By Devlin Kuyek
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

Is rights-based activism a step in the wrong direction?

It’s the end of October in Montreal. About 20 of us have stepped away from what could be the year’s last sunny autumn evening for an opportunity to hear from one of Canada’s most important elder activists and thinkers. Brewster Kneen is in town to talk about his new book, The Tyranny of Rights (Ram’s Horn, 2009).

I remember gathering not far from this room on McGill’s campus nearly a decade ago when Brewster was on a road show for his previous book, Farmageddon. That book tore a strip off the overhyped biotech industry and laid plain how our government was colluding with companies like Monsanto to dramatically alter our food system for the sake of corporate profit. The room was packed that night – testimony to the mass food movement that had been building across the country – a movement which Brewster played a critical role in shaping.

But now, 10 years later, it’s a much smaller crowd. Those who are gathered are an eclectic bunch, and probably wouldn’t identify with any single movement. The topic this time isn’t food, and the familiar following of food activists is notably absent.

This time, Brewster’s book is about rights. The connection with his previous work is not obvious. Why would Brewster leave the comfort of a blossoming movement for a lonely struggle to take on what he calls “the tyranny of rights?”

A conversation between covers

About 40 years ago, Brewster and his wife and co-conspirator Cathleen left their friends and fellow activists in Toronto to take up sheep farming in Nova Scotia. He says they wanted to walk the talk and get some experience with “primary production.” Several years of hard work later, with a well-functioning farm to show for their efforts, the Kneens started once again to organize.

They began raising questions about the structure of the industry and working with other farmers to set up land trusts, co-operatives and other means of reclaiming some power in the food system. They were learning a lot from their experience on the farm and from conversations with fellow farmers and other actors in the food system. As was natural to them, they looked for ways to share this knowledge. Thus was born the Ram’s Horn (ramshorn.ca), a monthly newsletter on food and farming that the Kneens are still churning out today.

Brewster’s first book also emerged from this plunge into farming and food politics. From Land to Mouth remains perhaps the most succinct explanation of the logic of the industrial food system I’ve encountered. Brewster’s insight into how the system expands and creates profit for agribusiness by constantly creating distance between the various points along the food chain is still central to the current analysis of the industry. It also helped lay the groundwork for one of the most important responses to industrial food – the local food movement.

If Brewster was able to unpack the underlying logic of the corporate food system and provide its critics (and victims) with such enduring insights, it is perhaps because he did not do so alone. Brewster thrives in conversation with others. He talks to everyone. He asks tough questions. He regularly makes impromptu visits to corporate offices or the stalls of Ottawa bureaucrats. He’s not afraid to risk causing discomfort at neighbourhood potlucks by talking politics. And through these ongoing conversations Brewster gathers insights into the ways systems work.

Out of such conversations, Brewster also came to understand, long before the rest of us, that the new source of power in the food system and the broader economy is the corporation. This is why he immersed himself in the study of perhaps the world’s most important – and most opaque – food and agriculture company: Cargill. His book on Cargill has been translated into four languages and has taken Brewster around the globe, meeting with farmers and activists facing off against the huge behemoth – and leading Brewster into ever more conversations, some of which opened the path towards his latest book on rights.

The tyranny of rights

The organizer of the Montreal event was Aziz Choudry, a New Zealand activist and professor who first met Brewster in Kuala Lumpur during a forum held to protest a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Brewster had been invited to talk about Cargill and to build bridges between Canadian farmers and peasant movements in Asia. In the ensuing years, Brewster made many other stops around the planet, talking with farmers, activists, indigenous peoples, professors, religious leaders and even corporate and government types, jotting down ideas, insights and data in the various notebooks he takes everywhere with him.

The more he talked with people, the more he saw the connections between their various struggles, and the more he began to develop ideas about how these struggles could be brought together. But he also began to see how certain ways of thinking actually inhibited effective, collective action. For Brewster, the expansion of the use of the “rights” discourse, by both activists and corporations, was a central problem facing global struggles for social justice.

Food is Brewster’s entry point into talking about rights – and for good reason. Over the years the term “rights” has assumed a more and more prominent place on the agricultural landscape. The most glaring example of this is corporations claiming property rights over seeds and strands of plant DNA. The age-old and open systems of sharing and co-operation that characterize both farmers’ seed systems and public plant breeding have been largely destroyed to make way for a corporate seed system that criminalizes such practices in order to protect the “intellectual property rights” of corporations. One response to this attack has been to call for farmers’ rights.

Brewster has worked closely with those who call for farmers’ rights. He probably once argued for them himself. But after a decade or so of going nowhere with the concept, Brewster feels it is time to question whether we are on the right path. As he now sees it, such “reactive claims” for rights are never going to work because they are, necessarily, appeals to states that are interested in protecting corporations, not farmers.

Plus, if you get right down to it, why should farmers all of a sudden need the state to protect their seed saving? Sure, corporations need the state to stop farmers from saving seeds, but farmers have never needed the state to help them save seeds.

As Brewster points out, “Without the state there would be no Plant Breeders rights, no copyrights and no patents. Farmers who save, select and use their own seeds neither have nor require such state ‘protection’ to go about their work.”

The problem, for Brewster, is not a lack of rights. Farmers’ rights are a distraction that takes us away from the urgent matter of abolishing patents over seeds and re-establishing the conditions for farmers to be able to save seeds.

“U.S. to give more rights to Afghan prisoners”: According to Kneen, the “right to intervene” creates a loose framework that is easily manipulated to serve the interests of powerful states. (Photo: Devlin Kuyek)

From individual rights to collective responsibilities

Brewster takes this same line of thinking into his discussion of the “right to food” – another rights claim emerging from the deep social inequities of the current food system. He likens it to an empty bowl: an abstract concept that avoids a clear political agenda for action. Like farmers’ rights, it is an appeal to the state, when what we need are concrete plans for how to feed ourselves.

