Down the endless spiraling road

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Three jets streaked over the busy divided expressway in perfect formation. I looked up through the windshield of maybe the biggest pickup ever, a one-ton Dodge dually with a six-speed transmission, twin exhaust stacks and a big Cummins diesel. “How’s this for fossil fuel conservation?” I thought.

We were on vacation and the vehicle in question is my brother-in-law’s rig, which he’d bought for his logging business. He’d lent it to me to go downtown to visit some friends. I looked up at the visor and noticed that the electronic mileage calculator was reading 18.5 miles per gallon or about 12.5 liters per 100 km. I was a bit surprised. My old ’02 Dodge pickup could average only 16 miles per gallon, and that’s when I feathered the pedal.

I’m obviously conflicted about road trips these days but there’s no escaping the fact that everything runs on fossil fuel. I’ve decided to sit back and enjoy the ride for a while.

The trip up to our old hometown was a 30-hour drive, which we did straight through, switching drivers. Among my favourite parts of the country are the farms along the St. Lawrence, some fields around Earlton and the big pine forests of Temagami, all of which we got to see in daylight under huge skies.

The city has changed a bit over the six years we’ve been away. Nothing stays the same. Some big old buildings have been demolished leaving big holes. New box stores keep popping up like giant concrete and glass mushrooms. It’s like most cities across the continent. But the overall effect is extreme impermanence. The old stuff seemed to be decaying from lack of pride and maintenance, and the new stuff seemed completely temporary, as if designed for a five-year lifespan. Which is perhaps close to the truth given the churn of business starts and failures these days.

Lake Superior is still spectacular, and I was told by friends that housing prices along the waterfront are higher than ever. We were sitting in front of one of the most famous restaurants in Canada, the Hoito. It’s an old Finnish hotel with a workers’ eatery in the basement. The place is so popular that there are lineups out into the street for hours. We jumped the line to sit at the snack bar and ordered a couple of karjalan pirikkas with egg salad. A pirikka is a weird rice- and butter-filled rye flour moccasin about the size of your hand. The egg salad, tomato slice and pickle add a bit of zip.

The oddest thing about these road trips is all the television. We don’t have TV at home. But when we visit there’s always a TV set flickering away in the background. I admit to being addicted. So I catch up on years of missed programming in a day or two, everything from Mad Men to old Seinfeld shows. I watch so much it makes me a bit sick, especially the opinion-driven news from Fox to CNN to CBC. The net result is being caught inside a steaming box of endless news glop.

But there are some perks, too. Last night we went out for fabulous Singapore noodles, which I can’t seem to find on the East Coast, at least not the kind with thin rice noodles and curried shrimp. Later, we took in a cool movie, “Inception,” a sci-fi flick starring Leonardo DiCaprio at one of those huge movie palaces. It was all about dreams within dreams inside dreams, which may be a bit too much like life at the moment.

Back on the road I noticed that it’s only mid-August and the leaves on the popular trees in Northern Ontario are already starting to turn colour. There was edge to the air that I’d forgotten. It’s the sharpness of the Arctic nights colliding with the hot updrafts from the Midwest over Lake Superior.

My friends are all looking older. Sitting at an outdoor café with one of them I glanced across the street and recognized a guy I hadn’t seen since high school. He had long white hair with the dazed look of a reformed doper, which he was, according to my friend. Like the buildings and landscape, the people were starting to seem impermanent, too.

Something seems to be happening to the world. Or maybe it’s happening to me. When I talk to people there seems to be less optimism about the future. People are more cynical, less hopeful. As I’ve said, our expression through the urban landscape looks less permanent, too, as if it, too, is less concerned about the future. The endless miles of gaudy plastic signs and cheap strip malls are the sad proof.

Our kids are growing up differently, too. We took our boys and their cousin to an arcade. They played a round of laser tag and a few noisy video games and between the four of them they burned though 60 bucks in less than an hour. They came out as if they’d been inside a clothes dryer. Spun.

Later, we took them to visit my mom and dad. They spent a few hours with my dad in his garage. It’s filled with junk, 8-track tape players, old hats, costumes, dusty toy cars and his Model A roadster. The kids loved their time trip back to my dad’s childhood and they fit right in.

