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Today's
Stories
Jan.
31 / Feb 1, 2004
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
January
30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No Stan
for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
January 31 / February 1, 2004
War in the Great White
North
Illusion
of a Land Ethic in Western Canada
By JOHN HOLT
(Note: The following is a slightly
condensed version of an article that recently appeared in E:
The Environmental Magazine.)
The widely held notion that Canada is taking excellent
care of its wild, pristine lands far better than the gluttonous
citizens in the United States, is nothing more than a misperception
approaching myth. Americans or Yanks as they are often called
up north, are frequently verbally assailed by Canadians with
the misplaced, disingenuous and perhaps naïve notion that
all U.S. citizens are swine when it comes to caring for and preserving
quality country while residents of Canada are quite the opposite--valiant,
conscientious souls who have none of the blood of the killing
of good country on their hands, while we in the States are literally
drenched in the stuff. Such is not the case. This stance is at
best spurious and possibly created to hide the obvious fact that
the western provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest
Territories and the Yukon are being plundered at an astonishing
rate.
While having a couple of drinks in a
bar called The Pit in Dawson City, Yukon last summer a Canadian
came up to me and asked where I was from. When I told him he
said "You damn Yanks don't give a damn about your own land.
You log it and strip mine it all to hell. Then you come up here
to enjoy are country." Over the years I've heard many comments
along those lines.
True, there are individuals in Canada
who have devoted their lives to preserving good country and there
are, as most of us know all too well, greedy bastards tearing
apart the last remaining shreds of unspoiled country in the U.S.
But fair is fair, and the bottom line is that Canadians should
take stock of their own environmental situation before gleefully
casting aspersions America's way.
Forty years of perfecting my personally
arcane art of being an inveterate road bum traveling back roads
on a skinny budget, fishing malarial bogs, inadvertently canoeing
class X whitewater, hiking non-existent trails bound for nowhere
and unavoidably staying on top of environmental issues in Canada
(perhaps a natural adjunct of a confused life) has provided an
ongoing opportunity to see disturbing change in a land of incredible
splendor and abundance--one peopled with some truly remarkable,
generous and creative individuals. In the last five years these
destructive shifts in direction have been seismic, both metaphorically
and literally.
From Fort Nelson in northern British
Columbia to Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta to the vast
Tintina Trench region in the southern Yukon and NWT and over
east to Yellowknife on Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories,
the landscape is under siege. The extraction industries are running
the show, tearing blasting, sucking and cutting every diamond,
gold nugget, drop of oil, chunk of coal and stick of timber they
can access. If it's of value, these industries intend to have
it. What's going down in western Canada makes the devastation
being visited on states like Montana, Wyoming and Utah look like
carefree walks in halcyon parks. What are obviously horrendous
clearcuts or devastating open pit coal mines in the U.S. West
are everyday situations in Canada, too. Most of that country's
citizens are loving the action. Provincial campgrounds are filled
to the brim with late model pickups tricked out with all the
options and pulling expensive fifth wheelers and pricey speedboats
and ATVs and jet skis. The Cypress Hills sitting along the Alberta
Saskatchewan border and the setting for Wallace Stegner's book
Wolf Willow are now overrun to the extent that during
the summer the place resembles a scene from a Chevy Chase "vacation"
movie. Housing developments in cities like Calgary and Edmonton
stretch for miles with quarter-million dollar and much higher
homes numbering in the thousands. All of this comes not only
from the jobs provided by these corporations but also from royalties
paid by the industry based on the amount of a given mineral extracted
from a province. In Alberta this figure exceeds $6 billion annually
dollars just for coal. The money is flowing in direct proportion
with the abundance of the oil coming from countless wells hammered
into the Canadian countryside. The old phrase "a chicken
in every pot" has been updated in the northland to "an
oil pumpjack in every yard."
A good example, and there are many, is
Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. This used to be a rather sedate
town of a few thousand sometimes impoverished souls who enjoyed
life on the bluffs above the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River.
The residents enjoyed all of the outdoor activities one would
expect in an area that rests in the foothills along the east
slope of the Canadian Rockies and is surrounded by dense, mature
pine forest with countless rivers and streams pouring out onto
the prairie. Lakes of the purest water abound as do grizzlies,
moose, eagles, deer, wolves, various species of trout, grayling,
mountain lions and so on. For years timber has generated decent
incomes for many as did motels restaurants and service stations
that supplied the occasional tourist and outdoor enthusiast with
the basic needs. Most everyone knew everybody else and crime
rates were low. The population was perhaps a couple of thousand.
The town, originally founded 150 years
ago because of the fur trade and the natural highway provided
by Saskatchewan, is now an insane riot of oil rigs, logging trucks,
related workers and the destructive craziness that comes from
too much money deposited in a local economy way too quickly.
