No more hunter-gatherer ecotopias
Elizabeth Nickson
National Post
SALT SPRING ISLAND - All politics is local, eh? A 60ish woman from one of the founding farming families in the Gulf Islands called me recently. "None of us can afford to retire," she complained. "We're not allowed to do anything with any of our hundreds of acres."
Except pay property taxes. Last year I was sitting, somewhat amazed, in a public meeting listening to the 200 or so people, who hold back progress on this island, discuss how to get rid of some iniquitous developers. The problem seemed unsolvable, when a lithe red-haired chap with a Prince Valiant hairstyle -- hard to see how he maintained that in his off-the-grid yurt -- stood up and said, "Why don't we go and see the chief of the Cowichan Band? Maybe we can get them to claim the island as their traditional territory. That'll throw a wrench in the works."
A whole five per cent of the land in British Columbia is private property, so everyone in the room who owned a tiny slice, immediately had that familiar, dreadful shrinking feeling. The feeding of the environmental left on natives is the most recent and most wicked of
the many chapters of do-gooder whites, bent on some socialist ecotopia, playing hunter-gatherer dress-up dolls with native people.
The worst part is that it could be so very good for everybody. B.C. is so very rich and so underdeveloped. There probably is tons of oil and gas under the sea, under Haida Gwaii, for instance, or whatever they're trying to call the Queen Charlotte's now, which instead is slated for a future park in this province which is already, as far as I can figure it, all park. Embargoed. No drilling. The local community is either moderately against it or completely against it. Never mind the considerable debt, never mind the broken health
care system or natives living in extreme poverty, in catastrophic isolation, without any hope of a future.
So it was that last week, watching CNBC, I saw a two-person panel discussing the future drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the current drilling in Prudhoe Bay. A rather gorgeous young woman, clearly intelligent, educated in her subject and very calm, was listing the benefits drilling on the North Shore of Alaska had brought to her Tribe. On the other side of the screen a weedy young lobbyist from the Environmental Defense Fund or League -- or whatever the hell -- was facing his worst nightmare: an educated native who didn't oppose development and didn't need his weedy little butt feeding off her trouble.
Hunter-gatherer socialist ecotopias be damned, she was saying: We have indoor plumbing, thank you very much, we have a high school, we have roads and jobs and money, we're independent and ... we like it. Plus, guess what, we police the environment, we watch over it, we are its first and best custodians and it's green as could be, as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could be, as any drilling operation could be. Get out of the Third World, get out of the Middle East, it's not environmentally (or politically) sound, drill here. Now. We know how to make it right ... and so on.