grass!struggle

Manufactured disaster

2011-10-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

The ISA virus. Photo: Fisheries Research Service

Sadly, we had it coming. It is now official. The European strain of Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) has been reported today for the first time in Pacific wild salmon. It was found in sockeye caught on the central coast of British Columbia. Read the press release from Salmon Are Sacred, and the stories all over the media.

ISA is a deadly virus directly linked to fish farms. It has decimated salmon stocks in many countries since the 1980s such as Norway, Scotland, Chile. Entire ecosystems and coastal communities have been ecologically and economically devastated by this salmon equivalent of the Black Death. And now we learn we have it too.

With such a dangerous virus out in the open around the world for so many years, the question on everyone’s minds this morning was: how did we get to this? How did we allow this virus to even reach the shores of British Columbia? Surely by now, we know how to stop this thing, don’t we?

We actually do, and we have known for many years. Ban the import of Atlantic salmon hatchery eggs. In this age of total globalization, even farmed salmon eggs are no longer produced locally but rather thousands of miles away, usually in Europe. Those imported eggs are important, because scientists see them as the primary vector in the transmission of viruses such as ISA from one region of the world to the other.

Since the late 1980s, scientists in Canada and elsewhere have relentlessly alerted government against the risks of such egg imports. But Canada’s Department of Fish Farms chose instead to ignore those calls and adopted a policy of institutional recklessness to fulfill its mandate of serving industrial aquaculture. A report written by Dr. Alexandra Morton for the Cohen Commission before ISA was discovered in BC, and which was recently admitted as evidence in spite of furious objections on the part of government and industry lawyers, explains in detail how government has gambled with our wild salmon.

BC’s eggs, Morton explains, are shipped from a hatchery in Iceland called Stofnfiskur. The problem is that this particular hatchery does not meet the health safety standards of Canadian law. So technically, they couldn’t be imported. Don’t let that technicality stop the Department of Fish Farms, though! In a briefing dated 2004, DFF’s Director for the Pacific Region Laura Richards articulated the following key arguments in an effort to allow those eggs into Canada in spite of their non-compliance:

“Two BC salmon farming companies wish to import Atlantic salmon eggs from Stofnfiskur, an Icelandic company which is not certified under the Canadian Fish Health Protection Regulations”
“Failure to provide permission for egg importation may trigger a trade challenge under the World Trade Organization …”
“Additionally, DFO could also be viewed as causing a competitive disadvantage of the aquaculture industry by denying them access to alternate strains”

Following this briefing, Alexandra Morton wrote to Justice Cohen in her report, “Laura Richards was successful in her petition to allow eggs from a hatchery that does not meet Canada’s Fish Health Protection Regulations.” By opening that regulatory backdoor for the industry, Dr. Richards may have allowed the ISA virus to enter British Columbia.

In that same report, Dr. Morton also showed that the ISA virus may have been present in BC for several years but that scientists on government payroll have chosen not to acknowledge that possibility. Dr Gary Marty, a lead veterinarian with the Province of BC, reported cases of classic lesions associated with ISA 1,100 times since 2006. Yet he never registered any of those repeated diagnoses – not a single time – as being the ISA virus itself, even though the disease was very well known worldwide and was routinely associated with fish farm operations similar to those found in British Columbia, and even though the symptoms matched the disease perfectly.

The problem in this matter is not so much Dr. Marty’s personal decision not to recognize those thousand diagnoses as being ISA. Rather, as Alex Morton noted in her report to Cohen, the problem is that “Dr. Marty is the only government person we know of who is doing these examinations.” Placed by his employer, the government of BC, in a position of complete monopoly over the diagnosis of ISA, Dr. Marty can literally say whatever takes his fancy about those symptoms. For that matter, he could have said that those fish died of old age. No other scientist is in a position to either confirm or challenge his conclusions, not having access to the same information as he does. And so, Marty’s statement that those classic symptoms of ISA are not actually ISA can never be scientifically disproved. It is, as Morton wrote to Cohen, a statement that “could be repeated indefinitely”.

And this is how a government maintains the status quo, preserves a position of business as usual no matter what may be happening in the real world. By manufacturing self-supporting scientific statements which cannot be challenged, the charade can be, in effect, maintained and repeated indefinitely. Of course, this is no longer called science, but dogma. And yes, it may occasionally find itself contradicted by real things that happen in the real world – such as herrings bleeding from their fins, Harrison sockeye dying by the hundreds of thousands without spawning, or the emergence of freakish bright-yellow pink salmon all over the Fraser River. But those are merely PR matters that need to be managed, a small price to pay for the perpetuation of the cozy relationship between government, industry, and the scientific establishment within the salmon-industrial complex.

How does the public fight back? As so many times before, Alexandra Morton is showing the way, and it’s actually simpler than it sounds. She is breaking the monopoly of knowledge that government is working so hard to maintain. She has taken the matter of salmon testing and diagnosis in her own hands. Earlier this month, she went in the field twice to test the salmon – and came back with evidence of severe hepatitis and pre-spawn mortality in the Fraser salmon. She struck a partnership with SFU professor Rick Routledge to send central coast sockeye for testing – and came back with the ISA virus. She has fearlessly denounced the ruthless policy of financial starvation and bureaucratic harassment inflicted by the Department of Fish Farms on one of her most talented scientists, Dr. Kristi Miller – and I will wage my money that Alex will succeed there too in breaking the knowledge impasse. Miller will eventually get her money and her research will resume and provide us with righteous answers.

Fighting back will require an array of initiatives. In this asymmetrical struggle against a bloated and hyper-powerful bureaucracy, our strategy is to initiate shocks which grow over time by taking a life of their own. One such initiative is called the “Kristi Miller Fund”. Back in September, Dr. Miller testified at the Cohen Commission that her research funding for the sockeye salmon had been cut off. In particular, she had applied for a grant to test farmed salmon for the virus signature that she had identified. She was asking for $18,750 – a pittance in research terms – but her hierarchy said sorry, we don’t have the money at this time.

The Kristi Miller Fund

What a slap in the face. We who were sitting in the public gallery at the Cohen Commission on that day were fuming with rage. Then someone said: “So they don’t have that money, eh? Heck! (actually she used another word) Let’s just raise the money ourselves so Kristi Miller can do her testing.” The Kristi Miller Fund was born. To date, about $6,000 of the money has been raised. That’s about a third, not bad. I suspect we will get way beyond the required $18,000 without even breaking a sweat, as soon as this particular initiative will have taken a life of its own and grown beyond control. People have given anywhere between $10 and $1,000. What matters really is not how much each person gives but rather how many people end up contributing to this Fund, that’s the metric I’ll be most interested in.

The purpose of this initiative is not to bail out government with our own paycheques. Rather, it’s to turn this petty, shameful move to starve Miller’s work into a media and PR nightmare for the government. Initiate a shock that will grow on its own and blow up in the bureaucracy’s face. When we have the money, we’ll hold a press conference and put up a big stink about it, hand out to the media a story that they will want to tell. The plan is to force Miller’s hierarchy to miraculously “find” the money that she was denied. It’s really about saving government from its own stupidity, helping the Department of Fish Farms to start its long, painful march towards detox. So than one day, it can break away from its incestuous relationship with industry and be – once again! – the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

People have asked: what happens if the Department of Fish Farms refuses to take the money or if it suddenly finds money of its own to fund Miller? Where does the money go? Well, I think that answer is rather obvious. We will hand it over to Alexandra Morton, so she can do more testing and diagnosis independently of industry and government. That way, we will win on both counts. Miller will get her funding restored, and Morton will continue her heroic work to break the state monopoly over salmon knowledge.

Follow this link to pitch in your own two cents to the Kristi Miller Fund!

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Yellow salmon

2011-10-06T10:12:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a bright yellow salmon before? With shock and horror, I give you one.

This photo was taken yesterday by Dr. Alexandra Morton and activist Anissa Reed on the banks of the Fraser river.

They found several such dead yellow fish yesterday during a field trip. Those salmon clearly died of jaundice. And when Alex opened one fish, she found a severely diseased liver, one which appeared to be covered with tumor-like growths.

Don't eat that liver!

What is causing this deadly disease in so many of our salmon? Is it a virus? We don’t know. But we need to find out, right now.

Dr. Kristi Miller, the DFO researcher whose work has been recently published in the journal Science, has discovered a candidate virus which may be causing cancer and anemia in wild salmon. Yet last month, it was revealed at the Cohen Commission that she has been denied funding by DFO to test Atlantic salmon in fish farms for her virus. She was asking for $18,750 – a pittance in research terms – yet her DFO hierarchy told her that they didn’t have the money!

Why is DFO doing this? Why is it pretending that it does not have twenty thousand dollars to conduct critical tests on salmon disease? Why would it say that, when it was also revealed at the Commission that the federal government has given $145,000 to the fish farm industry to conduct “research” on how to make farmed salmon more palatable to the end consumer?

Pre-spawn death

As yellow salmon are dying on the banks of the Fraser, this DFO charade must stop. The people of this Province demand that viral tests be performed on fish farms - right now. Not next year. Not next month. Now.

WTF are those whitish growths in that salmon's gills?!

Are we losing our fish?

2011-09-25T22:55:00.000-07:00

I am receiving some terrible news from different people today. I don't understand it. So I'm just going to repost it without further comment.

I'll just add this: that this pretty much seems disease-related, definitely looks like a virus of some kind.

So first, I got this from Alex Morton earlier this afternoon:

And only a few minutes ago, I got this from Geoff Gerhart:

Just got some bad news today. I went to the BC rivers day at Britanna creek and was speaking with some people that have a source that has informed them that sockeye are dying by the thousands. They are going up to the birkeanhead river but are not making it before they spawn. The count is estimated at 90,000 dead so far. It has been reported to DFO but they are saying that there is no problem. People have asked DFO to test the fish but they will not do so at this time. I have also seen dead fish that have not spawned. I have seen this before but something is different about this.

What is going on?! Are we losing our fish, not just our salmon, to a deadly virus?

I'm going to sign off for the night because this is more painful than I'd care to share. I may have to cry a little. Maybe tomorrow morning, who knows? I'll have some good news waiting for me in my inbox.

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Wheat harvest in the city

2011-09-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Hello friends in Vancouver,

Incredible news!

Yesterday night I was on my way for some party and since I was a bit early, I decided to stop for a few minutes at the Strathcona community garden to check on my garden plot.

It was already nightfall, so I didn’t expect to meet anyone in the garden. But instead, I found the garden teeming with life and gardeners inside and around the Garden House busy harvesting wheat!

The wheat, I learned, had been grown over the summer in a neighboring garden and dried in the Garden House for the past few weeks. Gardeners were now threshing - separating the seeds from the straw to complete the harvest.

The atmosphere in the Garden House was eerie and from another world. The smell of dried straw was intoxicating. As I watched the gardeners sift the grains and collect them in large buckets, I was transported to a time and place we don't belong to.

I took a few low-fi pictures on my iPhone which do a poor job in capturing the magic of the moment.

I never thought I would see that – people harvesting wheat in the city! Cabbages and tomatoes and beans are one thing. But that’s bread we’re talking about. What a milestone in the fight to regain our food sovereignty.

The gardeners were very much aware of the somewhat groundbreaking nature of their work, and some wondered jokingly whether this constituted or not the largest wheat harvest in Vancouver in recent decades...

Okay so now, here is the scoop:

Today Saturday September 24, 2:00 PM there is a work party at the Strathcona community garden to continue the wheat harvest.

(That’s at 800 Prior Street, at the Garden House behind the apple orchard)

I had plans for this afternoon, but I am definitely changing those to be part of this. Hope you can make it too!

According to the weather man today will be a glorious day and WE ARE GOING TO HARVEST WHEAT IN THE CITY!!

The ugly face of state repression

2011-09-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

Mitch Taylor, counsel for the government of Canada. Photo UBC Law Alumni Magazine, Winter 2008

When Mitchell Taylor, the counsel representing Canada, rose last Thursday to cross-examine Alexandra Morton, we were expecting some payback time. For the past two weeks, through the mighty voice of her lawyer Gregory McDade, Alex had exposed to broad light the incestuous relationship between government and industry inside the salmon-industrial complex.

The cases of conflict of interest, incompetence, and acts of sabotage within DFO had piled up at the Cohen Commission like as many dead fish. Mr. Taylor’s job was to level the playing field a little for the government of Canada by bringing as much discredit as possible onto Alexandra Morton. Character assassination was his mandate, a despicable but generally accepted practice in the legal profession. So we were definitely waiting for him on that terrain.

Taylor performed his duty meticulously. He insisted on calling his witness “Ms. Morton” rather than the customary “Doctor” used to address people holding a Doctorate. He attempted to bring her US degree into disrepute by alluding to her university as being “famous for political activism”. He systematically declined to discuss any of Morton’s numerous published scientific papers or any of their content, insisting rather that she was an “advocate against open net fish farms” and that her primary activity in life was to “write a blog” and to be “quite a prolific emailer”.

Mr. Taylor did something else, however, which was not expected of him and of a different nature altogether. Deliberately, he crossed a red line. He used a technical and overall minor incident to conduct a frontal assault against Alexandra Morton’s right to free expression.

The night before her cross-examination, Alexandra Morton had made a bad judgment call by posting a blog. Something that she had been doing routinely on an almost daily basis for the past several months. September 7, however, was the one night when she shouldn’t have done it, according to a rule of the court that specifies that a witness should not communicate about the ongoing proceedings while under oath. A honest mistake, Morton explained to the court the next morning. I thought that only my evidence, which the public had not yet heard, was included in the ban, I did not know that the material already made public and broadcast live on the Internet was included as well. She apologized to the court and her apology was graciously accepted by Justice Cohen, with apparently little consequence over the proceedings.

Not so for Mr. Taylor of Canada. He wanted to extract his pound of flesh out of Morton’s screw-up. So he put Morton’s September 7 blog on the screen – even though Morton had already removed it from her blog after realizing her mistake –, and he proceeded to dissect it line by line, punctuating every sentence with a you violated the rules of this court reprimand. It would have remained more of the same character assassination exercise, if it were not for what Taylor did next:

Taylor: Let’s continue with your blogging, if we may Ms. Morton. Let’s look at the blog from August 31. This deals with the evidence that the veterinarians gave. If we go to page three, this appears to be a cartoon that you put on the blog of what appears to be the Commissioner speaking to those four witnesses. And the cartoon is showing flames coming from the pants of the witnesses and the words of the Commissioner are “pants on fire”. Ms. Morton, are you familiar with the saying “liar, liar, pants on fire”?

The sight of Mr. Taylor – a sinister figure if there ever was one in a courtroom – uttering on public record the phrase “liar, liar pants of fire” with his nasal daffy-duck voice while maintaining his expressionless poker face was truly hilarious. I could not help but join the rest of the crowd in a rowdy and joyful eruption of laughter.

This moment of comic relief passed quickly though, as I realized what had just happened. The August 31 blog? Wait a minute. Morton was not under oath on that date. This was no longer about her breaking some obscure court rule. What was it, then? Oblivious to the laughter still shaking the public gallery, Taylor continued:

Taylor: Do you agree with me that this cartoon is disparaging of those witnesses’ evidence?

Morton: I thought this was a representation, without saying the words --

Taylor: -- Are you saying they lied?

Morton: How can you look at the symptoms of a disease, have somebody like Dr. Gary Marty report those symptoms as being the clinical signs of marine anemia, which a DFO scientist [Kristi Miller] thinks the majority of Fraser sockeye are being killed and weakened by, and the vets above him, Peter McKenzie of Mainstream, and Dr. Mark Sheppard simply don’t recognize that that disease exists. That --

Taylor: Ms. Morton --

Morton: -- that cannot stand.

Taylor: Ms Morton, this is not an opportunity for you to make a speech.

Morton: Well don’t ask me questions, then.

Okay. Got it. I’m with you now, Mr. Taylor. What you are really getting at with this is that Alexandra Morton should not be criticizing the scientific and industrial establishment – ever, whether or not she is under oath. Because for one thing, this could be construed as libel, a punishable offense. And for another, as Taylor proceeded to explain, this is a morally reprehensible behavior:

Taylor: Do you agree with me that it is against the code of conduct for a registered biologist to speak disparagingly of a colleague registered biologist?

Morton: It is, yes.

Taylor: Can we equally apply that, then, to the fact you should not be disparaging of other professionals such as veterinarians?

Morton: Mr. Taylor, my personal code of conduct is that when I see an ecosystem being destroyed, I will use what tools I can that are fair and legal to try and represent that truth. And if --

Taylor: -- all right, thank you.

Morton: -- and if the cartoon was the only way to do it, that’s what I was going to do.

Taylor then brought up another of Morton’s blogs, dated September 5, and therefore also clearly outside of the “no comment while under oath” restriction period. In that blog, Morton referred to an incident where gas bubbles were spotted near a fish farm in the Broughton Archipelago. Called by residents to investigate, DFO biologist Kerra Hoyseth found an underwater pipe full of dead farmed salmon. In spite of her discovery, Hoyseth reported that there was no conclusive evidence as to the exact cause of the gas emanations and so she closed the file.

In her September 5 blog, Morton commented about this incident: “Everyone knows rotting causes gas. I suspect Hoyseth's first instinct was to be more truthful, but I think this painfully illustrates DFO's relationship with fish farms. How can I believe anything DFO says about salmon farms after this? Hoyseth did not tell me the truth. I feel badly for her, because I suspect this was what was expected of her. How many others in DFO are doing the same thing just to keep their job?”

Mr. Taylor charged at Morton head on:

Taylor: You have no evidence that [Ms. Hoyseth] was not telling the truth, do you? You just don’t agree with what she was finding or her interpretation of it. You have a different interpretation.

Morton: Mr. Taylor -- a pipe full of rotting salmon! Ms. Hoyseth, I am sure, understood that it could easily produce bubbles. But it was my interpretation that she did not want to report that to me, and so she glossed over the finding of that entire pipe full of rotting fish.

Taylor: Thank you. You just answered it, because you used the word “interpretation”. Now, you say "How many others in DFO are doing the same thing just to keep their job?" You have no evidence to support that accusation that people in DFO don’t tell the truth just to keep their jobs, do you?

Morton: I actually do. But I am not going to reveal all my sources, because they are scared.

Two things jump out of this extraordinary exchange. One, Morton is sending a stern warning back to Taylor and the members of the scientific-industrial establishment: Sue me if you dare! I will not come to court empty handed. The second is Taylor’s dorky Aha I nailed you answer over the word “interpretation”. How not to think of an Inquisition trial with the church prosecutor exclaiming: She uttered the word of God in vain, what more proof do we need?

Taylor then went to the next level of his attack against Morton. He put in question her right to peaceful assembly.

Taylor: Ms. Morton, I want to ask you about some protests you may have participated in against fish farms, and there is nothing wrong with that of course. You have participated in protests against fish farms at the farm site, haven’t you?

Morton: Yes.

Taylor: And you did that in a way that you and others got very close to the actual site and pens and/or may have gone into the site itself.

Morton: No, we never go into the pens.

Taylor: I see. And you did that [did what? Morton just told him they didn’t do it] despite there being some signs that say No trespassing, quite prominent signs?

Morton: First of all, there were no signs at that farm. Second of all, it is actually illegal to put a No trespassing sign on a marine farm that has a license of occupation. Mainstream tried that for a little while, but they were told to remove them. So it was a temporary situation because it was unlawful.

As you have gathered from Alex Morton’s razor sharp responses in the various exchanges quoted above, Mr. Taylor did not fare as well as envisioned in his original game plan. After she absorbed the initial shock of such brutal attacks against her person, Morton began to fight back like a goddess. As the day went, and as the lawyer for BC took turns with Canada in attempting to unseat Morton, she took full control of the battlefield. She would detect the traps embedded in the questions a mile away, she would avoid them effortlessly. Nay, she would turn them right back against the examining lawyer like as many lethal boomerangs. If you have not seen Alex Morton on the witness stand this last Thursday, you do not know yet what a salmon warrior truly looks like. Such is the overwhelming power of shining and uncompromising truth.

Being a Frenchman, the historical reference that naturally jumped at me as I witnessed that extraordinary day was that of Joanne of Arc, and how during her trial for witchcraft she turned her interrogators into a bunch of half-witted jackasses with their pre-canned mechanical questions. All that these two women needed to do in order to overcome the sophists and Pharisees tasked with prosecuting them, was to provide some simple, luminous, painfully truthful answers which needed no other support but themselves. It is a bit frightening to see how the interrogation techniques in matters of the state have not changed much since the 15th century. It is reassuring to see that the manner to respond to such techniques have not really changed either. Just speak the truth and let its magic do the work.

In the end, and for all his misgivings, Mr. Taylor has rendered a valuable public service to the people of this country. By choosing to conduct his cross-examination of Alex Morton in the way he did, he has revealed the ugly face of state repression in action. Morton has dared to expose the collusion of the government of Canada and the fish farm industry? The government responds by attacking her personally and viciously, threatening her over her constitutional right to free speech and free assembly.

The service that Mr. Taylor provided was certainly not worth the $25 million that we have disbursed on this Commission, and frankly I dare not ask how much his personal invoice for mudslinging Morton will amount to. The final answer to the worthiness of this Inquiry will have to come from Justice Bruce Cohen himself. It was noted by some, perhaps as a sign, that at the end of the day Cohen personally thanked Alex for standing as a witness and ostensibly called her “Doctor Morton”.

The Lion

2011-09-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

Photo Don Staniford.

Gregory McDade, Alexandra Morton’s lawyer, ruled the courtroom last week. He has reshaped the Cohen Commission’s most critical days – those dedicated to salmon disease and aquaculture – in his own image. The dull and mostly meaningless proceedings of the previous months have been transformed in a series of short, sometimes brutal, always thrilling single combats between McDade and the “expert” of the moment sent by the DFO machine to counter him. Those will remain as the McDade days. Does it mean that the man succeeded in everything he has attempted at the Commission? Far from it. But he has sent some shattering shock waves through the system and set in motion a process of exposing the salmon-industrial complex, with deep ramifications that we can only begin to envision today.

Recently, I got in the habit of referring to McDade on my Facebook as “the Lion”. It’s pretty tacky, I know. But it captures my personal enthusiasm for the man and for what he embodies. For one thing, with his generous moustache and sometimes unclean shave, he physically looks like one. Then, he definitely acts like one. He sees every cross-examination as a hunt – albeit one for truth rather than for flesh – which requires impeccable preparation and methodical execution. Patiently, McDade asks. He waits, circles, retreats, gets to know and appreciate his prey as he identifies its weaker points. He knows from his long experience as a hunter that he has until the very last minutes of his allocated time to deliver the deadly strike. That weak point may emerge as insufferable self-infatuation as in the case of Dick Beamish, or shocking incompetence as in that of Michael Kent, or an excessive penchant for logical argumentation as with Josh Korman. But whatever that weakness is, Greg McDade usually finds it.

A classic illustration of McDade’s technique was his cross-examination of Dr. Michael Kent (ex-DFO, now professor of Microbiology at Oregon State University) over a report that Kent prepared for the Cohen Commission regarding pathogens. McDade proceeded in three successive strikes which each, taken individually, looked rather innocuous. But when he assembled them into a weapon, McDade delivered such a powerful blow to Kent’s credibility that subsequent witnesses to the Commission felt prudent to distance themselves from Kent’s work and name altogether. One. He established that the witness was primarily an expert in fish farm pathogens, rather than salmon pathogens in general. Two. He showed that Kent’s mandate with the Commission was to study all pathogens (both wild and farmed). Three. He demonstrated that Kent, contrary to both his field of expertise and clear mandate with the Commission, chose on his own accord to study only wild pathogens, inexplicably omitting those found in the fish farms. McDade didn’t openly say that the witness was guilty of dereliction of duty, but that’s pretty much the message that the audience received:

McDade: Let's just be clear. You didn't spend any time studying the role of fish farms in the causation of disease.

Kent: I disagree.

McDade: Did you look at the fish health database?

Kent: Which exhibit is that one?

McDade: That's the actual spreadsheets and reports and fish health auditing that the fish farms make to the Province around fish health. Did you look inside those documents?

Kent: I scanned them, there are quite a few. These are Excel sheets, right? I looked at them, they came to me quite late. I actually reviewed them this morning. I scanned them pretty extensively but I didn’t get through them at all in all sorts of detail.

McDade: Did you have them when you did your report?

Kent: No I didn’t.

McDade: wouldn't that be relevant to your report, if there are diseases that are all over those spreadsheets?

Kent: They would be useful. It’s not peer reviewed literature, but they would be useful.

McDade: What’s the distinction from peer reviewed literature?

Kent: It’s then validated by professionals. But it would be of use, but I – given the limitations that I had with my time, the most useful data were peer reviewed papers for the study.

McDade: And so DFO hasn’t studied the matter, and there is no peer review paper on it, and so for you, it didn’t exist?

Kent: No. I said it has less significance to me.

Another beautiful example was McDade’s cross-examination of Dr. Josh Korman, who wrote a report to the Commission on mortality rates observed in fish farms. Korman definitely loves the mathematical music of a logical argument, and that translates into a natural repugnance for intellectual dishonesty, unlike so many of McDade’s other customers at the Commission. McDade exploited that characteristic masterfully on a critical point involving the discovery that Chinook fish farms may have been directly linked to the recent ups and downs of the Fraser sockeye:

McDade: So the Conville Bay farm was experiencing problems with symptoms that at least some thought was marine anemia. But what I was asking was this: if there were Chinook farms experiencing marine anemia in the Discovery Islands in 2007, but none at all in 2008, would that not be a significant matter that you would want to investigate? And that is the information that I get off of those spreadsheets.

Korman: Yeah, that does line up with that pattern that you described. There are so many steps to determine that this was actually a big factor, right? Does that disease transmit? Does it cause death? All those steps we have been talking about. But certainly, it’s a hypothesis that is not unreasonable.

I came across a photo taken at this week’s salmon warriors rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery (the one posted on this blog) and I immediately went: that’s him – that lion is Greg McDade. A friend I showed the picture to remarked ironically that it was quite the lion indeed! with a rope tied around its neck. I shrugged that comment off by saying that no picture ever perfectly captures the essence of its subject.

The photo, I was to discover the next day, rope and all, was perfect. I had been acquainted with McDade’s professional expertise and class in a courtroom. I had not yet witnessed his personal courage when placed in a hostile environment. This was revealed to me last Wednesday when McDade rose to cross-examine four critical witnesses with veterinarian expertise. He started by pointing out that the employers of each witness were either the government or a fish farming corporation. He then added:

McDade: So I take it that all of you gentlemen are supporters of the status quo.

[silence]

McDade: Let me ask that question differently. There is no one here that is an independent expert from the government and companies as to the structure.

One of the witnesses: Maybe you should define “independent”?

McDade: I just want to make a statement, Mr. Commissioner, that the choice of experts for this important panel on disease is missing any expert who can comment in opposition to the current structure. But we’ll work with what we’ve got, even if it’s working with one hand behind our back.