Residents are now moving towards surliness, depression and anger
caused by these rapid changes to their lifestyle. A recent trip
up that way this spring revealed streets, even residential side
streets, overrun with trucks of all sizes run helter skelter
to the oil-and-gas biz shuffle. Gas stations--service stations
are nearly extinct--were nonstop busy nearly 24/7 filling tanks
of industry vehicles. Beleaguered locals put on game but grim
faces in the wake of this onslaught. A woman at a local bakery
said "I don't even remember what my town used to be. None
of us know anyone the way we used to. This place is frantic like
Calgary." The town has more than tripled in population
and that doesn't include the countless oil and gas roustabouts,
drilling maintenance crews, surveyors and the like.
What is happening to longtime residents
of Rocky Mountain House and countless other towns scattered about
the forests, mountains and prairies of western Canada is to be
expected wherever extractive industry moves in and shoves locals
out of the way. What was once home is now a corporate compound
replete with out of control drinking, drugs, prostitution and
the ubiquitous grifters plying a variety of hustles and cons--the
ever-present tag alongs with this avaricious carnival. The town's
people don't know what's happening to them or their land. All
that most of them see is the quick money fix that blinds them
to the negative and long-term changes of this way of life. The
continual boom-and-bust cycle of the West is at play in Canada.
Ten, maybe twenty years of feast, then complete collapse and
all of the new homes and expensive toys go back to the banks
while the oil, coal and timber companies are long gone searching
for the next valley to plunder. It's an old, ugly story that's
been played out in Butte, Montana, Deadwood, South Dakota and
in ghost towns with names like Garnet, Pony and Como. Canada's
dancing now.
Millions of hectares (about 2.5 acres)
of land in these western provinces are being surveyed, mapped
and then exploited by these extraction industries. And production
figures in oil and gas, coal and other minerals along with timber
are climbing rapidly and in many cases equal or exceed production
totals in the U.S. Forest trunk roads that used to wind serenely
through dense pine forest and alongside unspoiled rivers along
the Rocky Mountain foothills and now bustling muddy or dusty
corridors conveying a steady stream of enormous trucks hauling
huge machinery.
A couple years ago a friend and I were
traveling north from Rocky Mountain House on Forest trunk 743.
We wore working on a book about the northern high plains called
Coyote Nowhere. The late-June weather was warm but rainy
and the dirt roads were now a muddy and treacherous quagmire.
Even if there had been no other traffic the drive would have
been a sporting proposition. We'd been warned by a forest employee
the night before and a campground along the Pembina River to
watch out for the steady stream of oil and coal rigs moving up
and down these roads. "They don't stop or even move over
for anyone. People are killed all of the time. Trucks, cars campers--all
of them sometimes crushed flat like empty beer cans. That's an
extremely dangerous drive your about to undertake." He wished
us luck and then headed off down the road to check on another
campsite. At the time I considered his warning a bit extreme,
but I was to find out differently. The next morning as we drove
north a steady stream of enormous rigs roared past us, the tires
on these machines taller than our GMC Suburban. The noise of
the engines was deafening as they belched thick black clouds
of diesel exhaust. While climbing a sticky hill a semi pulling
drilling equipment moved well over to our side of the road just
missing us by inches and drenching the Suburban including the
windshield in a thick wash of slop. We barely made it to the
top of the rise, driving blind, and barely managing to skid over
into a slight turnoff. Getting out to collect ourselves and settle
frayed nerves, I looked around. On both sides vast open-pit coal
mines stretched deep into the ancient pine forest. Tall metal
stacks that rose above the trees were crowned by flickering flames
of natural gas being burned off at several pumping stations.
Oil company signs said "No Trespassing" at the entrance
to every side road. In the pits large machinery was scooping
up and hauling away coal. Dynamite blasting roared in the distance.
Far in the west the lofty crest of the Rockies flickered snow
white between swirling openings in the cloud cover.
Twenty years ago when I traveled this
road on my way to the then remote mountain town of Grand Cache
(now overrun with the same madness as in Rocky Mountain House)
I felt like I was in the middle of a primeval forest, that a
grizzly or moose could appear from the edge of the trees at any
moment. Now the atmosphere was more like a scene of some vast
industrial park. Nothing pristine or peaceful about the place
remained. The rivers were running muddy along the road and the
only wildlife I saw was an occasional raven gliding high above
what remained of the forest. This was a vision of desecration
that went beyond even the extensive open pit coal operations
in southeastern Montana. The devastation continued for 60 miles
before we turned off onto another road that soon led past a mammoth
coal mine where mountains on the eastern edge of Jasper Park
in the Gregg River drainage were being carved down to nothing.
The air was filled with the noise of heavy machinery and choking
with waves of black dust swirling in miniature tornados as the
wind whipped down from the remaining mountains. More than 800
miles north from my home in Livingston, Montana and I felt like
I was Detroit.
Half of Canada is covered by either temperate
forest (like that found in Montana, Idaho and Washington) or
by boreal forest (similar to that found in Siberia). The boreal
forest is a 600-hundred-mile-wide band of timberland stretching
from approximately 300 miles north of the U.S. border to tree
line in the Arctic, and spanning the breadth of the country.
