The Wayfinders (12 page)

Four

SACRED GEOGRAPHY

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the
rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours
the servant and has forgotten the gift.” — Albert Einstein

IN A RUGGED KNOT OF
mountains in the remote reaches of northern
British Columbia lies a stunningly beautiful valley known to the First
Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. There, on the southern edge of the
Spatsizi Wilderness, the Serengeti of Canada, are born in remarkably close
proximity three of Canada’s most important salmon rivers, the Stikine, the
Skeena, and the Nass. In a long day, perhaps two, it is possible to walk
through open meadows, following the tracks of grizzly, caribou, and wolf,
and drink from the very sources of the three rivers that inspired so many of
the great cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en,
the Carrier and Sekani, the Tsimshian, Nisga’a, Tahltan, Haisla, and
Tlingit. Keep on for another three days and you’ll reach the origins of the
Finlay, headwaters of the Mackenzie, Canada’s greatest river of all.

The only other place I know where such a wonder
of geography occurs is in Tibet, where from the base of Mount Kailash arise
three of the great rivers of Asia, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, vital
arteries that bring life to more than a billion people downstream. Revered
by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain, Kailash is considered so sacred that no one is
allowed to walk upon its slopes, let alone climb to its summit. The thought
of violating its flanks with industrial development would represent for all
peoples of Asia an act of desecration beyond all imaginings. Anyone who
would even dare propose such a deed would face the most severe sanctions, in
both this world and the next.

In Canada, we treat the land quite differently.
Against the wishes of all First Nations, the government of British Columbia
has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. These are not
trivial initiatives. Imperial Metals Corporation proposes an open-pit copper
and gold mine processing 30,000 tons of ore a day from the flank of Todagin
Mountain, home to one of the largest populations of Stone sheep in the
world. Its tailings pond, if constructed, would drain directly into the
headwater lake chain of the Iskut River, the principal tributary of the
Stikine. Over its lifetime of twenty-five years, the mine would generate 183
million tons of toxic tailings and 307 million tons of waste rock, which
would need to be treated for acid drainage for over 200 years. Two other
mining concerns, Fortune Minerals Limited and West Hawk Development Corp.,
would tear into the headwater valley itself, on a similar scale, with
open-pit anthracite coal operations that would level entire mountains.

The largest project is a proposal by Royal Dutch
Shell to extract coalbed methane (CBM) gas from the same anthracite deposit,
across an enormous tract of more than 4,000 square kilometres. Should this
development go ahead it would imply a network of several thousand wells,
linked by roads and pipelines, laid upon the landscape of the entire Sacred
Headwaters basin. CBM recovery is by all accounts a highly invasive process.
To free methane from anthracite, technicians must fracture the coal seams
with massive injections of chemical agents under high pressure, more than a
million litres at a shot, a technique that in some deposits liberates
enormous volumes of highly toxic water. More than 900 different chemicals,
many of them powerful carcinogens, are registered for use, but for
proprietary reasons companies do not have to disclose the identity of the
solutions employed at any given site.

Environmental concerns aside, think for a moment
of what these proposals imply about our culture. We accept it as normal that
people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to
the country, may legally secure the right to come in and by the very nature
of their enterprises leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape
utterly transformed and desecrated. What’s more, in granting such mining
concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant
cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, we place
no cultural or market value on the land itself. The cost of destroying a
natural asset, or its inherent worth if left intact, has no metric in the
economic calculations that support the industrialization of the wild. No
company has to compensate the public for what it does to the commons, the
forests, mountains, and rivers, which by definition belong to everyone. As
long as there is a promise of revenue flows and employment, it merely
requires permission to proceed. We take this as a given for it is the
foundation of our system, the way commerce extracts value and profit in a
resource-driven economy. But if you think about it, especially from the
perspective of so many other cultures, touched and inspired by quite
different visions of life and land, it appears to be very odd and highly
anomalous human behaviour.

In this, the fourth of the Massey Lectures, I
would like to reflect on this particular attitude of ours, this manner in
which we have reduced our planet to a commodity, a raw resource to be
consumed at our whim. In doing so, I will suggest rather hopefully that, as
the anthropological lens reveals, there are in fact many other options, any
number of different ways of orienting ourselves in place and landscape. The
multiple ways in which people all over the world settle themselves in
geographical and ecological space reflect, as Father Thomas Berry has so
beautifully written, the infinite and the impossible, the innocent and the
profane, the sacred and the sordid, all of which represent unique dreams of
the earth.

During the Renaissance and well into the
Enlightenment, in our quest for personal freedom, we in the European
tradition liberated the human mind from the tyranny of absolute faith, even
as we freed the individual from the collective, which was the sociological
equivalent of splitting the atom. And, in doing so, we also abandoned many
of our intuitions for myth, magic, mysticism, and, perhaps most importantly,
metaphor. The universe, declared René Descartes in the seventeenth century,
was composed only of “mind and mechanism.” With a single phrase, all
sentient creatures aside from human beings were devitalized, as was the
earth itself. “Science,” as Saul Bellow wrote, “made a housecleaning of
belief.” Phenomena that could not be positively observed and measured could
not exist. By the nineteenth century the positivist tradition defined even
the study of society, with the invention of the social sciences, an
oxymoronic turn of phrase if ever there was one. The triumph of secular
materialism became the conceit of modernity. The notion that land could have
anima, that the flight of a hawk might have meaning, that beliefs of the
spirit could have true resonance, was ridiculed, dismissed as ridiculous.