“A direct moral appeal to the public for the construction of an equitable and ecological food system,” he writes, “might, actually, be more politically effective and morally satisfying – though much harder – than appealing to governments for the right to food. Such a direct, public approach is captured by the term ‘food sovereignty’ which has rapidly gained usage around the world.”

But more is at stake here, and this is why Brewster has devoted a good year or two to his new book. In his eyes, all fights for rights are ultimately beholden to a narrow Western concept of human rights that feeds into today’s globalized capitalism. The rights framework privileges the individual over the collective and leads us away from other notions, like responsibility and gratitude, which are central to many non-Western societies and provide, in his view, a better footing for social transformation.

The rights framework also feeds into a more generalized proliferation of rights claims, which only favours corporations and the powerful. The global push for intellectual property rights, for example, is commodifying knowledge while strangling our capacity for collective work and creativity, whether we are farmers, writers, musicians or software developers.

Moreover, Brewster warns that the rights language provides a slippery slope towards military intervention. In one of the last chapters of his book, Brewster describes how rights, in this case the “right to intervene” inherent in the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, are being evoked to justify military invasions. He does not dispute that human rights violations are going on and need to be stopped, but for him the “right to intervene” creates a loose framework that is easily manipulated to serve the interests of powerful states, overriding the long-standing notion of state sovereignty in the process. He wants us to think hard about the dramatic implications of this trend.

Brewster stops short, however, of a blanket condemnation of all use of the “rights” language. He is sympathetic to struggles for social and collective rights, especially if they come not as appeals to the state but as declarations by communities or other collectives of what the state can and cannot do. And he is certainly supportive of many of the processes where “rights” are being defined, such as with the struggles against dictatorships in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century. But given all the problematic aspects of “rights” that he details, Brewster cannot help but conclude that it would be better if we avoided the term.

“My conclusion,” Brewster writes, “is that social and individual justice is not furthered by the language of rights. Justice would be much better served not by making claims and demands, but by stating what is being done and what must be done by those that otherwise might be making a claim for the right to do something. . . . It is time to consider whether the language of rights actually serves the intents of social justice or has become just an illusion of intent – good intent, to be sure – behind which individualization and privatization are carried on unimpeded.”

If we are to form a strong global movement, convenient terms like “rights” cannot be used as shortcuts. We need to speak clearly and candidly about how we can meet our needs and the needs of others. Thanks to Brewster Kneen, the conversation is well underway.

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Illustration by Ben Clarkson

By Robin Tennant-Wood
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

For over a century, we’ve thought of work as the use of human labour and technology to transform natural resources into tradeable goods. This economic model has brought us unparalleled prosperity - and exhausted the planet’s capacity to support us. Building a green economy, Robin Tennant-Wood argues, requires nothing less than a fundamental change in how we understand work and a complete overhaul of the global economy.

If you are the big tree,
we have a small axe.
Sharpened to cut you down,
ready to cut you down.
-Bob Marley

When the global financial system went in to a tailspin in September 2008, western governments, faced with the spectre of collapsing industries and rising unemployment, acted quickly and decisively to secure the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy. Emergency measures like the auto industry bailout in the U.S., massive injections of cash into the construction sector in Australia and similar support for the manufacturing sector in the U.K. were meant to protect jobs in the face of the potential collapse of these industries.

But massive cash injections can only sustain these industries for so long. Inherent in the concept of sustainability is a recognition that there must be limits to growth if we are to ensure that the present generation does not harm future generations by exhausting available resources. With global supplies of key resources such as oil, copper and steel tightening, we are rapidly approaching these limits, and may soon reach the point when continued expansion of industry becomes not just ecologically perilous but economically impossible.

The global economy has been built on the backs of industries that are neither environmentally nor, in the long run, economically sustainable. We are faced, then, with two unworkable options: allowing these industries and their massive labour forces to disintegrate, precipitating a calamitous increase in unemployment and widespread economic hardship, or continuing to pour vast amounts of public money into an economic model on the brink of collapse. Neither option is tenable, but a third option is emerging that involves rethinking not just the role of work in the economy, but the role of the economy in society.

The nature of work under scrutiny

The place of work in society, especially for the lower classes, has remained largely unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. Technology has dramatically altered many traditional jobs, rendered others obsolete and created new ones, but labour as the primary factor of production has remained unchanged, particularly in industries that rely on a large unskilled or trade-based workforce. These are the jobs that governments rushed to save in late 2008 and early 2009: the jobs of workers dependent upon a production system that uses human labour to transform natural resources into consumer goods. When this system was developed, natural resources were in cheap and plentiful supply. This is no longer the case.

As more people begin to recognize the unsustainability of our economic system, an alternative view of work has been steadily gaining traction. The purpose of work, according to this emerging paradigm, should not be subverted to the demands of a constantly expanding economy - growth for growth’s sake - but should be dedicated to enriching the social fabric, natural ecosystems and public infrastructure that sustain us.

Contemporary British philosopher Alain de Botton notes in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work that we have become completely distanced from the labour that goes into the things we use in our everyday lives, including our food. There is no acknowledgment of the Kenyan woman who picked the tea, the Philippine pieceworker who sewed the jeans, the Korean factory worker who spray-painted the car, the Egyptian farmer who grew the oranges or the Chinese teenager who assembled the plush animal that wears your football team’s jersey. Unrecognized, too, are the hundreds of pairs of hands that the goods pass through between origin and destination: forklift and truck drivers, commercial shipping and wharf labourers, baristas and retail clerks are all providing the labour that creates global capital.

This chasm between the production and consumption of almost everything we use is being challenged by a growing movement to source goods and services locally. This drive to localize helps foster a grassroots system of production-consumption-production that reconnects people with the pro­cesses that sustain them, puts minimum pressure on resources and reduces the ecological footprints of urban areas. It also is fueling the emergence of a new “green-collar” labour market consisting of jobs that are socially and environmentally useful and that contribute to a sustainable economy, rather than one based solely on the creation of wealth.

