Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books

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The Year of No Summer
Rachel Lebowitz
Biblioasis

The Luminous Sea
Melissa Barbeau
Breakwater Books

The Rest Is Silence
Scott Fotheringham
Goose Lane Editions

Amphibian
Carla Gunn
Coach House Books

“Inspiration sometimes comes straight out of facts,” says Nova Scotia author Rachel Lebowitz in her Biblioasis interview for her linked lyric essay collection, The Year of No Summer. “I read about birds falling dead from the skies and I knew I had to write about that.” (The facts as I write this: oil tanker protesters are dangling from the Ironworkers Memorial bridge in Vancouver, the Rusty Patched Bumblebee is now an endangered species, and the headlines scream “Red Hot Planet: All-time heat records have been set all over the world.”)

Much environmentally themed creative literature arises from real-life events. The year following the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora on April 10, 1815, for instance, is what inspired Lebowitz’s collection. She weaves prose with direct quotations from historical documents, novels, poetry, myths and parables, and in doing so provides a darkly fascinating account of how people responded to global weather disruption, disease and famine. Whereas we may take amusement in apocalyptic films and movies, during this particular summer not so long ago, many believed the world was ending.

Along with “acts of God,” though, today’s writers have a broad array of human-caused environmental crises from which to choose. These, of course, have provided fodder for contemporary apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. The magnitude and complexity of environmental problems and conflicts loom large, and with the pace of destruction ramping up, writers can’t help but reflect this in their fiction.

Take, for example, plastic. There is a constant stream of news stories about the negative impacts of this impervious stuff. In the recent novel, The Luminous Sea, a story of a sea creature and the conflict over her fate (which can be read, I think, as an environmental allegory, with the sea creature emblematic of nature), Newfoundland author Melissa Barbeau draws our attention to the way plastic has changed the landscape:

“Broken bottles transformed into sea glass. Boats rotted into the grass, ropes disintegrated in the water. Now you have all this plastic everywhere and it’s getting harder and harder to disappear us…We’ve finally found the way to immortality, found a way to keep company with everything ancient down there, and it’s through trash.”

In The Rest is Silence, a 2012 novel by Nova Scotia author Scott Fotheringham, plastic is central. In the very near future scientists have discovered a bacterium that breaks it down and effectively recycles it—but these bacteria are released into the ecosystem with dramatic unintended consequences for humans.

And plastic inspired my own eco-novel, Amphibian. When my son was nine and biking along the trails near our home, he suddenly hit the brakes, jumped off his bike, hurled it aside and raced toward a plastic bag that was floating across the path. “Don’t people know sea turtles choke on this stuff?” he screamed, shaking the bag in his clenched fist.

Anxiety (do you see what I see?)

As you might expect with “crisis” fiction, anxiety is palpable. In The Rest is Silence, Benny experiences increasing frustration by what she sees as inaction on environmental issues. In The Luminous Sea, Vivienne is deeply disturbed by the callous treatment of the sentient sea creature her supervisors refer to as “the specimen.” And in Amphibian, nine-year-old Phin is overwhelmed by anxiety in response to the destruction of the natural world.

Although one reader told me that by page 30 she experienced so much anxiety that she hurled Amphibian at the wall (which struck me at the time as odd as I thought I had written a funny novel), if you’re among the one third of pre-teens who believes the Earth won’t be around by the time you’re an adult, crisis fiction may simply be imitating what you already know—and you find comfort in the knowledge that others know it too.

As Scott Fotheringham puts it, “Environmental fiction offers some solace to know that there are others out there who care about the world. Isn’t that one of the most beautiful things about fiction—that we get to not feel so alone?”

“He suddenly hit the brakes, jumped off his bike, hurled it aside and sprinted toward a plastic bag floating across the path. “Don’t people know sea turtles choke on this stuff?”

Despair (processing, processing)

In Amphibian Phin created stories to help make sense of and cope with dark realities. In The Year of No Summer Lebowitz highlights the parables, fables and myths we humans created to weave meaning into our lives and to

which we return for comfort. We need stories to help us process our experiences.

Dystopian environmental fiction, like The Rest is Silence, may be of particular importance to us collectively as it introduces scenarios that we can imagine (and may already have imagined) happening. Since we humans are horrible at responding to events that we perceive as far off in the distance, this sort of fiction elicits the sense of urgency that we need to feel before we act. Many environmental advocacy groups are aware of this and craft messages to overcome the problem of temporality.

In particular, I am reminded of a climate change public service announcement from about a decade ago: “Climate change? That won’t affect me,” says a man standing on railway tracks. Suddenly he steps off the tracks and his young daughter takes his place as a train comes hurtling toward her.

Moreover, although set in different times, The Year of No Summer and the Rest is Silence both prompt us to explore how people respond to a crisis that has already occurred or is in the process of occurring, and then to use these stories to project ourselves into the future. After relating the horror of the sinking of the ship, Medusa, in the summer of 1816 and what hunger incited the surviving crew members to do, Lebowitz muses about the future: “I’d like to think it takes thirty days, not two, for us to bite.”