As I walked out of the garage I noticed rot eating at the bottom of the walls. Too soon my dad, that garage and my old home will be gone. The only real home we have is where we keep our memories alive.

No places left in a placeholder society

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“Sage,” I said. She didn’t think so. So she pulled the old colour sample books. “There,” she said. “Larch, that’s it.” She was right. What a memory. As she mixed the colour we talked about the neighbourhood.

We talked about a new seniors’ housing project being planned for the park across the street, and ironically, how town council is considering building a new park dedicated to dogs—a doggie park—even as it decommissions a provincial heritage park. But we didn’t dwell on it. She wondered about the future of a town filling up with seniors and lacking jobs for young people.

Work was always plentiful back in Ontario—or at least it was when we lived there. Since moving here I’ve learned that jobs or contracts are scarce.

The lack of opportunity explains why someone working in, say, the aquaculture industry, wouldn’t want to criticize any part of that business for fear of losing a good job. That attitude quickly evolves into keeping one’s mouth shut and head down, which gives employers a bit of an upper hand. With employees living in a chronic state of low-level job anxiety, employers call the shots. And with willing workers, established companies can keep on growing. To a point.

With fewer opportunities at home the best and brightest workers leave. Meanwhile the local companies struggle to find skilled workers and how to keep the ones they have motivated. So it’s a vicious cycle. The lack of opportunity keeps the workers submissive. But it also keeps them unmotivated and unproductive, which keeps the companies always on the lookout for new talent.

These aren’t just local issues. The world is rapidly running out of new frontier. New frontier is what America was all about. In North America the natural resources were as unlimited as the opportunities. But somehow those unlimited natural resources are running out. The great cathedral forests are nearly gone, and have been on the East Coast for almost a century. The wild finfish fishery is in decline if not collapse. And out west the best of the light crude oil is gone and we’re starting to scrape out the oil sands—perhaps the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel yet.

So where do we go from here? The main bet has always been technology. When anyone talks about the world running out of oil, the immediate response is technical. Humans are resourceful. We’ll always invent something new, so don’t worry about it.

But people at the top are worried. Since 1991 the U.S. has been going to war in the Middle East. The first time was Kuwait. The second was Iraq, ten years later. Now it’s Afghanistan in the east (and where our Canadian soldiers, scheduled to pull out next year, are being replaced by American troops). And in the middle is Iran, which seems to be the target of intense political interest and in the news every other week, especially around its fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is being touted as the next Great Satan.

With more than two-thirds of the planet’s supply of oil, the Middle East is the obvious prize in a world running out of the stuff. In fact, the region is the last remaining great frontier.

So, one has to wonder, how did “we” manage to justify getting into an oil war in the Middle East in the first place. Right. It was the plane crashes into the World Trade Centre. And it wasn’t an oil war that ensued, but a War on Terror, launched by George W. Bush and his backers. What resulted is now history. Osama Bin Laden was never found. Nor were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. By some estimates up to a million Iraqis have been killed. And the rest of the world, especially the United States went into terrorism lockdown.

American constitutional rights were revoked. Homeland Security was created and put on high alert. Thousands of civilians were put on “no fly lists” with no public reasons given. Citizens could be detained without due process. Suspects in other countries could be taken from their homes and detained in places like Guantanamo indefinitely, without rights or due process of the law.

Since then the global economy has collapsed. Jobs in the States are scarce. Opportunities for ordinary people have evaporated. Meanwhile, the bankers who received huge bailouts are back in control of the game. Strangely, the American picture is starting to look a lot like the New Brunswick picture.

So what’s really happening? It’s pretty simple, really. For the first time in human history we’ve run out of new frontier. We’re running out of gas, literally. The game of staying alive will become much more competitive for us and for our kids. And we’re already seeing it. The kids with the best pedigrees and most expensive credentials go to the top of the list.

Holding our own place in line may the best any of us can manage—unless we become a lot more cooperative, creative and involved in our own political destiny.

End of the silver harvest

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“Nobody eats sardines anymore.” That’s what a retired fish marketer told me a few years ago. Tastes change. But the story about the collapse of the herring fishery deserves a closer look.

A few weeks ago I got a call from my editor telling me that a reader wanted to talk to me. Jim wanted to talk about herring fishery, so we agreed to meet and talk about possibly writing a story. But where to start? He loaned me a couple of books.