From blue-collar to green-collar

Green jobs focus on sectors such as renewable energy, food production, transportation and recycling and waste minimization, seeking to build healthier social and environmental systems rather than simply to promote economic growth. Retrofitting old buildings instead of demolishing them to make way for new ones, creating urban food forests, organizing the office carpool and bike fleet, or designing wildlife and biodiversity corridors in cities are jobs that didn’t exist 25 years ago. Now, they are part of a transformation in our understanding of labour and how it can contribute to sustainability.

Van Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy, and served recently as special adviser to the White House on green jobs. He is also the co-founder of Green for All, a U.S. organization that works “to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” Jones sees a green-collar workforce as the “upgrading” of blue-collar employment to “better respect the environ­ment: family-supporting, career-track, vocational or trade-level employment in environmentally friendly fields.”

Green-collar jobs encompass a wide range of skill sets. The Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Council of Trade Unions recently released a paper promoting green jobs. It included blue-collar areas of work, but also upgraded white-collar jobs such as procurement or purchasing officers, office managers and education officers. Far from the bucolic ideals of the back-to-the-land movement, these jobs are fully enmeshed in the urban, tech-savvy, 21st-century economy. If one thing unites them, it’s that they contribute to the economy not by exploiting natural resources, but by pursuing initiatives that conserve or rehabilitate natural resources.

Most local governments in Australia are already creating green-collar positions. As recently as five years ago, local governments saw environmental services as primarily concerned with regulatory aspects of planning and development. Increasingly these jobs are being geared towards educating and engaging the community.

Debra Bell is the sustainability officer for the city council of Queanbeyan, a city of 37,000 in southern New South Wales. One of Bell’s biggest recent successes was a two-day sustainability expo organized in response to community requests for information.

Does Bell see a future for “greened-up” white-collar jobs in local government? “Absolutely. This area is growing all the time. It would be great to see all [local government] positions sustainability-based and community-driven.”

Working out of the same office as Bell is Geoff Pryor, project coordinator for the South East Resource Recovery Regional Organisation of Councils (SERRROC). Pryor facilitates a co-operative venture to sustainably manage waste across a region consisting of 12 rural and regional councils that represent a population of around 170,000. The project is based on the premise that small local governments do not have the clout or resources required to reduce and divert waste cost-effectively. As a co-operative, the 12 councils share resources and programming and work with industry on measures to reduce waste. Pryor is optimistic that SERRROC can even have some influence on federal government policy regarding electronic waste, in particular.

From a national policy perspective, if green jobs are worth creating when the economy is good, why, when the economy goes bad, are national governments so fixated on protecting jobs in old resource-extraction and polluting industries? The green employment sector at the local government level is growing rapidly, but at the national and international level, governments continue to undervalue the environment as a resource in its own right and pour money into protecting jobs almost exclusively within industries that are contributing to serious environmental problems. Diverting that investment into retraining and education for displaced workers or creating jobs in areas such as renewable energy, information and communications technology, plantation timber production or recycling and resource management would have a far more positive long-term effect.

Looking to the grassroots

Rather than taking a linear view of labour as part of the conveyor belt that transforms natural resources and human labour into consumer products, the emerging view of green and local economies sees labour as cyclical: part of a system that directly addresses social needs from source to sale to disposal, building community in the process. Sustainable labour systems should be based on the same sort of cyclical processes that govern natural systems: complementary, overlapping, mutually beneficial processes. In much the same way as we are coming to see one sector’s waste as another sector’s valuable resource, labour in one field complements a need in another. In a grassroots sense, this view of labour is personal, direct and empowering: no job is without value.

Holistic approaches to work and the economy can take many forms. The mantra of the early green movement, “Think globally, act locally,” is reflected in the rise in popularity of such initiatives as Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), farmers’ markets, co-housing initiatives and power generation co-operatives. Within these operations, work is co-operatively managed to ensure that each participant is part of a process in which their contribution is visible and valued by all others in the system. In the case of LETS, for example, goods or services are traded directly rather than for money. Replacing the flow of capital with the direct provision of goods and services creates a sense of shared responsibility among traders, building both social capital and local economies.

The local food movement in particular has been gaining ground in recent years. Farmers’ markets are growing in size and number as city dwellers turn their backs on imported and processed foods and look for locally grown, fresh, seasonal produce. The biggest such market in Australia is held each Saturday morning in the national capital, Canberra, where up to 5,000 people buy fresh fruit and vegetables, wines and oils, bread, dairy produce, meats, patisserie and plants directly from more than 100 growers and producers. After only five years in operation, the demand for direct purchasing of food in Canberra has been so great that a second, Sunday-morning market has been established and is flourishing on the opposite side of town.

One of the Canberra market founders, Dave Pentony, has seen a huge shift in the way people are thinking about their food purchases. Pentony and his family have a small farm on the outskirts of Canberra and sell organically grown salad greens at the markets on Saturdays and Sundays. Pentony has also opened a direct outlet for local growers in a suburban shopping centre. Based on the Japanese tradition of farmers selling directly to consumers, his store, Choku Bai Jo, which translates as direct selling place, has created five jobs in retail and provides a point of sale for up to 20 local urban, peri-urban and rural growers.

In Europe, power co-operatives have provided local communities with access to power from renewable energy, particularly wind power, through co-operative ownership of the infrastructure. On the Scottish Isle of Gigha, for instance, three wind turbines generate about two-thirds of the local community’s power. The net profit of the venture goes into improving the energy efficiency of the local housing stock, which is owned and operated by the Gigha Heritage Trust, itself a co-operative arrangement that gave ownership of the once privately owned island to its residents. The upgrading of the housing stock is creating local employment in a small community where unemployment and poverty are common.

Taking control of work

At a time of upheaval in the traditional labour and capital markets, there is surprising resiliency in local economies, where individuals have relatively more control over their economic well-being rather than being locked into a linear and hierarchical labour system. Within the traditional capitalist labour hierarchy, each participant in the workforce is dependent upon the level above for decisions and the level below for implementation. The higher the level, the more abstract the decisions and the greater the distance from their implementation and consequences. Each worker has less autonomy to direct their energies to responding to the needs of their community or the environment.