For some, fiction with such severe themes may be too intense. For others, it helps them prepare psychologically for possibilities. I have a friend who may or may not have inherited a fatal disease. She has envisioned what the future may hold and has mentally worked through various options. This exercise has, to a certain extent, relieved some of the anxiety. For many, a sense of predictability—even when what’s predicted is horrific—is better than unpredictability.

Love (break it to me gently)

For some readers, however, more of a “Love not Loss” theme may be most palatable. In fact, in recent years some organizations, such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), advise that environmental organizations move away from fact-based campaigns that emphasize death and destruction and instead toward messages that draw attention to the beauty and value in our natural world. The idea is that we will want to protect what we love.

Deep love and respect for the natural world are reflected in many Atlantic Canadian works of fiction. Along with descriptions of seasons, flora and fauna—which pepper Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence—New Brunswick author Beth Powning’s beautiful prose springs to mind.

Whether the intention is to encourage a deeper affinity with our natural worlds, this perhaps is a consequence, especially if the prose evokes the reader’s own memories and love for natural areas.

When it comes to what dosage and intensity is best suited to which reader, the jury is still out. I’m reminded of a cartoon I show in my psychology classes when we talk about therapies and how there needs to be a level of “readiness” before clients can accept insights: Kermit the Frog is seated in his doctor’s office and is about to be shown an X-ray of his spine, revealing a human hand that extends right up to the base of his skull.

“Sit down,” says the doctor, “what I am about to tell you may come as a huge surprise.”

From US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Kingdom Collection, taken at the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea, by Ben Mierement

Heartless (I really don’t care, do u?)

Recently Rebecca Solnit, in a Literary Hub article titled “Not Caring is a Political Art Form,” argued that many of the crises we face—gun violence, climate change, agendas of the “alt right”—are all “exercises in not feeling and not connecting,” or what she calls the ideology of disconnection.

Many novels, including environmentally themed fiction, explore how injustice is facilitated by callousness. Some bring attention to how this enables the destructive corporate mindset of “progress” at any cost, which often involves the exploitation of “others”—whether those others be humans, animals or the natural environment. Lebowitz references multiple historical examples of cruelty in the Year Of No Summer, such as in the early rubber industry:

“You walk more than twenty miles to the European agents, who weigh the rubber. You are paid with a piece of cloth, a handful of beads, a few spoonfuls of salt. You skirt this spot here where Rene de Permetier has all his bushes and trees cut down around his house, so he can sit on the porch and use passerby as target practice.”

In The Luminous Sea, Vivienne’s supervisor warns her that her efforts to blow the whistle on an act that reflects an astounding callousness (that parallels the treatment of the sea creature pivotal to the story) will be futile:

“Telling anyone else about this will not make things better for you. Your story will be like one of those dolphins…This dolphin swam right into the beach where all those Spring Breakers were getting pissed, and someone spotted it and hauled it in and everyone had a picture with it, everyone got a selfie, and rubbed their tits on it, and the next thing they knew it was dead. Mauled to death.”

By focusing on injustice and the heartlessness that so frequently underlies it, environmental fiction can be emancipatory. It prompts us to examine both the individual and systemic variables at play and consider where we stand—and perhaps collectively emboldens us to take a stand.

Empathy (walk with me)

The poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “I learn by going where I have to go.” You can exchange “going” for “feeling” and it also holds true.

In contrast, psychology literature is full of examples of what people do when they can no longer consciously experience emotion: nothing. The Year of No Summer, The Luminous Sea, The Rest is Silence and Amphibian all evoke big doses of emotion: anger, sadness, curiosity, disappointment and joy, albeit in different proportions. One emotion they are all effective in eliciting, though, is empathy. And when it comes to environmental issues, this may be the most important of them all.

Researchers are attempting to tease out the relationship between fiction and empathy. In one experiment, participants read literary fiction, genre fiction, nonfiction or nothing, and only literary fiction had the effect of markedly increasing levels of empathy. Another study found that those who read fictional scenarios about an individual dramatically impacted by climate change spent more time afterward reading educational materials about climate change and voluntarily took this material home.

“We’ve finally found the way to immortality, found a way to keep company with everything ancient down there, and it’s through trash.” -Melissa Barbeau in The Luminous Sea

Action (a kick in the pants)

Does the empathy elicited by fiction inspire action on environmental issues? To attempt to answer this, let’s return to plastic.

Many of us know that straws and other plastic waste are negatively impacting wildlife. We’ve read the statistics—like how over 100 million marine animals die each year due to plastic debris. We know all of this but we don’t feel it. However, when a straw is lodged up sea turtle’s nostril and there’s a video documenting this poor creature’s plight, well, we’re suddenly mobilized.

Why? The simple explanation is the psychological finding that when something horrible impacts many lives we care less about it than when it affects few lives, but the deeper explanation may be that when something is personal and woven into a narrative, it engages our emotions and not just our minds. That individual sea turtle’s struggle makes it relatable (imagine a straw stuck up your dog’s nose, or your own) and children take up the cause.

