COASTLINE JOURNAL

by Michael JS Cox, Simon Fraser University

(An edited version of this essay appears in Confluence, vol. 15 no.2, spring 2010)

Download this essay as a pdf file: Drinking This Champagne Water

Thomas Hill, Great Canyon of the Sierras - Yosemite, 1871

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure…(John Muir, Nature Writings 228)

Sixty years separate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s death (1778) from John Muir’s birth (1838). Muir is not considered a philosopher, and Rousseau is not considered an environmentalist, but each man had an abiding passion for the solace occasioned by long walks in nature, and saw in Nature^[1] an expression of God. Each loved the mountains, whether hiking or appreciating them from a distance, and each shared a love of flowers, and of moving water, and each saw himself reflected in the cold, still waters of alpine lakes. This paper addresses the parallels between these men, and the divergences and convergences, which until now have not been sufficiently explored.

In those papers I have read on Muir, references to Rousseau are scant. Several works compare Henry David Thoreau with Rousseau, most of them examining their social philosophies,[2] but as Joseph Lane (2006) notes, “the lines of intellectual transmission from Rousseau to Thoreau and his successors…are, at best, indirect.”

Indirect, but not indistinct. If I were to list several founders of contemporary environmental philosophy—which I am aware would be contentious—there is good reason to include Jean-Jacques Rousseau.^[3]

(more…)

© rankingamerica.com (click image for website)

Every act of human so-called economic production is really an act of consumption under the second law of thermodynamics…we’re now exceeding the rate at which nature is producing the resources, we can consume resources faster than nature produces and as a result we’re dissipating waste much more quickly than nature can process and assimilate those wastes.

This is the fundamental imbalance between the human enterprise and nature. We’re literally consuming the ecosphere from the inside out.

That’s William Rees, the UBC professor who, with PhD student Mathis Wackernagel, invented the ecological footprint concept some fifteen years ago. In a wide-ranging interview on current thinking about the impact we’re having on the planet, he reviews the footprint, and suggests some solutions. The interview, published by UBC’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, has been posted as a series of questions, each question on a separate web page with his answer as both a YouTube video and a transcript.

Below, one segment, answering the question,

There’s this sense that we’re like a blind man walking on the edge–so if that’s the predicament we’re in, and we’re not even aware of the predicament, how does one move forward?

by John McAfee and Shelly Nixon, University of North Carolina at Asheville

Presented to the Midwestern Political Science Association’s 67th Annual Conference in April, 2009.

download this essay as a pdf file: Nixon Nuclear Weapons

Abstract:  The global community is currently facing a resurgence in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Given the horrors experienced by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the dropping of the bomb in 1945, it is difficult to understand why nuclear weapons have not been eradicated entirely. In this paper, the authors explore the history and rational behind nuclear armament. Highlighting South Africa as an example, they explain a success story of voluntary nuclear disarmament. In addition, the authors outline a global plan as well as a citizen’s action guide for attaining global nuclear weapons disarmament.

1965 Soviet Nuclear Test "Chagan"

I.  Introduction: The Threat of Nuclear Weapons

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” – Albert Einstein

No single weapon holds as much self-contained destructive violence as a nuclear bomb.  In the last seven decades, the United States has been the only country to use nuclear weapons in an act of war with the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August of 1945.  The incineration of both Japanese population centers with a combined death total well into the hundreds of thousands ushered humanity into what is commonly referred to as the First Nuclear Age.  The world during this age was characterized by the proliferation of nuclear-armed States, advancements in the power and delivery of nuclear weapons, the establishment of nuclear war-fighting doctrine, and a radical shift in foreign policy decision making (Beckman et al. 2007, xiv).  By the close of World Ware II, mankind wielded the power of ultimate destruction, not only threatening perceived enemies, but all life upon the globe.

Fire and blast radius, Hiroshima. US Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946.

(more…)

Christopher Aceto, Wesleyan University

download this essay: the long road home – aceto

What are the limits of values?  Would an “environmentalist” stick his head in the sand of rejection and the status quo so long that the environment suffered because of it?  Would a “market capitalist” scream the word “free” so long that she passed out while the economy fell down in shambles?  The answer to both is “maybe.”  It is very likely that those on the two poles, the extremes of environmental policy will reject anything that infringes on their idealistic representations of the world that the rest of us have to actually live in.  It is therefore essential that policy be developed by and for the vast majority of people: the groups, corporations, and nations that comprise the expanse inside these margins.  The tensions between these absolutist margins have painted a clear picture, one that shows that following a single path alone will not work.  Willingness at all levels to accept and adopt change must be matched by incentives to achieve reform and build quality environments from the local to the global.

(more…)

Sandy Penn, Simon Fraser University

Download this essay: Sandy Penn_nature culture

“The Earth’s declining health is our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy earth,” states Lovelock (2006) in his book, Revenge of Gaia.  Brian Handwerk[1] used the same metaphor in his article “The Earth’s Health in Sharp Decline, Massive Study Finds,”  in which he highlights a “UN-backed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report [which] revealed that nearly two-thirds of Earth’s life-supporting ecosystems, including clean water, pure air, and stable climate, are being degraded by unsustainable use.”