Workers in a local economy, on the other hand, can better assess what they need to get from their job, their contribution to their community, the needs of those around them, the wider social or environmental benefits of their job and its long-term impacts and consequences. This greater responsiveness helps to ensure that each participant in the local economy is able to meet his or her own needs while contributing to the common good.

The green economy is gradually emerging as a true alternative, but real change is coming much more slowly than the urgency of our situation demands. For substantive change to really take hold, governments must recognize that socially useful and environmentally sound work will also be economically viable, and invest and regulate accordingly. Local communities and local governments are already beginning to do so.

If the global financial crisis has taught us anything, it should be that, to paraphrase Einstein, problems can’t be solved by using the same kind of thinking that created them. The nature of work and how we organize it must be in accord with the nature of the society we wish to build. The hardship that accompanies economic recession can be greatly reduced through creative investments in green labour and local economic initiatives.

For more information, please see “Resources to fuel the shift to a green economy.”

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Conrad Schmidt helped found the Work Less Party as a way to spark a discussion about the value of work.

By Anna Kirkpatrick
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

Work is a blessing and a curse. At its best, work gives our lives meaning and purpose. Many of us derive our self-identity from our work. More than just a means to an income, work can provide an opportunity to contribute, interact and connect with others.

Yet at the same time, work can be demeaning drudgery. Meaningless employment can sap us of dignity and creativity, leaving us drained and diminished. British economist E.F Schumacher was well aware of this dual nature of work, advising in his book Good Work that young people “should be taught that work is the joy of life and is needed for our develop­ment, but that meaningless work is an abomination.”

What, then, makes work meaningful? What is good work and how do we find it?

Some see moderation as the key. Back in the 1930s, British philosopher Bertrand Russell complained that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.”

Vancouver-based writer and activist Conrad Schmidt agrees. Schmidt, author of Workers of the World, Relax, helped found the Work Less Party as a way to spark a discussion about the value of work. Among other things, the Work Less Party advocates a reduction of the standard work week from 40 hours to 32 hours.

Schmidt points out that countries with a shorter work week tend to have a higher quality of life and to be more egalitarian. “When you have a society where people are empowered and have more time to think, more time to read, more time to communicate with their neighbours, you create a more empowered society that is better able to challenge social injustice like the income gap,” Schmidt told Briarpatch.

Schmidt thinks a shorter work week would have both social and ecological benefits. Less time spent working means that fewer consumer products are manufactured and less garbage and pollution are created. Schmidt suggests that some of the time that was once devoted to paid employment could be re-directed to self-improvement and community development. “People need time to get involved in community and create a healthier, stronger society. The more we work, the more we produce, the more junk just ends up in a landfill.”

Schmidt thinks the popular definition of work is far too narrow. Our understanding of work, Schmidt believes, should include all the diverse and important tasks needed for a healthy community, including raising children, meeting neighbours and engaging in political activism. According to Schmidt, we need to redefine our concept of work to include a much broader spectrum of activities. “Everything we do is work. Our definition needs to be more than heading off to offices and trying to fill up landfills with junk that we don’t need. Essential work that creates a stronger society is just not happening because, as far as we’re concerned, it’s not work.”

Schmidt clearly is not advocating sloth. Instead, he calls for a more rigorous, thoughtful approach to work. And he’s not alone.

Peter Blanchard, founder of GoodWork Canada, the country’s largest environmental job board, is also reimagining employment, though from a slightly different vantage point. Blanchard started GoodWork Canada after becoming disillusioned with his own career path. Blanchard believes that any work that is personally meaningful can be good work, but is quick to add that finding good work is about more than fulfilling personal ambitions. “I would say a vital determinant of good work is that it is to some degree for the greater good. If you have a job that is great for you but you are working for an evil corporation that is really doing less than environmental things, maybe that is not truly good work,” says Blanchard.

Good Work Canada provides an online listing of environmental jobs in both the private and public sectors. A wide range of careers are represented, including entry-level and highly skilled positions. Blanchard maintains that it is fully possible to find paid employment that is meaningful and socially beneficial, but admits this may require stepping beyond the boundaries of the conventional job market. “If people tried harder to find meaningful work for organizations that are doing good things, I think we would see some fundamental changes in society,” Blanchard says.

For Schmidt and Blanchard alike, persistence and creativity are the keys to finding meaningful employment and to building healthy communities. For those willing to go off the beaten path and live on less, the opportunities to contribute are numerous.

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Photo: Alan Westhaver

By Angela Street
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

Every year from May until August, initial attack crews are deployed from Canadian district fire bases to help contain fires (and occasionally conduct prescribed burns) in Canada’s boreal forest. Like intelligence operatives, fire rangers often work in isolation and obscurity, in a remote and dangerous world hidden from public view. Welcome to the Big Wild.

“Strangle!”

The command flies down the line like electricity running to ground. I clamp the steel stranglers around the hose, ensuring that I don’t pinch or pierce its woven skin.

“Strangling!”

My crew leader uncouples the nozzle from our hose line, attaches another hose length and affixes the nozzle to its free end: “Water!”

I release the stranglers - slowly, slowly - and water shoots back up the line.

“Water in the loop!” yells another crew member, and we’re in business again, 70 pounds per square inch of water pressure directed at the fire’s edge.

We will work our way around the entire perimeter like this, laying out hose in advance, a giant inchworm moving forward, its extended body our escape route back to the water source. Although we find ourselves in a natural labyrinth, we are facing no ordinary Minotaur: a forest fire can suddenly magnify in intensity, capriciously engulfing its antagonists from multiple directions at barely a moment’s notice. For the average ground crew, fire behaviour remains notoriously unpredictable; small errors in judgment can easily beget grievous outcomes.

I inhale deeply. The burning forest smells most alive in the throes of death - more pungent, more sharply defined, a bouquet of scents under pressure. By design, the very carnage that surrounds us will ensure that forests continue being forests forever.

