A wakeup call to Canadians

Review of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care). Knopf Canada: 2007.

William Marsden is an author and investigative journalist who bravely took on the Hell’s Angels biker gang in a series of books and columns. Now he’s after a bigger, richer, and far more deceptive foe… the Canadian oil industry. Marsden goes to the physical and metaphorical heart of Canada’s oil country to provide an incisive examination of an environmental catastrophe effected by a manipulative oil industry in denial and aided an impotent and incompetent system of governments.

Marsden begins by supplying a great deal of informative historical background of the oil sands project, including a bizarre scheme in the 1950s to extract oil via controlled nuclear explosions. He also provides an inside view of the immense scale oil sands excavations by visiting the projects and talking with the workers. This sets the stage for the critique to come.

 

The two primary targets polemically identified by Marsden (the “stupid” ones of the title) are the oil industry and governments within the province of Alberta.

 

Marsden describes a heavily subsidized industry that flouts the rule of law, uses propaganda and intimidation to achieve its ends, is deliberately deceitful, and remains astonishingly ignorant of the long term effects (environmental, social, and financial) of its activities. He illustrates how time and time again the massive public relations machine of the oil industry obscures facts and keeps citizens in the dark (for example, by stating that the toxic petrochemical-related products suddenly infusing wells and land are naturally occurring).

 

The second side of the problem rests with an impotent and largely incompetent provincial government. This is not a government that serves its citizens; rather, it is a veritable plutocracy under the sway of corporations and addicted to royalties delivered by the ever-increasing prices of crude oil. The politics of ignorance appear to be the central creed of the Alberta government, and there is little or no desire by elected officials to listen to citizens or take their concerns seriously. As such, Marsden takes it upon himself to visit concerned citizens and report their stories, and they are not pretty. He reports of a government bought and paid for by the oil industry and who remain astonishingly oblivious about the effects of the industry on the citizens of Alberta.

 

Marsden concludes that the results the industry and government action/inaction have resulted in boreal forest depletion of a massive scale, a significant and possibly catastrophic depletion of the water table, and destruction of wildlife and rural agriculture. If continued unchecked, the Alberta of the future will be a bleak monument to avarice, and yes, stupidity.

An environmental butterfly effect

Review of The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey by Robert Hunter. Arsenal Pulp Press: 2004.

According to the butterfly effect, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China can ultimately result in a tornado in North America. That is, small variations in initial conditions of a given system can have large and unpredictible effects. The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey demonstrates how a small act by a determined group of individuals begat the worldwide environmental organisation known as Greenpeace.

In 1972, a group of intrepid peaceniks from western Canada set sail on a dilapidated forty-year old fishing vessel from Vancouver to Amchitka (a small island in the Aleutians), hoping to force the cancellation of nuclear device test by the U.S. government. The Greenpeace To Amitchka is a first-person account by this journey by the late Bob Hunter.

Hunter was well known to Torontonians as an environmentalist, newspaper columnist, and television reporter. It is not quite as well known that Hunter was a founding member of Greenpeace and was on the ill-fated voyage of the Phyllis McCormack that fall of 1972. That persevering vessel would be renamed en route as the Greenpeace as it continued the desperate and ultimately futile voyage.

The book is written in a late 1960s “gonzo journalism” style reminiscent of writers such as Hunter S. Thompson. As such, the prose comes across as somewhat dated, yet retains a lively and frenetic feel. The tensions between the picaresque participants are captured with unabashed honesty, and Hunter writes with a mixture of humour and pathos. Like Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, the book provides a vivid description of a remote part of the world that few of us have or ever will see. The book also contains many photographs by Robert Keziere, who perfectly captures the bleak landscapes and stoic countenances of the participants.

The voyage was unsuccessful in its initial goal of stopping the nuclear test. Bad weather, frequent delays, harassment by the U.S. Navy, and a rift among the protesters all contributed to the cancellation of the voyage. However, the dejected protesters returned to Vancouver as environmental celebrities, due to the growth of public awareness resulting from media coverage of the voyage. Like the butterfly’s wings, this initial futile and seemingly inconsequential event sowed the seed for a trans-national environmental movement… a movement that became Greenpeace.

Review: Freedom of Expression

Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity
Kembrew McLeod. Doubleday, 2005.

The subtitle “overzealous copyright bozos and other enemies of creativity“ aptly describes this missive against current trends in intellectual property law that media prankster Kembrew McLeod has launched with this thought-provoking and often humorous book.

A central premise of McLeod’s book is that an erosion of the creative commons by continually expanding copyright and patent legislation, rather than encouraging artistic and scientific innovation, has actually had the opposite effect. Moreover, the encroachment of private interests on the public domain via this expanding legislation has made it prohibitively expensive to perform scientific research and cheapened our culture.

Copyright and patent laws were legislative tools originally conceived to foster creativity. The laws allowed the creators of cultural and technological artifacts to exclusive profits for a fixed period of time. Afterwards, the works would enter the public domain, where they could be built upon by the next generation.

