Normétal, Lebel-sur-Quévillon, Chapais, Senneterre, I discover you while you are being evacuated. Clova, I learn your name and already you could disappear. The winds will have the last word, with the endorsement of the Prime Minister himself. The Crees of Waswanipi, the Attikameks of Wemotaci, the Anishinabés of Lac-Simon and all the guardians of the lands and waters, my heart is with you. Now and in the future, our geography will be learned through tragedy.
I wonder if the logging companies are sad that they didn’t raze those acres of forest themselves. Clear-cutting or burning bloody, the result is the same, but dying by fire is a waste of money. Apparently, you have to keep exploiting, growing and pounding if you want to survive. How many forests do we have to set on fire and blood before we realize that they are what makes us breathe?
We must save the villages, but the villages will not last long without the forest monument. It’s as if we were unable to see the longer-term urgency. Respond to the immediate crisis without seeing that it is just a symptom of a more insidious problem. That’s it, we are in the climate crisis whose warnings we have ignored. The air is already irritating; can you imagine in ten years? My lungs are on fire, the companies are playing with fire and the youth are throwing a distress fire.
So, when will we dare to name the fuel of our extinction? Pipelines clear land, pollute rivers and kill communities to line the pockets of a handful of billionaires. The rich burn gas to do Formula 1 laps while the vulnerable suffocate. The companies point the finger at the individual as guilty while the oil companies rejoice that their strategy has worked. The ecological footprint that kills us is not that of humans, but of dirty oil. Capitalism fuels our exploitation. Capitalism fuels our extinction.
You have to be a barrel of oil to be valuable.
I look forward to the day when forests replace the value of oil and stop bleeding. As the forest is the last fortress of freedom to fall, it is she who gets gutted. As the forest is the last fortress of freedom to fall, it is for it that we must mobilize. So what it takes is an uprising for the forests, but above all for our humanity.
Our extinction is coming slowly and we are consciously moving towards it. Do we have to measure the gravity of the crisis on the scale of tragedies? It is imperative, we must re-invite our reality outside of this infinite growth that takes advantage of us. It burns us with fatigue, it just burns us.
I don’t know what else to do but to call for a popular uprising to get out of capitalism, to imagine the future of the world. We need to get out of fossil fuels now. We must call for a decrease now. We have to stick together, because we cannot survive without a community. We have to reinvent our reality, because our reality is suffocating us.
Tonight I cry, but tomorrow I get up. Indignation must be shared, anger must be inflamed. Because I refuse to let myself be smothered without a fight.