Imagine my delight that Lakeland has been selected for this year’s OBOC title!

While I’ve known about this for a little while, I had to keep my mouth shut until the official launch, which took place today in a library branch in Waterloo, attended by guests and media. I’ll be in Ontario this fall for OBOC events in Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo and Elmira — and maybe some others. As for today, I got to send along a video message and reading which you can find on the Facebook page for OBOC.

Naturally, any author is pleased to be singled out in a positive way.  Lakeland will be promoted by the Waterloo Regional Library, by my friend Mandy Brouse and the folks at one of nation’s very finest independent bookstores, Words Worth Books — to name just two very nice perks for a certain lucky author.

Far more importantly, OBOC offers a chance to discuss some complex and wonderful things: about how the earth under our feet shapes who we are; about what access to a clean lake now and then does for our state of mind; about how natural beauty is connected to our kids’ happiness; about how being lucky citizens of a lake-rich country like no other on earth shapes our quality of life.

To me, literature isn’t about authors but about readers. It’s not about the words on the page, but about the ideas and discussion they may facilitate. A book ought to be just the beginning of dialogue, of many dialogues. I wrote Lakeland not merely in hopes that people would read my one book — gratifying though that may be on a personal level — but rather to do my part to drive a discussion that is just beginning to unfold in our society.

One Book One Community, it seems to me, is really an opportunity for sustained discussion of community values. That’s something we don’t nearly get enough of in our fast-paced era, and I am honored and excited to be a part of what is to come.

Check out what the Kitchener Waterloo Record had to say about the launch.

See also www.oboc.ca!

Meantime, check out my latest piece, published on The Tyee. It’s all about how the Canadian federal government under Stephen Harper is exploiting a loophole in the Fisheries Act to turn virgin lakes into mining tailings ponds, thereby destroying them in perpetuity.

Sadly, this is not all.

In just the last few days, a leaked government document has come to light showing that the Harper conservatives intend to entirely remove the concept of habitat protection from the aforementioned Fisheries Act. The damning document was brought up in the House of Commons by British Columbia MP Fin Donelly. The government did not deny nor disavow the document, and it confirmed that unspecified changes to the act were forthcoming.

My colleagues from Nature Canada’s Stop Wasting Our Lakes Campaign and Living Lakes Canada have received warning that the Harper government intends tack these legislative changes onto the federal budget bill due to be tabled in just a few days. As is always the case with these omnibus bills, the intention is bury the unpleasantness in mountain of paper. The media and opposition will be spread thin trying to deal with the fallout of the whole budget. Who’s going to notice a little wording change in the Fisheries Act?

The Fisheries Act is one of our oldest environmental laws in Canada, and indeed the world. Its concept of habitat protection is simply to support fish but to protect the whole pyramid of life upon which fish depend. Habitat-level protection is holistic law, the kind of thing we need more of, not less. Losing it will be a terrible, and dangerous, setback.

The budget comes down in a few days. I would dearly love to be wrong about this. If you have any influence with the government of the day, please use it nip this ill-considered move in the bud. Make a liar out of me, please.

The Blossom Project formally begins the night of August 5, 2011. The paintings will be shown for one night only at the AKA Gallery in Saskatoon. If you happen to be in town, please join us. (Links will be posted soon.)

Anyway, the one-night exhibition is really just the beginning of an experiment which asks the question: “If you give away some art, will it make the world a little better?” After hanging briefly on the gallery walls, Marlene’s 20 paintings will come down and get packaged in mailing tubes and be sent off as gifts to people around the world. For the most part the recipients will be people who don’t know us. They will open their package to find a large, original watercolour painting, mostly semi-abstract whorls of bright colour, or hearts strung together by ink lines — and they will be surprised and delighted.

It is my job to make sure they are not also freaked out or confused. My task is to write accompanying letters to each recipient explaining why they have been singled out to receive this unexpected gift from an artist in far-off Canada.

The Blossom Project is about bringing out the best in people using the gift of art. By giving away art, we want to acknowledge people who are doing good work around the world. We also want to encourage people who could be in a position to great things if they chose. (Note the duality there!)

What kind of good work? For a guide, we are using the Millennium Development Goals, a set of global targets developed by United Nations and agreed to by all 192 member countries in that organization. If ever there was a blueprint for a better world, the Millennium Development Goals package is IT.

The Blossom Project has its own website, and you can get the complete story there. Most importantly you can also suggest names for our Recipient List. We really need help finding likely candidates, especially in Africa, Asia and South America.

Kathleen O’Grady’s favourite colour is blue. Blue as in water. Kathleen is a clothing designer who uses blue-dyed textiles in her line called Grady Bleu (yes, spelled the French way). I met her at a World Water Day lecture a few weeks ago, and she explained that her interest in indigo and other traditional dyes was connected to her desire for a sustainable water future on this blue planet.