Counsel for the Commission: The hearing plan has received Mr. McDade’s endorsement, so we will take that point, but I think it should be understood in that light.

McDade: Well, the experts that we asked to call have not been called. You are not suggesting that we haven’t asked for other experts to be called?

Counsel for the Commission: No, certainly I have not suggested that. But the final hearing plan is one that has received, to differing degree, either support – or at least no objections – in the way of applications.

That was quite a way to start a cross-examination for a lawyer, to directly incriminate the very Commission that you are addressing! McDade had a very solid point, no question about it, one which had been eloquently echoed by Alexandra Morton in her blog that same morning. But to say in Justice Cohen’s face that, like the lion in my photo, he had to work with a hand tied behind his back? It was risky, it was bold, it was brilliant.

Like the Borgs in Star Trek, his opponents had adapted to McDade’s weaponry after only a few shots. They had been carefully briefed on how to dodge his questions by bouncing him back and forth from one “expert” to the next (I am no expert in this matter, but you should address this question to Dr. X who is not here today.) McDade knew he was not going to get anything out of that panel – especially under the ridiculous time constraints imposed by the Commission, as explained in Alex Morton’s blog. So McDade-the-lawyer went political. Lost for lost, let’s get something out of this day. The Cohen Commission, he implied on public record, is an integral part of the “current structure” and actively assists in the perpetuation of the “status quo”. Dodge this.

McDade’s credit rating with the Cohen Commission must have dropped by a few notches after that sortie. But he also scored a perfect AAA with those sitting in the public gallery. We roared with pleasure at his statement. Gregory “The Lion” McDade is in synchrony with the public sentiment over this whole Cohen Commission charade, and the $25 million that it is costing the taxpayer. I personally expect nothing to come out of Justice Cohen’s recommendations. But I do expect a hefty political backlash to hit “the structure” and shake it in its core. And that will be worth the price of admission of having to sit in silence and listen for hours to the endless lies of this elitist bunch of dorks.

Greg McDade, you have our gratitude for saying out loud what we have been carrying in silence for all those months.

Kristi’s choice

2011-08-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

Dr. Kristi Miller (Head, Molecular Genetics, DFO). Photo Globe and Mail.

Reckless sabotage. Bureaucratic harassment. Financial starvation. A quasi-religious resistance to novelty. And a good dose of incompetence.

That is the mix that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has prepared for Kristi Miller, with the incredible result of bringing her critical research on salmon anemia to a complete halt. Or so we learned this past week at the Cohen Commission. As I write these lines, Kristi Miller’s research is fully stalled, with no money allocated to it and no clear indication on how long it may take to get it moving again.

How did they stop it? By using what scientists living at the top of the intellectual food chain do best: a mind game. Consciously or not (that part remains to be seen), senior management and high-ranking scientists of this bureaucracy have blocked Miller’s work by using a circular argument which holds in 4 simple statements:

1. We don't know that there is a disease.
2. We won't take any action until we know that there is a disease.
3. We make sure that our scientist cannot find whether there is a disease.
4. Therefore, we don't know that there is a disease.

We don't have hard evidence of a pathogen affecting wild salmon, Dr. Michael Kent (ex-DFO, currently Professor of Microbiology at Oregon State University) stated on the Commission’s witness stand. Without more research, it is purely speculative to say that the virus uncovered by Kristi Miller was a significant factor in the 2009 collapse, said Dr. Kyle Garver, Research Scientist at DFO. Some of the interpretations and assumptions that Miller makes in her research may be speculative or overreached, said Dr. Christine MacWilliams, senior fish health veterinarian at DFO. (A stunning comment given that MacWilliams did not feel it was necessary to explain what she meant by that.)

To some extent, Kristi Miller herself adheres to such views about her research, notwithstanding the personal and unsubstantiated attacks carried by some of her colleagues. She agreed that there is no conclusive evidence yet linking virus to disease, or fish farms to wild salmon. But there are some pretty good indications that this may indeed be the case, “a smoking gun” as she put it to the Commission. There is a distinct genomic signature found in the Fraser sockeye, there is a virus which may be linked to that signature, there is evidence of anemia and leukemia in many infected wild salmon, and there is a dramatic decline in the sockeye population in the Fraser. And so, one may conclude, there is ample and urgent justification for pursuing Miller’s research forward at DFO’s earliest convenience.

Given the promising and novel nature of Miller’s findings and level of interest it has generated in the scientific community at large – her research was recently published in the journal Science –, the amount of resistance she has encountered at DFO from her own colleagues and management is staggering. In 2009 for example, Kristi Miller prepared a memo to her senior management alerting them over the “potentially devastating impacts” of the discovered disease on the sockeye. Dr. Kyle Garver, who was asked to review the memo, attempted to water down its contents. Alexandra Morton’s lawyer, Gregory McDade, asked Garver about this particular incident during a cross-examination at the Cohen Commission:

McDade: When a senior scientist at your department says “potentially devastating impacts”, that's a significant finding for you, is it not?

Garver: I'm sorry – for me?

McDade: What I am trying to get here is a sense of what level of certainty you need about a potentially devastating impact to the sockeye salmon to actually take action, rather than more studies. How far do we have to go in proof?

Garver: We’re following a scientific approach, so we need to establish that this sequence is indeed causing a disease.

McDade: And you are not prepared to recommend an action to your senior people at DFO until you’ve done all of these laboratory studies and have found proof to your satisfaction?

Garver: Until I find that this virus is causing disease, and that it is indeed transmissible, then I probably would not recommend action at this time.

The resistance to Miller’s findings at DFO did not always follow a strict scientific approach either, and sometimes verged on the irrational or even the supernatural. In a memorable meeting, for example, Dr. Christine MacWilliams explained to Kristi Miller that all possible pathogens affecting sockeye had already been discovered and that, therefore, there was no room for any “novel undescribed” pathogens. Science, MacWilliams was telling Miller, had ended its journey. There was nothing else to discover. We, at DFO, already hold all the knowledge that there is to hold. Search no more! All truth has been revealed. Another colleague, according to Miller, stated to her that he “did not believe that marine anemia truly exists”. As if the existence or nonexistence of such diseases was a matter of faith, rather than scientific observation.

Confronted with such a wall of resistance, Kristi Miller, a pragmatic person, decided to change her tack. They wanted a causal viral agent linking her genomic signature to an actual disease before she could pursue this further? Okay then, she’d focus her work on identifying that causal (or etiological) agent. So in 2009 she went to DFO management and to Genome BC, her major funder, asking for funding to identify the etiological agent. But they didn’t like it, Miller explained, “because our scientific advisory board wanted to keep the program as we had originally proposed”. So her funding request was denied. Talk about a catch 22. We won’t support your research because we don’t see a causal agent in there. But we won’t allow you to refocus your research on finding that causal agent either, because that’s not what had originally been proposed!

Another incident. In early 2011, Miller explained, the fish farm industry showed some signs of openness and agreed to go ahead with testing their Atlantic salmon. “But I was told later by one of the vets from one of the companies that they were advised against doing the testing by someone from DFO. So that’s as far as it went, I did not test the [farmed] fish for the signature.” Miller subsequently discovered that the person – or one of them, at least – who had killed her testing program with the industry was Christine McWilliams. Her again. What a drag, that woman. In a following meeting, according to Miller, McWilliams told in her face that “if we were to ask industry to voluntarily submit fish for testing, [she] would recommend to them that it would not be in their best interest to comply.”

Loud gasp in the Cohen Commission’s audience. But we were not done gasping yet, far from it. Shortly after came the bombshell previously mentioned: that Kristi Miller’s current funding to conduct her research on the Fraser sockeye has been reduced to, well, zero. My group is not the only one in this situation, there are several others, Miller quickly added coming to DFO’s rescue. Bu then, as if engaged in some dark inner battle with herself, she made the following comment: Well of course my group is the only large one in this situation. I have eleven people on my staff, whereas all other affected groups have one or two people at most.

It was also revealed during the same session that, just as Miller’s Science paper was being published, an order came straight out of Stephen Harper’s office banning her from addressing the media or any outside scientists. The pretext invoked for such an outrageous decision was a meaningless technicality involving a disagreement about some acronyms in the media lines. Again, Miller made a feeble and unconvincing attempt to shield her bosses: I was not the only scientist covered by that ban, she explained to the Commission. Well no, Ma’am, you were not. But you sure were the only one being published in Science that next morning.

What was very troubling in this incident, in addition to Harper’s direct intervention in a purely scientific matter, was that Miller’s senior management at DFO dropped her like a rock in this instance. The counsel who was conducting the cross-examination asked Miller:

Q: So we’re just on the eve of the publication of your paper in Science. Essentially, you have a very important paper that’s being published in a very prestigious journal, and media are contacting you, and you are being told by Dr. Richards [Miller’s boss] that you have to go to Ottawa to get approval to talk to the media. Is that correct?

A: Yes, absolutely.

This complete let-down of Miller by her management on the eve of a pretty significant day in her career was confirmed in an email, in which Dr. Richards wrote: “I understand your concern, but unfortunately there is nothing they [the PM’s communications office in Ottawa] can do.” Read: Unfortunately there is nothing I am prepared to do. If Richards had tried something – anything – to correct this awful situation, the email she wrote to Miller would no doubt have referred to it. But no, nothing. Just this one-liner.

A final cause for audience stupor in Kristi Miller’s testimony was this. In March 2011, a meeting was organized at DFO to brief Dr. Richards in preparation for her testimony in front of the Cohen Commission. The object, essentially, was to tell Richards what to say and not to say to Justice Cohen. At the meeting were present representatives from both Marine Harvest (the world’s biggest fish farm corporation) and the BC Salmon Farmers Association (the front group for the fish farm industry in BC). Miller must have sensed that there was something pretty stinky about such people sitting in such a meeting, because she said what sounded like two big fat lies to many people in the audience: (a) I was not aware that those industry people were at the meeting and (b) I don’t remember whether Dr. Richards was in attendance. I paused for a moment. Why in the world would Miller “forget” whether her boss what at that meeting or not? Was she trying to cover her again?

To see Miller defend the very people and bureaucratic machinery which are sabotaging her work recklessly on a daily basis was very troubling. Another extraordinary example of this Mother Theresa attitude was given when the counsel read to Miller a transcript in which her own boss, Dr. Richards, stated that Miller had “misrepresented” her words in regards to her being muzzled. Even though her boss was attacking her directly on public record, Miller gave the following angelical response:

Q: You would not agree that this is a misrepresentation of what you heard from Dr. Richards, would you?

A: What I would have not known at the time was whose decision it was [to muzzle me]. As I learned through the inquiry process, the decision not to allow me to speak to the press came out of the privy council office, not from DFO.

Many members of the activist community have spontaneously embraced Kristi Miller as a folk hero. And she is no doubt a heroic figure. She is interested in scientific truth, and she also departs from the DFO dominant culture in that she does appear to see scientific research as a means for solving human problems, such as the precipitous decline of the sockeye. She also shows a great degree of humanity, often expressed in the form of genuine frustration towards the DFO bureaucracy. And she displayed a high level of personal honesty and integrity in the vast majority of her responses. But she is also a product of the system, a DFO scientist raised and bred like all others to follow the same unwritten code of conduct. The prime directive of that code, of course, is that you never publicly criticize the agency no matter your grievances, that we are a family, that we solve our issues internally.

So she is a hero yes, but a tragic one. One which is stuck between two worlds: that of independent, unfettered, outcome-oriented research, and that of the self-serving bureaucracy which sees research as a means to its own perpetuation. Attempting to belong to both worlds, but unable to do so, Miller runs the risk of being part of neither. But does she have a choice?

As Meryl Streep in the classic film Sophie’s Choice, Kristi Miller has to choose between the child that she has grown and nurtured for so many years (her research on salmon anemia), and her oppressive and abusive mother, the DFO. She also has to deal on a daily basis with the growing hostility of her numerous siblings in that highly dysfunctional family, her fellow researchers, who don't understand what the hell is wrong with the rogue sister, why can’t she just be like the rest of us?

The fact that Kristi Miller has not yet given up on scientific truth, in spite of the incredible and often very personal pressures she has been enduring, is a tribute to her character and moral integrity. But how much longer can she last in such a toxic environment?

Resources and action items:

Week 1 Review of the Cohen Commission: The Skeletons Rattling in Cohen’s Closet. To get all the facts that emerged at the Commission this week, referenced with their sources.

Alexandra Morton's blog. To get the analysis.

Dr. Kristi Miller's Testing Fund: *ACTION* Wild salmon supporters raising the $18,700 needed by Dr. Kristi Miller to test farmed Atlantic salmon for diseases and viruses. That amount was denied by DFO.

Wild Salmon Warrior Rally: *ACTION* Vancouver Art Gallery, Tuesday August 30, 2011

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Salmon-industrial complex in damage control

2011-08-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Justice Bruce Cohen. Ready when you are with that disease data, buddy!

The final chapter of Justice Cohen's inquiry in the 2009 sockeye collapse opened yesterday in Vancouver. Dedicated to the critical issues of salmon disease and aquaculture, this final set of hearings will take place over the next two weeks. It represents a major deal for the people in power. At stake is nothing less than the perpetuation of the cozy relationship which unites the “three amigos” of the salmon-industrial complex: the fish farm industry, the government, and the scientific establishment.

Back in November 2010, in his infinite wisdom Justice Cohen ordered the release of disease data collected over ten years in BC's fish farms. The industry has remitted the data as ordered by the judge, but it has also obtained that it be embargoed. Those who gained access to the data had to sign an undertaking not to disclose any of it until Cohen said so. According to a persistent rumor, that data is godawful damning: it will show that BC's salmon stocks have been hit by a massive viral outbreak for many years and that the industry, government, and perhaps even high-ranking scientists knew about it for all this time but decided to keep it a secret.

The public's patience, unlike Cohen's wisdom, is not infinite. Yesterday at the Commission, I heard some wonder aloud why the disease data had not been released yet, as Cohen had hinted it would be by now. The Commission's usually deserted public gallery was almost full, a pleasant and unusual sight which conveyed a clear message that people were now awaiting some concrete answers.

Those in power, of course, know that they have to respond to the public's expectations, and in particular that this bad-for-business disease data must be made available sooner rather than later, if only to avoid a rogue and uncontrolled wikileaks-style release of the entire dataset. But how to avoid a public backlash? What is the best strategy to soften the blow of such terrible and incriminating data, if any of this persistent rumor happens to be true?

Yesterday at the Commission, the establishment laid its cards on the table. Before even releasing any data and knowing that such release is ultimately unavoidable, it preemptively deployed an elaborate damage-control strategy hinging on a simple yet effective message: Yes BC's salmon stocks have known a viral outbreak for many years, but so what? This strategy has been carefully planned and thoroughly rehearsed, as the tightly choreographed exchanges between counsels and witnesses revealed.

The first witness, Dr. Michael Kent (Professor, Microbiology & Biomedical Sciences, Oregon State University) started the day by stating right off the bat that it is very hard to study diseases in wild salmon stocks and that such diseases have consequently been understudied. He added: Yes there are pathogens in BC's wild salmon but I don't see a smoking gun, we don't have hard evidence of a pathogen affecting wild salmon.

Dr. Stewart Johnson (Head, Aquatic Animal Health, DFO) concurred with his fellow witness: there is an absence of any hard evidence of a correlation between pathogens and salmon decline. The bottom line is we can't predict that link between the presence of pathogens in the water, and the number of fry that will come out of an adult spawner. And there is also a great variability from year to year, he added for good measure.

And with that, the tone was set for the day. The same message came out of the four witnesses again and again, a message expertly multiplied and amplified by the capable counsels representing the Commission and government. That message was: we have viruses, we have high salmon mortality, but we don't have a clear link from one to the other.

The name of the game was to cultivate uncertainty, and the counsel for Canada was particularly adept at bringing out just that. "In a paper, he asked the panel of witnesses, you caution that results from different studies are difficult to compare, different methodological approaches and different species in regards to their specific susceptibility to infection. You have to be careful about how you take results from different studies. Is that right?"

Panel of leading experts [chorus]: Right!

Later, the counsel for Canada asked: “What I'm really getting at here is that when you have concurrent infections, in order to understand what are the contributing factors – if any – of the given pathogen, it's usually complex, because of the given interrelated concurrent nature of the affections that are at play. Is that correct? Do the members of the panel agree with that?”

Panel of leading experts [chorus]: We agree with that!

Counsel for Canada: “What I am hearing in this is that there is considerable uncertainty around this salmon anemia disease and no one is able to tie it to any disease so far.”

Panel of leading experts [chorus]: Thou hearst well!

Dr. Michael Kent felt obliged to qualify this last response by adding: Anemia can be caused by more than one agent, such as a parasite in addition to a virus. The virus is probably a cause but we cannot rule out other causes. Retrovirus are very common in animals, many of them are endogenous. So yes we did find a virus in our studies, but definitively was that the cause of the disease? We cannot say.

I call them here the “panel of leading experts” because that is precisely what the counsel for Canada called them on record. Counsel for Canada: “Is it fair to say that we have in you leading experts in your fields? Come on, don't be modest!” Panel of leading experts [displaying signs of modesty]: Well hmm if you say so okay then!

All counsels officiating yesterday did not show the same level of talent as their friend representing Canada. For some reason, the Province of BC decided to send out a rookie of a lawyer who immediately struck the wrong chord with the panel of 'leading experts'. She tried to obtain from the scientists something they would not give her: an actual denial of any linkage between the virus and the salmon. Fatal mistake. The fundamental principle guiding the entire day's proceedings (as the counsel for Canada had so masterfully understood) was uncertainty, not denial.

Counsel for BC: “Dr. Kent, have you concluded that no specific pathogen is a major cause to the decline of the Fraser sockeye?”

“Dr. Kent: No. I have concluded that we cannot identify any specific pathogen to be the cause of the demise of the Fraser sockeye. I know this may seem as splitting hairs but I am not saying we have excluded the possibility that a single pathogen has caused the demise of the sockeye.”

The panel of scientists was telling the young counsel from BC (albeit in much more polite words than that) "don't push your luck, lady!" Sensing the danger, and perhaps getting a little worried about the looming cross-examination due to take place on the following day, the scientists were sticking to the script: there is no certainty one way or the other in regards to viruses and salmon.

One of the problems encountered by the panel and counsels in promoting this principle of uncertainty was the groundbreaking research conducted by Dr. Kristi Miller at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Her team's work established such linkage between viral infection and the decline of the salmon, and it has been recently saluted by the international scientific community through a publication in the journal Science. Meanwhile at home, Miller has been subjected to what can only be qualified as censorship and muzzling by her employer the DFO. Yesterday, some significant time was set aside to debunk Kristi Miller's research in no uncertain terms:

Commission counsel: Could you comment on Dr. Miller's work?

Dr. Christine MacWilliams (Fish Health Veterinarian – Salmonid Enhancement Program, DFO) : My interpretation of Kristi Miller's research based on the paper that I read is that some of the interpretations and assumptions being made were perhaps speculative or overreached. (Unfortunately, Christine MacWilliams did not explain the specific grounds on which she dismissed Kristi Miller's research, so we're going to have to take her word for it.)

The amount of ammunition that yesterday's scientific panel handed over to the fish farm industry is staggering. All the industry will need to say next week when called to witness is, tobacco industry or Exxon-style: yes our farms are heavily diseased but hey! the science is not in, the correlation between pathogens and salmon decline is not established as per our panel of 'leading experts', and we need another 10 years of science at least to establish that. But don't worry! We'll make sure that this research does happen and we'll take care of the scientists' bills.

In that cozy threesome relationship I referred to earlier between industry, government, and scientific establishment, one may ask: what's in it for the scientists? Why would they line up with the industry and politicians rather than defend, say, the principle of objective scientific truth? In a previous blog, I argued that scientists are not necessarily corrupt on an individual level, that actually most of them are fairly honest people. Rather, it's the research funding system itself which is corrupted to the bone, having been handed over to the the very industry which science is supposed to help watch over.

Dr. Stewart Johnson gave a spectacular illustration of that reality yesterday while testifying at the Cohen Commission. The strange thing is that he did not even realize he did! Describing a three-year research project which involved the study of migration patterns of Fraser sockeye from their spawning lake to the Strait of Georgia, he referred to the project's three-year funding and added almost in passing: "We received some support for this research from Marine Harvest". The fact that Mr. Johnson does not even perceive the existence of a conflict of interest here shows how deeply the scientific culture and code of ethics has been compromised by corporate funding.

As one of my fellow activists wrote in a live Facebook post during the Commission hearings: “If you leave it to the tobacco industry to detect cancer in smokers you'll get the same answer than when you leave it to fish farm apologists to find what's killing the sockeye.”

No more mistaking Red Conservatives for "Liberals"

2011-05-02T21:14:00.000-07:00

I find the following graph from the Globe & Mail ("CHANGING SEATS - Ridings gained or lost compared with the 2008 federal election") by far the most interesting of the evening.

At least 4 lessons learned:

1. Conservatives and NDP have shared the spoils of the night according to a neatly demarcated line: Conservatives taking most lost Liberal seats, NDP wiping out the Bloc.

2. This means that disaffected Liberal voters have mostly gone Conservative, with only a minority going to NDP. Ergo, the Liberal Party is - always has been - a right wing party rather than a center or moderately left-leaning one notwithstanding that party's mythology.

3. Simple math reveals then that Canada is clearly a conservative country: over 50% if we conservatively (pardon the punt) allocate half of tonight's remaining Liberal votes to the Conservatives. In this light, "strategic voting" and "Anything but Conservative" reveals itself to be ironic and tragically mistaken.

4. If Liberals have any sense left in them (I am not certain that they actually do) then they will reach those same conclusions and rapidly swing to their right, to save whatever can be from this disaster. NDP should definitely celebrate tonight, because tomorrow they might find that they are rather lonely as a political formation, much more so than the Conservatives.

Activists, take a deep breath. Get over it. Go to sleep early. Prepare yourselves mentally and physically for some ridiculously uneven battles - which will need to be fought nonetheless.

Good news is, tomorrow the picture will be that much easier to read. No more mistaking Red Conservatives for "Liberals".

Simple seeds

2011-02-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

Will Allen embodies the aspirations and contradictions of the urban farming movement. Photo Growing Power, Inc.

THE GREAT ecological crisis – our generation's gift to the world which will ensure that our names live in infamy long after we are gone – can be boiled down to the fundamental division between town and country.

That old divide is one of environmentalist Derrick Jensen's central premises: civilization is an urban-centered culture based on the city's violent appropriation of resources from the surrounding land. It was also, long before him, a key point of Marx's critique of capitalism. As peasants are forced off the land and driven to the city to work in factories, the products of agriculture are also massively shipped to the city to feed its growing population. Soils, harvested bare and starved of organic nutrients, are unable to regenerate themselves. Like a drug addict, the land becomes dependent on regular supplies of chemical fertilizers produced in the cities. Marx called this starvation of the land to the benefit of the city the metabolic rift.

Such an imbalance is not meant to last. Even as the metabolic rift continues to deepen before our eyes at a frightful speed, the revolutionary response is already in motion. It does not, however, imply a nostalgic “return to the land” as some environmentalists offer simplistically. On the contrary, it consists of bringing the land into the city. It takes the form of an explosive urban farming movement which relies on new concepts such as vertical indoor farming, new technologies such as solar power and hydroponics, and rediscovered forms of political organization such as community-based participative democracy.

A few weeks ago, I met one of the movement's gurus, Will Allen. About seven hundred people packed the Croatian Cultural Centre on Vancouver's Commercial Drive to hear him tell how he had started Growing Power Inc., a community-based urban farm in Milwaukee's inner city.

Food is the number one tool in community development, Allen explained, because food is what connects everyone to the world. We have worked with the juvenile justice system with kids who did some pretty awful stuff. They would grow plants and give them to shelters as part of their healing. We took over vacant lots where there were drug dealers, and they left. We called those operations “flower explosions”.

Urban farming has gone from a movement to a revolution, he added. Five years ago, maybe 50 people would have been in this room. Now, I get crowds wherever I go. This is a below-the-ground movement, it has taken root, he concluded unable to resist the agricultural punt.

The crowd was cheering with enthusiasm. Half of the Drive's food growing community must have been in attendance that night, and they were roaring with pleasure, loving every part of it. I personally bumped into at least 20 people from my own rabble-rousing seed-loving network. It was clearly a night for radicals.

Will Allen, however, was also surrounded by a different group of friends. This event, the PA system announced at the start, is proudly sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. Tucked under every chair, a brown bag was filled with goodies courtesy of organic cereal maker Nature's Path. Half a dozen representatives of the City of Vancouver were on stage or among the crowd, including deputy mayor Andrea Reimer who gave a hearty speech. The event itself was moderated by former NPA (yes, the real estate party) city councilor and mayoral candidate Peter Ladner. The corporate and government establishment – at least, its more green-leaning faction – had come in force to express its active support to Will Allen.

This was not just a Vancouver oddity, either. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Allen “has become a darling of the foundation world”, raking over a million dollars in grants in recent years from corporate charity household names such as the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation. During his slide show presentation, Allen showed some of his farming projects situated in the financial districts of America's largest cities, with manicured urban gardens growing in the shade of 80-floor skyscrapers or on the front lawns of high-tech corporate campuses in wealthy suburbs, all paid for by their happy hosting sponsors. Corporate America has identified Will Allen as a high value asset and has solidly latched onto him.

Allen's personal history embodies some of the deeper contradictions which make the urban farming movement. The son of a South Carolina sharecropper and himself a long time inner-city activist, he is also a former professional basketball player and successful salesman for Procter & Gamble. Allen lives and works at the crossroads of worlds often at odds with one another, with very different understandings of the word “revolution”. In fairness, it is very tempting to accept those generous partnerships from such powerful and wealthy friends and, arguably, very foolish to reject them. But as hard as it may try, the urban farming movement will find that on the long run, it cannot reconcile its strategic goals with those of the industry. The best it can hope for is to establish tactical, short-lived alliances. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the movement faces potential liquidation if it fails to understand this reality.

To my right, the rock: the entrenched interests of America's corn belt, the Archer Daniels Midlands, Monsantos, and Tyson Foods of the world, who are the heirs, beneficiaries, and guarantors of the metabolic rift. They love the fact that crops and chemicals get shipped back and forth over long distances between country and city. They are outright pissed at the initiatives of Will Allen and other like-minded urban hipsters. Their philosophy is that feeding the world is a serious business which should be left to grown-ups of the sort that sit on the boards of, well, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto and Tyson Foods. Initially dismissive of those awkward and smelly urban farmers, the industry is now getting slightly worried at the speed and magnitude of the revolution, and is gearing up for battle.

To my left, the hard place: green capitalism. What's not to love about them? They channel the forces of the market, reform the system from the inside in order to make the world a better place. They are the Nature's Paths and Happy Planets which line the organic shelves of our supermarkets, and the hi-tech start-ups which invent every day new bleeding edge technologies and intensive processes to grow food inside high-rise downtown buildings. Their CEOs drive electric cars, establish partnerships with community heroes such as Will Allen, and run successfully for mayor in large cities like our own. Just like the “brown” capitalists of the American corn belt, green capitalists understand the magnitude of the urban farming revolution. Unlike their less forward-thinking friends however, they don’t plan to fight it but rather take its lead.