The notion that the environmental crisis has led the earth to suffer from potentially terminally illness is a metaphor that relies upon our familiarity with illness.  It places global environmental concerns within a tangible anthropocentric framework. Illness, an affliction or pathology of the individual body that causes suffering, is universal in nature, but personal in its effect.  It has been with us since the beginning of human time. Our understanding, reactions, responses, management and approaches to human illness have evolved with us. In contrast our perceptions of earth, as a complex, intricate, fragile, discrete object is a recent phenomenon. Our responses to global environmental concerns are fresh, untried and unproven.  We are faced with rethinking our position and  our impact as earthly inhabitants. The illness metaphor framework allows us to empathize with the environmental crisis and explore how the variety of approaches to illness may be relevant when attributed to the global environmental setting.  This essay will take advantage of this paradigm shift in our understanding of the earth to explore the environmental crisis through the various lenses we usually confine to health and illness.
(more…)

Elaine Brière, Simon Fraser University

download this essay: Briere_Fish weirs

“The management of fisheries is intended for the benefit of man, not fish.”
Canadian Economist H. Scott Gordon, 1950

photo by Elaine Brière

Introduction

Amongst my earliest memories are the sights, sounds and smells of fishing activity on the docks of Prince Rupert and Nanaimo. My father was a commercial fisherman of French-Canadian descent. His first boat was a double-ended troller; one of the hundreds seized from Japanese fishers during the war. Salmon was the main fishery, but there were also halibut. In Prince Rupert I remember seeing a mature halibut filling the hold of my father’s thirty-two foot boat. A fish of this size was rare as the once great north coast halibut fishing banks had been greatly depleted even by 1915. After my family moved to Nanaimo in 1958, my father fished salmon for some years in the Georgia Strait before the development of the purse-seine fleet depleted the gulf fishery. Commercial salmon fishers in the Gulf were then forced to travel to the west coast of Vancouver Island to earn a livelihood.

Herring came into Nanaimo harbour in great shoals in the 1950′s. As a 10 year-old I recall the excitement going out to rake herring at night in a dugout canoe with my Indian neighbours, who lived in stilt houses in Newcastle Channel. This was before herring, a vital food for the marine ecosystem, itself became a major commercial fishery. Between 1960 and 1967 when sharply declining stocks forced the closure of the reduction herring fishery, hundreds of tons were taken for fertilizer and feed. Herring stocks are again in serious decline since a market has been developed in Japan for the female roe. Federal fishery biologists estimate that about 170 locations where herring used to spawn in the Johnson and Georgia Straits are barren or near barren. The Indians and their stilt houses disappeared from Newcastle Channel along with the herring. They were removed to the reservation at the other end of town, near the mouth of Nanaimo River, whose marine life was destroyed when it became a booming ground for the logging industry.

Since the European West Coast fisheries began in the latter part of the 19th century, West Coast marine life has gone from awesome abundance to precipitous decline, to extirpation or near extirpation of many species that most British Columbians have never even heard of. (more…)

Justin Bendell, Northern Arizona University

download the complete essay: Bendell_SeedsSoil

Justin Bendell, an Illinois native, earned a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He moved west and, in 2008, gained a Master of Liberal Studies degree from Northern Arizona University. He resides in Tucson with three chickens and his partner Rose.

With the progress of civilization, [humans have] learned many skills, but only rarely [have they] learned to preserve [their] source of food.  Paradoxically, the very achievements of civilized [humanity] have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.

—Tom Dale & Vernon Gill Carter, Topsoil and Civilization 1

Behold, my friends, the spring has come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun and shall soon see the results of that love.

—Sitting Bull, Lakota elder 2

Beneath the Chinese elms long beheaded, in a front yard the size of a Navajo rug, we overturn a mosaic of non-native grass, dirt, and dandelion in preparation for the planting season.  Rose and I rented our east Flagstaff lot and house from a quiet man who owns a heating and cooling business; it is our third rental pad in three years on the southern Colorado Plateau, fourth in four years in Arizona.  As perpetual renters, Rose and I have been estranged from the landbase.  It is difficult to find motivation to break both backs and soil to grow food when the likelihood of reaping the harvest most years is nil.  We—the renting class, the (albeit privileged) landless—have little control over the edible aspects of our lives.

This year we are digging, planting, watering, mulching, composting.  Despite the limitations of time, soil, and space, we are determined to raise an ecological garden, a small-scale food system that uses marginal groundwater, takes advantage of micro- climates, and emphasizes drought-tolerant native varieties of squash, corn, bean, chile, and other food crops.  If we are not around next year, it will be okay.  This is a summer project, an experiment in sustainable living, a quest to understand the constraints of place.  Not quite permaculture, our garden is of similar spirit and intention.

We are inspired by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan’s experiment of eating locally in the Tucson basin, eloquently recounted in Coming Home to Eat.3 Eating within one’s bioregion, or as Nabhan attempts, living off native foods raised within a 250-mile radius of home, is as much political as it is personal—perhaps more so.  In an era where most food crops are raised monoculturally on giant industrial farms, soaked in chemicals, genetically engineered, and patented by transnational corporations like Monsanto and ConAgra, shunning industrialism in favor of food sovereignty is a political act.

In a sense, there is also a spiritual danger in not knowing from where one’s food comes.  Preeminent ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold wrote that this danger lies in supposing that our meals come from the grocer.  “To avoid this danger,” he suggests, “one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.”4

(more…)