The most insightful of the two was ‘Silver Harvest’ a picture book produced by the Fundy Weir Fishermen’s Association in 1986. It shows the state of the herring industry at that time, and documents the history of the fishery on the Bay of Fundy.

The driving engines of the herring industry from the late 1800s to the 1940s were the weirs. By 1932 there were 596 weirs on or near Passamaquoddy Bay—this according to the old map on Jim’s wall. He told me families with a share in a productive weir could afford comfortably raise and educate their kids. A lucky few became wealthy. But the advent of large purse-seiners from the 1960s onward changed all that. The weirs became unproductive and few remain. The rest are skeletons scattered around the Fundy coast.

From the 1980s on, old weir licences were sold to the aquaculture industry, with salmon cages replacing them as the dominant feature on the waterscape. As with the herring industry, the aquaculture industry grew and then consolidated. Today, Connors Brothers and Cooke Aquaculture are the leading fish producers in New Brunswick. Connors, the sardine giant, is now owned by U.S.-based Bumble Bee Foods. Both are global companies serving a global market.

Ironically, salmon farming operations depend on fishmeal, a product that can come from anywhere in the world, and made from any fish similar to herring. In the decades after World War 2 the Atlantic herring industry produced millions of tonnes of fishmeal, most of it used to fertilize farmers’ fields. So in a bold move we’ve redirected our declining wild ocean resources from land back to the sea. Brilliant.

Greg Thompson of Dipper Harbour, NB is just one concerned fisherman. “They [scallops, groundfish, herring] have declined so much you can’t make a living as a ground-fisherman or a herring fisherman. They are no longer stand-alone fisheries. If lobster landings drop abruptly, then the economy of the fishing communities will be ‘decimated,’” Thompson said in a Gulf of Maine Times article last year. That doesn’t bode well for the future.

Much earlier, in the Silver Harvest book of 1986, Thompson made the connection between the growing international presence of purse-seining ships and the decline of the herring fishery. “I presume that one caused the other. There used to be a lot of fish caught along this shore. The seiners came in here all the time catching herring. Sixty-eight [1968] was the last time we caught herring here in the spring.“ The spring catch was an important indicator, as the seiners were only allowed to fish in winter—the winter haul clearly having a dire effect on the spring fishery.

Silver Harvest was sitting on my coffee table when Walter Kozak dropped by. He picked it up, opened it to the Preface section and pointed to his own name on the first page. He’d been one of the people responsible for its publication. His group wanted to document the industry before the oldtimers died. On the cover was a photo of Walter’s own weir, and his men, David Garnett, Harold Earle and Stephen Lord working from Walter’s boats hauling in a heavy load of silver fish from his weir. Walter was proud of the photo and went on to say that, despite his best efforts, he’d managed to lose $150,000 in the herring business.

And it’s a business. Today’s Atlantic Canadian herring catch is about 100,000 tonnes a year. But just how many fish is that? Well, there are about 250 herring in a cubic foot. A cubic foot of fish, a little lighter than the weight of water, weighs about 25 kilograms. So there are 40 cubic feet of fish (1000 kg ÷ 25 kg) in a metric tonne. Doing the math (40 x 250), there are 10,000 herring in a tonne. That’s 1,000,000,000—one billion—individual herrings caught every year in Atlantic Canada. At least legally by Canadians.

International purse-seiners fish nearby, too, especially on Georges Bank to the south, the spawning ground for Bay of Fundy herring.

Of course, Canadians never fished Georges Bank off the U.S. coast—officially. But one source confided that Campobello fishermen in the 1960s were fishing Georges and selling fish “over the side” to Russian and Polish seiners for on-the-spot cash which was then banked in the U.S. to hide any trace of the deals in Canada. The practice was said to continue for years. Truth or rumour, who knows?

But that was then. Today, the Connors Brothers plant in Blacks Harbour is the last sardine cannery in North America. One wonders how long that, too, is gone.

The “E”s have it

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We shoved harder. A car was stuck in the soft gravel of the ocean floor on its way to Ministers Island, and as I pushed to get it out I thought about the interconnectedness of everything—mostly cars to the environment and tourism. And the “E”s in the human project occurred to me all over again.