Both shades of that industry, whether green or brown, operate according to the same general principles of the capitalist class. Strict division of labor between manual and mental tasks. Enclosure of the means of production, whether those means are land, seeds, technology, or know-how. The enclosure of the land is pretty straightforward and happened some time ago, through the combination of a forceful dispossession of the peasantry by the state, and a re-foundation of the legal apparatus with the effect of elevating private property to an inviolable principle. During this initial phase of capitalism, the commons were successfully outlawed.

The enclosure of the seeds is more recent and required a certain level of scientific mastery, as well as a higher degree of legal sophistication in order to secure patent rights over something so inherently “public domain” as a seed. But that revolution is now accomplished, thanks to the combined efforts of Monsanto and governments worldwide which coerced their rural populations into accepting this transformation, with often tragic consequences as in India's ill-named “green revolution”.

The enclosure of technology and know-how is a bit trickier and still very much a work in progress. Indeed, how does one suppress popular know-how over something as simple as growing food? The technology involved in growth is complex beyond comprehension, don't get me wrong. But it's already embedded in plants in the form of photosynthesis and other miracles of life, and provided at no charge to anyone who cares to throw a seed in the ground. To enclose and privatize such a free gift of nature, one needs to bury it behind layers of privately owned complexity which can then be unlocked in return for compensation.

Have you noticed how vertical farming solutions offered by corporate start-ups are always ridiculously complex, even though those offered by community groups or your average Joe Doe in his basement tend to be simple as pie? Check out for example the following sales pitch by an average start-up which sells (pardon the mouthful) “eco-technology growing solutions”:

“The rotating hydroponic technology enables high-density vertical growing – more plants can be grown in less space producing crop yields of up to 20 times more than conventional farming methods. With the use of organic nutrients, VertiCrop™ and AlphaCrop™ can also be fully utilised for organic growing”

Got it? Well, that is sort of the point of the ad. We know, you don't, if you buy this then you won't have to understand it. Simplicity usually does not make for very good patents, and vertical agriculture tends unfortunately to be rather simple. Bad business. Let me give you a silly but real example: in my apartment's second bathroom, I grow lettuce year-round in a bookcase. The technology and cost involved in that project are close to zero: a timer and a bunch of CFL lamps. I had to resolve a few hurdles, such as how to adjust the distance between the containers and the lamps as my lettuces grew larger. I needed surfaces that could move up and down, and Ikea's Billy bookcase came to my rescue to solve that problem. Well folks, it works! I can grow up to 12 lettuces at a time, and tonight we're having delicious, crunchy salad for dinner. It will feed my family, but it won't make me rich because a casual look at my system will allow you to build the same one in your home, and probably improve it dramatically. From my basic bookcase to more sophisticated hydroponics vertical farms, it's just a matter of degrees.

With the help of people like Will Allen who unlock knowledge and set it free, it won't take very long for people to read through the vertical farm technology bullshit and use only those toys that they really need (a solar panel would be one of them), and therefore for the brilliant inventors of VertiCrop™ and AlphaCrop™ to file for bankruptcy. Moving forward, the only viable long term option that will remain for the industry is good old repression against those pesky urban farmers. We will see the industry invoke property rights to deny growers access to land, lobby governments to enact more stringent “food safety” regulations and bury growers under red tape, and demand that authorities crack down on “illegal” and “unsafe” operations such as my little Ikea bookcase lettuce grow-op.

You think I'm out to lunch? Case in point. Mission, BC this past January. A house was raided by the RCMP and its owner fined $5,200 for – ahem – growing cucumbers in his basement. A stark warning of times to come. Like every other revolution, the urban farming revolution will involve the use of force, violent struggle, loss of livelihood, and at times loss of freedom. No point pretending that corporate sponsors will always be our friends, because they won't. Time for us growers to grow up, and to understand what we are dealing with. Let's harden off a little in preparation for colder days.

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The power of Bullshit

2011-01-19T18:56:00.000-08:00

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has invented an esoteric language which it uses to assert its power. Photo holisticwebs.com

On January 17, the Cohen Commission resumed its hearings on the collapse of the 2009 Fraser sockeye. I decided to attend, because two DFO managers were called to witness on that day. Having heard the intense testimonies given by representatives of the First Nations back in December, I was curious. For three long days, aboriginal leaders had blasted the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in the most compelling manner. How would that agency respond? Would it send some of its top gun communicators in an attempt to control the damage?

It did not. Instead, it sent two archetypal technocrats who gave one the dullest and most abstruse testimonies on public record. It was dull to the point of being disturbing. Activists who have been following the Cohen proceedings have got into the habit of killing some DFO testimony time by playing “Bullshit Bingo”. The rules of the game are simple: you come with a card that has a grid of pre-filled bureaucratic words such as 'benchmarks', 'baseline monitoring', 'adaptive management', etc., you cross the words out whenever a DFO witness uses them, and when you cross out an entire line – Bingo!

Well folks, on January 17 DFO took the game of Bullshit Bingo to a whole new level. For the first hour, I was shell shocked. DFO Salmon Regional Resource Manager Jeff Grout was the first to speak. “One of the key elements that the forecasting model uses is a forward simulation which looks at historical spawning and recruitment data to try and understand what the performance might be of different harvest rules into the future”. “We use cumulative probability distribution”. “The relationships give a probability distribution on the range of possible returns”. “The probability of achieving the run is actually an inverse of what is being shown in this table”, etc., etc. for two straight hours. That man was a machine.

The mid-morning recess was welcomed as holy water by everyone, as it made the technobabble stop for a full fifteen minutes. This allowed my brain to reboot and start making sense of what was truly happening on that day. No one in this room understands what is being said, my brain whispered to my ear. Even the Commission's legal counsel who had taken on the tedious task of leading the questioning (and did a rather good job at that) appeared lost on occasion. The other lawyers were deep into their morning nap. As for the good Commissioner Bruce Cohen, he was frantically shifting his attention from the witness to the counsel to his notes and back to the witness again, like a trapped mouse in a lab cage which hits the same wall again and again in a desperate search for the exit.

And yet, those DFO bureaucrats sitting in the witness box were among those calling the shots in the field. They were making concrete life and death decisions over the salmon runs and the human and non-human communities depending on them. Those decisions, we learned that morning, were in large part based on “Frizzie”, a statistical forecasting model whose inner workings Mr. Grout was explaining to us. No doubt, this was a dry and arduous subject to grasp. But shouldn’t other people – shouldn’t I – make the effort of understanding it, given the enormous stakes involved? Isn’t the sharing of knowledge one of basic principles of our democracy? Bravely, I re-entered the court room after the recess, resolute on understanding what I was hearing.

But soon, my brain was stunned to complete numbness again by the sound of Mr. Grout’s voice. At one point the Commissioner’s counsel asked almost casually, as if to give us all a little breather, why DFO’s forecasting model used a 48-year time frame in the future. His answer:

In terms of the modeling work, there is a number of uncertainties associated with the model, including uncertainties about what the best model parameters would be to describe the population dynamics of these populations. There may be patterns in the annual abundance of the spawners that may change in the future, associated with a particular harvest rule. So we were wanting to look at the performance over a longer time frame to see what we might expect to have occurred. Through the various workshops, I think we also looked at different time frames during the planning period as well, but – One of the other reasons is that using a longer time frame gives you a better sense of where you expect the populations to potentially equilibrate from applying a particular harvest rule.

After that, even the counsel was thrown off balance. A painful silence ensued as she was rummaging through her notes searching for a follow-up question which would allow her to temporarily conceal her newly-found state of cluelessness. She came up with this:

Q: the model assumes – correct me if I'm wrong – that the past history of productivity in the past [sic] will be predictive of the behaviour of stocks in the future?

Oh boy, that was deep. She was asking him in substance: are you telling us that your model makes predictions about the future based on the past? Well yes Ma’am, that’s usually what models do.

But, being fundamentally a nice guy who is deeply passionate about his subject matter, Jeff Grout did not seem to notice the clumsiness of the counsel’s question, and responded almost enthusiastically with the following:

A: The model itself uses the information from spawning and recruitment and distribution of the annual variations about that. In the initial formulations of the model, we were just looking at the historical spawner recruitment data, but in recent revisions to the model we have added elements allowing us to look at different productivity scenarios moving forward into the future – by that I mean you can look at a continuing decrease in recruits per spawner eventually, or maybe something that goes back to historical patterns, break it even, put in your own series of productivity in the future to see what the potential........................

I lost what he was saying after that because a fellow activist sitting next to me came to my brain’s rescue by exclaiming rather loudly into my ear “He lives in a cloud, that guy!” I stopped taking notes after that and went instead into meditation mode, as the esoteric blathering continued like a shopping mall music in the background.

Not a single time in his two last long cryptic responses did Mr. Grout use the word ‘salmon’ or ‘fish’, I realized. That can be seen as a problem, given that his job title is – after all – “Regional Resource Manager, Salmon”. Instead, he used terms such as ‘populations’, ‘spawners’, ‘harvests’, ‘recruits’ to abstract this magnificent animal into a set of mathematical variables which could fit in his equations. Mr. Grout does not deal with the living salmon, but instead with conceptual entities, statistical mind games, complex sudokus for PhDs which he is being paid by the taxpayer to resolve. The word ‘salmon’ in his job title? A mere embarrassment on his business cards, an awkward reminder that he, too, is after all a carbon-based organism receiving justification for his paycheck from another carbon-based organism which he only seldom gets to see or think about. The question for Mr. Grout I desperately wanted to whisper in the ear of the Commission counsel to help her get back on her feet was: “Mr. Grout, how many times have you left your corner office this year to go out in the field and see the Fraser sockeye in their natural environment?”

When the First Nations leaders testified before the Commission last month, one of their main complaints about DFO was the fact that this agency claimed to hold exclusive rights over salmon knowledge, that it dismissed aboriginal traditional knowledge as pseudo-science, and that it used it to assert a complete monopoly over decision making, in contradiction with its mandate to co-manage the resource with the First Nations. This resulted in a top-down neocolonial attitude whereby, according to the witnesses, DFO would unilaterally say to aboriginal communities: we in our wisdom have determined your fishing quotas for the year. Here they are. Sign here, or you don’t get to fish.

Sitting in that room with Mr. Grout, I was definitely getting their point. A bureaucracy such as DFO really does epitomize the classical division between manual and mental labor, which in Marxist theory is one of the main instruments of control of the ruling class over the rest of society. We know. You don’t. And so we decide and we organize, and you get to execute according to our decisions and modes of organization. Here are your quotas. Go fish. Don’t ask how we got that number, our models wouldn’t mean anything to you anyways.

You don’t believe that this is actually how DFO thinks? Well then, listen to the following exchange between the Commissioner’s counsel and DFO’s Area Director for the BC Interior, Barry Rosenberger, who testified at the Commission on that same day:

Q: Do you think the stakeholder groups have the capacity to understand the issues that are presented to them for decision and feedback, including some of the technical work that we just touched on today?

A: The level of technical capacity for some of the groups varies for sure. Some of the groups definitely want and expect the Department to have that capacity, to bring them that information and them to be able to give input based on that. Other groups are trying to have people that understand all the models at the same level that we do.

Q: Do you think the stakeholder groups need to understand the technical workings of the forecasting models in order to provide meaningful input?

A: I do not. I don't know the technical workings of those models myself. We can't all have PhDs and all have the same expertise, and we're all going to be geneticists and modelers and whatever. We have to be able to get that information from someone. I don't think it's effective to expect that they are going to have 10 or 15 people developing their own models and having discussions around this.

The strange thing, as one of my fellow activists with a scientific background remarked, is that the key principles behind DFO’s insufferably complex forecasting models are rather self-evident – actually, even lame – if one would accomplish (as she did) the superhuman effort of cutting through the bullshit. Her aha! moment came when Mr. Grout commented on a very complicated graph representing three possible return trends for the Fraser sockeye. All they are doing here, she told me afterwards, is take three basic scenarios – optimistic, middle of the road, and pessimistic – and provide the agency’s decision makers with those three options to pick from.

What my friend was pointing to was the fact that the very language used by DFO bureaucrats was the main cause of their work's complexity, rather than the work itself. And why should we be surprised? We all know since Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking that the basic concepts of science – even special relativity, of all topics – can indeed be explained to the layperson if one chooses to leave a few details out. When one, instead, overburdens the listener with tedious jargon and unimportant minutiae, as Mr. Grout did for a whole day at the Cohen Commission, one is performing (unknowingly, I’ll grant him that) a political act which consists of locking knowledge away from people by using an encrypted code.

There is another institution which has performed this type of encryption of knowledge for millennia in an effort to subjugate and control the masses, using the division of labor between intellectual and manual tasks to achieve its purpose – and that is religion. We know, you don’t. Only we the priests can speak to the gods, that is why you must work for us and provide us with regular offerings in wheat and gold. The primary tool of religious power over the masses is ignorance. And ignorance can indeed be manufactured, by transforming the simple into the complicated, by turning what everyone once knew into what only the initiated can now comprehend. Like the priests of the world's great religions, DFO bureaucrats have invented and honed over time an esoteric new language and set of rituals understandable only to them, which they call knowledge and use to hold power over what they call the "stakeholders".

The great irony in this knowledge power trip embodied by Messrs. Grout and Rosenberger is that DFO's forecasting models of the Fraser sockeye runs have been consistently and massively wrong over the past decade. For example in 2009, they predicted that 10 million salmon would return, when barely a million did. In 2010, determined not to make the same mistake again, they announced a ridiculously wide range of between 7 and 18 million salmon – and missed the mark again, as 32 million sockeye came rushing up the Fraser. In effect, DFO’s fancy and expensive models, which only they can (and claim they should) understand, are useless.

One of the core demands of the First Nations leaders when they testified before Justice Cohen was this: we need funding to hire our own biologists, so we can integrate modern science with our traditional knowledge of the salmon. They were spot on. This is indeed where the battlefront lies. Break the division between mental and manual labor maintained by DFO's self-serving bureaucracy and the legions of “independent” scientists who gravitate around it. Reclaim the knowledge from those who took it away and who are keeping it vaulted in a custom-designed apparatus of scientific-bureaucratic hocus pocus. Indigenous people have long known what we settlers are only now awakening to – that on the Fraser, like everywhere else, knowledge is power.

Conflict of knowledge (2)

2010-12-18T11:29:00.000-08:00

An elder of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation cooking salmon, c. 1940.

Photo Vancouver City Archives, source www.firstnations.eu

Part 2

According to most aboriginal witnesses ^[1]who testified at the Commission this week, DFO's lack of interest in the aboriginal worldview goes farther than its dismissal of traditional knowledge. The agency is convinced that it is the only actor to possess valid (read “scientific”) knowledge in all things salmon, and so, it has quite logically concluded that it should also hold a monopoly over decision-making power. DFO did consult with us in the beginning, Joe Becker of the Musqueam said, but now it's more like a dictatorship where agreements are presented to us on a take it or leave it basis, and if you leave it, then you don't get to fish. Councillor June Quipp: We have no part in the management of the fisheries. We may sit at a table with DFO people, but they believe we are so low on the totem pole, we have no authority. Chief Robert Mountain: We have attended some of DFO's meetings, but we are not part of their decision making process. DFO communicates us its decisions. That needs to change.

One particular manifestation of this process of disempowerment, according to the witnesses, is a bad habit – or perhaps is it a conscious tactic? – developed by DFO to send subordinate staff, who have no negotiating mandate or decision power whatsoever, to meetings with the aboriginal leadership. This has the result of preventing any true negotiation from actually taking place, in spite of DFO's clear mandate to carry out such negotiations with the First Nations. Chief Robert Mountain: We had our chiefs present at the table with DFO, and so we would like DFO to send their own decision makers, so that decisions can actually be made. Otherwise, we are not on a same footing.

Grand Chief Clarence Pennier:

We need a good level of understanding with senior officials from DFO. Right now, we are just dealing with people who are coming to put documents on our table and tell us 'this is what you are entitled and not entitled to'. That does not constitute negotiation.

[ Question from legal counsel: Do you mean to say that DFO representatives who meet with you don't have a mandate to negotiate? ]

Answer: That's right. They don't.

Such practices have led to the development of what several aboriginal witnesses have described as a culture of harassment and abuse of power on the part of DFO towards indigenous communities. The witnesses provided the Commission with numerous concrete examples of how this abusive relationship manifests itself.

Councilor June Quipp, about DFO's petty decisions over ceremonial rights to fish:

I recently put a request with DFO for a ceremonial permit. I asked them for the right to harvest one fish for a ceremony, and my request was denied. And this was in 2010!

DFO has recently taken upon themselves to define what constitutes our ceremonial practices. But they have only defined death so far. So – you have to die to be allowed to set the table.

Rod Naknakim, about the inadequate terms of the fishing permits granted by DFO:

Our fishing permit extends for only 12 hours for the entire season... It's hard to teach the young generations about fishing practices in such conditions, because you want to make sure you optimize your 12 hours on the water.

President Guujaaw of the Haida, about unequal treatment over access to the resource:

It became evident that DFO's efforts were focused specifically on our people. I was charged and convicted for taking 27 pink salmon and I spent 2 days in jail, while the industry took 750,000 from the same watershed without running into any difficulties.

Councilor June Quipp again, about paternalistic and redundant sharing of “scientific information”:

DFO was organizing those telephone conference calls on global warming. One year, my sister noticed that the water in the river was warmer but also higher than usual. She gets on the conference call, where a DFO biologist makes that exact same comment. And so she told me: do I really need to get on a conference call to hear something that I already know?

Chief William Charlie, about how DFO's dismissal of traditional knowledge has led that agency to make ill-informed decisions which were detrimental to the salmon:

We would use torch lighting in the in shallow parts of the river. You would build a fire on your canoe which would attract the salmon and that would allow you to pick and choose which salmon you want to fish. This practice had been banned for years by DFO on “conservation” grounds. We have finally been able to reassert ourselves and make the case that it's a selective technique.

A particularly telling exchange took place between the lawyer representing the Ministry of Justice, who was defending the position of DFO, and Chief Newman of the Heiltsuk. This tense dialogue illustrates the two incompatible logics as well as the power struggle taking place over the salmon numbers:

Dept. Justice: The number of fish allocated for food, social and ceremonial purposes (FSC) – those numbers have been stable for years, right?

Chief Newman:Yes. That's because DFO sets those numbers for us and we have no input whatsoever in setting them.

Dept. Justice: But your nation does not even come near to using its allocation.

Chief Newman: Like I said earlier, things have been bad and so there are not enough fish for us to live on.

Dept. Justice: But you don't meet your allocation –

Chief Newman: Because there is nothing for us to fish!

Dept. Justice: You are not catching your allocation because the fish are not there?

Chief Newman: That's right.

Dept. Justice: There is no sense then in bumping up those numbers, since the fish are not there.

Chief Newman: But we want the government to know what our needs are. If the fish do come back, we want to be able to harvest them.

One of the most striking comments about DFO's disregard for aboriginal knowledge and culture came from Doctor Ron Ignace of the Skeetchestn: ^[2]

There was a time when they tried to take the Indian out of the child. The way I see it now, the way the fisheries are being operated, it’s like they are trying to take the fish out of the Indian... The younger generation of the last 20 years have lost the knowledge of how to fish with a spear in the river... they have lost the language to communicate. That practice is lost to us.

The First Nations are responding to what they perceive as DFO's assault on their knowledge, culture, and way of life by formulating some key demands:

Reclaim control over their traditional knowledge. We need funding from the government so we can hire our own biologists on the river, Grand Chief Clarence Pennier said. Councilor June Quipp: We need our own biologists. We have many people who have a lot of knowledge, having lived on the river, knowing the signs and symbols that we use, people versed in our traditional knowledge.
Redefine co-management of the salmon resource to be precisely what it was supposed be: a “co” management between two equal partners. Chief William Charlie: Co-management means that we can sit down and come up with ways to go forward, as opposed to DFO's attitude of 'this is the deal, sign here, or else you cannot fish'.
Reassert the fundamental right of aboriginals to harvest fish for their traditional needs and subsistence. Assert that right by force, if needed. President Guujaaw of the Haida gave the following example involving Copper River: it was a sockeye stream under management of DFO. It went down to a few hundred fish, so our people just took over the river. We did not fish there for several years, and today it's producing salmon again.

A more radical approach has been tested by the Haida over the years, rather successfully it appears: ignore DFO altogether, return it the favor of considering the “other party” as powerless and irrelevant. President Guujaaw:

We don't go to DFO for permits anymore. We have no respect for DFO in their management of the resources. Twenty-five years ago in Gwaii Haanas, we set up some blockades and we stopped logging in that area. The Federal government cut a deal. All our rights remain intact: we can hunt, fish, trap, live there, cut trees, and do all the things our ancestors did for generations without impacting the land. Now, management has really become management of the visitors in the area, determining the quotas of how many people we should allow in.

What a spectacular reversal of fortune for both the Haida and the salmon – Think about it. In the southern half of Haida Gwaii, stewardship of the salmon is no longer measured in the number of fish that can be harvested, but in the number of people who are allowed in! And it really does make sense, it simply requires another system of knowledge, of values, of economic priorities to take the place of the old one.

I left those extraordinary three days of testimony wondering whether the Haida were not onto something with their unconventional, yet decisive, treatment of what must be called “the DFO question”. When a governmental institution behaves towards your people as a neo-colonial power, ignoring its most basic contractual and treaty obligations, dismissing your ancestral knowledge and culture as being child play, and – to add insult to injury – depleting the resource that it is supposed to protect while arrogantly lecturing you on what constitutes good stewardship, should you not indeed declare such an institution irrelevant and simply walk away from it?

To anyone who has attended some of the hearings at the Cohen Commission – not just those three days dedicated to the First Nations – it is pretty clear that this Inquiry has turned into the trial of DFO. Show up at the Commission on any random day, and you will have a good chance of either hearing some witness blast DFO, or some DFO bureaucrat attempt to survive the heavy artillery barrage fired at him/her by an army of lawyers representing groups who have to deal with DFO in their daily lives. This raises a fundamental question. Is DFO, this broken institution, reformable? Or is it simply beyond repair and must be abolished at the Federal government's earliest convenience, to avoid a growing section of civil society from following the lead of the Haida, and simply declaring DFO's authority not applicable to them? Perhaps one of the primary contributions of this Commission will be to help answer this fundamental question. To be continued, then, in January.

(Part 1 of 2)

^[1] I am using quotes from aboriginal leaders which I transcribed to the best of my ability as the testimonies were being given at the Commission. While my transcriptions accurately convey the meaning of what was said, they may not always reflect the exact words used by the witnesses. For that, we will have the official transcripts which should be posted on the Commission's website within the next couple weeks. To indicate that my quotes are true in their content yet not necessarily exact in their form, I am using italics and no quotes whenever quoting an aboriginal witness.

^[2]I was not present on the second day of the testimonials and so for those, I am relying on the transcripts provided by fellow activist Elena Edwards.

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Conflict of knowledge (1)

2010-12-18T11:13:00.000-08:00

An elder of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation cooking salmon, c. 1940.

Photo Vancouver City Archives, source www.firstnations.eu

Part 1

This past week, representatives of BC First Nations were called to testify before the Cohen Commission which is inquiring in the decline of the Fraser sockeye. The stated purpose of this week's hearings was to provide the Commission with insight in the worldview, cultural context and traditional knowledge of the aboriginal people in relation to the salmon. In total, 14 First Nations leaders appeared over a period of three days to provide their testimonies.

The hearings rapidly turned into a frontal assault against DFO, as the various indigenous leaders took turns to convey the same message to Justice Bruce Cohen: the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is a tyrannical and incompetent agency which dismisses aboriginal traditional knowledge, routinely tramples over basic indigenous rights, and accelerates by its mismanagement the decline of BC's wild salmon.

The attack on DFO was no accident, nor was it (at least solely) the result of the aboriginal leaders' personal frustration and sense of aggravation with this agency's incompetence. Rather, and more fundamentally, it was the expression of a head-on collision between two systems of knowledge, two incompatible worldviews.

Most aboriginal witnesses started their testimonials^[1] by explaining the meaning of “traditional knowledge”. The First Nations possess a unique and invaluable knowledge of the salmon which has been acquired over thousands of years and is passed from generation to generation through oral tradition and direct experimentation, under the guidance of a parent or elder. A key characteristic of that knowledge is that it is not acquired in the abstract inside a classroom, but through concrete interactions with the land and the living beings which inhabit it, leading to a direct empirical understanding of how things are connected to one another. I grew up on a boat, Rod Naknakim of the Laich-Kwil-Tach said. The entire village was involved in salmon fishing. My grandfather told me about his father being a fisherman. Fishing, Grand Chief Clarence Pennier of the Sto:lo said, is a family function which you learn from your parents and grandparents.

Chief William Charlie of the Chehalis:

I used to fish with my grandfather. He would tell me which type of net I needed to bring to catch the fish that we would have in the water that season. I asked him: how do you know which fish we are going to have? He pointed to plants and birds and animals and said: when they are here, this is the kind of fish we get in the water. It's part of a system. (…)

We try to understand the full ecology cycle. When the pussy willows appear and the robins and black birds are coming around, that's when the early spring salmon come back.

Rod Naknakim:

I was always amazed how my grandfather knew the area and when the fish would come, and how many. He would whistle at the orca whales and they would rub against the boat. He was famous for predicting the size of a salmon run. He would get into fights with DFO, telling them 'there is a big run coming', and often he was right. The elders would know which run was which just by looking at a fish, mostly from its size and appearance. I used to know some of the differences myself when I was young.

Chief Fred Sampson of the Siska: ^[2]

Our traditional knowledge is very important. My grandmother knew. She would wait till the mock orange blossoms were on the trees and say “now we will go fishing.” “Why not before?” I’d ask her. I could see the fish going by. She'd say, “those fish belong to somebody else, the people higher up the river. It is only when the mock orange blossoms come out that it is our turn to fish.”

Chief William Charlie:

I have a cousin who works in one of the spawning channels. He works with SFU. He would say: this one spawned, this one didn't but tried to, etc. And the SFU people were able to sample the fish and verify and confirm what he was saying. That knowledge was passed on to him by his father and grandfather. We need to integrate this knowledge with technology and modern tools.

In this worldview, having practical knowledge of a particular ecosystem cannot be dissociated from living in that ecosystem and depending on it for daily subsistence. This is why the witnesses, as they spoke before the Commission, tended not to separate factual knowledge from cultural tradition from dietary habits from stewardship of their land. Salmon are in our songs, dances, carvings, Rod Naknakim said. Twins in our family had their own salmon song to signify abundance, Chief Robert Mountain of the Namgis said, and he then added: when I was a child, we would live on the sockeye, we would eat sockeye three times a day and then we would have sockeye as snacks. Councilor June Quipp of the Cheam: we have to respect the salmon because it is such a big part of our lives. I teach my children and grandchildren about the meaning of the salmon and how we cannot waste that food.