In a similar, albeit more horrific vein, the image of the body of a little Syrian boy washed up on shore saw donations to the Swedish Red Cross jumped from $8,000 over a period of months to $430,000 in just a few weeks.

One of the powers of fiction is that, like real-life stories, it draws us into a personal narrative. Stories engage the heart and this is key to motivating us to act. Although it’s anecdotal, readers of Amphibian wrote to tell me that Phin’s struggle changed the way they viewed animals and that this was in turn influencing their product choices.

I am reminded of a parable: a starfish is washed up on shore and a young boy throws it back into the ocean. An old man scoffs, “But there are thousands of dying starfish, what difference does it make?”

The boy replies, “It made a difference to that one.”

California Clear-cutting photo by Tomas Sennett, US Environmental Protection Agency

Hope (storying a way forward)

In order to act, people need to feel that what they do will have an impact. But when the scale of disaster looms large, we feel helpless and are often thus paralyzed. “What’s the point?” we think.

We may look to God for meaning and direction, or to those we believe have more knowledge than we do. “If there is wisdom, it’s nothing I know. It’s all just birds and storms and hauntings. We look behind and scoff, as if those ahead weren’t doing the same,” writes Lebowitz.

These days we turn to science and government for reassurance that something effective can and will be done. But when these institutions fail to give us the reassurance we seek, we end up feeling frustrated and disillusioned. This is what happens to Bennie in The Rest is Silence: “What was needed was rapid planetary triage. Throwing a spanner in the gears was the obvious means of disabling the machine that continued to spew all over the planet.”

How do we collectively overcome feelings of futility? That’s an open question. Recently, however, I came across an exciting project funded by The Trudeau Foundation called Storying Climate Change. Headed by York University professor Catriona Sandilands, the goal of this project is for writers, artists, activists and academics to work together and produce a collection of stories that the group can use as a vehicle to engage the public and start meaningful conversations.

In this collection, I anticipate that we will see protagonists who choose to act and for whom these actions have consequences that are positive and affirming. Turning pessimism into optimism is not a one-dose cure, but the more we are exposed to these stories, the more they will seep into our collective consciousness, perhaps inspiring us to respond to the very real threats facing us.

Adaptation (“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything” -George Bernard Shaw)

We hear a lot these days about physical adaptation to climate change, like using scarce water resources more efficiently, but I would argue that psychological adaptation is just as important. This sort of adaptation takes many forms and can be fostered through reading environmentally themed fiction in all its variety.

We relate to the anxiety and frustration experienced by Benny in The Rest is Silence and we feel not so alone. We witness Vivienne in The Luminous Sea respond to injustice and we are prompted to consider how individual acts are important. Through reading fiction like The Year of No Summer, we come to a deeper understanding that both continuity and transformation are imbedded in the human experience, and in doing so we ourselves are transformed.

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Hope Blooms youth. Image courtesy of Hope Blooms and Nimbus Publishing.

Hope Blooms
Hope Blooms/Arlene Dickinson
Nimbus Publishing

 

Be Prepared!
Frankie MacDonald and Sarah Sawler
Nimbus Publishing

 

My River
Anne Laurel Carter
Formac Publishing

 

Mamadou Wade is fond of this particular quotation, attributed to ground-breaking thinker and computer scientist Alan Turing. As a long-time member of Hope Blooms, a youth-led community project growing vegetables and herbs and producing their own line of popular salad dressings, Wade is getting accustomed to “achieving things people don’t really imagine you achieving.”

“I feel like that resonates with us,” says Wade, “because from the outside looking in you see the stigmas, you see the stereotypes of inner-city kids. But we’re really achieving great things.”

Back in 2013, Wade was on a team of young kids from Hope Blooms who presented on CBC’s reality investor series, Dragon’s Den. After going in asking for a $10,000 investment to help meet the growing demand for their home-grown herb salad dressings, the Hope Blooms kids brought tears to the eyes of several Dragons and went home with four contributions of $10,000 each.

The story that moved the Dragons to tears (and to ponying up financial support) is told in Hope Blooms: Plant a Seed, Harvest a Dream. It is one of three new books—the others are about an autistic weather aficionado and an 11-year-old citizen scientist—that, on the surface, tell vastly different stories. But they all hone in on some basic principles that drive their subjects—all of them under 40—who “no one can imagine anything of.” They have all achieved book-worthy success and they are all, each in their own ways, are changing and inspiring the world in the process.

The Garden Tycoons

The Hope Blooms story goes back to 2008, when nutritionist Jessie Jollymore brought together nine children and youth living near an abandoned community garden in Halifax’s North End. Together, they grew enough fresh ingredients to produce 150 jars of homemade salsa. The “Salsamania” crew sold the lot, then voted to donate the proceeds to a local women’s shelter. The seeds of Hope Blooms were sown.