For several centuries the rational mind has been
ascendant, even though science, its finest expression, can still in all its
brilliance only answer the question
how
, but never come close to
addressing the ultimate question:
why
. The inherent limitation of
the scientific model has long provoked a certain existential dilemma,
familiar to many of us taught since childhood that the universe can only be
understood as the random action of minute atomic particles spinning and
interacting in space. But more significantly, the reduction of the world to
a mechanism, with nature but an obstacle to overcome, a resource to be
exploited, has in good measure determined the manner in which our cultural
tradition has blindly interacted with the living planet.

As a young man I was raised on the coast of
British Columbia to believe that the rainforests existed to be cut. This was
the essence of the ideology of scientific forestry that I studied in school
and practised in the woods as a logger. The rotation cycle — the rate at
which forests were to be felled across the province, and thus the foundation
of sustained yield forestry — was based on the assumption that all of the
old growth would be cut and replaced with tree farms. The very language of
the academic discipline of forestry was disingenuous, as if conceived to
mislead. The “annual allowable cut” was not a limit never to be exceeded but
a quota to be met. The “falldown effect,” the planned decline in timber
production as the old growth was depleted, was promoted as if it were a
natural phenomenon when it was, as everyone in the logging camps
acknowledged, a stunning admission that the forests had been drastically
overcut every year since modern forestry was implemented in the 1940s.
“Multiple-use forestry,” which implied that forests were to be managed for a
variety of purposes, began with a clear-cut. Old growth was harvested,
though it was never planted and no one expected it to grow back. Ancient
forests were described as “decadent” and “over-mature” when by any
ecological definition they were at their richest and most biologically
diverse stage. The intrinsic value of these rare and remarkable rainforests,
like the inherent worth of the mountains and meadows of the Sacred
Headwaters, had no place in the calculus of the planning process.

This cultural perspective was profoundly
different from that of the First Nations, those living on Vancouver Island
at the time of European contact, and those still there. If I was sent into
the forest to cut it down, a Kwakwaka’wakw youth of similar age was
traditionally dispatched during his Hamatsa initiation into those same
forests to confront Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven, cannibal
spirits living at the north end of the world, all with the goal of returning
triumphant to the potlatch that his individual spiritual discipline and
fortitude might revitalize his entire people with the energy of the wild.
The point is not to ask or suggest which perspective is right or wrong. Is
the forest mere cellulose and board feet? Was it truly the domain of the
spirits? Is a mountain a sacred place? Does a river really follow the
ancestral path of an anaconda? Who is to say? Ultimately these are not the
important questions.

What matters is the potency of a belief, the
manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people,
for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a
culture, the impact that any society has on its environment. A child raised
to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a
profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a
mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. A Kwakwaka’wakw boy
raised to revere the coastal forests as the realm of the divine will be a
different person from a Canadian child taught to believe that such forests
are destined to be logged. The full measure of a culture embraces both the
actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the
metaphors that propel them onward.

Herein, perhaps, lies the essence of the
relationship between many indigenous peoples and the natural world. Life in
the malarial swamps of New Guinea, the chill winds of Tibet, the white heat
of the Sahara, leaves little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait
commonly associated with the Inuit. Nomadic hunters and gatherers in Borneo
have no conscious sense of stewardship for mountain forests that they lack
the technical capacity to destroy. What these cultures have done, however,
is to forge through time and ritual a relationship to the earth that is
based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on far more subtle
intuition — the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human
consciousness. Mountains, rivers, and forests are not perceived as being
inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For
these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and
transformed by the human imagination. This sense of belonging and connection
is nowhere more perfectly elaborated than along the spine of the Andean
Cordillera of South America and in the heights of the Sierra Nevada de Santa
Marta, an isolated massif that soars to about 6,000 metres above the
Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia. And it finds perhaps its most abstract
and consequential expression in the exquisitely subtle philosophy of the
Aboriginal peoples of Australia. These are the places I would like to
explore in this lecture.

I FIRST TRAVELLED SOUTH
through the Andes in the spring of 1974, when as
a young student I was fortunate to join a botanical expedition charged with
the task of unravelling the mysteries of a plant known to the Inca as the
Divine Leaf of Immortality – coca, the notorious source of cocaine. It was a
remarkable assignment. Cocaine, first isolated from the leaf in 1855, had
revolutionized modern medicine, particularly ophthalmology, by allowing for
the painless removal of cataracts. It remains our most powerful topical
anaesthetic. The essences of the leaves still contribute to the flavour of
one of the world’s most popular drinks: coca makes Coca-Cola “the real
thing.” The soft drink company in turn provides the pharmaceutical industry
with all the legal cocaine employed today by the medical profession.

By the mid-1970s the Latin American cartels were
emerging, though no one knew quite how, and no one realized how sordid and
murderous they would become. The illicit trade, such as it was, still lay in
the hands of the independent drifter. Efforts to eradicate the traditional
fields had been underway for half a century, but these misguided purges had
nothing to do with cocaine and everything to do with the cultural identity
of those who revered the plant. Physicians in Lima, in particular, whose
concern for the indigenous peoples of the Andes was matched in its intensity
only by their ignorance of Indian life, glanced up to the Sierra in the
1920s and saw dreadful poverty, poor sanitation and nutrition, high rates of
illiteracy, infant mortality, and disease. They sought an explanation. The
real issues of land distribution, economic exploitation, and the persistence
of debt peonage challenged the foundations of their own class structure, so
they settled upon coca as the culprit. Every conceivable social ill and
pathology was blamed on the plant. The eradication of the traditional fields
became a state priority, and with the intervention of the United Nations in
the late 1940s, international policy.