Today, though, we are consciously interrupting this process: the fire is perilously close to human habitation. As casually as possible, I glance at a crew mate who is plastered with mud and ash from head to toe, knowing full well that she’d like me to take a turn operating the nozzle end of the thrashing hose so that, later on, we can be wet and miserable together and thereby appreciate the true meaning of teamwork.

Having encircled the fire, we move into the burn area itself, tracking and extinguishing hot spots - individual patches of smouldering fuels that could be as small as the tip of your baby finger or as large as a bathtub. Smoke-hunting in the giant ashtray of a burn can be enjoyable if you possess acute eyesight or a sharp sense of smell; otherwise, the work is arduous and painstakingly slow.

One afternoon, the crew finds a large hot spot and begins digging it out, only to discover a solid mass of permafrost 30 centimetres below ground level. From this moment on, our efforts assume a decidedly recreational character as delirious fire rangers pitch snowballs through the smoky atmosphere, at the height of the Canadian summer.

Mop-up is grubby work. Diehards have been known to purposely blacken their faces with ash upon arrival at the site. By this time, body odour, too, can take on a life of its own. The thought comes to me unbidden: “You will never again be so dirty in your lifetime.” It’s an oddly comforting notion; things can only get better. Or so I imagine.

We are so far from anything resembling civilization, doing such dangerous work, that safe and well-ordered behaviour becomes exceedingly important. But there are stripes to be earned in this military-style enterprise. Objectives have been set by top brass, and during a dry spell there are always more fires than crews can hope to contain. With a pronounced sleep deficit dogging our every move, our accident rate is sharply rising.

On one occasion, a crew member cuts his hand open with an axe and is evacuated by helicopter. Another ranger puts the blunt end of a Pulaski axe into his forehead. Still another is knocked down by a tree that jumps back on its seat while she is felling it. And as the end of the season nears, I will contract second-degree chemical burns from unprotected exposure to fire-foam concentrate, a fire-suppression aid. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that adequate rest and recovery time and a more cohesive effort from senior management are in order, our employer proffers the time-honoured, enlightened response: a towering wall of silence.

For any fire ranger with sanity to spare, there is no such thing as too safe or too cautious. On the end of a fire line, at the end of the world, no one is going to look out for you but yourself.

Licorice swizzles & chimney trees

“We’re not getting any water!” my crew leader shouts across the burn.

I’ve just trekked the 700 metres over scrub brush, blowdown and bog to refuel our Mark III water pump and have made my way back to the spot fire, fully anticipating things to be running smoothly. They aren’t.

Although there appeared to be pressure in the hose at the pump site, there is none here at the end of the line. I am exasperated. My radio dangles uselessly, victim of an accidental drowning while I checked the state of the pump’s intake hose coupling. It will take three more ventures, some short-term hearing loss and the intervention of the most mechanically inclined crew member to improvise a seal for the cracked carburetor shroud that escaped everyone’s notice.

It is difficult to gauge whether more energy is lost on a fire due to physical exertion or to the sustained outpouring of adrenaline and other stress hormones. Whatever the answer, this recent bout of excitement would soon prompt refuelling of another kind.

If the traditional Inuit diet exemplifies Robert Atkins’ gastronomic dream, the traditional firefighter diet surely represents his nightmare. Our 24-hour survival kit packs enough sugar to cause a diabetic attack in a bull moose: sticky chocolate bars, granola bars, licorice swizzles, potato chips, instant noodles and manufactured cheese spread that would be better suited to the inner workings of a chainsaw than a human being.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of fat fire rangers. Between the six-packs consumed during days off and the on-duty diet, it’s little wonder so many become obese over the fire season, proudly displaying their bowling ball guts like some blue-collar badge of honour.

That night I have a dream that my teeth have fallen out of my head and are trailing behind me on a long metal thread as I desperately try to track down a sympathetic dental surgeon. In the morning, I fastidiously scrape every last wretched bit of dental tartar away from my long-suffering gum line. A crew member ominously intones, “Ignore your teeth and they’ll go away,” and everyone laughs.

The laughter quickly subsides, though, at the prospect of our next task.

There is one job on the fire line that, without exception, demands concentration in the highest degree: felling chimney trees or any other hazardous trees. Left standing, these “chicots” expose personnel to unnecessary danger, and chimneys, specifically, can very rapidly spread fire throughout the crown canopy.

While cutting trail may be monot­onous, ploughing a bar into the middle of a flaming tree is another matter altogether. Sweat is drenching my coveralls as the chain’s teeth bite deeply into the rotted wood, carving out a thick notch as the tree quietly smokes out of its hopscotch cavities, the fire tunnelling up from the root base, hollowing out the core. I am standing in hot ash, my hands glued to the saw, while the rest of the crew scans for deadfall and other aerial hazards.

The chain sparks and flames burst out of the centre of the tree, licking my uniform. Repositioning the saw for the back cut, I am grateful that the chain has been well-sharpened; this would be a bad time to bog down. The heat is intense - this tree had better fall fast.

“Back cut!”

Moments later, the chimney topples and is promptly extinguished.

A smoothly executed operation, but not necessarily typical: the firefighting milieu boasts an unprecedented number of sawyer shortcuts and bad habits, such as balancing midstream on a floating log in order to fell a given target. Opportunities abound to honour the cult of machismo prevalent in fire control, but this tendency must be consciously weighed against the possible severing of body parts, which, though thrilling in shock value, might have a deleterious effect on crew morale and productivity.

Four and 20 blackbirds

Dead animals abound. Today we find a small snake in the burn, its mouth stretched open in a final, defiant protest. Half-baked birds are perhaps the hardest to bear; this giant oven is unbiased and all-encompassing.

Another day I find the remains of a puppy. Skull and teeth intact, it had been buried in a canvas bag. Someone else finds a dog wedged in a tree, left to die. The forest guards many secrets, not all of them pleasant to contemplate. A loon calls out and eyes me from the lake, while a toad’s bloated corpse drifts downstream, decaying slowly, an intruder in the realm of frogs.