Ten years later there are more than 50 Hope Blooms youth, ranging in age from five to 18 years old, growing over 4,000 pounds of produce annually. The group has a bustling commercial kitchen and storefront, a solar-powered greenhouse growing herbs year-round and an ever-evolving garden space, which has become a focal point of the local community. Hope Blooms dressings are now available in major grocery stores and, in addition to funding local charities, they have created the Hope Blooms scholarship fund, currently helping four garden alumni cover their post-secondary education costs. Mamadou Wade was the first scholarship recipient in 2016, and attends the University of Toronto focussing on business and technology.

Wade recalls first joining the group when he was 11. “Some of my peers would go to the Hope Blooms garden, and I was kind of curious,” recalls Wade, admitting that the gardening was not what won him over. “I like gardening but I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s my main passion. The business side of things really attracted me—going to the Seaport market every Saturday selling the dressings.

“I still garden occasionally,” he admits with a smile.

 

Photo by Nicola Davison, Snickerdoodle Photography

In the spirit of a youth-led organization, the children and youth take ownership over what Hope Blooms does, says Wade. “Salad dressing is obviously our staple product, but there’s also other things we do. We’re starting a tea business, which is completely youth-led. And we have a lemonade business. Going on Dragon’s Den, that was our idea that we put forward,” he recalls. “We really were into it. We would come in after school and just really put in the necessary work. We took ownership and we took pride in that. It wasn’t just about getting the money, it was about making our community proud.”

After ten years, Hope Blooms has become a self-sustaining community engine of positive impacts, with older participants and “alumni” like Wade mentoring the younger gardeners and budding social entrepreneurs. And that, according to Wade, is the real payoff. “Starting off as kids, and growing into young men and women who are going to eventually change the world… that’s kind of the end goal.”

The Citizen Scientist

It’s a goal Stella Bowles can relate to. In Grade 6, at age 11 going-on 12, Bowles became a household name in Nova Scotia. Her science-fair project documenting the dangerously high enterococci bacteria levels in the LaHave River put the adult stewards of her community to shame, and kick started a process that will, eventually, put an end to more than 600 illegal “straight pipes” that have been flushing raw sewage directly into the river for generations.

Like Mamadou Wade, Bowles is taking her personal success and parlaying it into helping other young people. Using awards, grants and donations, and in partnership with the conservation group Coastal Action, Bowles has put together kits and training sessions to make it possible for other young people and citizen scientists to measure pollution levels in their own local waterways. And she’s also become a strong advocate for better science education, calling for more hands-on experience and inquiry-based learning in schools.

The story of how Bowles got where she is today—a savvy, determined 14-year-old who may end up seeing the demise of straight pipes throughout Nova Scotia—is told in My River: Cleaning up the LaHave River, co-authored by Anne Laurel Carter.

It all started with a conversation around her kitchen table. As her parents discussed the prospect of replacing their septic system, it came up that not all properties along the river actually had septic systems. “And Mom explained what a straight pipe was and my jaw dropped. I had no words,” recalls Bowles.

Bowles had questions. Her parents decided to help her find the answers. Through Coastal Action, Bowles met her first mentor outside her family, Dr. David Maxwell, who had been testing the LaHave for two years and was finding unsafe levels of fecal contamination. Bowles was shocked and concerned, especially for the people swimming and boating in the river, including her father and brother. Even today, says Bowles, “I see people swimming in the water and I’m like, ‘oh, I wonder if they know.’”

Before taking on any testing herself, Bowles decided to start getting the word out. She put up her first now-famous sign facing the road on her property: “This river is contaminated with fecal bacteria.”

Photo by Andrea Conrad, courtesy of Formac Publishing

Almost two years later, after her science project had gained boatloads of media attention and garnered her a silver medal at the Canada-wide Science Fair in Regina, the government funding needed to put an end to straight pipes had still not come through. So Bowles put up a second sign: “600+ homes flush their toilets directly into this river.”

“It was to the point, it was simple, and everybody understood it,” says Bowles. In addition to learning the rudiments of controlled experiments and the importance of valid scientific results, Bowles had learned the value of simple, clear messages when communicating to the public at large. She had also learned that to provoke change in the adult world, you need to keep up the pressure.

After federal funding was approved and the demise of straight pipes in the LaHave seemed imminent, a call came in from the municipal government to ask if Bowles would consider taking down her discomforting sign. She agreed to, but only after the first hole was dug to replace a straight pipe with a proper septic system.

Bowles’ youth has had its disadvantages. Though no one challenged her in person, Bowles has heard people discrediting her work, “because you’re a kid.”

Luckily, she has had mentors showing her how to do the science right, her parents and Dr. David Maxwell, as well as other local scientists. She was even invited to Acadia University to perform further tests to confirm that what she had been counting were actually enterococci. (They were.)

At other times, her youth has proven advantageous. “The fact that I was a little kid, kind of shaming the adults, was creating a lot of talk in the community,” says Bowles. “‘Hey, look at what this kid did for a project. Why hasn’t anybody else done this?’ There was a lot of upset people, not because of me, but because this is happening and nobody was really doing anything.”

