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It is undoubtedly true that nature is
rude in tooth and claw, as the popular saying goes. But it is also true, as I
have discovered during my many dabblings in this subject over the years, that
it is incredibly beautiful. I am not talking of the sort of beauty with which one
might describe a woman. I have in mind something far deeper, a beautiful system
that left to itself is perfectly balanced between all its components, balanced
in such a way as to have established for every creature, whether animal or
vegetable, modifications and behaviours that are utterly dependent on other
aspects of the system.
When the Crees of northern
Quebec entered court in 1972 to challenge the decision of the Quebec government
to build in their traditional hunting and trapping lands a huge project
designed to produce electricity for southern markets, I discovered a fact that
I had not previously known: every piece of land or water, every so-called
ecosystem, at any given time is bearing
its maximum population of creatures.
This was evidently unknown
to the Premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, (although he had much more reason to
know it than did I, a mere journalistic observer), when, on April 29, 1971, he
announced the creation of the James Bay hydro-electric project in terms that
made it sound like the biggest thing since the Pyramids. He spoke of the great
rivers of northern Quebec --- the Rupert, the Eastmain, the La Grande, the
Great Whale and Little Great Whale --- as “wasting away” into the sea of James
and Hudson Bays, having evidently never heard of the dependence on these rivers
of the wide range of creatures that occupied the territory. Indeed, he spoke of
the land up there as if it were empty, unpopulated, which, since few white
people lived there, presumably he believed, ignoring the fact that his advisors
must have drawn to his attention, that the area had supported a permanent population
during all the thousands of years since the decline of the Ice Age, Cree and
Inuit indigenous hunters, who had
occupied every square inch of the country from which they had always drawn
their subsistence living.
He could hardly have known
that, as the witnesses for the plaintiffs established in court, when these great rivers
froze, and their waters diminished in volume, little lanes were established
under the ice along the shore that were vital to the existence of one of the
riverine species, the muskrat, that had become part of the diet and livelihood
of the indigenous inhabitants.
Similarly, when, towards
the end of the winter, the rivers begin to thaw, in the last days of their
thaw, the surviving ice, extending into the bay, is essential to the survival
of newly-spawned seal pups, who begin to
grow into adulthood by feeding themselves on these last remaining spurs of ice.
Interruptions of the river flows would be devastating to the survival of these
growing species, Judge Albert Malouf was told. One of the most revealing and
surprising days I ever remember in my life occurred when an Inuit called
James Watt, from Fort Chimo, as the town
of Kuujjuaq was then called, gave evidence in his own language for a whole day
about the likely effects of such riverine changes on the wildlife so necessary
to the lives of the hunters. When he had finished, the high-powered lawyers for
the $16 billion James Bay Development Corporation asked the judge for an
adjournment. When he queried their need, they said that the evidence they had
just heard was so technical that they did not know what questions to ask, and
needed at least an overnight pause for them to get up to speed. For me, this was a triumphant demonstration
that a person does not need to have attended a university to become a scientist.
To pick up again on the
question of forest fires that I have touched on in my previous Chronicles. One
of the most wonderful facts I learned from my dabbling in this subject
concerned the jackpine, one of the half- dozen most prominent trees of Canada’s
boreal forest, that stretches virtually across Canada from coast to coast. That forest fire has always been a natural
phenomenon in the Canadian forest is proven by the fact that jackpine (and
lodgepole pine, too, I believe, another stable of the boreal forest) have
adapted by what is called serotiny, to forest fires, by developing a seeding
mechanism of such tightly packed cones
that they will respond only to fire. In other words, a jackpine can stand in
the forest with its seeds for many years and will not open its seeds until they
are persuaded to open by the heat of a forest fire. To me there is something so
amazing about such an adaptation as to almost take one’s breath away. (For
those who are interested, serotiny is defined as “an ecological adaptation exhibited by some seed
plants, in which seed release occurs in response to an environmental trigger,
rather than spontaneously at seed maturation. The most common and best-studied
trigger is fire.”)
I have something of this
same wonder-struck attitude towards Nature every spring or autumn when I hear
the curious squawking of a fight of Canada geese flying over on its bi-yearly
migration. South of Ottawa on the St
Lawrence river is a major stopping over place for these birds, and it is
astonishing to see them, and to think that all this life has been going on,
being born, grown and died, independent of we humans. Mind you, I believe that
was not always true: another story told in the court room was that before the
war the population of Canada geese was so diminished by over-hunting, that a
group of interested scientists got involved, established the flight routes, and
worked to limit hunting along these routes and at those particular times of year,
with such spectacular results that nowadays many locations in Canada complain
about the birds stopping off in their parks and making an unholy mess of them.
For me, it is worth any amount of mess, just to see the flocks, as I used to do
every migration when they could be seen on Ottawa’s Experimental Farm in their
thousands.
I put all this knowledge I gathered
from the witnesses in that 1972 court case into a book I wrote called Strangers Devour the Land, a book
originally published by Alfred Knopf of New York in 1975, that has since been
re-published by at least three other publishers. I want to end this Chronicle
by quoting two paragraphs from that book:
“In these wondrous ways
does nature perform: the caribou munching away on the lichen that has attached
itself to the branches of dead and dying trees on the uplands; the moose
easting the young vegetation in the burnt areas or along the rivers; the lynx
preying on the little snowshoe hare (from which, when the fur around its hind
legs begins to turn brown, the Indians can tell that winter is gone and colder
weather will not return); the beaver creating its own permanent high water; the
muskrat burrowing around in tunnels under the shore ice; the birds eating
sedges and grasses, nesting under tender little spruce trees, building their nests
on well-protected points that nobody else needs; the wolf following the caribou
herds, culling the old and the feeble, maintaining in this way the strength and
vitality of the herd.
Even the falling leaves blown into the lakes by
the high winds, play their part in maintaining the infinite variety of life that
has adjusted itself to the wondrous rhythm of nature’s year.
“With this system the
people who govern us showed no concern of any kind. They knew only one fact,
and cared about no other: we needed electricity for our factories, homes,
offices, streets, refrigerators, televisions and hair dryers, and by fulfilling
this one need, they claimed, they would be improving the variety and quality of
life on his earth.”
Oh, yes, there’s no doubt
about it: there is much still to learn if we are not to destroy the elements on
which all life depends on this, our precious earth.
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