I’ve discussed these at some length with a friend of mine over the past couple of years. And what are these “E”s? Well, they form a basic formula: energy x environment x enterprise = the economy.

Here, energy refers to the natural resource kind, sunlight or stored sunlight in coal, oil, gas and natural gas and biofuels, as well as nuclear energy and “alternative” sources such as wind, wave and geothermal energy. Energy powers everything we do, including the power to think—especially since the massive switch to fossil fuels over the past 200 years. Energy is the reason we have a modern technological civilization.

The second “E”, the environment, is pretty much what we plunder day by day. It’s the entire ecosystem that we “harvest” from minerals to fish to chemicals. Scientists (and some wise old people who can remember the day) tell us that these environmental resources are rapidly depleting and the environment itself is critically degraded.

Enterprise, the third “E,” is human ingenuity, the innate gift given to us by our large brains, vertical stature and opposable thumbs. Several non-“E” things factor into enterprise, notably inspiration, innovation and the initiative to do something about the first two. We humans are a particularly utilitarian species, and as the dominant species on the planet, clearly pernicious as well. Perhaps the best summary for our enterprising nature is that we are intrinsically “opportunistic.”

Furthering and safeguarding the human enterprise notion are the other “E”s. These include: engineering, education and ethics.

Engineering, starting with tool making, is the foundational skillset of human resourcefulness. A flint arrowhead has much in common with the Taj Mahal in terms of engineering perfection. Engineering, in the broadest sense covers all aspects of human tool making, including language and communication technologies. Even the discovery of fire has engineering aspects. Education is simply the way we carry our engineering and other knowledge. And ethics is about protecting our engineering and education over multiple generations. Ethics is our system of trust, which has evolve into an elaborate governance and legal system.

Finally, we come to the thing that separates us from all other creatures as far as we know (though that may be too anthropocentric), which is enlightenment. True enlightenment is not covered by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Enlightenment is beyond survival, security, social acceptance, prestige and self-actualization. Enlightenment is, in fact, beyond the self.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell talked about these forces that bring people together, and also mentions Maslow’s pyramid, which he views as the structure of divergent forces—the self-serving forces that draw us apart from other people as we move up the personal development ladder.

The binding forces, Campbell says, are “terror” and “aspiration.” It’s easy to see how terror is a binding condition. When we—and others in our group—are gravely threatened and shocked into a state of terror, we reach out.

Aspiration is a different thing. Aspiration is based on a view to the future that extends well beyond our small lifetimes. Aspiration has, at its core, the element of hope. Somehow, we hope to be more than we are. Somehow, we hope to leave something of ourselves behind after we’re dead and gone. And somehow, we can even transcend that selfish desire. It’s enough to hope for a better world ahead.

Terror and aspiration are the cornerstones of enlightenment. And there are three streams of human activity that pursue enlightenment: philosophy, religion and art, each of which is in serious decline in our materialistic, post-industrial, consumer society.

As binding agents of human beings, terror and aspiration fuel artistic investigation. Artists, philosophers and spiritual thinkers grapple with the larger questions such as “why are we here?” “Why do we die?” “What happens after we die?” “What possible meaning do our lives have?” and so on.

But aspiration has other, more subtle features. There is something known as “mythic seizure” or “creative seizure” that possesses both individuals and whole societies. Scholars use the cathedral building craze of the 11th and 12th Centuries to illustrate this phenomenon. What great creative seizure possessed the people of Europe at that time and incited them to build those fantastic spires reaching toward the sun—when they barely had enough to eat on their tables? God only knows.

There’s another path that parallels the enlightenment path. On this path the “T”s have it. Invention starts with being transfixed by something. Somehow a transference takes place. Lightning strikes a tree and the idea of fire is “discovered” by or transferred to some naked ape.

Then, from that initial discover comes a translation. Knowledge gained by one ape is translated from crude to ever more elegant applications by other apes. Transformation comes next. For example, the transformative power of fire is the main process for all human industry, including how we power our cars. Reciprocal transactions are the basis of our trading and the financial system itself. Then there’s transcendence. Collectively we're beginning to realize that the consumption of 80 million barrels of oil a day is killing their planet. That realization is transcendent.

But like anything precious, enlightenment and transcendence always come with some kind of price.