there also be places made sacred in their wounding? -Batoche feels like this ...I'm told that Auschwitz does too. Are there places where the skin has been torn, if you will, where the connective tissues that bind our place as part of a vital cosmos are also revealed? Certainly, there are places here at the outfall of the Lake of the Woods where the injured sinews of our relationships with the Earth and with each other are raw and self-evident e.g.: Railway = Hole in Earth; Industrialized, consumer economy = displaced, wounded practitioners of ancient, sustainable economies. In the presence of connections so strained and severed poet/thinkers might be moved to cry alongside such a world; -for a home made so distant.

I have no idea where these thoughts are going, except that this place that juxtaposes the Boreal with Bay Street; this location that is the literal intersection/collision point for so many forces and things; this is the kind of place that prompts such thoughts. The range of human experience in the world that can be reflected upon from this vantage point is impressive indeed. Although jarring, the extreme contrasts within that scope feel important. It strikes me that the possibility of truer understanding exists only when the sweep of one's view is sufficient to prompt both singing and crying with our world. 'Common Ground' is one of those rare, valuable places where the the capacity for both beauty and horror in all our relationships is revealed.
It feels like there is something important here. Send in the poet/thinkers!

Urbanization - the dangerous disconnect

Christopher Hume, the Toronto Star's urban columnist recently wrote a column entitled "Can Toronto Learn to Love Winter?"
http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/578823
in which he observed:

"Most of us would rather pretend it [winter] isn't happening and carry on regardless. And given the hermetically sealed nature of the modern city, we're nearing the point where that's almost possible."

Sadly, Mr Hume's observations are correct about a good many cities that have come to ignore the reality of their location or the world in which they find themselves. (Has anyone checked out Dubai lately?)

Here's Freda's comment on Hume's article:

"It is truly frightening that so many who know only the cave of their built environment would become so blind as to think that copious quantities of fossil fuels and a multitude of technofixes would be sufficient to overcome their geographic reality. I live in the City of Kenora, where, as in other border-hugging southern Canadian cities like Winnipeg, Ottawa and Calgary, we smile and celebrate the shared understanding of our place in the cosmos, -a place that makes Sorels quite acceptable ...even the recommended footwear with a winter's evening gown. Torontonians' denial of winter hints at a much deeper disconnect from what it means for a society to live WITH their place or this Earth."

The disconnection of human beings from our life and death relationship with the world, a disconnection that is fostered by an increasingly urbanized, (read: man-made,) sense of Canadian self, is dangerous to all of us, not the least of whom is Mother Earth.