To date, about ten straight pipes have been replaced along the LaHave. More are underway. The full project is expected to take about five years.

“I’m really, really happy with the progress,” says Bowles. “It’s crazy to see that a little project sparked so much change. Being a kid doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. You can make a difference. Your age is just a number.”

Bowles found strength not only in science but also in effective communication. For that, she didn’t just rely on roadside signs. She also made good use of social media.

“Posts went so far,” says Bowles. “Social media can be used for good. It doesn’t have to be always negative. Without Facebook I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with this project.”

The YouTube Weatherman

The support of mentors and the ever-growing online world has presented opportunities for another young Nova Scotian, too.

You may know Frankie MacDonald from his videos on YouTube, where he reports the weather forecast with a gusto that has won him fans across the globe. He also creates popular comedy clips such as “Guy Tries to Eat 50 Hot Dogs at Once,” which has garnered more than 1.2 million views.

In Be Prepared: The Frankie MacDonald Guide to Life, the Weather, and Everything, author Sarah Sawler teams up with MacDonald to give a glimpse behind the videos and tell the story of how MacDonald’s interest in technology and weather eventually led him to carve out a dream job for himself.

In Be Prepared, we learn of MacDonald’s early life, growing up with autism in Sydney, Cape Breton. We learn of the people in his life who helped him learn to connect with others and encouraged him to pursue his interests. We learn of his passion for weather, rooted in his early childhood watching the weather channel, and later chasing the odd storm with his father. And we learn that concern for people is at the core of his dedication to weather forecasting.

Frankie MacDonald, photo courtesy of Nimbus Publishing

“I warn people to get them ready for bad weather,” says MacDonald, with advice ranging from “get your flashlights” to “order your pizza, order your Chinese food.” And always, “take care, be prepared.”

Of course, MacDonald has had his run-ins with the darker side of humans so prevalent on the internet. He shut down his first YouTube channel in 2010 after too many negative comments. But his current channel is going strong, with more than 175,000 subscribers and pages of positive comments. MacDonald says when things get nasty, there’s only one thing to do:

“Ignore all the trolls. Ignore bullies. Ignore negative comments,” says MacDonald. “Those guys will be banned from YouTube sooner or later.”

On Twitter, where MacDonald maintains an active presence as @frankiemacd, Frankie Defence Teams have sprung up to help maintain the positivity and shut down the bullying.

MacDonald’s new book (replete with weather facts from around the world) and his new line of action figures (sporting hoodies emblazoned with “Frankie Says Be Prepared!”) are his current projects, but otherwise MacDonald is focussed on producing more videos, continuing to care for people by warning them of bad weather in the making and continuing to make them laugh with his comedy skits.

Your age is a number. Ignore the bullies. Seek out the right mentors. Put in the necessary work. Make your community proud.

It’s almost as if the kids of Hope Blooms, Stella Bowles and Frankie MacDonald were all following the same recipe for success, each in their own unique way.

It’s lucky for us they are, because someone has to have the guts, the creativity and the fortitude to “do the things no one can imagine.”

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Africville residents were moved using City of Halifax dump trucks. Ted Grant – Library and Archives Canada.

Now hailed as a vibrant artists colony, Salt Spring Island, BC counts as its first permanent residents a group of free Blacks from California who settled the landscape in the late 1850s. Street signs bearing names such as Starks Road and Whims Road honour the island’s early Black families. Indeed, the enclave of about 10,000 continues to attract an eclectic coterie of people of African descent. For about a decade, I was among the Black folk who called Salt Spring home.

One day during a visit to the Salt Spring library, I was drawn to a book titled The Spirit of Africville. I’d previously read about the “velvet touch” Canadian racism that had facilitated the razing of Africville and other close-knit African-Canadian communities such as Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver (the 1997 film Rosewood showcases the more “rigorous” tactics utilized in the US, where I was born).

But I was stunned to discover that Halifax officials, in the purported guise of being “helpful,” had dispatched municipal dump trucks to relocate many residents of Africville to new homes. Founded in the 1840s by William Brown and William Arnold, two Black men who’d purchased land abutting the Bedford Basin, Africville housed about 80 families when it was demolished in the 1960s.

Published in 2010 (by the Africville Genealogical Society and Formac Publishing), here’s a passage from The Spirit of Africville: “Just think what the neighbours thought when they looked out and saw a garbage truck drive up and unload the furniture.”

Juxtaposed against the history of Blacks on Salt Spring Island (admittedly not without its tensions), the humiliation of the Haligonian maneuver left me speechless. I can only imagine the anger and sorrow of African Nova Scotians freighted with memories of forebears who’d been hauled like trash.

In Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax, author Ted Rutland chronicles the machinations that have led to the degradation of the longest-standing community of Blacks in Canada; a group that, in the absence of government-sanctioned oppression, might have emerged as the archetype of Black achievement in North America.