McLeod describes how folk musician and political activist Woody Guthrie freely borrowed melodies and lyrics from existing folk and show tunes for his compositions. Many of these tunes were only a few years old at the time Guthrie incorporated them into his music, yet this was not seen as theft. Artists of his era implicitly recognized the concept of the information commons – that they could build upon existing melodies to create something novel. In fact, this methodology goes back to nineteenth century classical music, where composers like Mahler and Dvorak used folk melodies as a basis for many of their symphonic compositions.

Woody Guthrie has been dead for 40 years, and many of his songs are well over 60 years old. Ironically, the current holders of his copyright have been very litigious in their pursuance of any perceived transgression against their “right” to his music. They fail to recognize how the genesis of these songs relied on a freely available pool of existing melodies, rhythms, and lyrics – a creative commons – that they in turn are slowly eroding. The result is that current copyright legislation no longer encourages creativity, but destroys it.

McLeod looks at the effects this erosion of the public sphere in a wide range of areas: sampling and collage in music, trademarks in biotechnology, the use of lawsuits to curtail fair use, and the copyright of common sayings.

There are long-reaching ramifications, including the curtailing of free speech and democratic institutions. If the Watergate scandal occurred this century, could it have been made public, given that documentation produced by outsourced private entities is not freely available? How could the results of voting machines, produced by and managed by private corporations, be independently verified if they are under private control? These and many other troubling issues are raised in this incisive analysis of unchecked greed.

Reading for 2007

It was a slow year for reading in 2007, perhaps the slowest in more than a decade. However, I did manage to read a number of interesting books and plan ahead for a more intensive reading schedule for 2008.

1. Kevin Bazzana (2005) – Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
2. Kim Stanley Robinson (2004) – Forty Signs of Rain
3. Kim Stanley Robinson (2005) – Fifty Degrees Below
4. Kim Stanley Robinson (2007) – Sixty Days and Counting
5. Lawrence Osborne (2005) – The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World
6. Dennis McNally (2002) – A Long Strange Trip: An Inside History of the Grateful Dead
7. Barney Hoskyns (1993) – Across the Great Divide: The Band and America
8. Henry David Thoreau (1854) – Walden
9. Henry David Thoreau (1849) – Civil Disobedience
10. Ted Schredd (1996) – The Cycling Adventures of Coconut Head: A North American Odyssey
11. Lester Bangs (2003) – Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader
12. Lorenzo Valla (1517) – The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine
13. Lorenzo Valla (1440) – The Profession of the Religious
14. Charles Wilkins (2004) – Walk to New York
15. George Plimpton (2005) – Ernest Shackelton
16. Jon Ronson (2002) – Them: Adventures with Extremists
17. Robert Hunter and Robert Keziere (2004) – The Greenpeace To Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey
18. Daniel Poliquin (2007) – A Secret Between Us
19. Kembrew McLeod (2005) – Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity
20. Shirley Teasdale (2000) – Hiking Ontario’s Heartland
21. Eric Enno Tamm (2004) – Beyond the Outer Shores
22. Ian Carr (1999) – Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography
23. Philip Freeman (2005) – Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis
24. Bill Bryson (1998) – A Walk in the Woods
25. Harold Bloom (1995) – The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
26. Michael Ondaatje (2007) – Divisadero
27. Michel Finkielkraut (1995) – The Defeat of the Mind
28. Homer (c. 700 BC) – The Iliad
29. Homer (c. 700 BC) – The Odyssey
30. William Marsden (2007) – Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care)
31. Jimmy McDonough (2003) – Shakey

My favorite read for 2007 was Beyond The Outer Shores, Eric Enno Tamm’s insightful and illuminating biography of ecological pioneer and polymath Ed Ricketts. The book’s tagline mentioned Ricketts as an inspiration for John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, and this is what initially caught my attention (being a fan of Campbell). Tamm demonstrates how Rickett’s personal philosophy and humanist outlook inspired them both. In particular, the “Doc” character of Cannery Row was directly modeled on Ricketts.

A biologist with the outlook of a philosopher and the heart of a poet, Ricketts lived a fascinating yet shortened life, never receiving his due recognition as a scientist and thinker until well after his death. His environmental philosophy permeated the works of Steinbeck in the late 1930s. In this way, The Grapes of Wrath can be read as a warning against anthropogenic environmental degradation, and Cannery Row read as a human reflection of the diversity of tidepools. Likewise, his revolutionary work on the western American and Canadian shores remains influential to this day. Tamm’s book is a fantastic read that brings to light the life and spirit of a true Renaissance Man.

A close runner-up for my favourite book in 2007 was Divisadero. Another sublime read by Ondaatje that, as the title implies, examines the divisions (intentional, unintentional, emotional, physical, and geographical, among others) within the interweaving lives of seemingly disparate characters. Ondaatje’s elegant prose is the highlight, providing just enough illumination while leaving room for open-ended interpretations.