Chief William Charlie:

Salmon contribute to the physical, spiritual, and social health of our people. When salmon has been a major part of your diet for so many generations, it becomes a part of you. It becomes soul food and medicine. You crave for it, you become anxious for it when the fishing season comes upon us.

When asked to define what stewardship of the salmon meant to him, Chief Charlie explained: stewardship is how we conduct ourselves to ensure that all living things carry on. We don't want to be the generation responsible for losing something, especially not the salmon.

DFO, however, does not recognize aboriginal knowledge as being useful or relevant to its mandate and, according to the witnesses, dismisses it altogether as being pseudo- or at best anecdotal knowledge. When asked by her legal counsel how DFO deals with her culture and traditional knowledge, Councilor June Quipp responded: They are in denial. They ignore our culture, they don't use their mandate to deal with it.

Chief Fred Sampson: ^[2]

The traditional ecological knowledge is not acknowledged, not respected by the scientists, by the management. We believe our traditional ecological knowledge is very important in caring for the fish. They [the scientists] would say “you just don’t understand the science” and we will say, “no, you don’t understand the role that traditional ecological knowledge plays.”

That denial is unfortunate according to the witnesses, since DFO is itself perceived by many First Nations as being a deeply ignorant organization which would gain much from tapping into some of the accumulated aboriginal knowledge. Such knowledge would help them, for example, to avoid some basic and rather embarrassing mistakes as they fumble to gather information on fish stock sizes. Chief Robert Mountain:

When I was a commercial fisherman, we were wondering what DFO was doing, fishing on the biggest tides when it was dangerous. They were doing tests at the wrong times when there was no fish, so their numbers on how many fish were out there were not accurate. DFO was doing the wrong tests at the wrong times in the wrong areas – and that's too bad, because our elders had, and still have, that knowledge.

The legal counsel of Chief Edwin Newman of the Heiltsuk produced a handwritten map maintained by the band, showing all the salmon-bearing streams and creeks in his territory. Most of those streams don't bear salmon anymore because of bad logging practices, Chief Newman commented as the map was being projected on the courtroom’s computer screens. We attempted to restore some of them, but we were told not do that, not to interfere with that. The map was entered as evidence in the Commission’s proceedings. On a similar note, Chief Robert Mountain commented:

I am concerned about the assessment done [by DFO] in the creeks. A lot of creeks are not recorded, even though we would see tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of salmon in those streams and creeks. There was a noticeable drop in the past 20 years. I used to swim in streams with 20,000 sockeye, and now there are maybe 1,000 of them.

(Part 2 of 2)

^[2]I was not present on the second day of the testimonials and so for those, I am relying on the transcripts provided by fellow activist Elena Edwards.

Selective science

2010-12-14T17:45:00.000-08:00

The Fraser sockeye - a run facing a unique "boom and bust" challenge.

Photo Isabelle Groc, Tidelife Photography.

An important blog posted today by Alexandra Morton deals with the role of science in the ongoing struggle to save BC’s wild salmon.

She starts by giving a quick analysis of a scientific paper published yesterday which discounts sea lice as a primary cause to recent wild salmon declines. “The authors state they won the trust of the Norwegian feedlot companies”, she writes, “and present conclusions that run counter to science published across the North Hemisphere. They don't report on why their results are such distant outliers to the scientific weight of evidence that wild salmon populations go into steep decline wherever there are salmon feedlots. They suggest something else must be killing young wild salmon near salmon feedlots, but they don't [say] what that could be.”

Further down in her blog, while not discounting climate change as a long-term factor in the Fraser sockeye decline, she remarks that other sockeye runs did not boom and bust as the Fraser run did and “so it would seem the Fraser sockeye are facing a unique challenge and that ocean conditions assist or aggravate whatever the problem is.” She then adds the following:

“Of concern is that scientists are not talking about the evidence that DFO has found a "novel" virus that appears to be compromising specifically the Fraser sockeye that travel north out of the Fraser through fish feedlot effluent. The technique examines the RNA of the sockeye and this has never been done before in fish. However, the methods are sound and suggest a retro virus is infecting the majority of Fraser sockeye that travel along the east coast of Vancouver Island. It is not being found in the sockeye that come in from the open ocean via Juan de Fuca. In a leaked briefing [obtained] by the Globe and Mail, it would appear DFO believes this is one of the three most likely causes of the 2009 collapse and yet no one is mentioning it.”

Alex Morton’s comments reinforce my own direct observation that some scientists appear to be engaged in what I can only describe as a practice of “selective hypothesis making” consisting in over-emphasizing certain scientific explanations while downplaying others, with no detectable consistency or method as to how such selections are being performed.

That's a big problem, because scientists enjoy a natural prestige and legitimacy in society by the sole virtue of being who they are. A PhD, a professorship carries a certain weight – one may say inertia – in our collective belief systems. As such, and unlike what the dominant mythology would have us believe, a scientist’s opinion is anything but neutral.

How to account for this tendency by some scientists to engage in selective hypothesis formulating? Scientists at least in their overwhelming majority are honest and highly ethical individuals, and therefore plain corruption or sell-out to the highest bidder does not account for that phenomenon. A more plausible explanation lies in the considerable (and truly irresistible) pressures being exerted on research teams by market forces in a fashion very similar to those applied on a routine basis upon our politicians.

Large transnational corporations, unlike civil society, have long abandoned the myth of "scientific neutrality" and have instead identified scientists and researchers for what they are: a malleable political material carrying a strong potential for influencing public opinion, and as such a force which ought to be channeled to one’s benefit. Since most scientists have too high moral standards – or opinions of themselves – to be simply bribed, the research system itself needed to be corrupted. This has been accomplished over the past 30 years of neoliberal regime through the systematic privatization of research funding. I challenge the reader to identify more than a handful of large research projects in North America today which do not rely mainly on private funding for their perpetuation (after one has discounted US military research, which represents a totally different beast and I won't even touch it here).

In a system of privatized research financing, researchers no longer have a choice but to comply with, or at least take significantly into account, the exogenous pressures which corporations exert upon them. They are submitted to market forces, having to sell their research projects like so many commodities, competing with one another for access to funds, forced to give their funding sources a say in the nature, direction, and results of their research. Research directors would be highly irresponsible not to allow this to happen, given that their research team’s payroll and livelihood for the next few years may indeed depend upon it.

It’s a subtle game, of course. First, there are often intermediate funding organizations with neutral-sounding names standing between research labs and their corporate sponsors, making linkages from one to the other harder to trace. Second, researchers don’t decide consciously and cynically to dismiss a perfectly valid hypothesis in favor of a doubtful one in order to please a private funder. Rather they learn, often at an unconscious level, to modify the research directions that they provide to their staff. To ponder every word in their communications with the public in a manner that does not unnecessarily aggravate powerful interests. To master the art of compromise, of performing daily self-censure on peripheral aspects of their research so as not to endanger what they consider to be the core. In a word, they learn the difficult, mostly foreign to their culture, yet necessary, trade of politics.

And guess what? We activists engaged in the fight against “evil” corporations are no different, not in the slightest. We slant, bend, interpret science in a direction favorable to our own agendas on a continual basis just as corporations, governments, and scientists do. Truth is not an idea which somewhat awaits in hiding to be uncovered. It is a dialectical process. A synthetic, contradiction-ridden knowledge base which is continuously set in motion and transformed by a succession of crises and clashes. This is, after all, how evolution works. To think that scientific truth is any different would be foolish.

We who are participating in the struggle to save the Fraser salmon from extinction are actively engaged in one such clashes of knowledge. The fight for truth is always political in nature. In the case of scientific truth, that political struggle must be waged using scientific tools. If we pay attention to the manner in which Alex Morton responds to the research paper published yesterday, she does not respond using ideology. Instead, she uses rigorous scientific methodology, asking for example why the authors don’t explain how their findings are such distant outliers to previously gathered scientific evidence – a basic question in the scientific peer-review process. In a follow-up post, she adds: "If these authors want to champion their methods they need to explain why it is more accurate [than that of previous research teams]."

The sooner we accept and embrace the objective reality that scientific truth is a hard-fought, hard-won political struggle which is waged using a rigorous scientific arsenal – and yeah, a healthy but always marginal dose of polemics –, the quicker we may get to work on counteracting the tremendous power that large corporations have mustered in influencing and controlling the production of scientific knowledge.

Salmon think tank gives lesson in (political) science

2010-12-09T22:33:00.000-08:00

The Alaska sockeye have not undergone the same population swings as here in BC: a stream in Alaska. Photo alaska-in-pictures.com

Last Monday, a panel of scientists convened at the SFU Harbour Centre to present its preliminary findings on the dramatic variations in the Fraser sockeye populations. In a single year between 2009 and 2010, those runs went from catastrophic (1.7 million) to legendary (29 million).

The main message of Monday's presentation, at least I think, was intended to be one of scientific caution in the face of a bewildering swing of events. This year’s record return has opened a lot of questions, panel chair Mark Angelo offered as an introduction. Surprises should no longer surprise us, John Reynolds of SFU said, it is the new norm and only safe prediction as we ride this rollercoaster. There is an expectation that we scientists can explain all of this, Brian Riddell of the Pacific Salmon Foundation added, but we can't really. – Etc. You get the idea. The humble “I know that I know nothing” Socratic paradox. And in all fairness, if uncertainty was the only finding that those scientists could produce in the aftermath of such contradictory events, I would have been fine with that.

Scientific caution, however, did not last for very long on Monday night as John Reynolds gave us a quick run through the main causes identified by the panel for the sockeye's wild swings. There is a confluence of two or three factors, Reynolds said, and in our opinion a primary one is climate. There was a dramatic cooling of the North Pacific Ocean in 2008, he explained, and the panel feels very strongly that it played a massive role in the 2010 turnaround of the Fraser sockeye.

A massive role? That's a massive statement coming from a scientific panel which had just finished explaining that we really don’t understand much about what's happening to our salmon. Ten minutes into the presentation, and the panel was telling us in essence: sorry folks, climate change did it, there is really nothing you can do, go home and we'll keep you posted. The implicit corollary to this statement, of course, was pretty clear to the 150 people in attendance: if climate change is indeed the primary factor, then fish farms have nothing to do with the decline of the sockeye. As for the specific details of how the panel had reached such a compelling conclusion, Dr. Reynolds did not deem necessary to explain them to the audience. Without further ado, we were ushered on to the next topic.

That next topic, it turned out, was worth its while. It was a presentation of the findings of an original field research conducted by Brian Riddell. It involved the radio-tagging of two hundred Fraser sockeye smolts which allowed the researchers to plot their routes as they left Chilco Lake down the Fraser and then through the Georgia Strait. Only 40 smolts made it alive to the mouth of the river, and 5 to the top of Queen Charlotte Sound, suggesting that some very heavy mortality rates were occurring first inside the river, and then in the Georgia Strait before the juveniles could reach the open ocean. Riddell concluded his presentation by making a rather sound recommendation that scientists should focus their field research efforts on Johnstone Strait, a narrow stretch of water in Northeast Vancouver Island which the sockeye travel every year and which is relatively easy to monitor.

And with that, we moved on to the question period. The panel had managed the exploit of reaching that stage of the evening without even using a single time (to the best of my recollection) the two phrases which were on everyone else's minds: “fish farm” and “salmon virus”. The audience, however, was less kind to the fish farm industry than the panel members. People made it immediately clear through their questions that there were some other strong hypotheses to explore in addition to climate change. The first question of the public was about salmon viruses; the second, about fish farms. A recent Globe and Mail Freedom of Information request has revealed, the first member of the audience said, that DFO has known for almost a year about a viral infection causing brain lesions to the Fraser sockeye. Why has DFO omitted to inform the public about such a critical piece of information? Kristi Miller, a research scientist with DFO, has been studying this potential viral disease for some time, he continued. Yet her work is being systematically embargoed and almost never mentioned in scientific conferences and research panels across the province – Why?

Brian Riddell gave one of those Byzantine and tautology-rich responses which senior researchers well honed in the practice of bureaucracy hold the secret to. This disease is virus-like, he said, it has not yet been formally identified as a virus. The samples and data are being sent around to labs. Unhealthy fish have higher mortality rates – so we don't know if deaths are solely caused by the lesions. It's a very long process which has to go through a stringent embargo. It is premature to say that there is a link between virus, brain lesion, and higher mortality rates, he concluded.

I learned later that night from Alexandra Morton, who is herself a trained biologist and has read Miller's research, that we already know that this brain lesion is contagious. Contagion typically involves some form of organism such as a virus, and so in fact there is already a strong presumption that we are indeed dealing with a virus.

In a follow-up question about the high mortality rates observed in the Fraser River, Riddell dismissed viral disease as a possible cause, because the seven days that the salmon take to travel down the river do not provide enough time for a virus to run its deadly course. But his dismissal relies on two assumptions that (a) the virus has a rather long incubation period (unlike the common flu for example which only needs two days) and (b) the fish were healthy when they left their holding lake.

The second person to address the panel noted that the Harrison River – a tributary of the Fraser – has witnessed a good sockeye run in 2009 while the rest of the watershed system crashed. Is it a coincidence, he asked, that this particular healthy sockeye run is also among the rare ones which travel South through the Juan de Fuca Strait, a route which has almost no fish farms on it, while most others use the fish farm-infested North route through Johnstone Strait? Good question, we don't have enough data on the Harrison sockeye, was the laconic answer by the scientific panel. One of the panelists did venture out of the safe zone, however. He acknowledged that fish farms did represent a significant change to the conditions in Johnstone Strait, along with climate change. Finally! Someone on the panel had uttered the 'F' word (as in farms).

I came out of this panel presentation my head spinning with questions. Why make climate change the overriding factor in the instability of the BC sockeye runs? The climate change hypothesis is weak to say the least in accounting for the dramatic boom-bust cycles that BC has known over the past decade, for several reasons. Neighboring Alaska has known very good, and more importantly, very steady salmon runs in the past decade while ours were swinging up and down like a broken thermostat. Alaska's clockwork regular sockeye harvest numbers should give us pause, and make us wonder what is specifically wrong with our own runs. In BC proper, the climate change hypothesis does not appear to account very well for intra-regional differences either. The Harrison sockeye run's good numbers during the otherwise catastrophic 2009 year is a case in point. Another one is the fact that so many Northern BC runs have fared poorly this year, during the so-called “legendary” run of 2010.

Alaska sockeye harvests
(source: Alaska Department of Fish and Game)

2005        43.3 million
2006        41.8 million
2007        46.3 million
2008        39.1 million
2009        43.3 million
2010        41.0 million

I am not dismissing climate change which could very well be a factor in long-term sockeye declines. Rather, I am saying to this panel: if you want to make climate change your primary cause in the sockeye's short-term misfortunes while dismissing other good hypotheses as you did on Monday, you're going have to do much better than a few broad generalizations on the shifting climate conditions over the Northern Pacific in 2008. Why be so trigger-happy on climate change, yet so conservative and reluctant to acknowledge Kristi Miller's virus hypothesis, which – if I believe my sources – is about to be published in the journal Nature? And what's so hard to believe about that hypothesis anyways? After all, a virus is what wiped out Chile's salmon fisheries only two years ago.

One (non-scientific) problem with the viral disease hypothesis, of course, is that it may create a strong link between salmon decline and fish farms. That is what the Chilean case has so tragically illustrated. The climate change hypothesis, on the other hand, carries the great advantage of being a rather “soft” and non-confrontational thesis, one that is not liable to aggravate some powerful interests such as the aquaculture industry. This is not to suggest that this scientific panel is being dishonest or corrupt about its scientific positions, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that. But, in a time of extreme scientific uncertainty over BC's wild salmon runs, climate change is a good “middle of the road” position to adopt if one is seeking to park oneself in a-wait-and-see spot, if one wants to somehow hedge one's bets and stay put until things decant a little, scientifically speaking, and until it becomes safe again to commit oneself to a strong scientific hypothesis (whether viral disease or other) without having burnt too many bridges along the way. In a word, the climate change hypothesis is good politics.

Invoking climate change as the primary cause behind BC's wild salmon's decline, however, is anything but neutral. It is extraordinarily disempowering for people, it gets the fish farm industry off the hook before we even get to study their fish disease data, it undermines critical scientific research such as that carried by Kristi Miller on the viral infections, it allows both the BC government and DFO – this broken institution – to continue their bankrupt policies of business as usual. It is a scientifically lazy niche to occupy, all the while some concrete and heroic scientific research work needs to be urgently accomplished on the ground. Brian Riddell's smolt radio tagging project, and his proposed monitoring of Johnstone Strait, are prime examples of such critical work. Miller's infection work is obviously another one. Studying the Harrison River sockeye may yet be another one, since the panel acknowledged on Monday that the data for that key run is lacking.

This panel needs to remain focused on its core scientific mandate. Acknowledge that the scientific community is unable to reach meaningful conclusions on the Fraser sockeye for the time being. Demand, as it claims to have done in the past, that the fish farm industry release all of its disease-related data to the scientific community and the general public by way of an open website (and not only to Justice Bruce Cohen for the sole purpose of his Inquiry). Continue to promote critical hands-on field research to gather more data. And stop dangling climate change as a catch-all explanation to everything – unless, that is, they are onto something specific which looks as promising as Miller's research on the viral disease. In which case, they need to tell us what it is they have discovered. What they did instead on Monday night is to tell us that “it's climate change, now go play in your room”. It's just too short an explanation for so big an issue. And I, for my part, don't like to be patronized.

What Is a College Degree Worth in China?

2010-12-03T09:23:00.000-08:00

A job fair for college graduates in Hefei, China. Photo New York Times.

An interesting New York Times panel discussion about the value of college degrees in China. The article frames the problem in the following terms:

"While China's economy keeps growing at a rapid pace, the dim employment prospects of many of its college graduates pose a potential economic problem.

According to recent statistics, the average Chinese college graduate makes only 300 yuan, or about $44, more a month than the average Chinese migrant worker. In recent years, the wages of college graduates have remained steady at about 1,500 yuan a month. Migrant workers' wages, however, have risen to 1,200 yuan.

If China's graduates are unable to capitalize on their costly investment in education, then is it worthwhile for students to obtain a college degree? What does the imbalance say about China's education system and its economy in general?"

We're hitting here one of the classical choke points of capitalism: surplus-value has to be extracted somewhere from workers in order for capitalists to make a profit. Today, that somewhere is China.

As one of the panelists puts it, "Despite all the hoopla that foreign analysts have heaped on China’s growth, the economy remains driven by manual labor, low-cost and low-margin manufacturing. (...) Knowledge production requires an elite but an extraordinarily small number of workers. As a result, it cannot absorb many college graduates." The room for a Chinese middle class is thus extremely narrow, hence the chronic oversupply of worthless college degrees.

China's way out of this contradiction (within the limits of capitalism, that is) is to build its own economic empire, i.e. export its manufacturing jobs to undeveloped regions such as Africa, keep its "command and control" jobs in China, and have its own middle class live off the exploitation of Africa's manual labor, as the U.S. and Europe have done for the past century throughout the world. Until the next crisis of overproduction. Meanwhile, entire generations of Chinese college graduates are condemned to fight over the few qualified jobs available in their country - thousands of applicants for every job, it is said.

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Saying No to logging on Flores Island

2010-12-02T23:46:00.000-08:00

Flores Island, Clayoquot Sound. Photo Wilderness Committee.

This from the Wilderness Committee:

We have recently learned that there is a plan to log a pristine old growth valley on Flores Island in the heart of Clayoquot Sound. The company has marked out its planned cutting areas and is preparing right now to obtain logging road and cutting permits from the Provincial Government.

Write the Minister of Natural Resource Operations, Steve Thomson now and ask that no road or cut permits be issued for Flores Island or any other intact areas in Clayoquot Sound's rare, ancient temperate rainforest.

Together we can get this done!

Joe Foy | National Campaign Director
Wilderness Committee

My letter to the Minister:

Dear Mr. Thomson,

Okay this one – hopefully – should be really easy for you to decide upon.

Who in the world is this company which wants to log the trees of Flores Island? Have they lost their senses? What a silly move on their part. Logging Flores is not going to happen, it's as simple as that. It won't happen, I might add, with or without your government's consent. You would have entire communities – and not just the local ones – walking massive marches to Victoria and raising human shields and going all guerrilla on you before the first giant tree of Flores is allowed to be felled.

What government in its right mind would want to tie its name to such a doomed adventure? I know the Liberals have made some pretty outlandish decisions in the past few years, but here is one where you are actually liable to side with the decent, reasonable, normal people, rather than with the occult corporate forces which your government usually serves so obediently.

Your government should try “good decision” before it is ousted out of power, just for size. Come on Mr. Thomson, you can do it!

Ivan Doumenc
Vancouver, BC

India's best export

2010-11-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

Arundathi Roy. Photo Wikimedia

Activists fighting private power projects in British Columbia are so absorbed in their local struggle, that we easily forget how much this battle is truly global in nature. That point was carried home back in 2001 in a book by Indian novelist, essayist and activist Arundathi Roy, Power Politics.

The book tells the story of the controversial 400MW Maheshwar hydropower project on the Narmada river in central India's state of Madhya Pradesh, which according to watchdog organization International Rivers will submerge, if completed, the fertile lands and homes of about 100,000 people.

That private project was initially structured as a joint venture between US incineration giant Ogden Energy Group and Indian textile company S. Kumars. Since then it has descended, as so many other projects of its kind, into an investors' nightmare and Ogden has walked away. But the project has managed to survive and is now 80% complete, in spite of fierce resistance by the valley's population, continuous and repeated environmental and contractual violations at every step of the way, legal battles of epic dimensions, and a recent order by the central Indian government to temporarily interrupt construction - an order contemptuously ignored by the developer which has continued construction of the dam with the support of the state government.

Arundathi Roy's book is available at the Vancouver Public Library's central branch (Call # 320.954 R88p) and is worth being read cover to cover, but here are a few passages particularly relevant to our own situation in British Columbia:

The cost of the electricity [produced by this project] at the factory gate will be 13.9 cents per kilowatt hour, which is 26 times more expensive than existing hydroelectric power in the state, 5.5 times more expensive than thermal power, and 4 times more expensive than power from the central grid. (It's worth mentioning here that Madhya Pradesh today generates 1,500 megawatts more power than it can transmit and distribute.)

Though the installed capacity of the Maheshwar project is supposed to be 400 megawatts, studies using 28 years of actual river flow data show that 80% of the electricity will be generated only during the monsoon months, when the river is full. What this means is that most of the supply will be generated when it's least needed.

S. Kumars has no worries on this count. [...] They have an escrow clause in their contract, which guarantees them first call on government funds. This means that however much (or however little) electricity they produce, whether anybody buys it or not, for the next 35 years they are guaranteed a minimum payment from the government of approximately $127 million a year. This money will be paid to them even before employees of the bankrupt State Electricity Board get their salaries. […]

To date, S. Kumars hasn't even managed to produce a list of project-affected people, let alone land on which they are to be resettled. Yet, construction continues. S. Kumars is so well entrenched with the state government that they don't even need to pretend to cover their tracks. […]

What they don't realize is that the fight is on. Over the last three years, the struggle against the Maheshwar Dam has grown into a veritable civil disobedience movement, though you wouldn't know it if you read the papers. The mainstream media is hugely dependent on revenue from advertising. S. Kumars sponsors massive advertisements for their blended suitings. After their James Bond campaign with Pierce Brosnan, they've signed India's biggest film star - Hrithik Roshan - as their star campaigner. It's extraordinary how much silent admiration and support a hunk in a blended suit can evoke. […]

Over the last two years, tens of thousands of villagers have captured the dam site several times and halted construction work. Protests in the region forced two companies, Bayernwerk and VEW of Germany, to withdraw from the project.”

The similarities between India's Maheshwar project and our own “run-of-river” schemes are painfully evident, only perhaps a little more extreme in their Indian manifestation. Roy's book demonstrates that there is not only a global agenda of private appropriation of public resources. There is also a proven methodology, a transferable know-how, a reusable template according to which such appropriations are performed. What is being done to our rivers in BC today by the ruling class has been tried and tested and fine-tuned elsewhere in the world many times over.

As such, when fighting our local battles to reclaim our commons from the ruling class, it's simply not good enough to keep it local. Thinking globally while acting locally is a slogan which does not cut it anymore. We must act globally too, constitute a transnational movement of organized political resistance which actively connects like-minded movements worldwide.

Elsewhere in her book, Arundathi Roy writes that what we need is a new kind of politics:

“Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction. In the present circumstances, I'd say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It's India's best export.”

Such an organized political resistance is indispensable indeed if we are not to constantly reinvent the wheel at every new local battle, and therefore inevitably lose every such battle as we fruitlessly attempt to reinvent its particular rules of engagement.

We all know that the climate summit in Cancun next month will amount to nothing at all in terms of measurable results. Yet it could achieve a lot - possibly even more than Copenhagen, precisely because it will be relieved of the pressure of having to deliver any "results" - in terms of building the global organized political force of resistance that Roy and other leaders are calling for. An organization which will federate and reconcile heterogeneous and often mutually class-antagonistic movements such as climate justice and anti-WTO, landless peasant and indigenous rights, armed insurgencies as in India's northern and eastern regions and classical industrial workers' movements as the ones now emerging in China. A movement which unifies topics and regions under a common struggle to rid the world of the plague of neoliberalism.

In other words - and to shamelessly use some outdated and historically tainted terminology - what we need today is an International.

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How Marine Harvest stole the fish farms

2010-11-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

An enclosed, land-based aquaponics fish farm. Photo socialearth.org

The public overwhelmingly supports Alexandra Morton's campaign to remove open-pen fish farms from BC's waters. In particular, Alex's recent demand that fish farms disclose all their disease-related data since the beginning of their operations is extremely well received in the general public. It is fair to say that, today, the campaign has gained tremendous momentum and could be reaching critical mass. Victory is now a clear and distinct possibility.

Those observations made a recent conversation I participated in all the more distressing.

I was meeting with an old friend at a coffee shop and he introduced me to two of his friends. The conversation rapidly landed on the topic of fish farms. They were both enthusiastically sympathetic to Alex's cause. I was cruising, enjoying the pleasure of finding myself in such friendly territory without even having to work at it. Then one of them said: you know, the problem with farmed salmon is that it tastes awful. The wild salmon has this “gamy” flavor which cannot be replicated in a fish farm.

Whoa, hold it there buddy. I could hear the deafening sound of screeching tires in my head. I was stupefied by what I had just heard. Is that what we have reduced the wild vs. farmed salmon issue to – a mere consumer debate?

I told my new acquaintance that if, tomorrow morning, Marine Harvest got its act together, took all of its fish farms out of the ocean and brought them inland into properly contained systems, I would applaud loudly. That, moreover, if Marine Harvest took the additional steps of rendering its farming operations sustainable by (a) finding alternative feed sources to ocean fishing by-catch and (b) ensuring the proper recycling of its waste – I would become Marine Harvest's most faithful customer.