Even downtime can present sudden shocks. On a balmy evening at the end of a long shift, I am sitting in the middle of a small lake, hunched atop a solitary rock, lost in thought. The weightlessness of my head unencumbered by the ubiqui­tous safety helmet is hugely enjoyable. I feel the stresses of the day ebb slowly through my fingertips dangling in the water. I am about to slip into a trance.

Out of nowhere, a helicopter is suddenly roaring directly above my head. It is coming in fast. The terrific whup-whup-whup of the rotors is upon me and the rush of wind beating down nearly blows me off my perch into the lake. I feel the sandstorm spray against my face and for a fleeting moment I fear for my life - will the rotors actually clear my head? Should I be underwater? How can the pilot not see me? Faster than I can answer these questions, Bell 204 mercifully touches down on the shoreline about five metres from where I am sitting and the pilot makes eye contact for the first time.

He grins, sheepishly. I smile, weakly. Firefighting is not for the faint of heart.

The following day, I spend the afternoon sculpting nude figures in the sand with sadistic flair. A woman lies face down in the sand with a stake in her back, her partner holds his severed head in one hand, and I idly wonder if the pilots can make this out from about 300 metres. The wind gradually turns their coffee-coloured bodies to beige and they eventually crumble, like excavated artifacts come to light. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew dozes in the camp tent, suffering terminal brain arrest from multiple sessions of Game Boy and other video games.

Outside the tent lies something from a fantasy film: fields of luminescent frosted lichen in pastel green and blue, 60 centimetres high, spongy soft and glowing in the twilight. It’s a magical spot, quite unlike any I’ve ever seen, rare and precious. I feel like protecting it, designating it my own private lichen sanctuary.

Extreme weather

Few are the fire rangers who don’t enjoy the odd bout of extreme weather; for one thing, thunderstorms frequently result in that event which provides us with our daily bread and butter. But tornadoes or tornado warnings are another matter; with winds gusting at nearly 130 kilometres per hour and rain soaking everything in sight, previously euphoric spirits come crashing to a sullen low. High on a ridge top, in the midst of one such tempest, we huddle under blue tarpaulins tied between two trees, eating sugar and playing video games, feeling sorry for ourselves, wishing we would get pulled from the fire already, and generally getting on each other’s nerves.

In these parts the weather changes frequently, but not always for the better: wind and rain morph into a hailstorm, and hailstones the size of fruit tins start ripping through the tarp that shelters us.

Yelping and cursing, we are torn between fear and the uncanny urge to laugh. Pandemonium reigns. One of us gets pelted viciously and we make a dash for lower ground, shrieking and rolling down the charred hillside.

When the clouds part and the hailstorm subsides, we spring into action: flimsy tarpaulins and conks on the noggin are “out,” and living underground is very much de rigueur. I feel like I’m digging our grave, but in a matter of minutes we have a four-body ditch, replete with a centre table, scooped-out seats and a heavy branch roof. Sweating, the crew proudly poses for a picture, playing cards spread out on the table before us. Come what may, we fear no hail today!

The body’s distress signals

Morning comes too quickly. In defiance of my alarm clock’s preordained assault, I lie still for a few minutes, savouring the warmth of my synthetic cocoon, dreading what is habitually the worst part of a firefighter’s day.

I pry my eyes open in the dim northern light, tuck a damp shirt into equally damp pants, and groan inwardly as my boots greet my feet with a sobering sploosh-sploosh sound. Not only are they still sopping wet, they’re also freakishly cold, and I tuck my hands into my armpits trying not to imagine my digits glued one by one to a steel nozzle like a tongue on a giant icicle.

Never mind what they teach you during standard training: the life of a fire ranger is about ignoring your body’s distress signals, soldiering through cycles of extreme heat, cold, hunger, thirst and exhaustion. While the regular buildup of ash, sweat, bacterial grime and ingrown hairs might very well see you throw yourself into the nearest leech-infested lake, frosty mornings will have you wishing the elements would undo all your hard work and spark up a monster blaze through which you would gladly parade like a born-again believer. Although aspiring firefighters are screened specifically for physical strength and endurance, mental stamina figures much higher on the list of prerequisites, as does a high tolerance for perpetual bodily discomfort.

All pain is soon forgotten, however, when the sun emerges and its rays light up an enormous and delicate spider’s web, shimmering with dew, suspended between two trees. The entire assignment crystallizes into this one transcendent moment; in the span of a single breath we are warmed, revitalized and ready to push on. If we are lucky we will avail ourselves of other restorative gems throughout the day, collecting and connecting them as they indelibly imprint themselves on our subconscious minds.

Tastes like poison

“What’s wrong with the food?” My crew leader’s expression is a perfect mixture of concern and wry amusement, having overheard my comment that the spaghetti sauce “tastes like poison.” I glare at the offending mash of noodles and sauce that I have spat onto my plate.

“I don’t know, but there’s something very wrong with it.”

The ensuing investigation culmin­ates in the discovery that ashes from a recklessly placed mosquito coil were inadvertently mixed into the sauce. Poison, indeed - and my lively outburst will earn me a clean batch of food and a distinctive moniker that will persist until the end of the mission.

It has been a long and gruelling fire season. Back at the helipad we commiserate with one another: giant bruises, open sores, sprained ankles and smashed fingers compete for attention, as jarring as the contrast between our tanned and weather-beaten faces and the pallid skin beneath our uniforms. Our evening game of hacky sack lacks its usual enthusiasm, and golf clubs, improvised from spruce sticks and duct tape, lie forgotten on the forest floor.

As we roll the firehoses into an assortment of melon-shaped balls to ready them for transport, our thoughts turn to post-season recovery plans. Many rangers will be returning to school, some will collect employment insurance over the winter, others will enter brand new occupations, but without exception, and without losing focus of the immediate mission, all are impatient for nature to release us from our seasonal contract. As daytime temperatures begin their gradual, steady descent, we realize that the end must be near.