A made-in-Nova-Scotia Barack Obama? Damn skippy it could-a happened. But no…

“More than any other Canadian city, Halifax is widely known for a particular example of anti-Black urban planning,” Rutland writes. “Africville is important because of…what happened to the people there, but also because of the broader structure of power that it symbolizes; the centuries-long neglect, plunder and subjugation of Black people in Halifax and across Nova Scotia by the state (in general) and planning (in particular).”

Readers familiar with the Pentagon Papers and its revelations about the deliberate US escalation of the Vietnam War will find resonance in Rutland’s bombshell narrative about Halifax. A faculty member in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, the self-described “white man from Northern Ontario” outlines his objectives in the text that spans from about 1890 to 2010.

“The story of Africville helped to expose my own ignorance about Canadian racism and the role of racism in shaping (advantageously) the circumstances of my own life,” writes Rutland, who completed graduate studies at Dalhousie University. He notes that his sojourn in the city awakened him to “forms of political and spatial segregation” that stand as the hallmark of the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), adding that all whites profit from the pervasive anti-Black (and Indigenous) sentiments in “Canada’s Ocean Playground.”

The author continues: “For a white person…the injustices…are inscribed not just in unjustly higher levels of white wealth or unjustly better white housing conditions but in the very make-up of our bodies and experiences of the world. It is important…to acknowledge…the intimate privileges provided to white people in contexts produced and organized by anti-Black urban planning.”

Bob Brooks/Nova Scotia Archives

Those inclined to dismiss Rutland’s volume as Kumbaya pandering should check the data upon which he builds his account of the disempowerment of Blacks whose presence in Nova Scotia dates to the early 1600s. In addition to his analysis of myriad works on Africville, the author mines documents from the archives of the Halifax planning department, minutes and reports of Halifax City Council, the records of the Nova Scotia land registry and the records of numerous civic groups such as the Halifax Council of Women (HCW), to name a few.

Having expressed his need for a definition of “institutional racism,” Halifax chief of police Jean-Michel Blais (aka “Street Checks R Us”) might consider Rutland’s 68 pages of source notes. There he’ll find, among other educational aids, a citation related to a 1916 HCW meeting at which members discussed city-owned and operated free-lunch counters where segregation was strictly enforced. Translation: Hungry Blacks were forbidden to step inside, let alone enjoy a sandwich.

“One member suggested that the policy should be opposed,” Rutland writes, referencing minutes from the HCW meeting. “But another argued that segregation was not the same as ‘discrimination,’ and the matter was dropped.”

Fast forward and readers will find Rutland’s citation from a Halifax Regional Municipality Planning Strategy document (circa 2005) that detailed a proposed housing development (think: white) near the historically Black communities of North Preston, Lake Loon, Cherry Brook and East Preston.

“In addition to plotting the location of new homes, the planning process sought to determine the ideal distribution of future investments in municipal services and infrastructure,” Rutland writes. Citing HRM planning department records, Rutland notes that residents of East Preston expressed their interest in better water services, bus transportation, the installation of sidewalks, functioning streetlights and the construction of new community and recreation facilities.

“These requests were universally spurned by city planners,” Rutland notes.

Hired in 2014, former Halifax chief city planner Bob Bjerke was fired (without warning), last August. Reading passages from Displacing Blackness one can’t help but wonder if Bjerke envisioned a planning process that valued the voices of African Nova Scotians likely wary of development projects (hatched before his arrival) that are steadily pushing them out of the city’s North End and outlying rural areas to which they’ve been relegated (apartheid-style) for generations.

“I had no plans to leave,” Bjerke noted in a media report after he was sacked.

“I am not disappointed,” said Halifax city councillor Matt Whitman about Bjerke’s sudden dismissal. Whitman’s offensive remarks about people of colour and his tacit support of pro-white groups (retweeting a letter from a white nationalist organization last February, for example) have been well publicized.

In addition to the racist bent of many politicians, Rutland faults the city’s clergy, health officials, legal experts, educators and media for proffering damning stereotypes about Blacks. He cites an 1850s era editorial in the Halifax Morning Post that decried African Nova Scotians as an “unproductive and destitute” group best suited for slavery. The Provincial Magazine chimed in: “We have no hesitation in pronouncing [African Nova Scotians] far inferior in morality, intelligence, and cleanliness, to the very lowest among the white population.”

The relentless disparagement of Blacks played out in the process that culminated in the annihilation of Africville. As evidenced by the author’s documentation, the community had, since its inception, routinely pressed Halifax officials (all-white) for better living conditions. Instead, “The most undesirable and noxious facilities in the city had a tendency to be sited on Africville’s doorstep,” Rutland notes. They included: a dump, a tar factory, a slaughterhouse, a fecal waste pit, a prison and an infectious diseases hospital. The predictable outcome? Fetid air, contaminated water and battalions of rats.

Children play around City of Halifax pump in Africville. Library and Archives Canada.

After more than a century of deliberate abuse and neglect, Halifax city planners condemned, as a “slum,” the enclave they’d helped to create. In doing so, they eviscerated a self-sustaining (albeit beleaguered) Black community that remains under siege. Promises of job training, legal aid, educational programs and financial support for displaced residents of the blueberry-laden landscape never came to full fruition.