As for the actual taste of salmon, I told him, I couldn't care less.

I love the taste of sockeye, don't get me wrong. It's one of my most intense and rewarding culinary pleasures in life. But I would give it up without hesitation if that could save this magnificent species from extinction. Hell, I've already done that! I have hardly eaten any sockeye in the past 3 years because of collapsing runs. In 2010, I have feasted on sockeye knowing full well that I may have to renounce it for good as early as next year. Because – no matter how tasty the flesh of a sockeye is – it does not come close to the transformative experience of watching the sockeye return to its river to spawn.

Why in the world did I have to remind this well-intentioned person of such basic and self-evident truisms about wild and farmed salmon? How did we ever get here?

It made me realize that Marine Harvest's impact goes further than just the potential eradication of the wild salmon itself. Another secondary and far reaching impact is that, through its operations, this corporation is instilling in people a deep and long lasting hatred for fish farming in general. The problem is that if we start hating fish farms, we and the oceans are in deep, deep trouble indeed.

Fish farms were supposed to be a positive and workable solution to the awful plague of ocean overfishing. High-tech farms, that is: farms which are enclosed, running in a closed cycle, producing their own feed through a combination of plants, worms, non-carnivorous fish, and predator fish (a technique sometimes known as aquaponics). Farms which do not overcrowd their fish or replicate in the ocean the scourge of land-based factory farming.

In our ongoing struggle to save our wild salmon, it appears that we are – once again! – fighting on the terms set by the corporations rather than our own. We are asked to choose between two impossible evils: destructive, overcrowded, ridiculously low-tech operations consisting literally of a net thrown in the ocean which the industry has the nerve to call “fish farms”. Or, the continuation of mindless overfishing of the ocean, down to the very last wild fish. Are we learning anything yet? We must reject both alternatives and proudly advance our own progressive agenda, our own solution to the tragic depletion of our oceans: fish farms!

In that regard, we must listen to Alex Morton's core message more carefully. She is and has always been a fervent advocate of contained land-based fish farms, provided that they are run under sustainable conditions. We need to ensure that we remain focused on that message and that we communicate it clearly to the general public. We LOVE fish farms and we WANT them, and Marine Harvest's operations DO NOT constitute fish farms.

As such, any part of our campaign that depreciates farmed salmon (e.g. popular slogans such as “farmed salmon sucks”, “tastes awful”, is a “freak of nature”, “has two heads”, etc.) is misplaced and actually counterproductive. We should instead glorify this magnificent animal, the Atlantic salmon, and recognize it as our objective ally in the battle to save its brother the Pacific salmon. Atlantic salmon are good! They taste good! They could taste even better with the proper application of technology and know-how! Contained, high-tech fish farming is good! The overfishing of wild salmon is evil! Marine Harvest's usurpation of the term “fish farm” to describe its nets in the water is evil!

Perhaps a more progressive, although slightly more complex, slogan for the general public would be something along the lines that “We want to reclaim fish farms from Marine Harvest”.

As I indicated at the beginning of this post, there is a distinct and reasonable probability of us actually winning this campaign. This poses the practical question of what happens after we win.

1. Will we win on time? Will it give the wild salmon a chance to rebound, recover, and adapt to other threats such as overfishing, loss of habitat, and (perhaps) climate change?

2. What will be the cost of this victory to the reputation of aquaculture and fish farming in general? A key question indeed, given that we need fish farms to save our oceans and, therefore, our wild salmon.

Once Marine Harvest has been forced to remove its despicable open-pen fish operations from our waters, do we just mindlessly go back to overfishing the ocean and eradicating our wild salmon through criminal mismanagement, DFO-style? No, of course not! From there, we move on to fish farms. Real fish farms, enclosed, high-tech, sustainable ones.

By denigrating fish farms as we sometimes do, we are cutting the branch we are sitting on. We are contributing to bankrupting in advance any chance of establishing viable commercial aquaculture operations as an alternative to killing our oceans. Yes, we need to - and we will - get Marine Harvest's factory nets out of the water. But we also need to stop undermining fish farms. Now.

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Wild salmon alliances

2010-10-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

Photos Don Staniford

The canoe landing protocol which First Nations travelers observe when they reach another nation's shores is a very formal one. I was fortunate to witness it on several occasions during the Paddle for Wild Salmon, a one-week journey down the Fraser River from Hope to Vancouver which a group of 100 paddlers recently undertook to demand that fish farms release their diseased fish data. It's a beautiful and powerful protocol, which takes place as follows.

The hereditary chief and members of the welcoming nation gather on the beach singing and drumming. The approaching travelers raise their paddles in vertical position, letting the canoes glide gently towards the shore as a sign of non-aggression. The canoes are brought to a full stop a few feet away from the shoreline and rafted together to face the welcoming party. One of the indigenous members of the flotilla addresses the chief. He states his name and nation of origin, explains that he and his fellow paddlers are traveling on a journey to protect the wild salmon and asks permission for his party to come ashore and get some rest before continuing on. The chief states his own name and role and responds that his nation shares the concern of the travelers over the future of the wild salmon. He welcomes them to come ashore and invites them to rest and break bread. Both speakers use their loud voices to ensure that all can hear, they choose words and expressions carrying particular meaning, and emphasize their speeches with expressive gestures such as grabbing a handful of water or sweeping the horizon with an extended arm.

I raise my hands to who you are, one of the chiefs said to the paddlers on one such occasion. I call you now my brothers and sisters that travel on this water with an open heart and mind of hope. I see the salmon heads that decorate the front of your canoes as an expression of the message that you are carrying to the bigger people [swooping gesture towards Vancouver], which tend to take care of our water in the wrong way.

I joined the paddle on its fifth day. As we disembarked in Musqueam at the end of the day, I was drawn in by the incredible intensity of this beautiful protocol. In the oral tradition of the First Nations, such ceremonies carry great cultural significance and also constitute a basis of agreement between two groups. The people who are gathered hear the specific terms of the exchange and can bear witness to what was said and agreed upon: in the absence of paper, the witnesses constitute the agreement.

The Musqueam people took us to their large communal room for the evening where they had prepared a sumptuous feast in our honor. After dinner, chiefs and representatives from various nations who had responded to Alexandra Morton's call for action sang and talked about the wild salmon. A young man sang a beautiful healing song from his nation, which he said he felt was fitting since we were on a journey to heal the wild salmon for our children and grandchildren. He then added: what a wonderful time to be alive, what a great responsibility, what a task we have in front of us, what a honor! Chief Marilyn Baptiste from the Xeni Gwet'in nation said a few words about the struggle that her people is waging to save Fish Lake from annihilation by a mining company. She explained that her nation may have no choice but take direct radical action to protect their lake.

Of all the leaders gathered in Musqueam that night, the only one who did not talk publicly was Alexandra Morton. Instead, she stood in the circle which had formed around the speakers and silently listened to everything which was being said. By traveling to the First Nations over the past weeks and months to meet them face-to-face, by spending so much time in gatherings and circles like this one, by listening in silence to the peoples and their struggles and their songs again and again, by breathing in their culture on a daily basis, Alex has succeeded where historically most environmentalists have failed in this Province – to establish durable, viable, long-term alliances with the First Nations, federating indigenous and ‘settlers’ alike under the common banner of the wild salmon. She has also, by mixing nations and their issues together in rooms such as this one, provided the First Nations with opportunities to build and strengthen alliances of their own.

The contrast between Alex’s approach and the shallow ‘take it or leave it’ deals that large corporations impose on their own terms to local bands over resource-extraction projects, couldn't be more striking. How many CEOs and politicians have spent one night – let alone entire weeks – sleeping on the floor of a band’s common room and taken the time to actually listen to what they had to say? It was particularly comforting to environmentalists such as myself to acknowledge the presence of representatives of the Homalco nation, who had joined the Paddle in Musqueam after an epic canoe journey across the Salish Sea with travelers from other nations. One will indeed recall that the Homalco were at the center of Plutonic Power's PR campaign over its Bute Inlet private power mega-project. With the help of controversial Klahoose elected chief Ken Brown, Plutonic had secured a deal which it had advertised in triumphant media releases stating that the company was “working” with the First Nations. The Bute project has since then collapsed, and so have the alleged benefits that Brown had hastily promised to his people. For their part, the alliances that Alex has initiated with nations such as the Homalco are made to stand the test of time.

The next morning we paddled from Musqueam to Jericho Beach. The atmosphere on the water was relaxed and joyful. People were singing and cracking jokes from one canoe to another. We were at that stage in every journey when people have become very familiar and comfortable with one another, when latecomers have been properly integrated to the mix by those of the first hour. The tide was coming out, the current and the wind were pushing us, and the sun joined in for the better part of the paddle contrary to Environment Canada’s dire predictions. After a quick stop at Spanish Banks to grab a snack we were back on the water, but then the radio called in to tell us that one of the hereditary chiefs meant to greet us at Jericho was running late, and so we were kindly asked to raft together and kill some time on the water. We gracefully obliged, remarking among ourselves that no matter who you are or what you do in life, you always seem to be waiting for some chief.

That downtime on the water turned out to be one of the high moments of the journey, according to people who had been on it since the first day. As we are floating in one big raft in the middle of the Bay, one of the First Nations leaders stands up and gets us into some singing. We sing well on that morning, in unison with a loud and clear voice. In that very moment, we are indeed one voice, one salmon nation united in a common purpose. We all bear witness that the alliance between the peoples of this land for the healing of the salmon has been enacted. As witnesses, we constitute the alliance. After the singing, Alex is invited to say a few words. She looks at us with her beautiful smile and simply says: Well, I think we'll get to keep our wild salmon after all.

The following day is Monday, and it is a work day for us paddlers as much as it is for most Vancouverites. This is the day when we deliver our message to the Cohen Commission that the fish farms must release their fish disease data – all their data since their operations started, not a limited dataset from some handpicked farms as the industry just did to counter our paddle in the media. It's a simple demand, really: release all your data. If you can’t, what are you hiding? To that effect, we paddle one last time from Jericho to Vanier Park. The strong wind and heavy rain are whipping our faces, and what was supposed to be a leisurely paddle turns out to be one of the hardest legs of the journey. For those long minutes we feel like the wild salmon, struggling hard against the elements to reach the destination where we know we must be. My eight-year old daughter who joined us for this last leg is shivering with cold but soldiering on, bravely casting her small paddle into the water with the rest of us. My heart is throbbing with pride.

After disembarking at Vanier Park, we march to the Cohen Commission in downtown Vancouver where Alex delivers our message to Justice Cohen in person, and we get a wild salmon rally going at the Art Gallery. As I distribute salmon stickers and information fliers to passers-by – most of them extremely sympathetic to our cause –, I look up at the glass tower where Mr. Cohen is holding his hearings. He is listening to us behind one of those windows, I think. Well, he better be. Because a lot of good people have worked their asses off on their own time and money to deliver him that message.

At the after-rally party, Alex Morton said the following: I'm not sure yet if we made a difference or not. Change is not incremental. Marilyn Baptiste will die for her land and that's the level where we need to be. I think that now, I’m just going to sleep. I'm a shell right now. When you're in the middle of this, you run on the energy.

I hear your words of caution about whether or not we have made a difference, Alex. But I beg to differ. That difference has been made already, thanks to the deep roots of unity that you have planted along with the other leaders who answered your call. This alliance of the wild salmon, of which I caught a glimpse during my few days on the paddle, is not going to vanish away. Not this time. Someone had to initiate that alliance, and you did. Good on you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You may sleep now.

(a salmon people's hero)

(another one)

The force of anger

2010-10-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Betty Krawczyk.

Last September, Crown Counsel took veteran environmental activist Betty Krawczyk to a new level in her struggle with the BC legal system. She is now facing – at least in theory – the prospect of life in prison for having temporarily and non-violently stood in the way of trucks and heavy machinery. To that effect, Crown Counsel has submitted two rulings to the court involving repeat violent pedophiles who had raped their own children, indicating that those rulings were relevant to Betty's case. That's quite an irony when one considers that this grandmother has spent her golden years standing up against large corporations which were raping the environment.

A few days ago, Crown Counsel announced that in the BC Rail corruption trial it had reached a guilty plea deal with the defendants, and therefore the case was closed before Gordon Campbell and his former finance minister Gary Collins could be called to testify. For some detailed analysis of this development, I refer you to Rafe Mair's indispensable and surgical daily blog. The two defendants, Basi and Virk, are reported to have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the Crown whereby they are contractually obligated to take to the grave the secrets of this case. In its wisdom, the Crown also found it appropriate to stick the BC taxpayer with the defendants' legal bills in the amount of $6 million.

Each of these announcements is stunning in its own right, but they take their full significance when put in resonance with one another. Together, they underscore the growing rift between the ruling class' infinite leniency towards itself, and its extreme severity and growing repressive stance towards ordinary citizens.

Such moves by the Attorney General's office are usually carefully calculated. In the case involving Betty, the goal is to send a chill wave through the activist community by making an example of a high-profile iconic figure. The calculation is that this obvious overkill on the part of the Crown will (a) feed our instinct of fear and increase our general sense of powerlessness and apathy, and (b) possibly set a useful legal precedent in the event that new generations of radicalized Betties would come of age.

And indeed, if it were carried through, the Crown's threat against Betty would probably be successful in achieving that goal. Increased repression and criminalization of nonviolent and non-criminal acts of civil disobedience does cause well-meaning people to pause and think harder about the consequences of their actions before they act. Who wants to go to jail for 10 months – let alone a lifetime – for holding back a bunch of construction trucks for a week or two? Certainly not me.

And yet, how little does the elite class understand the laws of dialectics! Clearly, they do not see that through their actions they are awakening and enabling the very monster that they are trying to keep locked away. They are, in their mode of reasoning, the tributaries of formal logic. In their worldview, something can never be simultaneously something else. People are either scared or they are not. They are either apathetic or politically active. If you successfully scare them into a state of apathy, you have by all measures accomplished your mission, case closed. Sometimes after a time of relative calm people grow agitated again, and so then you scare them again by stepping up the repression by a couple notches. Causes are followed by effects. A simple world, really.

In contrast dialectics, which can be defined as the study of the general laws of motion, describes the permanent state of change of things - which are, quite literally, always simultaneously themselves and something else. One huge practical benefit of dialectics as a methodology is that it is adept in all things contradictory. Whereas formal logic is incapable of explaining contradiction and generally dismisses it as a form of error, dialectics thrives on it. The dialectician actively seeks contradiction everywhere, sees it always as an opportunity and never as a problem, reads in its distinct pattern an indication that change is about to occur - that things are about to be set in motion.

Well folks – things are about to be set in motion. The elite class' contradictory treatment of the rule of law, their ridiculous leniency towards themselves paired with their increasingly repressive stance towards the rest of us, throws us, in turn, into a deep state of contradiction. We are deeply conflicted between our growing fear of repression against dissent, which leads us to apathy, and our growing revulsion of the elite class' appropriation of the judicial apparatus to their own benefit, which leads us to anger and therefore dissent.

As a social force, anger follows the same general laws as any physical force found in nature. A force which is repressed does not vanish away. Rather, it accumulates behind the obstacle which retains it and grows in magnitude until the obstacle comes under stress. And when the force is eventually released, it takes the form of a violent explosion which brings the obstacle down. Today, the obstacle constituted by the elite class' judicial apparatus is finding itself under considerable stress, pressured as it is by the forces of anger accumulating behind it.

Those pressures will continue to grow in years to come, as our rulers' judicial schizophrenia does not happen in a vacuum. It takes place in a global socioeconomic context of systematic looting of the public commons which I had referred to in an earlier blog post as a modern form of barbarism. It is because they are robbing us that the world's elite class must allocate an increasing amount of their resources to both controlling us and getting themselves off the hook whenever they get caught. Gordo and friends did not invent the neoliberal ideology which transfers the public commons into private hands: they are simply doing what the members of their global class are meant to do. And so, they have no option but continue to crack down on activists like Betty while bailing themselves out, thus accelerating the conditions for a massive social explosion. They are objectively working on the side of the revolution. All I can say to them is – keep it up, brothers!

In my frequent moments of powerlessness and apathy, I take personal comfort in one particular law of dialectics, the law of transformation of quantity into quality. Water when cooled down to zero degree turns to ice not gradually, but all at once. Change when it happens is usually not incremental but instantaneous and brings along a new qualitative reality. There are thresholds when suddenly we are not in Kansas anymore. That is what, for example, makes the threat of climate change so godawful terrifying. This law helps me answer the nagging question of why are we keeping our heads down, even as the elite class continues to abuse us on a daily basis. Marxist commentator Rob Sewell wrote:

“Just as colossal subterranean pressures that accumulate and periodically break through the earth's crust in the form of earthquakes, so gradual changes in the consciousness of people lead to an explosion which is turned into a class struggle. The "cause" of the qualitative change may be something quite small and incidental, but it has become "the last straw that breaks the camel's back", to use a popular (dialectical) expression. It has become the catalyst whereby quantity changes into quality.”

"A catalyst" is also what Rafe Mair called Betty in a recent column. He is spot on. That, indeed, has been Betty's historical significance in this province. By using disproportionate legal weaponry against her, the judicial apparatus has only succeeded in speeding up the very chemical reaction which it was trying to avoid. The Crown has realized the magnitude of its error and is now in damage control. It has recently circulated the following statement on the blogosphere, referring to Crown prosecutor Mike Brundrett's submission to the court of the two pedophile rulings:

"While making submissions to a Court the Crown may refer to cases for the legal principles they set out. That does not mean that the Crown equates the background facts of those cases with the case before the Court. In the context of Ms Krawczyk’s appeal, the Crown is not analogizing acts of civil disobedience with sexual offences."

Too late, Mr. Brundrett. The reaction is already initiated, the contradiction has been expressed. You are no longer in control in this matter. The laws of motion are in control.

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Salmon connections

2010-10-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

Photos Isabelle Groc, Tidelife Photography.

It was, we were told, the run of the century. So we decided to give ourselves adequate time at the Adams River. We settled for three full days with nothing else to do but sit with the sockeye and watch them undergo their magnificent transformation.

We walked off the parking lot and onto the river trail and realized right away that this year was of a different order of magnitude. We were stunned. The river was filled with thousands upon thousands of sockeye grouped in gigantic schools every two to three hundred meters, which were so dense that they looked like herring balls. I had been to the Adams four times already, but for the first time I was seeing the red river that elders sometimes talk about and which I had, until now, dismissed as a legend.

The other striking anomaly was the number of people massed on the river banks. I was habituated from previous years to walk the Adams in virtual solitude. This time, my family and I had to struggle to make our way through the crowd. There were many bodies in the water for sure, but also many bodies standing out of it. All these people staring and pointing and smiling at the salmon: if there ever existed tangible connections between humans and salmon, I was surely looking at one.

Kids were pulling their parents by the sleeve crying 'This way!' with their strident high-pitched voices. An old man who was hooked up to a respiration system was wheeling his bulky oxygen bottle along the bumpy trail towards the river bank. High-end urban people dressed in designer fashion clothes were rubbing shoulders with local folks dressed like you and me. Thomson River University students were exchanging amused comments with a congregation of nuns. Canada was standing on the banks of that river, and so too was the rest of the world if one believed the world map at the main entrance where people were invited to pin their place of origin and which was, literally, overflowing with pins.

The salmon, for their part, were oblivious of this human run taking place above their heads. Or were they? A badly diseased female – her decaying skin literally peeling off her head – was stubbornly guarding her nest in spite of a group of onlookers standing no more than four feet away from her. When a little girl came running down towards the bank, however, the fish took off like an arrow. The girl screeched to a standstill having realized the commotion she had caused in the water, and the fish came back. They were definitely watching our every move and we were no doubt impacting them.

The powerful stench of decaying dead fish was actually pleasant to my nose, probably because of its distinctive oceanic character which I was surprised and stimulated to find here, some five hundred kilometers away from the shoreline. One of the sockeye's many great powers is its ability to bend the laws of geography by turning a remote BC Interior area such as the Shuswap into a coastal region for an entire month every year.

At lunch, I sat down with a retired couple who had traveled from Penticton to salute the salmon. I wonder, I asked them, if people come here because they are just curious or because they are truly impacted by the salmon. I think it's a bit of both, the man replied. And if they arrived just curious they will leave impacted, he added.

People who visit the Adams for longer than an afternoon soon realize that the place is smaller than it appears and can easily be covered on foot. So they relax and usually settle for one or two personal favorite spots where they linger, come back, identify specific individuals among the masses of salmon, and start noticing the subtle and stunningly beautiful details of a sockeye's final hours.

In one of my own favorite spots, I focused on a salmon couple guarding their nest. I had known for some time that sockeye could be pretty aggressive animals. What I noticed this time around was the other side of that reality – companionship. There was a strict division of labor between that male and that female as they fought off intruders. The female chased other females, the male other males. They almost never attacked the opposite sex, except in one instance when the male appeared to be in trouble, to which the female immediately responded by bravely stepping into the fight. Another observation drew me closer to those two fish than I could expect. Every time one of the two partners chased off an intruder, it would then perform a full circle to come back to the nest from behind and, upon arrival, it would give a quick rub to the other, as if to say ‘I'm back’.

It is not all just happy and nice at the Adams River. One group of people who could definitely use a little more relaxation and observation time in their own personal favorite spots are the so-called underwater “wildlife photographers”. I use quotes here because, frankly, those particular photographers which I got to observe at the Adams didn't appear to care much about their subject. I saw many of them walk or stand in spawned sections of the river, destroying nests, chasing salmon away, and producing plumes of silt in their wake.

I confronted one of those individuals who brushed me off as an ignorant moron. Some “wildlife photographers” clearly believe that the basic rules of conservation do not apply to them, perhaps because they feel that what they are doing is far too important to have to worry about such petty details as not stepping on eggs, or perhaps because they take comfort in carrying around some pretty expensive phallic-shaped objects. I don't know and frankly I don't care, but I do know that their mindset is that of trophy hunters, not “wildlife photographers”. Those who act in such ways are parasites to the wildlife that they claim to photograph. I wish that the profession would crack down more forcefully on these rogue individuals through peer pressure and ostracism if needed.

My wife told me of another physical encounter between human and salmon that she witnessed, and which took on a whole different meaning. A Shuswap elder woman came down to the river with her grandson to salute the sockeye. She showed him how to touch a fish without startling it. It was, according to my wife, a very delicate, technical, and gradual process which the little boy carried out successfully. The salmon did not move as it was being gently stroked. Shushwap elder woman and her grandson on the one hand, Canon-bearing trophy hunters on the other. Two colliding and incompatible worldviews, one respectful and the other one not, yet both involving a physical interaction with the animal.

Another favorite spot of my wife and myself is the river mouth where the salmon enter into the Adams River from Shuswap Lake. There is an extremely shallow stretch of water there, about 10 meters long and perhaps two inches deep, which the salmon must cross in order to reach the river. They are forced to get literally out of the water and dash their way to safety. A sockeye sprinting above the surface of the water is more exhilarating to watch than the Olympic 100 meters final.

Because that river mouth is so treacherously shallow, the sockeye were particularly careful when entering it. They would gather at its entrance and wait, sometimes for hours, conflicted between their instinct of reproduction which told them Go! and that of survival which told them Don't! As new salmon kept arriving from the lake behind (the run was not yet finished), the waiting party would gradually grow until it would reach a critical mass. At that point one fish bolder than the others would venture into the river mouth, immediately followed by a bunch of others. And so, following the principle of force in numbers, the sockeye would almost always enter the Adams River as a group.

In a sense this is where we activists are today – at the mouth of the river, frightened by invisible corporate predators and ill-defined legal threats, waiting for one if us to make the first move. That one, historically, has been Alexandra Morton in the battle for wild salmon. Rather than a “leader”, she is better described as an individual who is bolder and more determined than most of us. She has made that first move, and now we are all seizing the opportunity to make a run with her. That was the meaning of Alex's march to the Victoria legislature last May. It is the meaning of this week's paddle down the Fraser River, and the ensuing walk to the Cohen Commission in downtown Vancouver next Monday. If only we were able to show up in great numbers in one location, as the Adams sockeye did this year, we would be an irresistible force indeed.

For the next few nights after this, I dream of the sockeye. You are home, I tell them. Do what you have to do, and come back. We are lost without you.

This weekend's calendar of events

What: Celebration at Jericho Beach to Welcome the Paddle
When: Sunday, October 24, 2010 - 12:00 - 16:00
Where: Jericho Beach, Vancouver

What: Stand up for Justice for Wild Salmon (Cohen Commission)
When: Monday, October 25, 2010 - 10:00 - 15:00
Where: Vanier Park, then 701 W. Georgia, then Vancouver Art Gallery

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Calling all wild salmon people

2010-10-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

The Paddle for Wild Salmon kicks off in Hope on October 19 and ends in downtown Vancouver on the 25th, to coincide with the opening day of the Cohen Commission’s evidential hearings on the disappearance of last year's Fraser River Sockeye run.

I'll be personally joining the flotilla on October 23, 24, and 25 (I'll be embarking in New Westminster) and I'll report back on the event on this blog.

But before that, I'm taking my family to Adams River this coming weekend, where we will salute the run of the century - over 30 million sockeye, OMG!! I'll definitely report on that as well.

If you feel like joining me for the paddle next week, simply RSVP to the email posted below. You are advised to do that ASAP, as spaces on the boats are said to be filling up quickly.

Hope to see you on the water!

Hello all Paddlers from far and wide,
If you have received this email, it means that we have you on our paddle participant list, and we expect that you are coming along on the paddle.
If we are mistaken, then please email back as soon as possible and let us know so we can give your seat to someone else.
If you haven't confirmed the days you are coming along, or are not sure about anything at all after reading the attached document, please contact Alexis Baker, Nicole MacKay, or Elena Edwards at the email addresses below.
For the paddling itinerary, visit us here - http://salmonaresacred.org/itinerary-paddle
If you know people who want to join up, or have friends that you have signed up that we do not have contact details for, please forward them this email and have them RSVP to: info@salmonaresacred.org and oceananele @hotmail.com or by telephone to Elena - 1+ (604)820-0088
As we draw closer to the actual day and carry on with our journey,
we will most easily be reached through Don Staniford's cell phone 1 (250) 230-1172

The send off BBQ and celebration is at the Telte-Yet Camp Site in Hope is in one week!
Please come between 5 pm and 8 pm on October 19th to the Telte-Yet Camp Site - 600 Water, Hope, BC V0X 1L0‎ - (604) 869-9481‎

Many Thanks, and see you soon.

Gordo to increase private power rates

2010-10-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

We sure can do it again: Anti-IPP rally in Kaslo, British Columbia. Photo Damien Gillis

An interesting announcement by the BC government this morning, which fits into my blog post from yesterday.

The BC government is considering an increase - not decrease - to its premium rates paid to IPPs. As it stands, those rates (~$100 per MWh) are already considerably higher than the spot market average price (~$50 per MWh). So Campbell is about to make a bad deal for the BC ratepayer even worse.