In the shared silence, we know ourselves to be bonded to the land in the wildest of ways, privileged to witness the awesome unfolding of an elemental planetary cycle. Next year, come spring, we will yearn anew for the smell of smoke, for the crackling underfoot, for the embrace of the magnificent birthing forest, and we will return.

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“During the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, the phrase ‘Turtles & Teamsters, Together At Last’ jumped from protest sign to guiding philosophy. It symbolically described hundreds of thousands of Sierra Club activists (who dressed as sea turtles) and union members who marched to demand that human and environmental concerns be included in discussions of global free trade regimes. ‘Turtles & Teamsters’ also put a name to the increasingly common alliances between environmentalists and labor unions, which were no longer willing to accept that protecting the environment and jobs were mutually exclusive conditions.”

Jay McKinnon, LongBeachPolitics.org

Turtles and teamsters, together at last. Ten years after the anti-globalization movement shut down the World Trade Organization negotiations, that slogan, and the vision it embodied of trade unionists and environmentalists joining forces to halt neoliberal globalization in its tracks, continues to inspire activists in both camps. In the midst of the current global recession and a steadily worsening environmental situation, there are hopeful signs that, rather than retreating to their respective corners, trade unionists and environmentalists, particularly in the United States, are working more closely than ever to advance their common struggles.

The Blue Green Alliance, for example, was formed in 2006 by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, and now speaks for 8 million Americans when it lobbies for “good jobs, a clean environment and a green economy.” Environmental groups have thrown their support behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize, while unions are actively organizing in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, considered the most important piece of U.S. environmental legislation in years.

These signs of cross-movement solidarity are badly needed on both sides. Ten years after sea turtles and teamsters danced in the streets of Seattle, workers of all nations continue to be pitted against one another in a race-to-the-bottom scramble for jobs, and evidence continues to accumulate that humans are rapidly damaging the planet’s very ability to support life. As Robin Tennant-Wood argues in this issue, addressing the economic and environmental crises requires that we put our economies at the service of our communities and the environment, rather than the other way around.

Global problems require global solutions. If trade unionists and environmentalists in the Global North can make common cause with those, particularly those in the Global South, who bear the brunt of capitalism’s excesses, including slum dwellers, migrant workers, climate refugees, indigenous peoples, farmers and others, then we may witness in the coming years the formation of a global revolutionary subject capable of seizing the means of production and putting them to work for the planet, rather than against it.

Call it the planetariat: the proletarian revolutionary class of the 21st century, defined by its suffering at the hands of global capitalism and its demands for the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, health, work with dignity and a life in harmony with others and with the environment. It could be the planet’s last best hope. Whether it’s expressing itself in the efforts of American trade unionists to pass a climate change bill, in environmentalists lobbying for green-collar jobs, in First Nations blockades of mining and timber operations, in the food riots that rocked the cities of the Global South last year, in the self-organizing efforts of slum dwellers uncounted by any government or in farmers’ efforts to wrest control of the food system from transnational corporations, this nascent revolutionary subject, the planetariat, has already begun to plant the seeds of a new world in the cracked thoroughfares of the old.

Let us learn to recognize these seedlings when we see them, and nurture them towards maturity.

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Briarpatch: Any observations about the current state of the environmental movement?

Noam Chomsky: I don’t think there is an organized, centralized movement. There’s a general range of agreement, including from scientists, that the problem is extremely serious, and while there are a lot of uncertainties with regards to what could happen, there’s a consensus that the longer we wait, the greater the cost to future generations.

Some serious socio-economic changes have to be made. We’ve got this unsustainable way of life, particularly in the Western world, particularly in North America. The atomization of the population and the drive towards unwarranted consumerism and indebtedness have created very serious social, economic and cultural problems which have to be overcome. There are no structures around where people can integrate and begin to organize themselves; those have to be rebuilt anew. There are many people involved in environmental issues but they are very separate from one another. People in one corner of town don’t know what’s happening in the other corner, and that has to be overcome.

How do we bridge these divides?

There’s no magic key for that. It has been done in the past and has been very successful. How did the women’s movement develop? From very small groups that coalesced. Very small groups of women getting together changed the country enormously. Or the civil rights movement. Or the labour movement. These were really hard struggles for years, in the U.S. in particular.

It’s just a matter of hard work and dedication. And it’s really hard in this case because people are going to have to change their lifestyles. It doesn’t mean a worse lifestyle, just a different one - one that you’re not used to, that has to be recovered. In fact, in many ways, it’s a lifestyle that did exist but was destroyed.

How do we recreate it? The same ways it was done in the past. It doesn’t happen by itself. There are models in our own history and some right in front of us today. Latin America is the most exciting place in the world; major changes are taking place based on mass popular movements. Take Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America. If poor peasants can organize and take over the political system in Bolivia, then it’s ridiculous to say that we can’t here. They did it. We’re not doing it, so that’s our problem.

So what’s holding us back?

What’s holding us back is the last century of intense efforts to atomize people, to drive them towards the superficial things in life, like consumption. You have to fabricate consumers. You have to make people hate governments. The mentality that’s been fostered is that there is this alien force out there - the government - that’s stealing your hard-earned money.

The corporate sectors, despite their words, want a very powerful state that intervenes drastically in the economy and in their world, but for their own interest, not the public interest. They want you to hate the government because the parts of the government that the population wants are there for the people’s benefit. I think people understand this intuitively, which is how you get the finding that 80 per cent of people believe the country is run by “a few big interests looking out for themselves.”

But the isolation and atomization are such that people feel they can’t do anything about it. In fact, some of the statistics are startling: one third of the population thinks the Bush Administration blew up the World Trade Center, and there’s a whole movement trying to prove that. The interesting thing is that a large segment of the population thinks that the government is a huge gang of murderers trying to kill us and that we’re powerless to stop them.

You can’t call that desperation. It’s as if you’re living in a slave state and you’ve got a master you hate who is doing all kinds of horrible things to you, but you can’t do anything about it. That’s a very common feeling, and it’s been driven into people’s heads through huge propaganda efforts. After the Second World War, for example, all over the world, there was a wave of radical democracy. People really wanted the world changed and made more democratic. It was a result of the Depression and the war; those just got people thinking. What followed was a huge public relations offensive to drive this out of people’s heads; extraordinary efforts that have been pretty well studied. Part of it was getting people to hate government.