And yet, about Africville, the white owner of a prominent “eco-friendly” Halifax enterprise recently declared, in a private conversation: “I don’t know why the Blacks here just can’t get over it.”

Whites inclined to lament the so-called carping of African Nova Scotians are well advised to check their attitude—especially those who’ve now set up shop in previously shunned, as “dangerous,” areas of the city. I’ll put it this way: Who’s zoomin’ who?

Rutland’s chapter on the Black United Front (BUF) offers an overview of the Halifax advocacy group that formed in the aftermath of the destruction of Africville. Among others, the author salutes future attorney Burnley “Rocky” Jones (1941-2013) for promoting a platform of Black self-determination that, ironically, was later undermined by the organization’s dependence on government funding.

Rutland also ventures that an informant with probable ties to the FBI and RCMP infiltrated the BUF and fuelled fears about “Black activism and violence.” By 1996, BUF had effectively disbanded.

Readers will find a noteworthy companion to Displacing Blackness in There’s Something In the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities. The text by Dalhousie University School of Nursing professor Ingrid Waldron (who is African-Canadian) offers strategies to combat the polluting and poisoning industries (dumps, pulp mills, sewage “treatment” plants, pipelines, et cetera) routinely found within spitting distance of minority populations throughout Canada.

Crafted with a pointed emphasis on Nova Scotia, the book is an outgrowth of Waldron’s efforts as director of the Halifax-based Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health (ENRICH) Project. In the opening pages, Waldron reveals that she launched ENRICH in 2012 after a white social and environmental activist, Dave Ron, contacted her about a campaign to remove a landfill near the African Nova Scotian community of Lincolnville.

Among the province’s early Black settlements, Lincolnville takes its name from President Abraham Lincoln, whose 1863 Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in the US. In an ironic twist, Lincolnville was home to the last segregated educational institution in Nova Scotia—the Mary Cornish School. It was not shuttered until 1983.

“As a professor whose scholarship had focused mainly on the health and mental health impacts of race, gender, and class inequalities…environmental racism had simply never caught my attention,” Waldron writes. “…Was this truly a problem in Canada as well [as in the US], I wondered?”

The book chronicles Waldron’s coming to consciousness on the topic and her collaboration, as an academic, with grassroots organizations in Lincolnville and other historically Black and Indigenous communities such as Pictou Landing First Nation, Lucasville, Eskasoni First Nation in Cape Breton, Acadia First Nation Reserve in Yarmouth, the Prestons (East and North) and areas of Shelburne.

The author writes: “One of the most important lessons I have learned…is that engaging marginalized communities requires a shift in thinking about…power, privilege, and equity. …Considerations about how researchers can work with rather than for or on behalf of communities must be premised on organic, trusting, collaborative, reciprocal, and equitable relationships. …This involves recognizing and respecting community members as experts in their own lives…at every stage of the research process.”

To that end, ENRICH facilitated (then and now) the participation of local residents in initiatives aimed to improve the air, water, sanitation and overall daily living conditions of groups traditionally ignored by corporate and government power brokers. In doing so, the project challenged myths about purported Black and First Nations “imperviousness” to physical, psychological and emotional pain.

“The reality is that both [groups] are more vulnerable than are other communities to illness and disease associated with their greater exposure to environmental risks,” Waldron notes.

And here, the author offers the reflections of a Mi’kmaw Elder on the reluctance of dominant cultures to honour Indigenous traditions of knowledge: “My greatest challenge…is to convince white people that [First Nations] not only have something to say, but to kind of raise a question in which [white people] ask themselves, ‘What am I doing?’ Because everything I do onto her, our Mother Earth, I do unto myself.”

There’s Something In The Water also breaks important ground in its discussion of the ways in which oppressed groups can internalize negative stereotypes about their own cultures and histories. “Resistance calls for a deep engagement with how colonization has impacted the minds of colonized people,” Waldron writes, noting the need for marginalized communities to believe in their inherent ability to survive experiences of “being burned, mistreated, exploited and ultimately abandoned” by outside “experts.”

The “ground up” ENRICH approach has led to successes such as the implementation of a water monitoring project in Lincolnville conducted by African Nova Scotian residents of the community. The initiative had three objectives: “To determine if there was contaminated water flowing in the direction of [residents] from the landfill site, to build the community’s capacity to test their own water, and to provide community members with basic knowledge about contaminants and groundwater sampling. …Members also reviewed reports and other literature on…hydroecology, and bedrock geology, as well as facility siting regulations…and maps created by government.”

ENRICH map of siting of toxic industries in relation to African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaq communities. Available at enrichproject.org.

Confronting both internal and external doubts about their competency, Lincolnville residents got their science on. In short, they moved from being victims of environmental policies that threatened their well being to informed “citizen scientists” brimming with self-worth.

Presented as a series of case studies, Something in the Water stands as a valuable resource for scholars and social activists (of all stripes) hoping to foster and sustain measurable social change.