Why would he do that? Because BC is finding it increasingly difficult to attract good investors to its private power adventure, in a context of continued recession in the US (call it a "jobless recovery" if you like), the emergence of new renewable energy players such as California's solar industry, a growing energy overproduction crisis on the continent, and therefore a situation of increased competition among governments - in this case, BC is trying to outbid Ontario's own generous offerings to the private power industry.

In other terms, Campbell is now fishing at the bottom of the barrel, trying to attract second rate investors now that the bigger ones appear to be walking away, or to get the big ones back with much higher payoffs.

This is extremely problematic, especially when it is coupled with the Site C project being carried out in parallel. The BC taxpayer is being hit by a double whammy: on the one hand, s/he is asked with Site C to produce at his/her own cost a surplus of energy that s/he does not need, and which will be sold at basement bargain rates to the mining industry and other regional polluters (there is rumor of sending Site C's energy to the Tar Sands); on the other hand, s/he will be required to purchase energy that s/he does not need at outrageous rates ($150 per MWh?) from private producers in 40-year contracts, which will also be sold at dirt cheap rates to private mines.

This is theft. How do we intend to protect our property?

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Site C, the Neoliberal Plan B

2010-10-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

Gordon Campbell selling Site C, April 2010. Photo Vancouver Sun

Many in British Columbia have noticed the curious coincidence between the ongoing agony of the “run-of-river” private power scheme, and the sudden resurgence of Site C as one of our government’s top priority policy objectives.

That timing is not coincidental, but reveals instead an organic link between private power and Site C - a publicly managed 900 MW dam project to be located on the Peace River. Put simply, Site C is Gordon Campbell’s Plan B in his pursuit of the neoliberal agenda, in the event that the collapse of the private power adventure is confirmed in months to come.

For those opposed to private power in this province, what an extraordinary year 2010 has been! No doubt (and barring any last minute catastrophe) this will go down in our collective memories as our finest hour, our annus mirabilis. Let’s summarize.

January. Plutonic Power announces its decision to put its gigantic Bute Inlet private power project on hold for 12 months. Two months later, in March, it announces that the project is suspended indefinitely. It is probable - although none of it has transpired publicly - that General Electric, the project’s financier, killed the Bute once it realized that the risks involved in this $4bn project had escalated dramatically, both in terms of its disastrous public image and the increasing uncertainty about whether BC would even be allowed to sell its energy to California.

April. The modest-size Tyson Creek private power project is temporarily shut down, two months after going online, due to large amounts of sediments being deposed in the nearby fish-bearing Tzoonie river. The incident has brought the entire environmental assessment process into disrepute, as regional districts have discovered to their dismay that some of the most textbook risks such as - duh - the potential sedimentation impact of a lake delta, have been completely left out of the impact studies.

May. BC’s other private megaproject, Kleana Power’s Klinaklini project in Knight Inlet, is killed by BC Hydro after environment minister Barry Penner publicly voices concerns about the project’s potential environmental impacts. The rumour goes that this project was so disastrous environmentally that the government could simply not afford to support it. I will also argue that at that stage of the game, the BC Liberals had already decided to shift their priorities back to Site C.

September. The California legislature says no - again! - to importing BC’s private energy, in spite of the Campbell government’s herculean lobbying efforts. California’s renewable power bill died of neglect on the senate floor, without even being voted upon. Not that it changed much for Campbell anyways, since the California legislators refused to change that bill’s language to qualify BC’s private power as “green”. And why would they? Their political duty is to protect the state’s fledgling solar energy industry - and its badly needed jobs - from the unfair competition of their northern neighbor’s subsidized private energy.

This year’s amazing developments are coming after another pretty good year, 2009, which saw among other things the West Kootenays rise against the Glacier-Howser private power project, and the BC Utilities Commission deliver a resounding slap in the face to the Campbell government by ruling that its private power scheme was “not in the public’s interest”.

On the face of it, Site C signals that Gordon Campbell has finally received the message from the public loud and clear. You don’t like private power? Well okay, he appears to be saying, let me give you instead a good old-fashioned Bennett-style public project, one that puts BC Hydro back in the driver’s seat, one that even the NDP won’t be able to object to.

Politically, it’s a savvy narrative. But the problem lies in its failure to address two nagging questions:

British Columbia does not need the additional power provided by Site C, any more than it needed that provided by Bute Inlet and the Klinaklini. That point was made clear time and again during the anti-private power campaign. Even BC Hydro acknowledged that fact in its 2007 Marbek Report. And if the purpose of producing this surplus energy was to export it, as the Campbell government was finally forced to acknowledge in 2009, that route has now been closed by California’s lawmakers.

Question #1: if we don’t need it and California doesn’t want it, for whom exactly are we producing Site C’s energy?

The BC government is actively pursuing a transmission line project which is under-reported in mainstream media and therefore remains mostly under the public radar, the Northwest Transmission Line. This $400 to 600m project consists of a 500-kilometre line from Terrace to Dease Lake. Whoa, hold it there - from Terrace to Dease Lake? What’s up there? A handful of diesel-powered rural and First Nations communities which, by the admission of the BC government itself, will not get linked to the grid after this new transmission line is completed.

Question #2: why are we spending half a billion dollars to build a Transmission Line to Nowhere, one which will fail to get a single community off diesel?

With incredible candor, the Mining Association of British Columbia provides a compelling answer to both aforementioned questions in the form of the following map, appearing in a 2008 report which underscores the benefits of the projected transmission line for the mining industry:

The MABC’s report further acknowledges that “demand for power in the northwest is driven largely by the mining sector”, and adds that “the potential economic benefits to the province of constructing the Northwest Transmission Line appear considerable” and are “extremely dependent upon the various mining projects identified in this report”.

And it’s really as simple as that. Site C’s excess energy, paired with this new transmission line, will serve to power private mining ventures in Northern BC. Mines consume enormous amounts of energy, and none of those projects north of Terrace would be economically viable without a very large supply of cheap, publicly subsidized energy. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the neoliberal hat, one being used today all around the world. Large transnational corporations apply their enormous political leverage to obtain from local governments full access to the country’s public resources - both energetic and financial - to the detriment of local populations. It’s a textbook case of the “enclosure of the commons”.

Campbell’s initial plan was to cater to two of his constituent groups in a single move. (a) Hand BC’s rivers over to the private power industry - the so-called IPPs -, purchase the entirety of the energy produced at outrageously high rates (~$100/MWh) on public funds through exclusive 40-year contracts, and sell that energy back at half the cost (~$50/MWh) on the North American spot market, while (b) catering to the mining industry by providing them with an ample oversupply of cheap energy thanks to the IPP gold rush, and by “investing” provincial and federal taxpayer money in a transmission line which would serve no other purpose in life but to power up those mines. This has nothing to do with sound economics or rational market-driven cost cutting measures. It has everything to do with the looting and pillaging of public resources by an elite class constituted of mutually serving corporate executives and government officials.

Part (a) of Campbell's plan is now falling apart, partly because of the massive public outcry, partly because of the greater economic context of a deepening recession which is now morphing into an outright depression, a situation which exacerbates the likelihood of an energy oversupply in North America, and which has, in turn, triggered California’s lawmakers to deny entry to BC’s private energy.

And so Campbell is now adapting to the new circumstances and refocusing on part (b) of his plan, the mines. What used to be a sophisticated scheme involving multiple players and several interrelated markets, has now devolved into a coarser and more classical case of good old “third world” appropriation of public wealth by a small group of private players. According to the new Plan B, corporations will now be allowed to make money by purchasing dirt cheap energy from the public, instead of selling it at outrageous rates to the public as was initially envisioned. This shift in the looting strategy reflects the simple fact that, since the 2008 financial meltdown, the energy market has become a buyer's rather than a seller's market.

Frankly, after the promising year 2009 and the glorious year 2010, I am a little worried about 2011. I don’t think that the activist community has fully grasped yet the scope and magnitude of the danger looming ahead, if the BC Liberals are allowed to carry out their plan. If we don’t react rapidly and mount a strong response to this latest phase of the neoliberal assault on our common resources and wealth, 2011 could become a year of major setbacks and great disillusion. Let’s gear up for that next battle.

.

Awakening

2010-09-23T17:40:00.000-07:00

Greek Communist Party members unfurl banners on the Acropolis. Photo the Daily Telegraph.

The American socialist commentator James Petras recently reflected that the current period of capitalist development is comparable to a barbarian invasion, albeit one taking place from the inside.

Looting and pillaging of economic wealth, raw exploitation of available resources, rapid dismantlement of political institutions, brutal destruction of existing communities and of the social fabric. Those are some of the characteristics common to both the Germanic invasions which overrun the western Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the neoliberal revolution which is gripping the world since the 1980s. Some of the defining features of the contemporary barbarian hordes, according to Petras, are:

The ascendancy of a parasitic financial-speculative elite which has pillaged trillions of dollars from savers, investors, mortgage carriers, consumers and the state.
Corruption at the top in all aspects of state and business activity – from state procurement to privatization to subsidies for the super-rich – and the establishment of an international network of organized corporate crime. This is particularly manifest in the merger of the corporate and political ruling classes, to the point where it becomes almost impossible to distinguish one from the other.
The placement of the burden of the pillaging onto the shoulders of wage and salaried workers, pensioners and the self-employed, resulting in long-term, large-scale downward mobility.
The massive exploitation of labor in post-revolutionary capitalist societies, like China and Vietnam – the contemporary equivalent of fourth-century populations being sold into slavery by their barbarian conquerors.
In the United States, the surge of a militaristic political elite overseeing a state of permanent warfare and the building of a military economic empire at the expense of the domestic economy and basic social services.

Today – particularly after the 2008 financial crisis and bailout of large banks at the expense of everyone else – the current political and economic system is historically bankrupt. That much is clear to everyone. The only people who are still likely to support this barbarian state of affairs are those who personally benefit from the looting and pillaging.

And that’s why another socialist commentator, Alan Woods, recently asked this troubling question: if all of this is true, why is it that the forces of socialism in general, and Marxism in particular, still remain a tiny minority? As a trained dialectician, Woods provides a simple and rather convincing answer to his own question, which is that collective consciousness always lags behind an objective situation. The people are awakening, but belatedly, to their condition of exploited class, not unlike climate change which occurs several decades after carbon dioxide is released in the atmosphere. In other words, patience.

Another equally convincing response is to say that this is simply a matter of optics. Socialism remains a tiny minority force here at the center of the capitalist Empire – the US, Canada, Western Europe – but those forces of change are in full motion as we speak in other peripheral regions of the world, such as India’s eastern provinces with the Maoist insurgency, Latin America with its Bolivarian revolutions, or, increasingly now, China itself where factory workers and local communities are mounting increasingly effective movements of resistance against naked capitalism.

A friend of mine who describes himself as an orthodox Marxist and lives right here on the Drive in Vancouver (so I guess the forces of change are not that far away after all) offers another explanation. While he does not dismiss at all the other two – he is a strong believer in the rise of collective consciousness and has intimate knowledge of the various revolutionary movements taking place today in developing countries – he sees us (that would be you and me) as the primary obstacle to a more rapid surge of the forces of change in Canada and the industrialized world.

The problem that my friend sees in the North American middle class, including its self-righteous, self-proclaimed forward-thinking “environmentalist” fringe (ouch), is that this class is a primary benefactor of capitalism’s global imperial system. And so, objectively, we have no reason to give up the relative material comfort which we have gained through the barbarian horde’s looting and pillaging of the rest of the world. Sure, the elite class is obscenely richer than you and I, but the two if us are still so much better off than the rest of the world. And so, my friend claims, we are more likely to fight to protect the system than to bring it down. Did I write earlier that the only people still likely to support this barbarian state of affairs are those who personally benefit from the looting and pillaging? Well yes. My friend’s point exactly.

My bad-conscience-of-a-friend sees the middle class as subservient, fickle, unreliable and fundamentally conservative. And to support his claim, he likes to quote a famous passage from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto which I am reproducing here with great reluctance, as it inflicts a painful blow to my self-righteous, self-proclaimed forward-thinking environmentalist ego:

“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”

Dialectics is really a wonderful thing. It expresses in the very same instant, in a flash of pure clarity of the mind, both the contradiction and its resolution. My objective condition of being a prime benefactor of the barbarian loot is incompatible with my self-righteous claim of wanting to save the world from the barbarian hordes. I am a fraud to myself and to the people around me. (The contradiction.) But the unstoppable erosion of my relative well-being creates the objective conditions for my awakening. Today, I would rather fight to protect my relatively privileged position. But tomorrow, I will have less to protect, and even less so later on until I can no longer identify myself to the system. (The resolution of the contradiction.) A process which, in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to as the gradual proletarianization of the middle class:

“The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.”

Since my objective sinking into the proletariat and the erosion of my family’s way of life are ineluctable, my subjective task should then be to welcome that change, as a necessary transition towards my positive acting upon the world. Of course, this resolution of mine is perfectly meaningless, self-serving, and slightly laughable as long as it is only considered individually. But as soon as such an awakening to one’s proletarianized condition occurs collectively, at a societal level, then everything changes and the forces in play become truly tectonic. Take Greece for example. If countries were people, Greece would fit exactly in Marx and Engels’ “lower strata of the middle class” categorization: a country which one generation ago managed to extract itself out of poverty and join – at least nominally – the exclusive club of rich countries, courtesy of the European Union. Today, a bankrupt country looking right down into the abyss. No question, I am a Greek.

Last month, the German daily Der Spiegel reported that the austerity measures imposed upon Greece by the financial-speculative elite had backfired big time. Yes, the Greek government has managed the extraordinarily exploit of reducing its budget deficit by 40% in one year. But the social and economic cost of the austerity measures is intolerable, translating in a collapse of the Greek consumer’s purchasing power, a very severe recession in 2010 which was supposed to be the year of the “recovery”, an overnight disappearance of the state’s tax base and therefore future revenue, and an unnatural unemployment rate of 70% in some cities and regions of that country.

Having reported on such a bleak situation, Der Spiegel could only conclude that there is “no way out” in Greece today and that “things are starting to simmer”. Well there is a way out of course, but not within the boundaries of the system under which Der Spiegel and other official media operate – namely a social revolution. It is fitting that the Greeks themselves invented the word barbarism which was used to identify foreign terms used in their language, and which literally means blah-blah. One of the reasons put forward for the 2008 banking collapse was the increasing complexity of the financial instruments used, to the point where only a few people were able to comprehend them. Societies are awakening to the contemporary barbarian hordes and their meaningless financial babble.

I strongly believe that the world’s middle classes will lead the assault (and in this I differ strongly with my Marxist friend) but not until they have undergone their necessary transformation and joined the ranks of the proletariat (so perhaps we agree on this more than we think). The next milestone which will signal that we are closer to a resolution of the contradiction than it appears, is when genuine socialist movements emerge and flourish in marxophobic Canada. Such structured organization will be necessary to avoid social upheaval from venting out aimlessly, or worse, tea-partying itself. How much longer? Well, I plan to see that happen in my lifetime.

.

Stream of Consciousness

2010-09-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

My old friend Andrew Teasdale sent me this beautiful story about his ecological restoration work and ensuing struggle with the city of Surrey's bureaucratic red tape.

What was that quote by Mead again? Oh yeah.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Keep it up, Andrew.

Pandora's Box and the Stream of Consciousness

By Andrew Teasdale

A chance meeting in a Vancouver cafe where I had heard about a house facing a forest found me the very next day wandering down a wooded trail in a faraway nook of Surrey but not in my wildest dreams had I expected to find this.

Suddenly the air was cool and fragrant. The succulent sound of running water could be heard nearby. Looking down a steep slope I stood transfixed: a shimmering little waterfall, the most peculiar one I have ever seen. It came out of a long rectangular concrete box two meters above the ground, the water hitting the mossy rocks below before disappearing into a valley in the distance. Shrouded in green and mist this little sanctuary was of such beauty to me I could have been staring at the goddess of the woods herself.

But there was a grotequeness to this vision. Mangled and rusted iron bars stuck out from the ancient looking moss covered box which had been hastily constructed when a road was built over the ravine in a bygone era. Beside the waterfall was an old fridge half buried in the ground. Rotten mattresses and pieces of foam lay amongst other discarded appliances. Garbage bags overflowed with plastic bottles and tin cans in various stages of decomposition. Old car tires and broken bicycle rims lay still. A burgundy 'GM' foot mat was curled up in the soil. Everywhere was innumerable bits of broken glass, cords, wires and metal shards.

As an avid hiker I knew that I could follow a stream up a hill face and find a waterfall somewhere near the top but never had I seen this. Suspended two meters above the ground this concrete box had created a waterfall not at the top of a mountain but near the bottom.

In some strange trance I stood looking down at the water and somewhere deep inside the deal was sealed: I had to get down to this stream. But of the steep and slippery slope and the sheer volume of trash made this impossible.

And so it was that a few weeks later in the hard rain of Vancouver's winter I found myself scurrying about in what was effectively a big dump with my little shovel making the first few uncertain steps of a earthen staircase down to the stream.

My new neighbor came out and asked, 'What are you doing down there?',

'I am a volunteer for Greenspace Vancouver', I replied somewhat dubiously.

Indeed, there was something almost obscene about digging about in this garbage pit. After all, I was doing this for free and with no permission from the city on whose land I was working.

Not to be deterred by the suspicious looks of passerbys and from my new landlord I plodded along carrying out the biggest pieces of garbage first before setting my sights on whatever else lay half exposed beneath the earth.

Months passed with no discernible progress. Regardless of how much garbage I hauled out from this little valley, there was more underneath. Wire, pieces of clothing, rusted pieces of machinery and sometimes the odd antique bottle or ancient farm tool in the form of a pitch fork or a horse shoe. Further down the stream I found the remains of a party from long ago including an old bottle of Chivas and a magnum of wine lying in the grass with an entire set of the type of kitchenware you'd expect to find in an affluent middle class household. But mostly it was just nasty garbage. The worst offenders were the pieces of broken glass and bits of sharp metal just waiting to make mincemeat of someone's unsuspecting digits.

But I plodded on. Eventually I made it down to mostly sticks and stones and earth.

On one of the few clear nights we'd had I looked out my window and for the first time realized that I could see the Fraser River. The Fraser comes all the way from the Rocky Mountains and is home to five kinds of salmon and the Sturgeon, or 'dinosaur fish', some of which can exceed five metres in length. This mighty river captivated my imagination and I hatched a plan to follow the little stream on my street down to the Fraser's banks and beyond.

First I had to finish my staircase down to the stream. But every time I would cut a stair into the earth the rain would wash away another. It was no easy task. In the woods were logs from trees that had been felled in years past and I used these wedging them into place with rocks hidden in the soil. At the most slippery part of the slope directly beside the stream I spent two months making an entire section of the staircase from rock alone. I somehow managed to lug these rocks, some more than one hundred pounds, by myself and fit them in place. Like icebergs once these behemoths were submerged into the bank it was impossible to judge their true size.

One day when the steps were nearing completion I finally decided to follow this stream down to the Fraser. After walking for a few minutes along the stream I came to a clearing and looked up to see a massive old craggy tree. On its highest branch were two eagles sitting in the sunlight.

Continuing on I came to another clearing with several beautiful pine trees. In the ground beside a different stream was the brick foundation of an old house. I followed the home's original path through this natural wonderland when suddenly I saw something hideous and totally out of place. A giant mound of sand fifty meters across and hundreds of meters in length brought this wondrous sanctuary to an abrupt end just beyond the eagles' tree. The Fraser River Perimeter Road!

Several years earlier I had heard of a plan to put a highway on either side of the Fraser and immediately grasped its implications. Why would anyone build a highway beside the home of the salmon? But to see it here made it all the more diabolical.

Passing over this sand trap I continued over a road where the stream passed through a pipe under the asphalt and out through the other side. It then flowed into a long canal which headed toward the Fraser. I followed it along the canal with my clothes getting caught on the blackberry bushes but it soon went under the fence and onto the property of CN land. From the 'no entry' sign I could see the Fraser not more than fifty meters in the distance! So close yet so far. My route was blocked.

I decided to follow the river along the closest road hoping that further along I could find a way to its banks. For several kilometers I walked in a spooky old area full of junkyards and barking dogs. Eventually I came to an old steel company that had been shut down. Massive coils of wire and other industrial equipment stood silent and rusting in the yard. A row of ancient turbine engines with 'Detroit Steel' on their sides had long ago ceased to run. I kept walking trying to find an entry to the Fraser but had no luck. I came to a pleasant forest but this soon gave way to the Perimeter road and another fence beside the railroad. Amazingly, despite being able to see the Fraser from my window I was unable to get to its banks even with a walk of several kilometers.

My plan to follow our little stream into the wilds of British Columbia had been crushed. Dejected, I turned around and made my way back through the forested area beside the steel plant. In the distance I saw some pink flowers and then a tiny hummingbird. This sighting lifted my spirits. I would content myself with the little stream on our street I told myself.

The highway might be approaching from all sides but I tried not to think about it. Instead I devoted my efforts to making this little waterfall an oasis. The fictional planet of Pandora in Avatar is really here on Earth I realized. Standing among the tall trees and large ferns all around me was a kind of blue green light created by the water and the forest. With my hands in the earth and falling sound of the water I was part of a fantastic world.

Several seasons passed since I first spotted this little treasure beneath the garbage. With my staircase looking more professional my neighbors started to be impressed with the beauty of this little spot. More than a few times I would walk past to see somebody staring down at the water. One night we saw a giant owl spread its wings and fly away from under the waterfall. Lovers started to make their way down the steps to be together in the forest. Another evening a shiny car drove past. It stopped and backed up as I poked around in one the little gardens I had made at the entrance of this green space. Was this another skeptic? coming to taunt me I mused when a lovely woman rolled down her window.

'I just wanted to tell you what beautiful work you do', she said before driving off.

But it wasn't long before I was paid a visit by another woman, this time from the city. After exchanging pleasantries, she came to her point. Looking at the fence which had bent just above where I had cut my trail, she said 'I like your work but it has caused some damage to this fence and we wouldn't want anyone to get hurt. Just so you know, your garden might be affected. It's a shame after all the work you've done', she added somewhat unconvincingly.

I too noticed the bent fence one day and big piece of the slope which had crumbled beneath it and realized it would mean trouble.

Then a couple of months ago, it came to a head when I was visited by a couple of different city workers as I was moving a big log.

'I like what you have done, but we are going to have to destroy it' said the older of the two workers who was wearing thick glasses which hid his eyes.

There was a younger guy with him wearing a glum expression ostensibly in disapproval at what they were being made to do.

Shocked I blurted out 'This was a dump when I moved here with garbage up to here', pointing to my knees.

'Well I am just warning you that we will be pouring 24” rocks in here tomorrow morning At 8 AM'

he told me.

'How far do you plan to go with them?', I asked in a panic.

'As far as they will roll', he answered looking at the beautiful pool of water beneath the waterfall.

The next day the trucks came with the rocks as promised while I was at work. I told my wife to go down to the green space we had built to make the city workers feel as badly as possible. Later my neighbour, a solid looking workingman told me he had also gone down to see what was going on and had told the workers that I had spent almost two years working on the staircase. 'Sometimes it's better to look the other way', he told them.

For whatever reason the green space and the little stream were saved that day. Nobody cared a whit about this little stream when it was a dump, least of all the city on whose land it runs. But since I started my project there has been enormous interest and dozens of workers surveying the area.

One reason for this is undoubtedly a result of the most vile thing I uncovered in this little valley when I was doing my work. Every time there is a heavy rain the whole stream turns into a toxic sludge of foam. It is clear from its volume that some type industry is dumping waste into this little stream which empties into the Fraser. But this terrifying fact had escaped detection until I had built my little path down to the stream.

I took a water sample of the sludge as well as some video and reported the violations to the provincial government. After weeks of calls to hapless officials I finally received a call from the provincial Ministry of the Environment informing me that this was a Department of Fisheries issue. The Department of Fisheries called me and said that it was the Ministry of the Environment's responsibility.

When I asked the person on the line to put that in writing, the line went dead.

Yesterday, two months after I filed my report we had our first big rain in recent memory. Returning home from the city I took a glance down at the little stream only to see it engulfed in foam two feet high.

The previous day I received an e-mail from a city worker in charge of the Surrey Beautification Program. Seeing the poster at our local library offering grants for those who have beautified Surrey's public spaces I made an application thinking our community green space would be the ideal candidate.

Instead the e-mail said that there were erosion issues with my project and so please cease any further work. When the city had threatened to destroy the greenspace because of erosion issues, I worked in the middle of the night to shore up the bank with logs and rocks. There were at present no erosion issues I assured the official and added that I learned from my neighbor that someone up the street who had damaged the fence and caused the erosion issue when he had lost control of his trailer which smashed into the fence bending it and knocking out the earth.

So I am not holding my breath for any awards from the city for my trail down to the stream.

But where there was once ugliness there is now beauty. At least for today.

.

No to proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture regulations

2010-08-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

Ed Porter, Team Leader, Regulatory Operations
Fisheries and Oceans Canada
PAR-RPA@dfo-mpo.gc.ca

Dear Mr. Ed Porter:

I am responding to the 60-day public comment opportunity on the proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture Regulations http://www.gazette.gc.ca/cg-gc/about-sujet-eng.html (left column “Part I Notices and Proposed Regulations” Vol. 144, No. 28, page 1933).

It was brought to my attention by Ms. Alexandra Morton that the purpose of the proposed amendments is to reduce, not increase, the safeguards in place to regulate aquaculture along Canada’s Pacific coast. In particular, the proposed new regulations would provide government with the ability to grant and renew licenses without public or First Nations input nor further environmental assessments. One of the reasons given for this amendment in the Canada Gazette of December 19, 2009 is to enhance our aquaculture industry’s ability to compete on international markets. These draft regulations, I am told, ignore the International (OIE) and the Canadian Food and Health Inspection Agency standards by exempting salmon feedlots from full disease reporting.

This is so wrong on so many levels.

First, at a time when sockeye runs are collapsing (this year’s exceptional and joyfully abundant return notwithstanding), more – not less – regulation is required to ensure that the aquaculture industry does not interfere with the threatened life cycles of our beloved wild salmon.

Second, introducing regulation which is aimed at keeping the public and First Nations out of the decision making process is yet another instance of the neoliberal “privatization of the commons” agenda, resulting in massive transfer of public wealth in the hands of private interests. It is yet another attack against our society’s democratic principles.

Third, the government’s official rationale for introducing such changes (as stated in the Gazette) are extraordinarily and inexplicably short-sighted. What is the point of enhancing Canada’s potential ability to compete on international markets for, say, the next 3 or 4 years, if after that period there is no aquaculture left to compete over? The 2009 sockeye collapse and ongoing Cohen Commission are tangible proof, if needed, that the disappearance of our fisheries has ceased to be a merely theoretical threat.