In 1954, there were two movies that came out. One was very famous, called On The Waterfront. It was about this ordinary, honest bloke played by Marlon Brando who stood up against the corrupt union bosses. At the end of the movie he throws the corrupt union boss into the water. Everyone cheers and so on. It’s a movie for the working man, but against the unions. That’s very important. If you look at Republican Party propaganda, they presented Bush as a working-class bloke. He became the guy that hung around the bar and he’s pictured on the side of the workers.

There was another movie done that same year, which was far better in every respect, called Salt of the Earth. It was about strikes in the mine which were led by workers. It was a very moving film. Well, you know which one was more popular. That’s typical of the way sophisticated propaganda works.

How do people break out of that?

The fact is that, individually, most people have. But that socialization is combined with a sense that it’s just me; I can’t do anything.

Go back to the days when organizations and movements had to be built from scratch. There’s never some shining leader who comes along and says, “I’m going to lead you out of the woods.” These things are built up by consciousness-raising groups. The antiwar movement in the 1960s was the same way: finally, it reached the tipping point and you got large-scale mass organizations. Why does Canada have a health-care system? It wasn’t given as a gift; it came from union activism.

So what sorts of actions can help take us to the next level?

I think small actions here and there and elsewhere are fine, but they have to coalesce.

Take the antiwar movement again. When I got started giving talks in the early 1960s, I was talking to small groups of people in somebody’s living room or maybe a church basement. Or we’d have to set up a meeting at the university with 20 different issues just to get people out to hear about the Vietnam War.

This is one thing they don’t teach you in school or write about in the papers; it’s too dangerous. People aren’t supposed to know what they can achieve, working together.

Could the environmental movement reach the same scale as the other movements you mentioned?

It could be a big movement, but things don’t happen by themselves. When a bunch of black kids sat at a lunch counter, you couldn’t tell what was going to happen, but in a few years you had a mass popular movement. Or take the women’s movement: just a few consciousness-raising groups, and pretty soon it was a mass popular movement.

The environmental movement is different because we don’t have to convince anyone of anything. They already agree. In these other movements, we had to convince people that their ideas were wrong, and their commitments were wrong, their way of life was wrong. But here, I think you already have a general agreement. They might not agree in the Wall Street Journal editorial offices, but who cares?

The hard part is always going from understanding among individuals and small groups to integration and focused action. That takes effort and commitment. It doesn’t happen by itself; there are no manuals.

So where is the hope in all of this?

Let me put it this way. You basically have two choices: you can give up hope, feel hopeless and therefore ensure that the worst is going to happen, or you can have hope, and then try to realize the hope, and then there’s a chance that things will improve.

Given those choices, it’s not a choice. You have hope, of course.

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By Brett Dolter
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009

A review of:

Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster
By Peter Victor
Edward Elgar, 2008

The world economic crisis has nations around the globe in panic mode, working feverishly to get their economies growing again. But as Peter Victor suggests in his book Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster, citizens of the richer nations may actually be better off if they stop trying to grow their economies.

This idea is anathema to the majority of politicians, and to the public. Most of us now implicitly agree that we should not take actions that are “bad for the economy, bad for competitiveness, bad for trade: that is, bad for growth.” Victor, however, argues that economic growth in the rich nations should not and cannot continue.

First, economic growth cannot continue indefinitely because we live on a finite planet. As Victor points out, the non-renewable energy resources that fuel our economy, like oil and natural gas, are limited and are being fast depleted. Our renewable resources are also being used up. Overfishing has caused drastic declines in almost every species of fish, habitat loss is causing species to go extinct at a rate one thousand times higher than historical levels, and forests are being lost from overharvesting. Economic growth depends on using more resources to produce more goods and services. Growth cannot continue if our resources run out.

Victor also reminds us that climate change can be directly tied to economic growth. The coal plants that fuel our growing electric grids, the gasoline that we use to transport increasing quantities of goods across the planet, and the natural gas we use to heat our ever bigger homes all release greenhouse gas emissions. Victor suggests that it will be very difficult to stop our greenhouse gas emissions from rising if we keep increasing the size of our economy.

Apart from making the case that growth cannot continue, Victor also questions whether more growth is actually desirable. Economic growth has failed to guarantee full employment and has failed to end poverty, even in the rich nations. The link between happiness and economic growth is also tenuous as more of us consume “defensively,” using our growing incomes to buy goods that are designed to increase or maintain our status, rather than buying goods designed to meet our needs.

This is not to say that all global citizens are in this position. Victor recognizes the need for economic growth to alleviate the grinding poverty in places like sub-Saharan Africa. However, Victor argues that growth in poor nations won’t occur if the rich nations keep using up all of the energy and material resources. As he writes, “the biophysical limits of the planet will prevent the kind of economic growth enjoyed by rich countries from being extended to all peoples of the world over the long term.” If we want to end poverty globally, the rich nations must stop growing their economies.

Victor’s book stands in contrast to books like The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, and B.M. Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. These authors believe that continued economic growth is both possible and desirable. They argue that technological progress will allow the human species to overcome any constraints to growth posed by scarce resources, scarce pollution sinks or the loss of healthy ecosystems. Victor cautions against this “blind faith” in the ability of technology to solve all of our problems. He points out that ideas can be considered technologies. The emerging idea that rich countries have outgrown the need for further growth may be precisely the technology that we need most.

Managing Without Growth offers a compelling argument for the need for a new policy focus in the rich nations. Peter Victor argues that it is time for our obsession with economic growth to end. A new focus on human well-being must replace our “more is better” philosophy. This new focus will be accompanied by policies like shortened work weeks, cap-and-trade systems for allocating resources and increased aid for poor nations. We have lived too long with “an unduly narrow interpretation of the meaning of progress.” We can act now to slow down our economy by design, not disaster.

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