The Earth Can Sue

From the Globe & Mail July 23, 2009

“Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance,” The Boston Globe reports. “Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from Nestle Corp., which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water…[The town] tried something new – a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all the town’s natural assets with legal rights: ‘Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.’ It further decreed that any town resident had ’standing’ to seek relief for damages caused to nature – permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.”

Dump Site 41 in Tiny Township on Georgian Bay might consider this too.

See also, Michel Serres: The Natural Contract

nest video

done

nido/nest installation

Arbor Genesis

done

I found myself sitting in the basement archives of Ottawa U which is under the medical services building at Somerset E. and King Edward, in an attempt to get to know the site better, and as a response to Gruenewald’s questions: Who was here? What happened here? What needs to be conserved? What needs to be created? There are binders to consult in the archives that list possible contents of boxes going back about a hundred years. Not many listings have the word “environment” in them. “ecology” is not listed. I chose one box for the archivist to find for me; it was marked “Environment 1990″. On opening it I came face to face with the first file “SICK BUILDING SYNDROME” in block letters, a 20 page report on how putting ourselves in plastic envelopes within concrete boxes in order to reduce energy consumption is not the road to healthy environmental relationships.

The second thing I came across was this lovely invitation to a tree planting ceremony called Arbor Genesis: “Through the simple act of planting one tree on Convocation day, the 1990-91 Teacher Education graduates begin the creation of a small park of flowering trees for all to enjoy, beside Lamoureux Hall. Please plan on attending this special occasion with your family and friends.” and then there’s a quote from Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees: “But the transformation took place so gradually that it became part of the pattern without causing any astonishment”

We’ve decided to make a large nest in the tree, which I believe is this little flowering crab, with the left over plant matter from our garden. I’m told that “nido” is nest in Italian, and also means nursery school.  I like this idea of “place”, a first place we all started from.

As far as I can tell, this is the only flowering tree that was planted. What was to be the arbor was planted with maple trees all at the same time at a later date.

Resilience alliance

research on resilience in socio-ecological systems

Do corn, beans and squash as a companion planting which survives brutal construction zone conditions constitute a system with built in resiliences?

Chris Turner (p.37) author of “The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need” quotes Brian Walker of the Resilience Alliance: “With resilience …we kind of embrace uncertainty. And we try to say that the minute you get too certain, as if you know what the answer is, you’re likely to come unstuck. You need slack in the system. You need to have the messiness that enables self-organization in the system in ways that are not predictable. The best goal is to try to build a general resilience. Things like having strong connectivity, but also some modularity in the system so it’s not all highly connected everywhere. And lots of diversity”.

able 1 Spiral

August: Barb. Pat and I worked with clay, placing spirals around the garden. This visceral experience was fascinating… holding the clay facilitated a sense of wonder and appreciation for the growth of this garden… in spite of such adverse conditions, the garden continues to flourish… I am really moved by the resilience of these relatively small gardens surrounded by clattering and sputtering machines. I think it would make a wonderful metaphor for a children’s book… B’s project also reminds me of a children’s book I have been writing for some time. It is called The Spaghetti Garden and it is inspired by my friend who immigrated to Canada from Italy after the Second World War. She is an avid gardener and recounts stories describing the significance of her garden in her first years in Montreal. After9/11, she saw many parallels between how she was treated as an immigrant from a fascist society, and the emerging Islamaphobia at the time [of 9/11]. After watching the news, she would say to me: You have to remember that this was a time when most people in Montreal had never heard of spaghetti. Hearing her experiences as a young person in a new country made me think of her garden as a metaphor for resilience… and the resilience of the garden at Ottawa U reminds me of her stories.

photo essay, fruits

It was strange how the clay spiral returned as an unknowing contribution from the construction workers, in the form of a spiral of copper wire.

(the spacing between these photos is part of the wordpress program I can’t seem to clearly understand or edit for)

birdseed feedlot plot

done

construction site/inside

done

Apron/process/re-call

July 16

I was sewing the April 1 pocket onto my apron early this morning- always kind of wondering why I’m doing it. “It’s an act of faith”, is what flits through my mind. Like the thesis, I trust that someday it will get done too. And I realize that I have to trim the corner of the plastic pocket so that it becomes an irregular shape, no longer as squarish as the others. No longer formulaic. And all of a sudden there’ve become overlaps of pocket corner bubbles and embroidered dates overlayed, and it’s getting jumbled up– assuming its OWN shape and telling me what to do. I’m having a relationship with it. I have to leave an opening in the pocket I am finishing sewing in order to insert whatever it is I found at the time which is Mar. 27- and I wonder what it was? that I picked up back then? I think to myself, because I started sewing this plastic bubble a few weeks ago but got tired and only half finished it because I sewed several at that one time, so I’ve forgotten why I made it that size. It’s quite large in comparison to others, and I discover that what I collected was a lovely lichen stained piece of bark.

“Oh it’s so lovely”, I say to it, as I draw it out of the envelope and sew it into the pocket, and still glad I picked it up, still seeing it’s beauty, what drew me to it, and it’s claim on me. It’s   its’?   its…    Its—-   possessive form—- Its claim on me,  it possesses me,   and I remember, as it calls to my mind, our introduction; how I now receive it again, and our shared memory. It re-calls me, as I sew it into the apron.

Also, I notice how, because I have to turn and turn the apron around in order to sew around the plastic pockets, that these bits of flotsam that I’ve picked up, or that have picked me up, the natural substances at least- have started to fall into bits and deteriorate. The transitoriness of what I am doing is evident, that is except for the computer keys and other “man-made” [human-made] plastic substances, which will last forever.

And, getting to the point here- I think of David Jardine (“Unable to Return to the Gods that Made Them” in Under The Tough Old Stars, 2000) yet again, and how he tells it, that the so-called modern man-made materials and particularly “disposables”, are made specifically NOT to be cared about or loved. Neither can they return to the earth when their lifespan is over. I love my apron now, even as it sucks my time and energy, and I have the notion to get some pretty beads and sew them on all over the place. To make it beautiful and complex and “frivolous”. And I think we oughtn’t make things to last, but to be loved.