In this context, such amendments make no sense at all, unless the non-stated goal is to eradicate wild salmon runs altogether as a means of establishing the fish farming industry’s monopoly over the “production” of salmon. An extravagant and outlandish conspiracy theory, no doubt! Yet, it is one which is gaining traction in the general public, as people attempt to rationalize a truly irrational set of decisions on the part of their government in recent years and months. For my part, I refuse at least for now to believe that our government could be involved in such a cynical, abject, and counter-nature plan.

Mr. Porter, I am asking you to help me restore my trust in my government’s truthful intentions. The aforementioned proposed amendments to the existing aquaculture regulations must be rejected.

Yours truly,

Ivan Doumenc

Vancouver, BC

Fish farms - critical public input required

2010-07-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

This urgent call from Alexandra Morton. Please pass on ASAP to your mailing lists.

In Alex's own words:

"I know it is very hard to react to everything that comes at us, so I have tried to make this easy for you. However, I can’t turn this looming disaster, it requires each and everyone of you and your friends and family. Please pass the petition to all you know."

Hello All

The federal government has released their proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture Regulations with a sixty-day public input period. These regulations role back the safe-guards we have in British Columbia to prevent heavy industrialization and privatization of the coast at the expense of our communities. Once these regulations pass there will be no further public input on how each salmon feedlot licence is written, how many wild fish they can take and what diseases they must report. The federal licences will be issued without First Nation or other consultation and can be expanded without an environmental assessment. I feel there has to be enormous response or else we all lose, even the people working in the industry, because no retailer is going to want to be in possession of a seafood product authorized to “Harmfully Alter, Disrupt and Destroy” parts of the North Pacific. Oddly these regulations will not apply to the east coast of Canada, where the Minister of Fisheries resides.

There are several options for you to act by the deadline September 12:

See my letter below/attached which interprets the proposed regs and provides a direct link to them
write to Ed Porter who is accepting public input PAR-RPA@dfo-mpo.gc.ca
Sign the petition http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dElVTFY0d1JqMGRYR2F6Vnp3QjEzRnc6MQ#gid=0

You can see my presentation on the strong correlation between disease in salmon feedlots and decline of Fraser sockeye "What's New"
http://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/science/

I know it is very hard to react to everything that comes at us, so I have tried to make this easy for you. However, I can’t turn this looming disaster, it requires each and everyone of you and your friends and family. Please pass the petition to all you know.

To stay up to date please frequent www.salmonaresacred.org I will let you know how many people have signed. Volunteers are hosting events throughout BC this summer to link all of us together and this information will be posted. The T-shirts left from the migration are on my website www.alexandramorton.ca and proceeds go to this effort.

The Get Out Migration brought thousands of people together, but government does not want to hear from our communities nor of our need for good health in our environment and our bodies. Clearly there needs to be more public response. That is all that is required to fix this. I will continue to push for protection for salmon feedlot workers, as this is a government mistake and they need not bear the cost of this to our coast.

I think we will have a good Fraser sockeye run this summer and that should tell us the ocean and the river are still highly capable of feeding this coast! This generation of sockeye has shown one of the least declines and we need to investigate why this run is good and the others have failed so badly. If we allow government to let salmon feedlot companies hide their disease outbreaks this investigation will be incomplete. If there is no salmon feedlot disease problem, there should be no reason for secrecy.

Hundreds of people have said “I am behind you Alex,” but this is not working. We have to stand shoulder to shoulder, where we are all peacefully and strongly visible. This is the only way to save ourselves and our planet.

Alexandra Morton

July 28, 2010

Ed Porter, Team Leader, Regulatory Operations
Fisheries and Oceans Canada
PAR-RPA@dfo-mpo.gc.ca

Dear Mr. Ed Porter:

I am responding to the 60-day public comment opportunity on the proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture Regulations http://www.gazette.gc.ca/cg-gc/about-sujet-eng.html
(left column “Part I Notices and Proposed Regulations” Vol. 144, No. 28, page 1933).

When BC Supreme Court ruled that the federal government must take over regulation of salmon feedlots, the intent was to bring the industry into compliance with the Constitution of Canada. But what Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are trying to do instead is remove safeguards established by previous governments and open the door to privatizing the ocean, which is prohibited by the Canadian Constitution.

With his document Harper not only licences massive ecological damage, he depreciates the market value of BC feedlot salmon. No reputable retailer can afford to be seen with a seafood product raised under a licence to “harm, alter, disrupt and destroy” the ocean. The federal licences will be issued without consultation with First Nations.

“Increasingly stringent international standards are driving seafood importing nations to require Canada to certify health (disease) status, not just food safety, of live aquatic animals and their products. … Canada cannot meet these standards, and is facing increasing challenges to export market access. Canada is already subject to a lesser market access than the United States, Europe ...“ http://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2009/2009-12-19/html/reg1-eng.html

Canadian pathologists warn against holding millions of diseased salmon in pens (Traxler et al. 1993) and the graph below demonstrates the reason. There is a strong correlation between salmon feedlot epidemics and the declining Fraser sockeye. This must be examined, but the provincial government is stonewalling release of salmon feedlot disease records and Harper is stepping in to help.

These draft regulations ignore the International (OIE) and the Canadian Food and Health Inspection Agency standards by exempting salmon feedlots from full disease reporting. Harper is not only offering Norwegian companies the right to leave infected salmon in the water, he is protecting them from liability. If government and the industry are willing to throw away premium market value for disease secrecy we are warned this is a dangerous and strong priority.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is also offering these Norwegian companies blanket authorization for “Harmful Alteration, Disruption or Destruction” of fish habitat (Section 35(1) Fisheries Act). This ignores the value of the oceans to communities across British Columbia. Oddly, these rules will not apply to eastern Canada, where the Minister of Fisheries resides.

Harper is going to legalize destruction of wild fish that become trapped in the pens, attracted by the bright lights and food in the water. There are no surplus wild fish and so this by-catch will compete with fishing quotas. Many feedlots are in rock cod conservation areas where fishermen are not allowed, but the feedlots will continue trapping unknown amounts. This is bad management and will affect herring, sable fish, salmon, lingcod and other important wild fish.

The federal Conservatives are proposing salmon feedlot licences be granted and amended without environmental assessment. This violates strong public demand for healthy coastal waters, but neatly resolves the irreconcilable issue of dumping over a ton/day/site of industrial waste into salmon habitat. These are the only feedlots that never have to shovel manure and chemical waste as it flows conveniently into public waters.

It is dangerous to humanity, (risking food security, drug resistance, disease mutation) to allow feedlots to contaminate natural environments with disease. Feedlots remove all the natural disease control mechanisms and thus allow viruses to mutate, multiply and jump to new species.

Because Mr. Harper is proposing to remove standards designed to protect the ocean from Norwegian feedlots, retailers like COSTCO will have to decide if their mission statements honor government or their customers. Promising to “Exceed ecological standards required in every community where we do business,” is meaningless if there are no ecological standards.

Salmon feedlots are an “ecology of bad ideas,” struggling to control disease with drugs, corrupting the foodchain by using warm-blooded animal products, plants and fish from the southern hemisphere as feed, displacing local businesses, turning a public resource into a corporate commodity with no public access, dyeing their fish pink to resemble salmon. If jobs were the goal, the federal Conservatives and BC Liberals would be working with the BC companies developing sustainable land-based aquaculture to create a viable, world-class product. Instead Mr. Harper is proposing to change the laws of Canada to allow unchecked pollution by a 92% Norwegian-owned industry associated wild salmon declines worldwide. Wild salmon are thriving everywhere this industry does not exist (Alaska, Iceland, western Pacific, areas of BC).

These proposed regulations are a signpost. If this was about fish, attention would have been paid to the market value of the product. Instead it risks one of the last naturally producing salmon regions in the world for a depreciating commodity. What these draft regulations do is clear away legislation established to protect Canadians and our coast from industrialization and privatization.

Ed Porter, the proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture Regulations do not protect the interests of Canadians or the world and must not be adopted.
Sincerely,

Alexandra Morton

The Fraser sockeye decline began at the same time government failed to cull millions of IHN virus infected feedlot salmon on the Fraser River migration routes. Government ignored federal scientists who state infected Atlantic salmon should not be permitted in pens (Traxler et al 1993). The federal government also ignored warnings from their scientists that would have saved the North Atlantic cod. When the cod went extinct the Hibernia Oil wells appeared on the Grand Banks – the most generous food-producing area humanity will ever have was exchanged for oil.

Avatar Grove - Part 2. Logging? What logging?

2010-06-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

Part 1. What's with the name?

Shayn McAskin at the Avatar Grove.

Photo Tom Jaugelis.

After we finished inspecting the bizarre red cedar known as the 'knotty tree', most of us assumed that our job at the Avatar Grove was done for the day, and so we started our slow descent back to the logging road.

But Shayn McAskin, the Environmental Technology student of our group, was not moving. Instead, he was focusing his attention uphill. He was looking for something in the dense vegetation. There, he said after a moment, pointing to a grayish patch in the trees about 200 meters above our heads. I’m going to check that cliff to see what it's made of. You guys go ahead, I won't be long. What are you looking for? I asked. Limestone karst, he answered. I shrugged. Did we really need to embark on a nerdy geological expedition so late in the day and in this lousy weather?

Searching for limestone

But then Shayn explained. Limestone karst is potentially critical for our purpose of protecting the Avatar Grove, because logging companies are usually not permitted to clearcut a forest which lies on a limestone bedrock. Limestone reacts to water and so it weathers away very quickly once it's exposed. This can result in catastrophic soil erosion which may prevent the forest from ever growing back. It recently happened near Campbell River in an area called the Tahsish River Valley. After the forest was clearcut 10 years ago, the soil gradually washed away, and last July a wild fire turned the entire zone into a moonscape. That area is wasted, Shayn said, it will take hundreds of years for the forest to reclaim it. He added: I recently checked a geological map which indicates that a limestone karst deposit could be located right under our feet, so I hope we can find evidence of it.

Moonscape caused by limestone erosion, Tahsish River Valley.

Photo Carol Ramsey, Canwest News Service.

After a few minutes, our little group reached the cliff. It was made of granite, not limestone. But around us, there were several yellowish boulders which Shayn immediately identified as limestone and he proceeded to take pictures of them as evidence. Well that’s cool, you've found the limestone, it's game over for the logging company, eh? I asked in excitement. I wish it were that simple, he said. Yes, there's definitely limestone here but it could have been brought down by the glacier. We'll have to establish that the bedrock itself is made of limestone. We may have to go to the top of that hill, he pointed out with his extended arm, and inspect the cutblock that’s already been harvested up there, maybe the bedrock is exposed enough for us to see the limestone. And so off we went. But the vegetation was getting increasingly dense as we climbed, and time was running out. The forest was resisting our intrusion. After an hour or so of hardcore bushwhacking, we finally spotted a more accessible area that we could use as a pathway to the top of the hill. We noted its location and planned to return in a couple weekends to continue our inspection.

'Local kids just fooling around'

Back in Port Renfrew, we stopped at a local coffee shop to warm ourselves a little. On its wall, there was an anonymous home-made leaflet which stated “Avatar Grove = Ecofraud”. The leaflet claimed that the grove had no environmental value, that many other sections of rainforest in the region were far more worthy of salvation, and that environmentalist Ken Wu (the guy who had initially brought the Avatar Grove into the media spotlight) had done nothing in the past to stop logging in the region. The leaflet then descended into profanity and personal attacks against Wu which I cannot reprint here and called upon local residents to “save your money” by not supporting Wu’s group.

What caught my attention about this pretty incoherent rant on the wall was not so much what was written in it, but rather over it – a hand-written inscription which had probably been added by someone else than its anonymous author and which read: “No Cutting Permit even Applied for, Save Avatar From?” The implication here was that there was no identifiable logging threat against the Avatar Grove and that environmentalists had therefore manufactured a nonexistent crisis. That same opinion was voiced by a local old man who went by the name of Lonesome Dave and was sitting at a table in the coffee shop. Those environmentalists are roaming around looking for causes and they have found one at the Avatar Grove, he commented. But the problem, he added, is that there is absolutely nothing happening here, this is a typical case of a Mouse that Roared.

I told him about the flagging tape which I had seen all over the Grove, and I pointed out that people don’t usually flag an area of old growth forest without a purpose. But Lonesome Dave responded: How do you even know that a logging company did that? The tape may have been placed by hiking enthusiasts opening a new trail, or local kids just fooling around. A few yards of tape don’t prove anything, he concluded.

But the flagging tape that I had seen up there had clearly been placed in a deliberate fashion, so I did not buy old Dave’s 'random act' theory. Later, Shayn explained to me that whoever did that had followed to the letter the guidelines provided by the BC Ministry of Forests, such as axe blazes exactly 10 cm wide by 30 cm long, delimitation of riparian zones, etc. Definitely a professional job, he concluded. Which left me scratching my head over why the locals would be in such denial about a rather self-evident act.

Cutting permit

So, logging or no logging? Back home, I decided to get to the bottom of it and I called the logging company which owns the tree farming license around Port Renfrew. Yes our people recently flagged and surveyed the Avatar Grove, John Pichugin, Manager of Engineering at Teal-Jones, told me. So are you planning to log it? I asked. We are looking at it, but at this point I cannot tell you if we're going to harvest or not, he responded. Have you applied for a cutting permit with the Ministry of Forests? No we have not. Do you know if and when you plan to apply? No I do not. So does it mean that the area is safe for now, say at least until the end of 2010? No I cannot tell you that.

Clearly, I was not getting anywhere with that line of questioning. So I tried something else. Are you aware that there is a possibility of limestone karst deposits in this area? Silence. I almost heard the gulp on the other side. Then after a brief moment, he responded: Personally I am not aware of that, but karst is definitely something that in general we have to take into account in our logging operations. How do you go about performing karst studies? I asked. We have engineers trained to look for karst, it's a very formal process. Have studies begun yet at this specific site? I don't know, I cannot say. Okay then, I asked, is there someone else in your company that would be able to answer that for me?

Potential limestone karst bedrock at Avatar Grove (in orange). Source: FORREX

At that point, John Pichugin changed his tactic. I need to be careful about the information that I release to the public, he said, so I need to know more about who you are and what are your motivations. After I finished telling him all he cared to know about me, he proceeded to lecture me. We want to engage the public, he said, but we are also running a business. Society has determined that logging needs to take place here. As a society, we all benefit from a high standard of living. Where do we get the tax dollars to pay for our hospital beds? Did you know that 40,000 hectares of old growth forest are protected in the area surrounding our tree farming license? etc.

I swiftly got him back on topic. How do I stay informed about future logging developments at the Avatar Grove? I asked. Well, you can call me, he said. That’s it? Just call you? Do you mean to say that there are no processes in place to keep the public informed? No, was the flat answer. Teal-Jones already went through the Forest Stewardship process in 2006. Back then, the public had an opportunity to voice any concerns. At this stage of the game, we are no longer required to consult with the public. Look, he said, we just follow the legislation here. Perhaps you want to take this up with the government.

So I did. I called Vivian Thomas, the media spokesperson for the BC Ministry of Forests. But before I did that, I took some time to study the documentation posted on the Teal-Jones website regarding the 2006 Forest Stewardship Plan that they signed with the Ministry. And I stumbled upon a map which indicated that, back then, some portions of the Avatar Grove had been marked as “draft old growth forest management areas”.

Old growth forest management areas

Vivian Thomas confirmed to me that cutting permits are granted by the Ministry to the logging company without any input from the public. Essentially, the Forest Stewardship Plan is a blanket agreement for an entire tree farm license, which includes a 60-day public comment period. After that, implementation details take place behind closed doors. In particular, there is no process to keep the public informed about this or that specific cutting permit.

What about old growth forest management areas? I asked. Oh, those areas have been set aside for protection, they cannot be logged, she said. But, I interjected, some sections of the Avatar Grove were marked in the 2006 Forest Stewardship Plan as “draft old growth forest management areas”. How, then, can that particular grove even be considered for logging? “Draft” sometimes means that one area can be subsequently substituted for another, she explained. So for example, for each area that will receive actual protection, you may decide to have 3 or more areas marked as “draft” in the initial Plan, allowing for flexibility when you get to the actual cutting stage. Maybe that’s what’s happening in this specific circumstance, she ventured.

But doesn't that change everything? I asked. It could mean that when people got an opportunity to comment on the Forest Stewardship Plan back in 2006, they did not really know what they were commenting upon. For example, someone may have agreed to the Plan based on the assumption that the Avatar Grove would be untouched. Also, if this is true, then the map gives the false impression that more forest is being protected than there really is. I understand the need for some amount of flexibility, I added. But if an area initially marked as protected is later being considered for logging through a cutting permit application, shouldn't the public be involved in the decision-making process involved in such a sweeping change to the initial Plan?

I’m going to have to get back to you on that one, Vivian responded.

Unanswered questions

Obviously with my two lonesome phone calls and casual research, I've barely scratched the surface in this matter. But already, I have harvested an unexpected amount of rats. Let’s summarize:

Shayn McAskin has discovered a geological map which uses Ministry of Forests data to locate a potential limestone karst bedrock right under the Avatar Grove. A superficial survey of the area confirmed the presence of limestone rocks. When I addressed that concern with a representative of the logging company, he did not confirm nor deny.
When asked about the recent flagging at the Avatar Grove, the company representative acknowledged that indeed his company did that, but he did not confirm or deny that the area has indeed been slated for logging.
Maps provided by the logging company indicate that some sections of the Avatar Grove have been marked as “draft old growth forest management areas”, an appellation which, according to a representative of the Ministry of Forests, provides full protection to those particular sections.
When asked whether a logging company should be allowed to clearcut a “draft old growth forest management area” without any further public consultation, the Ministry of Forests representative requested a time out, so she could consult with her hierarchy on what response to provide.

Many unanswered questions here! I am no expert, just an average joe doe from the public asking dumb questions to smart people, but my instinct tells me that well organized environmental groups bent on saving this area of old growth forest - and a few others while they're at it - may potentially have some very good cards to play.

Obviously, to be continued.

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Avatar Grove - Part 1. What's with the name?

2010-06-03T21:16:00.000-07:00

Avatar Grove, British Columbia. Photo TJ Watt.

One morning this past winter, environmental activist Ken Wu went for a hike in an exceptional tract of old growth forest which he and photographer TJ Watt had recently discovered near Port Renfrew, off the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island. That patch of untouched forest, made of approximately one hundred giant red cedar and douglas fir trees, is deep into logging territory, and so Ken had always known that it was under the theoretical threat of being cut to the ground.

When he arrived on that day, a nasty surprise awaited him. The area was covered in flagging tape and many of the giant trees were marked with pink and blue spray paint. That patch of forest had been thoroughly surveyed by someone. It was a recent job, since only a few weeks back the area was still in its pre-industrial virgin state with no visible signs of human disturbance whatsoever.

When Victoria-based social and environmental activist Zoe Blunt heard about that situation, she activated her group, the Forest Action Network. It was decided to map the area using GPS, investigate who owned the tree farm license for that zone, communicate with local communities and First Nations, and invite volunteers to come and discover this exceptional swath of old growth forest, which Ken and TJ had renamed "Avatar Grove".

When I first heard that name, I cringed. Avatar Grove? A catchy name, no doubt. But what happens when the hysteria around James Cameron's movie recedes? Shouldn't such an exceptional part of our natural heritage stand on its own feet rather than rely on Hollywood's hype du jour? Then, I reasoned that time appears to be running out for this particular patch of old growth forest and so, I guess - whatever works to save it from the feller bunchers. I decided to go and see the Grove for myself, and so I joined one of Zoe Blunt's volunteer expeditions.

As we left the logging road to enter the forest on a recent rainy Sunday, it struck me right away that this place stood out of the ordinary. No trail. We had to use a small creek bed to enter the zone. The first 50 meters were almost vertical, so I had to cling to whatever branches and tree roots were available to hoist myself clumsily into the grove. After a few minutes of being slapped in the face by low-lying branches and swallowing spider webs, I finally managed to reach a somewhat flatter section where I was able to stand up straight. A quick inspection of myself revealed that I was soaked in rainwater from head to toe. This forest didn't waste any time in whipping me into shape, I thought, a little annoyed.

My senses quickly adjusted to my new environment. The grove I was standing in was exceptional indeed. A completely untouched old-growth temperate rainforest. Massive 500 year-old giants surrounded by many smaller trees in various stages of growth, some of them not much older than myself, others starting to pile up the centuries. The light was dimmed by the dense canopy. The rain, which was coming down pretty hard on the road, only reached us here as a light powdery mist. I was immediately intoxicated by the primal smell of the wet forest. The floor was made of an inextricable chaos of fallen trunks, ferns, branches, moss, mushrooms and lichens, with baby hemlocks growing out of the flanks of their dead ancestors and striving to reach the sky some day. It was a delicate balance of the very large and the very small, a diverse society drawing its collective strength from the multiple relations of its various dead and living members - an ecosystem, in a word.

The pink flagging tape which I had been told about was indeed prevalent and stood out like a sore thumb in this world of brown and green. Every 50 meters or so, a new flag or spray of paint emerged out of the vegetation to construct an elaborate network of signals which were gibberish to us, but no doubt perfectly legible to a trained professional eye. Our mood, looking at all this flagging tape, was that of wild game which hear hunters approaching in the distance and sense the imminent danger, but cannot comprehend quite yet what's about to hit them.

Blue spray on a red cedar, Avatar Grove. Photo TJ Watt.

Our group of eight hikers was here to find a specific tree in the forest, a bizarrely deformed red cedar nicknamed "the knotty tree" which we needed to geolocate using the GPS device that one of us was carrying. That tree, I was told, had grown some enormous lumps around its base - or burls in technical terms - as a result of a non-lethal bacterial infection. Allegedly, this was Canada's largest "burly" tree, and as such it needed to be mapped with precision to increase its future chances of being preserved.

As we looked for our freak-of-a-tree, we rode the forest's three-dimensional maze, climbing over, crawling under, and walking along fallen trunks suspended in mid air. I silently thanked the sky for this rainy day. The forest is no doubt magnificent under good weather, but it fully reveals itself only in the rain. I sat on a fallen tree for a few moments, and suddenly I realized with amazement what I was sitting on. A forest within the forest. On the dead trunk, an army of small fern-like plants were springing from a carpet of lichen and struggling for existence, reproducing in small scale the battle of giants taking place over our heads. Each plant had captured a drop of rain in its bizarrely curled stem, and that drop was shining like a gem with an almost unnatural bright translucid yellow color which I initially mistook for tree sap. Yet as soon as I picked one of those drops with my finger, it immediately lost its color and turned back into what it was - rainwater.

At my feet, another miniature ecosystem was asserting its right to existence. This one was mostly made of delicate two to three-inch long bright orange plants which I couldn't decide whether they looked more like mushrooms or flowers. I thought that if I touched one of them, it would suddenly retract, but I did not dare to try. Hmm. It appears that I am allowing myself to be penetrated by the Avatareness of this place, I noted with embarrassment. While I was lost in the contemplation of this small world at my feet, one of my travel companions passed in front of me. Because of the position of the fallen trees, she had no choice but to walk through the field of orange mushroomy flowers (or were they flowery mushrooms?) in which my mind was so deeply immersed. She tiptoed very carefully through them, and at one point I heard her mutter to the attention of the forest "I am sorry". Sorry for stepping on some flowers? Okay... Obviously, I was not the only one going native at the Avatar Grove.

Then, on a gentle slope, we finally found it: our knotty tree. And what a tree it was. It looked like nothing I had seen before, and like everything at the same time, since one could read all kinds of faces, shapes and objects in its bizarre intricate knots. It was both grotesquely ugly, and absolutely sublime in its beauty. I was bewildered. What to make of it!?

The knotty tree, Avatar Grove. Photo TJ Watt.

Shayn, an Environmental Technology student at Camosun College who was operating the GPS device, went to work to obtain the knotty tree's coordinates. No luck. Only one satellite was above our heads, and the signal was too weak. Too much cloud cover and natural obstacles. We're going to need a stronger GPS unit, he concluded, one that carries a larger antenna. I'll borrow one from my school and bring it along next weekend.

For my part, I didn't worry too much about satellites and geo-coordinates. I was simply enjoying the moment and the place, in the weird company of the knotted tree. What's in a name? I thought. Whatever people decide to attach to it, I guess. This place is so beyond its 'Avatar Grove' name. For one thing, it's real. And so are the forces threatening it. It's a more subtle world, too, than the digital one being projected in our cities' multiplexes. You actually had to work a little, you had to pay attention, before its ineffable beauty would set itself in motion. But if the name helps people relate to the place, if it's actually going to facilitate their entry as external witnesses and allies into its delicate eco-society, well then hell yes, Avatar Grove it is. Because one thing that this place shares in full with its virtual counterpart, is that it is worth fighting for.

Next: Avatar Grove Part 2. Logging? What logging?

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Boreal forest agreement - It's even worse than it looked

2010-05-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

What were you thinking, dude?
The David Suzuki Foundation is a signatory to the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.
Photo johnwmacdonald.com.

A few days ago, I reported here on the questionable agreement signed by environmental NGOs and logging companies over the "joint management" of the Canadian boreal forest.

As it turns out, this agreement is considerably worse than I had initially realized.

One aspect of the agreement which has received particular media attention in recent days is the claim that 29 million hectares of caribou habitat will be preserved from logging for the next three years until a management plan is finalized. "An area the size of New Zealand!" ForestEthics, an NGO which is signatory to the agreement, emphatically proclaimed on its website.

But the Wilderness Committee has investigated that claim and the results are bleak. A close examination of the agreement reveals that this 29 million hectare figure is bogus. Indeed, only 2.5% of that total area (or about 760,000 hectares) had actually been slated for logging prior to the agreement.

Furthermore, the Wilderness Committee reveals that only a tiny fraction of those 760,000 hectares are to be preserved under the agreement, i.e. 72,000 hectares. The other 685,000 hectares - 9 times the amount of the land being allegedly "protected" - will be logged effective immediately.

In addition, the "protection" is really only a 2-year moratorium, meaning that the preserved 72,000 hectares can be logged out of existence as early as April 2012 if a joint management plan is not agreed upon. But as I made clear in my previous post, the agreement is structured in such a way as to give logging companies a virtual monopoly of bargaining power in the upcoming negotiations. The management plan, if it even materializes, will be a mere emanation of corporate will. If those 72,000 hectares are still in the deal two years from now, the free lunch is on me.

But there's more. The Wilderness Committee also found that, of those 72,000 hectares, 40,000 are coming out of the tenure of a logging corporation named Tolko which had already agreed not to log that tenure several years ago, pursuant to a separate agreement with the province of Manitoba.

Once the Wilderness Committee had finished crunching the numbers, 32,000 hectares - not 29 million! - emerged as the actual area of forest that this agreement will "save" from logging companies for the next 2 years.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it. Whenever you need to clearcut 700,000 hectares of pristine boreal forest, announce that you're going to save 30 million hectares of it (make it 29 so it looks more real), get some sold-out rotten NGOs on board, and then sit back and listen to the oohs and aahs and bravos emanating from the official corporate media outlets.