Approximately 300 million acres of the country's forest are managed
for timber production. This is an area more than one-and-a-half
times the size of Montana. Two-thirds of Canada's estimated 300,00
wildlife species live in the forest.
The temperate and boreal forests along
with the arctic tundra of these four provinces is extremely fragile.
I spoke with a biologist at the Tombstone Campground Interpretive
Center located on the Yukon's Dempster Highway. She pointed out
that as few as 20 people walking the same line to a distant peak
and back again would disturb the vegetation and soils of this
boreal environment to the extent that it would take several decades
to return to its natural state.
Less than two dozen people treading lightly,
not thousands of pieces of machinery the size of houses, thousands
more workers and thousands of tons of explosive, all ripping
and digging away at some of the last wilderness left on the planet.
The following figures give an idea of the magnitude of these
extraction processes in Canada.
The total timber harvest in Canada is
near eight billion board feet per year up from 2.9 billion in
1950. In the U.S. this figure is around 4.0 billion board feet
per year down from 6.0 billion in 1980s. Canada's forests cover
an area nearly three times the size of Europe. This is mainly
boreal forest with some temperate forest including temperate
rainforest. This represents 10% of the world's forestry cover.
Only 5.5 percent of this forest is under some form of legal protection
or constraint related to logging. This is the most productive
forest in terms of biomass in the world. Grizzly bears, cougars
the Baird Owl, woodland caribou and elk live here. Approximately
10.8 million acres of logged forest lands in Canada (an area
more than twice the size of Wales) remain denuded. If present
trend continues, all of Canada's suitable timber base (forest)
will be harvested within 30-35 years.
In British Columbia ancient forests are
vanishing at the rate of one acre every 70 seconds or 418,000
acres per year an area the size of 190,00 football fields. In
the time it takes to watch a 30-minute sitcom on television 26
acres of forest have been leveled. In the past decade an area
eight times the size of Connecticut has been clearcut. Companies
do not have to bid competitively to log public forests. Fees
are typically set at one-fourth to one-third market value. The
majority of logging in B.C. is in old growth forest and the Canadian
government estimates that the province is over cutting its forest
by 20 percent. Clearcutting makes up 80 percent of all logging.
In British Columbia it is legal to log smaller salmon streams
down to the banks destroying aquatic life and leaving no protections
against fine sediment and high temperatures that are lethal to
salmon eggs and fry. There is no endangered species legislation
to protect wildlife from logging despite the fact that the Committee
on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada now lists 387
species of plants and animals at risk of extinction (eight percent
of these species are shared with the U.S.). This is an increase
of 20 percent since 1992.
Coal production figures for Canada show
a similar situation. Alberta mines 27 million tons. Alberta 40
million. By example Montana, which is destroying its wide open
tracts of high plains country, digs out 38.9 million tons. Montana's
coal reserves are 1,600 billion tons. Alberta has 2,900 million
tons and is extracting these reserves at a rate that is slightly
faster than the Big Sky state and climbing yearly. So for Canadians
to say that we Yanks are plundering our countryside at a faster
rate than they are is, at best, inaccurate.
In Canada the oil and gas industry invested
more than $20 billion in exploration and development in 2000,
making it the single largest capital investor in Canada. Oil
production is not expected to peak for ten years. British Columbia
government officials have asked leaders in Ottawa to lift a decades-old
ban on offshore drilling along Canada's Pacific Coast. Geologists
estimate that there could be up to 10 billion barrels of oil
and 1.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the area.
"We risk enormous damage to British
Columbia's environmental heritage, all for a short-term dollar,"
said David Hocking, communications director for the Vancouver-based
David Suzuki Foundation.
Within perhaps as little as two decades
the ecosystem damage inflicted upon the Yukon, British Columbia,
Alberta and the Northwest Territories will make what happened
in Montana look like a walk in the park. At the present rate
most natural resources will be exhausted in Canada within 40
years. Even if Canada was exploiting its natural resources at
only one-half the rate of the U.S., which it isn't, everything
would be gone within a century. It appears that while the U.S.
is destroying itself natural resource wise, Canada is doing so
at an even faster rate.
During a recent trip to the Yukon I pulled
over at a wayside that offered a spectacular view of the Kondike
River valley and the seemingly endless sweep of mountains rolling
north towards the Arctic Circle. The ragged, surreal peaks of
The Tombstone Range ghosted in the distance. Looking to my left
I noticed a large display sign touting a gold mine that was hidden
behind a near range of mountains. Pictures and words graphically
showed the huge scope of the operation, and extolled the operation
as providing jobs and money for Yukon residents.
Certainly this is true, but what will
the real cost to Canadians and all of us be when all is said,
blasted and done in the not so distant future?
John Holt
has been called the Hunter Thompson of Montana. He is the author
of numerous books, including the gripping novel Hunted,
and Coyote
Nowhere: In Search of America's Lost Frontier. He lives in
Livingston, Montana and can be reached at: jholt@msn.net
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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