Adelard, my grandfather, knew thirty-six professions, thirty-six miseries. Among his avowed jobs, he was among others, in the United States, operator of forestry equipment. On this side of the border, he was heating buses, taxis. Then, he ended his life as a dispatcher for the police in Sherbrooke, busy all day long picking up emergency calls in the sizzling foam of short waves.
At the end of his life, he sat enthroned in his living room, sunk into a well-worn mustard yellow armchair. Between two cigarettes, he smoked a pipe, while listening to American television. He was a regular on the show The Price Is Right where the host, Bob Barker, armed with a long microphone, invited strangers to come out of the closed doors of their existence to wallow in the prefabricated desires of the consumer society.
Like so many others, my grandfather hoped, mounted on the wings of chance, to earn his place in a world that seemed destined to nail him to the ground. He had believed for a time that he would change his life by working, day and night, in a quartz mine. He very nearly left his skin there, after having left his shirt there.
The white stone of this mine, my grandfather took it for milk, for honey, for gold. He preferred her in any case to the four cows, three hens and two pigs promised by Heaven of the Catholic education offered to the multitude of his fellows, in the name of a Bethlehemian stable above which a star was supposed to shine for all.
He thought he would reach the light by descending ever further into the darkness, towards the center of the Earth, at the bottom of this great hole which became for him the bottom of things. Out of this hole where he left his knees, he was still digging with his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. He shoveled clouds as much as he could, swallowed the air in great gulps, as if to better plunge back into his unattainable dreams.
The white stone was his master. She ordered him to deliver himself bound hand and foot to the glory of the riches he hoped would rise to the surface of the great muddy hole where big pumps, powered by diesel engines, turned day and night. It was barely enough to expel the thousands of liters of water that rushed there to drown his dreams. This black mine of white stones, he talked about it until the end of his life, with the sun in the depths of his eyes.
I went to see, in the summer, what remains of the years spent digging the immense crater of this open pit mine on which his life was closed. The forest has regained its rights. Still water has made its nest and swallowed everything. At the entrance, near the access road, is a mountain of residue on which nothing will probably ever be able to grow back. Then, here and there, a few old abandoned miners’ machines, all rusty, pierced, punctured. The site was abandoned overnight. Everything stayed there. Nobody cared.
According to the benchmarks provided by the State, there are at least 223 mining exploration sites and 177 abandoned mining sites in Quebec. In several places, the extraction processes and the concentration of an intensive mono-industrial activity have caused significant damage to the environment. Risks associated with the dispersion in nature of dangerous products generated by these mines are proven and documented. These are so many little time bombs that threaten to explode on the world of the living.
Last year, $28.2 million in public funds was spent to rehabilitate just a few mine sites. However, the total expenses everywhere proved to be much higher than the initial estimates, due to the presence of unexpected toxic products and the complexity of the work.
In 2019, the Quebec state estimated that abandoned mining sites would cost the community 1.2 billion to be rehabilitated. Judging by the cost overruns so far, the final bill is likely to be much higher. We often don’t know much about these sites. The operators have disappeared.
However, the territory of Quebec continues to be criss-crossed by mining claims from people who hope, with more substantial means than those of my grandfather, to tear the earth’s crust from its cap to see if their ideas of wealth are teeming beneath it. The same circus goes on and on, led by psychopaths of profit who shovel their ecological disasters into the backyard of the community.
CBC reported that the Pentagon is coveting Canadian mines, offering them funding, now that Ottawa has expelled Chinese state-owned companies from the extractive industry of so-called “strategic” minerals, i.e. those that maintain our addiction to electronic gadgets, cars, armaments.
As if that weren’t already enough to worry us, the bottom of the oceans no longer escapes this desire to plunder the entire earth. For the past few months, the International Seabed Authority (AIFM), a UN body created in 1994, has been increasing its meetings. It wishes to arrive, for 2023, at an international regulation to fix the modalities of the commercial exploitation of mineral resources at great depth, several thousand kilometers below the surface. The AIFM has 168 States in its ranks. Including Canada. Next meeting early next year. Everything is progressing well, it seems. Good ?
The AIFM does not hide the fact that the exploitation of the seabed will lead to the destruction of living organisms, the disappearance of habitats and the formation of sedimentary plumes, to which are added the consequences of hydraulic leaks, and the effects produced by the noise and light from these activities. We don’t know what we are going to generate. But we are heading in this direction, with speed.
Does the future have to be undermined in this way?