The Wilderness Committee has masterfully exposed this boreal forest agreement for what it is: a despicable phony greenwash masquerade which will considerably accelerate - not reduce - the destruction of caribou habitat over the next couple years. A farce of an agreement really, in which some of this country's most reputable environmental NGOs have cynically chosen to play a deceptive and destructive, as well as critically important role - all for a fistful of dollars.

Once again, I am posting FYI and for your action the list of environmental NGOs which have chosen to associate their names to this nauseating deal:

Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society
Canopy
David Suzuki Foundation
ForestEthics
Greenpeace
The Nature Conservancy
Pew Environment Group International Boreal Conservation Campaign
Ivey Foundation
Canadian Boreal Initiative / Ducks Unlimited

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Environmental NGOs sign lousy forest agreement – But why?

2010-05-26T00:22:00.000-07:00

Camping in Canada's boreal forest. Photo A Little Mo'.

On May 18, leading environmental NGOs and logging companies announced the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. This agreement may appear as a genuine attempt by environmentalists and loggers to cooperate over the future of boreal forests. Sadly, a closer inspection reveals an agreement which is very detrimental to the forest. But why would ENGOs want to get involved in such a bad deal?

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On May 18, some of Canada’s most prominent environmental NGOs and leading logging companies announced the signature of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. On the surface, this agreement is a genuine attempt to move beyond the decades-long warfare which has opposed environmentalists and loggers over the fate of Canada's northern forests.

“The shared challenge”, according to a joint statement released by the signatory ENGOs and logging companies, “is to address sometimes conflicting social, economic, and environmental imperatives” by having “both parties committed to working together in the marketplace and on the ground to support governments in the realization of a stronger, more competitive forestry industry and a better protected, more sustainably managed Boreal Forest.”

I had to read that statement several times before I was able to reach its meaning, but once I did, it struck me as being rather contradictory. A more competitive forestry industry and a better protected forest? What does it mean, and how is it done? Unfortunately the details of the signed agreement were kept secret, and the official information released to the public was too vague and sanitized to provide much assistance.

Leaked agreement

But thankfully, on the same day that the agreement was announced, Vancouver Media Co-op published a leaked draft of the actual agreement. The document, dated May 12, is a 39-page Memorandum of Understanding marked Confidential and co-signed by pretty much every environmental household name in Canada, such as the David Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace, ForestEthics, CPAWS, the Nature Conservancy, Pew Environment Group, etc., as well as most logging companies which are still left standing in this lousy economy.

The leaked agreement's preamble confirms that the parties are seeking to reconcile two contradictory goals – the protection of the boreal forest, and its commercial logging. In its Whereas section, the agreement states that Canada's boreal forests are “ecologically significant” in a “local, regional, national, and global context”, as well as “economically significant” in a “local, regional, national, and international context”. The symmetry of the two statements is clearly meant to convey the notion that a complete equality of rights exists between those two colliding worldviews. Such balanced language is used throughout the rest of the agreement, reinforcing the subtext that ENGOs and logging companies are equal partners here, working cooperatively in the best interest of the parties involved as well as the forest itself.

The form of the agreement is definitely egalitarian, but sadly the same cannot be said about its substance. In particular, section 28 reveals the true nature of the deal. In it, we learn that whenever a signatory logging company sells its logging rights over a section of the forest – a tenure – to a third party, “such tenure will no longer fall within the scope of the [agreement]”. In other words, any restrictions to logging-as-usual that this agreement may manage to secure over a given tenure are automatically voided as soon as that tenure is being transferred from Company A to Company B. This is a devastating loophole for at least three reasons:

Unequal terms

1. This section establishes that private property has absolute precedence over the protection of the forest’s biodiversity. The underlying contradiction between the rights of the forest and that of the market, the decades-long conflict between environmentalists and loggers are indeed brought to a resolution here, but under the following unequal terms: markets have rights, forests do not. Indeed, all it takes to cancel the hard-fought conservation measures obtained by environmentalists over time is the effectuation of the most basic and mundane transaction in a market economy, the sale of a land title.

2. The entire biodiversity protection scheme envisioned by the environmental groups is thrown into irrelevance by this section 28. Indeed, according to the agreement, one of the strategic goals championed by the signatory ENGOs is “the completion of a network of protected areas”, in other terms the constitution of a coherent regional biodiversity management plan involving key areas such as species migration corridors, etc. But as soon as Company A decides to sell one of its tenures to Company B, the entire coherence of the management plan falls apart. What is the value, for example, of a migration corridor if one of its central sections has been sold to a third party and subsequently clearcut to the ground?

3. Thanks to this fateful clause 28, logging companies have secured the bulk of bargaining power for future negotiations over the joint management of the boreal forest. Said bluntly, they can bully and blackmail their ENGO partners as they see fit. Oh, you don’t like the amendments to the agreement that I am introducing today? says Company A to its enviro friends. Well okay then, I want out of this deal and so I’m selling my tenure to Company B, and oh – that company does not give a damn about our little forest management pet project here, so good luck with them. Faced with such power-play tactics, ENGOs will have little choice but to accept the demands emanating from logging companies.

Toothless dragon

But this is where it becomes interesting. In exchange for the logging companies’ benevolence for joining the agreement, the signatory ENGOs have contractually agreed to lay down their arms forever. As stated in the agreement’s strategic goal number 6, “ENGOs will suspend all activities” that seek to discourage customers from purchasing the products of the signatory logging companies “effective immediately”. Even though the conservation efforts under the agreement have not even been planned in much detail let alone implemented on the ground, NGOs have already taken a solemn pledge: from this day on, no more boycotting campaigns, no more direct action to alert consumers over “partner” logging companies’ unsustainable practices.

This part of the agreement is particularly targeted at Greenpeace, which has made consumer product boycotting campaigns an effective and feared instrument to force logging companies to the negotiation table. Well, no more. The Greenpeace dragon has lost its teeth. I was personally disheartened to learn that Richard Brooks, a Greenpeace forest campaigner who had managed the anti-Kleenex campaign in Vancouver a few years ago and with whom I had done some volunteer work on that campaign, is now one of the official spokespeople publicly championing the new agreement. Times have changed.

Adding insult to injury, strategic goal number 6 further states that “ENGOs will not, in any of their communications, cite forestry operations of [partner logging companies] as negative examples of certified practices”. In other terms, signatory environmental groups forego not only their freedom of action, but also their freedom of speech. They are contractually agreeing to refrain from criticizing their corporate partners even if their logging practices in the boreal forest do not actually meet the environmental standards envisioned in the agreement. If, for example, the logging companies use their position of force to subsequently water down the plan’s implementation, well tough luck. NGOs are still not going to bad mouth them.

Not only that, but whenever third party environmental groups who are not signatories to the agreement will do (what is after all) their job of denouncing bad logging practices in the boreal forest, the agreement expressly states that the signatory ENGOs are to publicly oppose those bad-ass groups by using any appropriate method, such as “responding publicly” to their attacks through campaigns “in the marketplace” or lobbying efforts “in political circles”.

Signatory ENGOs are also contractually committing themselves to – get this – “securing market place recognition” for the products sold by partner companies by using their “advocacy work and other communications” to “expressly acknowledge forestry operations of [partner logging companies] as positive examples of boreal forest management”. Since when has it become the mandate of environmental organizations to commit their limited resources to advertizing forestry products to the individual consumers shopping at Rona and Home Depot? Well, it appears, since May 19.

Let’s recap the type of agreement that we are dealing with here:

Domination of market logic over environmental concerns;
A vulnerable biodiversity management plan susceptible to being sabotaged by individual logging companies;
Corporations ideally positioned to force ENGOs into accepting their future demands;
ENGOs contractually renouncing their highly effective consumer boycotting tactics and, which is even more troubling, giving up their freedom of speech;
ENGOs committing themselves to actively fighting non-signatory third party NGOs which may object to bad forestry practices;
ENGOs actively promoting and advertizing partner company products to consumers.

Why do it?

Why would ENGOs even want to be involved in such a rotten deal? The short answer is, for the money. I have already referred here to a groundbreaking PBS/Frontline documentary called “The Money Tree” which dissects how large transnational corporations are using carbon offsets to privatize large swaths of the Amazon rainforest through complex financial montages, with the active complicity of large ENGOs. The mechanics of such schemes are simple to understand. In the case reported by Frontline, three large corporations – GM, Chevron and American Electric Power – invest in 50,000 acres of rainforest as a way to offset their carbon emissions and improve their public image. To that effect, they make a $20 million donation to American NGO Nature Conservancy who works with a Brazilian environmental group to purchase the land and manage the project on behalf of the companies, and helps them obtain the required carbon certificates from the United Nations. In exchange, the corporations earn carbon offsets which they can trade on the carbon markets. In order to ensure that local villagers don’t enter the newly enclosed lands, the corporations demand that the Brazilian government provide a Green Police whose primary mission is to harass and brutalize the locals out of their traditional lands.

In the case of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, the main motivation of the logging companies is obviously logging rather than merely obtaining carbon offsets. The certificate that they need the most is not about carbon but the one provided by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – and having heavyweight ENGOs on board to vouch for their “good logging practices” is a virtual guarantee that they will indeed obtain it. However, the carbon market would represent a tremendous bonus for those companies, especially in this bad economy where they may not even be able to log their forest tenures for lack of a lumber market. If you believe that the logging companies don't care much about carbon offsets, then read carefully the leaked agreement's strategic goal number 4, called “Climate Friendly Practices”. Deep buried in there is a reference to carbon trading in the following terms: “if the federal or provincial governments proceed to include forest management and protection in carbon offset programs”, then the partners of the agreement are to work together on obtaining certification and determining the eligible projects.

This boreal forest agreement vividly illustrates the strategic role played by some of the largest environmental NGOs in the advent of “green” capitalism. The ENGOs whose names are on the agreement are altogether the brokers, guarantors, and underwriters of corporate environmental goodwill in the eyes of the public. In particular, they are the ones which will secure the required certifications. They will receive hefty compensation for their services in the form of corporate grants which will allow them to meet their payroll and continue to grow, which is no small feat in the current context of a rapidly shrinking charitable donation market. In that sense, they are inhabited by the same internal logic as the corporations which they serve – growth for growth's sake.

Those environmental NGOs are enablers of capitalism's nascent environmental-industrial complex, and as such they have become a liability to the environmental movement. Personal donation choices should be adjusted accordingly, which is why I am posting below the complete list of ENGOs which are signatories to this boreal agreement.

Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society
Canopy
David Suzuki Foundation
ForestEthics
Greenpeace
The Nature Conservancy
Pew Environment Group International Boreal Conservation Campaign
Ivey Foundation
Canadian Boreal Initiative / Ducks Unlimited

UPDATE: Boreal forest agreement - It's even worse than it looked

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Salmon Migration - Untangling the spin wheel of "crowd estimates"

2010-05-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, but you were not sitting at this fountain. Photo Reegee Bee.

I could not fathom how the Times Colonist daily paper could have seen "nearly 1,000" people at Alexandra Morton's salmon migration rally in Victoria last Saturday, when I had seen many thousands. I really needed to understand.

So when last Monday, Times Colonist editor Stephanie Coombs kindly responded to my complaint letter about the event's coverage, I seized the opportunity.

"Reporter Katie DeRosa, who attended the rally," Coombs had written in her response, "spoke to two different Victoria police officers, as well as two rally helpers, who all estimated about 1,000 people."

Strange. That same day, I had received a message from Rafe Mair who quoted Global News reporter Holly Adams saying that "I spoke with Police outside the Legislature and they estimated just over 4,000 people, and that was just before 5:00."

The Globe and Mail had reported 4,000 people as well. So it appeared as if Victoria police officers had been mischievously telling 4,000+ to Global News and the Globe and Mail, and "nearly 1,000" to the Times Colonist.

So I wrote back to Stephanie Coombs asking her if she would care to comment about the Global News reporter's account of 4,000.

Her response: "We have spoken again with Victoria police today, and their official report on the rally indicates a crowd estimate of 1,000 to 2,000 at the legislature."

One to two thousand? But that was already double the number that her paper had initially reported. What was going on here? I figured that if I was going to understand those numbers, I'd better go to the source.

So on Tuesday morning, I called the Victoria Police Department's main line and asked to talk to someone about their attendance estimates for Saturday's rally. The switchboard operator connected me to Kathy Jorgensen from Operational Planning. Let me get back to you on that one, she kindly said when I explained the purpose of my call.

About an hour later, she left a message on my voicemail saying: "Our police estimated the count at maximum 1,500 once it got down to the Legislature Building."

Yet a different estimate. It was the fourth one I had received already. I called her right back. How did the police department go about determining that number, I asked, what's the methodology used? We just ask police officers who were there to give us their estimate; it's a casual count, we don't use a specific method, she explained.

I told her about what the Global News reporter had said - that police officers who were there had told her 4,000. I don't know who told her that, she responded, so I cannot comment.

Do you use photos of the crowd to help you refine your estimates? I ventured to ask. No, was the flat answer. Then she became a little nervous and told me: I don't know where you are going with this, so you need to call Sgt. Hamilton who is our media person.

Which I did right away. But he never returned my calls, so I was left spinning my little wheels about Ms. Jorgensen's responses. No specific methodology to count the crowds... But why not? What's wrong with introducing a little bit of objectivity in estimating a number which is so critical to so many different stakeholders? With modern technology and a bit of planning and brain power, you would think that something could be done.

So I decided to give it a try.

What we saw.

I downloaded the above sample picture (courtesy Don Staniford) which I found among hundreds on the web. I took a snapshot of the BC legislature's lawn in Google Earth and imported it into Google Sketchup. I then plotted a polygon representing the approximate location of the crowd according to the picture. Some distinct features allow you to situate the crowd in the picture fairly easily, such as the fountain, the statue of the Queen, the trees, the flagpole, the stairs where the photographer was standing, etc. Here is what it looked like:

What we saw (continued).

Google Sketchup calculated the area of my polygon: approximately 6,000 square meters. The lawn itself is a 100 by 100 square, or about 10,000 square meters. My polygon therefore occupied about 60% of the lawn.

I then proceeded to estimate how many people could be standing in that polygon according to the picture. Densities vary: people closer to the stairs are clearly shoulder to shoulder, while people towards the statue were able to sit in the grass. Your typical "cocktail party" average density is about 0.5 square meter per person. People close to the stairs were probably using less than that, while people in the back were using more.

I took a very conservative guess: I assumed - which is very unrealistic, based on what the photo shows - that each person used 2 square meters on an exclusive basis. That's a rectangle of one meter by two meters with no one else but its sole occupier on it. Measure that at home, and you will realize that it's a very, very conservative assumption indeed. I also assumed that not a single person was standing to the left or the right of the frame of the photo, and I further assumed that the columns of people still moving toward the lawn in the photo's far background were actually not going to the rally.

In spite of that, I still found that approximately 3,000 people were occupying my polygon. Once you add more realistic estimations that other people must have been standing outside of the picture, that some people in the far background are actually going to the rally, etc. you easily find yourself in that 4,000+ range which was given to Global News on that day by several on-site police officers.

Let's continue my little experiment. Let's assume that the Times Colonist got it right and that "almost 1,000" people attended the rally. At 2 square meters per person, that's a 2,000 square-meter polygon. Here is what the Times Colonist "saw" happening on the lawn of the Legislature last Saturday:

What the Times Colonist "saw".

Notice how the Times Colonist's polygon does not even extend to the fountain, which was in actuality covered with people. Does it look to you like they got their numbers right? Well yes, me too.

Now just to be clear - I am not claiming to have discovered a new "methodology"! My point is simply that some methodology would not have hurt. If I was able to hack those estimates in a couple of hours on my home computer using some free software and a publicly available picture, imagine what a trained staff could do with sophisticated software and pictures that were taken with that purpose in mind.

After spending the past three days chasing phantoms in spinland, my head was hurting a little. But then suddenly today, out of nowhere, someone - finally! - made some sense. Sgt. Matt Waterman from Victoria PD Operational Planning returned one of my many calls. He told me that the Department's official estimate was 1,500 to 2,000 people (yes, a fifth different estimate!), and he confirmed what Kathy Jorgensen had already told me - that the Police Department does not use any particular methodology to come up with the number. We just guessed it, he said. Well sure, we could have used pictures and fancy methodologies to come up with a number, he explained quite candidly, but we had no reason to do that! We didn't know it was important. After all, our job is not to count, but to escort and protect people.

I explained to him that it was actually very important to many people, starting with the 5,000 or so people who were at the Legislature, because media used those Police estimates and presented them as reliable hard numbers, rather than the subjective wild guesses that they really were. I told him how the Times Colonist's editor had pointed the finger to the Police Department as soon as I started asking her some hard questions. He was clearly not pleased to hear that. Well, lesson learned! he commented. I will recommend that the Police refrain from making any more such estimates in the future.

Halleluia, brother! I am totally with you on that one. Stop counting, just focus on your job of protecting. Let other spinmeisters trip all over themselves with ridiculously low-balled estimates.

So, two lessons learned here, as the good Sargent Waterman would have said:

1. The Victoria Police crowd estimates for Saturday's event are worthless, according to people working in that very Department.

2. Times Colonist, you have hereby been put on notice. Next time you publish absurdly inaccurate crowd estimates that get people mad at you, don't run to Mama-Police for cover, because she will kick your butt.

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RE: Victoria Times Colonist's incorrect reporting on Saturday's wild salmon migration

2010-05-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

To: Victoria Times Colonist

Dear editor,

The statement in the Times Colonist’s columns that “nearly 1,000 people crowded Government Street on Saturday” to support Alexandra Morton’s wild salmon migration is outrageous.

I have seen first hand that between half and three quarters of the Legislature’s lawn was packed solid with people. This amounts to at least 4,000 to 5,000 people. The Globe and Mail agrees with my assessment.

By printing such incorrect statements in your columns, your paper is tampering – whether intentionally or not, I leave that to you – with the democratic process.

It also contributes to ruining the Times Colonist’s long-term reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Let me explain you why.

4,000 to 5,000 thousand people can directly attest that you got your numbers wrong. Those people are angry at you right now, because they feel at a personal level that their efforts to show up on Saturday to support Ms. Morton’s cause have not been recognized.

They are now talking or writing to perhaps 10 other people about their sentiment of frustration. [I, for example, am posting this letter on my Facebook which has 150 friends].

That’s 40,000 to 50,000 people who have heard first-hand from a source which they trust that the Times Colonist has either lied, or does not know how to report a story. They, in turn, will tell other people what they have heard from someone they know.

Also, tens of thousands of other people will have read both your report and that of the Globe and Mail, and will be left wondering why there is such a blatant difference in your two papers’ assessments of the numbers.

Finally, as we speak, tens of thousands of people are reading, hearing, or watching on the Internet reports from independent media and blogs about Saturday’s event which all confirm that several thousands of people – not “nearly 1,000” – were standing on that lawn on Saturday.

Perhaps you don’t realize that the format of media has changed. People (this may come as a shock to you) don’t need to rely on the Times Colonist for their news as much as they did a decade or two ago. For one thing, they can now cross-reference any of your statements.

By allowing such sub-standard reporting to seep into your columns, you are accelerating the decline of your industry. A correction in tomorrow morning’s edition of the Times Colonist may be a first step in restoring your paper’s compromised reputation.

Yours truly,

Ivan Doumenc

Vancouver

(PS: I realize that my letter is over 200 words, but I don’t expect you to publish it either. Consider it "for your internal use" only.)

Along Migration, small trickles turn into mighty river

2010-05-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

Parliament Building, Victoria, 8 May 2010. Photo Salmon Are Sacred.

As my friend Andrew Teasdale and I got off the Vancouver ferry on Friday around 4:30 PM, we didn't know what to expect.

Like many others, we had received the call from Alexandra Morton to join the Get Out Migration to save BC's wild salmon. We had decided to show up for the last 27km leg of the trek, from Sidney to Victoria. I was hoping that the number of walkers would be high. But having participated in many other environmental actions, I had learned to temper my optimism in order to avoid heartbreak.

But then again, this one stood out of the ordinary. Alex had asked us literally to get off our butts and walk with her on a 500-kilometer journey as a message to the politicians in Victoria. I liked the simplicity of that action, and I was sure hoping that many others would like it too.

As we walked off the ferry, a car stopped to offer us a ride to Sidney and we jumped in. Oh yeah, the young man told us after knowing the purpose of our visit, count me in for Saturday in Victoria, I was definitely planning to be there. Cool, we thought, he already knows. As we drove on, a portion of the road was in repair and had one of those digital signs that usually say something like Slow Down Next 500 Meters. That one, however, said: “Save Our Wild Salmon”. We were blown away. Something was clearly happening on this side of the water.

We arrived in Sidney on time to greet the flotilla which had paddled down the Fraser River and then across the Georgia Strait, and was now connecting with Alex's group of walkers. I had read reports from earlier days of the migration which said that on average a core group of 20 people or so had been walking along with Alex since the beginning. A respectable number, no doubt, given the magnitude of the physical effort involved, but not an overwhelming one either. Not the kind that you need to force politicians into action. But on the beach where the flotilla's largest canoe had just landed, there was now twice that initial number – about 40 people.

The general mood was relaxed and cheerful, with walkers and paddlers greeting each other, cracking jokes and taking group pictures, some playing music, some just stretching out and enjoying the sunny sky. “Our first entirely dry day!” one of the walkers confided to me with a big happy smile. At the same time, there was some perceptible nervousness about the next day. What if people didn't show up in Victoria, what if we were it? Well of course, they knew that many more would be at the Parliament Building the next day, but you know the feeling. They had gone through that incredible journey for the past two weeks, and now, as the canoe was being hauled out of the water, they were thinking that it all better have been for something.

The group gathered around Alex and slowly proceeded with the canoe, which was now on wheels, towards Sidney's Mary Winspear Theatre for a public presentation. Along the way, I hooked up with a woman who had been walking from Quadra Island, and she broke me the wonderful news that the Klinaklini private power mega-project, which had menaced Knight Inlet for so many years, was dead in the water. Incredible. As if joining this migration had not been sufficient to make my day.

At the Theatre, the atmosphere was electric. The hall, which was packed solid with over 400 people, greeted Alex's group with thundering applause. As kids were cutting out, decorating, and stapling together salmon paper figures in preparation for the next day's final walk, speakers energized the audience. I am not exceptional, Alex Morton told the room. I have just put one foot in front of the other and not given up. There is nothing to negotiate, she continued. We are here to get our fish back and that's that. We have walked away from large sums of money, First Nations chief Bob Chamberlin said, and by doing so we are telling the fish farm industry that we and our resources are not for sale, because we are one with our territory.

The next morning, a large crowd gathered in downtown Sidney and filled the Shaw centre for a brief kick-off breakfast. At 8, backpacks and tents were loaded on the support trucks, safety instructions were given out, a horse carriage full of small kids took the lead, and off we went. About half an hour out of Sidney, my friend Andrew did a quick head count and found that there were about 200 walkers, or five times the number I had seen on the beach the night before. Encouraging. The numbers were solid, the sun was out, the cause was clear. People were visibly happy to be here.

As we were walking, I had a chat with a mother and her extraordinary 12-year old daughter who had walked all the way from Tofino to join the migration. The kid was slightly limping and supporting herself on her mom as she walked, visibly impacted by the grueling days on the road. She has absolutely refused to use the support vehicle, her mother explained, and so she has walked every single kilometer all the way to here. As I and other walkers around us were wowed by the exploit and warmly congratulating the young girl (who for her part remained silently focused on the task at hand), her mom added: Oh, and today is her birthday. Holy cow, I commented, talk about a birthday party. Thousands of people gathered on a legislature lawn to wish you a happy birthday. Well, you earned it.

At around 10:00 AM we definitely felt that there were more of us than when we set off, so Andrew did another count. Yep, a solid 250 now. From that point on, the numbers just kept swelling. Cars would catch up with us on the highway and drop off some walkers, people would arrive on their bikes or literally out of nowhere and blend into the march. The ferry people from Vancouver were starting to arrive en masse. I later learned from friends who were joining us in Victoria, that bus drivers were actually making calls on their PA systems when they were reaching us, saying “if there are any salmon people on board, this is your stop” and would drop off people on the highway, in complete violation I assume of the most basic safety regulations. As for the cars honking and motorists waving their support as they drove by, it was overwhelming. Do we have a single person in this province still in favor of fish farms, I wondered as I walked, apart from corporate vested interests and our politicians in Victoria?

We helped Alex's dog (who'd also been on the road for two straight weeks) hop into the canoe-on-wheels where he gratefully settled for a lazy nap, and then at one point we got off the highway into Saanich to join a group of supporters who had gathered at NDP MLA Lana Popham's constituency office. A crowd of hundreds were waiting for us there. We mingled, had some food and refreshments, and hit the road again, now walking in a city which was a nice change from the motorway. But whatever had happened to our numbers? There were many, many more of us. I quickly did another count: 500 walkers!

Finally, we arrived at Centennial Square in Victoria where I connected with my friends who had arrived on the bus and I retrieved my seven-year old daughter. She tucked on the “Salmon Are Sacred” t-shirt which I had secured for her the night before, and off we went to Parliament Building. Wow! I had already seen large protests and demonstrations in my home country of France, but never that large a number in obedient British Columbia. Now that's what I call a crowd. About three quarters of the Parliament's front lawn was packed solid with people, with more people roaming on the remaining unoccupied quarter, and many more columns of people still swarming towards it. We were at the tail of the walk, and so the speeches had already started on the stairs of Parliament when we arrived. Whatever, I thought, I'm tired. I dropped my backpack on an unoccupied patch of lawn outside of megaphone range and settled in the grass with my friends and daughter. 3,000 to 5,000 people was our collegial assessment of the attendance.

As we were resting, a young man approached us asking if we would write a letter to Fisheries Minister Gail Shea. You mean – now? Yes, and we'll take care of sending it for you. I was more in the mood for a nap than for letter writing, so I jokingly handed over the paper to my daughter. Here, you write it dear, I laughed. Okay, she said very seriously and grabbed the pen. Uh oh. But she wrote a marvelous letter explaining how she really wished that she could save the salmon and simply asking the Minister to close the fish farms, without forgetting to write down her age. When she handed the sheet of paper back to me, I was speechless and simply added: “Dear Ms. Shea. If a seven-year old can get it, then no doubt so can you. Close the fish farms” and I signed.

What Alex Morton has realized here, in the face of the corporate assault, is to enable us. Enable us to formulate a coordinated response. A response which is guided by simple principles, yet is irresistible once set in motion. A small trickle becomes a stream, the stream turns into a creek, creeks join together, and suddenly you have a mighty river gushing against the walls of Parliament Building. That is what I have witnessed first hand during those two extraordinary days, as my buddy Andrew's and my own meaningless little trickle grew from 2 people to 40, then 200, then 500, then 3 to 5,000 people celebrating the wild salmon on the front lawn of Parliament Building.

As Alex herself told the walkers during our short stop in Saanich: “Well, it appears that we are living in a democracy after all.”

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