The time that we no longer have

I could have called this text “The sacrosanct balance between a capitalist economy and the protection of the environment”. Looks like a simplified doctoral thesis title. All that’s missing is “in the XXIand century in the northeast of the Americas” to be complete. And then, that’s not so much what I want to talk about. But still a little.

Posted at 10:00 a.m.

In fact, I’ve wanted to write about wood for a while now: the forest, nature, lakes and rivers, animals, plants. That. The living beings. I constantly push the idea away as if I’m not “enough” to talk about it. Hints of impostor syndrome. Enough what exactly? What does it take to speak and care about what surrounds us all? No doubt it comes from the fact that I had cut myself off from all that a few years ago, too busy as a center player in the metro-work-sleep trio. Like you maybe. And it wasn’t my little weekend in a rented chalet in St-Machin-du-Lointain that was enough for me to be able to see, feel, think about all that.

This past year, I had the chance to reconnect with nature. Watching winter arrive on a slowly freezing lake, spring setting in. The morning birds singing again and not just a little. The silence too, a silence that hurts your ears. What happiness! What damned great happiness!

I also set foot in a forest of yellow birches, some of which are 400 or 500 years old. A magnificent place, preserved from everything, in the Seigneurie du Triton biodiversity reserve. A rare ecosystem like a caribou crossing the George River in 2022.

What I take away from this experience is humility. It’s funny, humility. It doesn’t happen all of a sudden. It settles like the seasons, quietly, and it puts us back in our place gently, with tact.

There, in the middle of nothing, nothing that has not been made by man, miles from the nearest road, without communications, I could only rely on nature, trust it in a way. I felt small, very small. I did not dominate nature. I was one element among thousands of others. I belonged to him.

Then, I remembered Mr. Dubé, in Manawan, who showed me how to harvest birch bark in the spring to make baskets, of Mrs. Sioui who concocted me a tea of ​​poglous to cure my cough and from Mr. Vollant who told me about his secret for capturing beautiful prey by trapping, a secret based on respect for animals. Aboriginal elders from another generation. It may surprise you, but not one of them told me to be careful of Mother Earth. Not like that anyway. They didn’t tell me, they just showed me. I wonder how I could have forgotten.

I was in high school when I first heard about global warming. Our ecology teacher had shown us the projections for the melting of glaciers in the Arctic for the next 25 and 50 years. It was a long way off, all that, in time and place, for the young girl that I was. We started recycling anyway. Then, global warming became climate change – it seems less scary – and we started to see more wind, fire, water and less earth. This time, changes not only in the Arctic, but here in Nutashkuan on the North Shore, in the Magdalen Islands, in the Okanagan. Record temperatures in Montreal. Tornadoes in Lanaudière.

The changes are not for tomorrow, they are already here. We now have to seed the trout in the river of my childhood. On the farms, you have to buy bumblebees to replace the dying bees. There are 50% fewer insects than just a few decades ago. You just have to go a little out of town to see it.

In all of this, I am trying to understand what drives ministers, provincially and federally, to persist in giving their approval to projects that we know are devastating for living beings. Or to remain in a bed of status quo which benefits industry, the exploitation of resources. Just more of the same. I am thinking of Bay du Nord or the caribou and their enclosures. To the thousands of square kilometers of territory that Quebec refuses to protect in the name… in the name of what again? Ah yes, of an economy based on constant consumption. Perhaps for the ministers too, the break was too long. This is what it is with the world in which we live.

The elders would probably say to them today, “Gentlemen, come take a walk in the woods. We no longer have the luxury of waiting. Time cannot be redeemed. »


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