“Environmental racism is about the way our systems, our laws and policies uphold white supremacist ideologies,” Waldron has noted in media reports about ENRICH.  “…We put the dump in a community because that community doesn’t matter. Many people may not want to admit…this, …and they may not even know it, it is so deeply embedded in their psyche.”

As for everyday relevance, the last I checked, the Canadian Football League was chockablock with players of African descent. Nova Scotia government and private investors now lobbying to lure a CFL team to Halifax should note that Displacing Blackness and There’s Something in the Water underscore the province’s “reputational risk” (as one HRM report put it) on race matters—the recent drop kick of the city’s infamous Cornwallis statue notwithstanding.

Indeed, throughout my reading of these two volumes, “Somewhere” by Aretha Franklin wafted through my head. Less known than her smash hit “Respect,” Franklin’s gospel-infused rendition of the song from West Side Story gives new meaning to the lyrics crafted by Stephen Sondheim in 1957:

 

There’s a place for us
Somewhere a place for us
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us, somewhere.  

Set against the plight of Black and Indigenous people as detailed by Ted Rutland and Ingrid Waldron, readers will find a poignant pathos in Franklin’s haunting interpretation of the tune.

Somehow/Someday/Somewhere!

by

The Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility photographed by journalist Miles Howe for the Halifax Media Co-op

Reading Joan Baxter’s The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest, the story of the infamous Abercrombie pulp mill in Pictou County, is shocking and upsetting. I can’t say what hits hardest. Perhaps it’s the desperate giveaway of Nova Scotia’s forests to foreign corporations with decades-long leases at bargain bin prices. Or it could be the obviously high-risk, careless decision to pump a healthy tidal estuary full of millions of litres of chemical effluent in hopes that nature would somehow clean it up. Or maybe it’s the deception and strong arming involved in getting the Pictou Landing First Nation to allow just that to happen in their own backyard, almost instantly decimating the waters its residents relied on for food and recreation.

Nova Scotia’s long-standing relationship with pulp and paper companies has resulted in clear cuts such as this one, photographed by author Jamie Simpson.

Any one of those aspects of this story is jaw dropping and agonizing to read about, but the straw that breaks the camel’s back is simply this: It’s been going on for over 50 years and it’s still going on today.

There’s little in Baxter’s friendly, highly readable account of the Pictou County pulp mill that is not still happening today, be it short-sighted forest management, lack of mill oversight, pricey government payouts to corporations or broken promises to clean up and restore Boat Harbour, the Pictou Landing First Nation’s beleaguered tidal estuary.

Through Baxter we hear from Pictou Landing Elders and activists and a multi-generational group of other Pictou community residents and activists. Many acknowledge that the mill has brought badly needed jobs to Pictou. But most question the price that was paid for those jobs.

The Mill is a valuable document of Nova Scotia history that connects directly to our present day. As I read it, I couldn’t help thinking that it should make its way into high school curricula. As Elizabeth May writes in her foreword:

“More people need to understand the political deals that brought this mill into being and protect it still. Can nothing change the political culture of Nova Scotia to protect its citizens?”

Of course the political culture of investment in and under-regulation of resource-extractive industries is not Nova Scotia’s exclusive domain. It’s a pan-Canadian political culture, one that in Alberta has seen public institutions penetrated by the oil industry to such an extent that they have formed what Kevin Taft describes as a “deep state.”

As a former Liberal MLA from Alberta, Taft has an insider perspective on the workings of political culture, which gives the stories in Oil’s Deep State: How the petroleum industry undermines democracy and stops action on global warming–in Alberta, and in Ottawa a sort of fly-on-the-wall quality. In Taft’s experience as a politician he’s been privy to conversations that might raise the hair on the back of your neck. (One particular threat from a “senior energy industry official” in 2007 stands out. Taft recalls being told, “We can do things you’ll never know. You won’t even know what hit you.”)

In Oil’s Deep State, Taft tells the story of the Alberta government’s journey from hard bargainers walking away from negotiations with Syncrude in 1973 over the first oil sands project (and later signing a deal with a 50 percent royalty on net profits and a 5 percent stake in the project) to the 1990s regime, which enacted policies written by oil-industry groups, offering open season on the oil sands and allowing firms to repay all their capital investments before paying just 25 percent in royalties. It’s a stunning turnaround of political philosophy and it all happened inside the same party, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives.

What accounts for such a dramatic reversal is the basis of Taft’s deep-state theory. He describes how corporations like Suncor, Imperial Oil and Enbridge threw money into political campaigns and created well-funded pro-industry groups like the Energy Policy Institute of Canada and the Canada School of Energy and Environment (housed within the University of Alberta), through which they were able to dominate the discussion around how to manage Alberta’s oil sands, and the province’s role in contributing to climate change.

Oil’s Deep State and The Mill tell similar stories–the hobbling of our democratic institutions by corporations whose profit margins are directly linked to their ability to control our natural resources. They are cautionary tales of what happens when the fox ends up running the henhouse.

Read ‘em and weep.