Missoula, Montana
In “A Russian Tragedy,” Alex Shoumatoff writes, “The ecological footprint of city dwellers is smaller than that of country people. One tends to forget that farming and grazing have been the main destroyers of the world’s terrestrial ecosystems.” This is a narrow-minded conceit typical of the urban-renaissance mindset.
Does Shoumatoff not see that the urban environment is nothing but an ecological footprint? Has he not noticed that smog is a largely urban phenomenon? What about the fact that the city of Victoria, British Columbia, dumps untreated sewage into the Pacific Ocean? There is no question that deforestation and overgrazing have also led to severe environmental degradation, but I would suggest that this has occurred in order to provide cheap food to urban people with a dysfunctional connection to the planet.
Canadian farmers are being asked to file environmental farm plans, while Shoumatoff suggests we abandon farmland — a “reversion to the wild” — to allow the forests to recover. The message is clear: “It’s all those ignorant farmers who are causing the problem. If we could only get them to take better care of the environment . . . ”
I’m sorry to break the news to you city folk, but farmers are the first ones to suffer from unsustainable farm management. It might surprise you to know that it bothers them as much as the weeds on your neighbours’ lawns bother you. It is time we all took responsibility for the impending environmental holocaust.
Kenn Wood
Ebenezer, Saskatchewan
Boom Boom Saskatoon
Having enjoyed The Walrus over the last four years, I was happy to see a copy of the May 2007 issue included in the delegates’ packages at this year’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Saskatoon. I was disappointed, however, on opening the June issue to find Ken Alexander’s “Vive le Saskatoon Libre” — a month too late.
What an important op-ed for a gathering of academics and intellectuals in the “Paris of the Prairies.” The potential intensification of industrial and economic development in Saskatchewan is a huge concern for the province as well as for Canada. Introducing this at the congress could have alerted the many scholars bumbling through beautiful but anachronistic prairie mythologies to this looming possibility.
Alexander gives these specialized ruminators of discourse — notoriously apolitical and complacent — something to chew on. Avoiding a duplication of Alberta’s energy-driven ecological disaster is paramount. This means acknowledging that sustainable economic growth will not be achieved through techno-scientific and corporate approaches, in which accumulation and profit are explained away as consensus and policy.
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