Natural dyes have been used for generations all over the world. The techniques are kept alive in villages in many developing countries and Kathleen says supporting these cottage industries helps provide a sustainable livelihood to artisans, and it offers an alternative to the mass-produced, high-profit-low-pay globalized textile industry.

Relative to synthetics, natural dyes also have a low impact on the environment — particularly water. Grady Bleu is a “labour of love” project that allows the artist to work with beautiful, low-impact textiles while simultaneously raising awareness about water sustainability, the issue, she says, that will define the 21rst century.

To follow Kathleen’s story further, and to find out more about her clothing line, visit www.gradybleu.com.

The talk will open U of S Water Week, a series of lunch time presentations to celebrate World Water Day. Garth Materie from the CBC’s Blue Sky will be hosting.

The folks at the university really want to reach out to citizens right now, to engage people in what they are doing on the science front, and this isn’t just public relations. Because in about seven years, some of the brightest people on the planet are going to hand us a blueprint for a water future that can serve both human beings and ecosystems. Building it is another matter, however. Scientists cannot do that for us. We have to do this ourselves, as a society.

As someone keenly interested in building direct partnerships between lay citizens and professional scientists, I am delighted and honored to be the only non-scientist on the Water Week roster, glad to walk through a door that is opened. I would love to see my friends and colleagues from town. For those too far away, the talk will be available online, and I will post a link. But it would be better to just be there.

For awhile, I am living in a rented house in eastern Long Island, not too far from New York city, in a country-chic village called East Hampton. The homes here are owned by movie stars and magnates. Informal sources suggest this is the richest zip code in America: 11937. Forbes.com has East Hampton only at #166. But collectively the towns around here all rate very high on the list, and houses selling for $20 million are fairly common.

Some of you have wondered how these domestic circumstances would befall a Canuck writer from way back in the jackpines, one who would seem to know more about paddling a canoe than about what to wear to brunch in the Hamptons in spring. Here’s how it went down.

A certain windfall of money came my way late last year. My partner Marlene and I put it into General Revenue for awhile and, predictably, it started to evaporate in a prosaic way. Since the money came ultimately from the Canadian taxpayer in support of the arts, we decided we better support some art with it. I write, Marlene paints. Perfect. We decided to fund a sabbatical, retreat, working holiday or call-it-what-you-will in some exotic locale.

We weighed our options and connections, from Costa Rica, to Morocco, to New Orleans, to Newfoundland. New York City is sort of a hobby of ours, but it was impossible to pay for the kind of space there to which we are accustomed, even with the Canada Council padding your bank roll. Then we thought to look upstate, and upon Long Island, and found a cute cottage with the stars and stripes hanging on the front, with easy connections to the big city.

But the Hamptons for god’s sake? First off, the locals rarely call it that. They use the names of the towns — South Hampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton or Hampton Bay. Or they say “the east end” or “the south fork” of Long Island. “The Hamptons” is an outsider’s expression; or, rather, it refers only to the jet-set aspect to this place.

Except for the wealthy, absentee minority (who own the vast minority of real estate) East Hampton is just a pretty Atlantic town, the oldest in the state of New York, with a rich history. The Montaukett nation was here for 3,000 years before the Puritans “founded” the place in 1648. Following colonial expropriation, one thing led to another — farming, witch-trials, whaling, slaving, pirating, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the railroad. At some point Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner famously showed up and threw paint around and the area became an artist’s colony.

East Hampton is a print junkie’s dream. There are half a dozen weekly newspapers. Mostly broadsheets, they run lengthy, utterly parochial stories. The used book collection for sale at the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society, est. 1895, is better than most any second hand bookstore I know.The place is crawling with authors, celebrated and obscure, living and dead. The library is small work of art with red leather chairs in alcoves.

More than that, the place is dead quiet in winter, so there is time to actually read the classics you drag home. Everything closes early, and it is an event at our cottage if a car passes down the street. You just lie on the couch reading The Inferno, then go to bed early like Benjamin Franklin.

And if all the quiet gets too much, you can ride the Long Island Railway or the Hampton Jitney down to New York City and recharge your stress-battery.

Pam Nimegeers of Saskatoon, tree-planting in the UK a few kilometres north of Hadrian's Wall.

In the early spring of last year, I went to the UK for a long list of reasons, but mainly to do with needing some fresh air after writing a book. The plan was to hike for a week in the Scottish Highlands (where “hiking” is simply called “walking”). On the way, I was going to meet up with a Canadian tree-planting contractor I know, Mr. Hugh Gilmour of Flat Cap Forestry, do a little tree-planting mostly for fun, and see if there was a story there. I’ve written about some parts of the trip in earlier posts, but I also wrote a piece about the tree-planting sojourn for Canadian Geographic magazine. The paper version has just appeared on newsstands, and you can read the full-text by following the link at the end of this post.

The story explains who these Canadian tree planters are, and what they are doing so far from their own boreal forest. Here’s a little background on writing the piece.

Tree-planters in Canada often live in tents right on the planting block. This crew was living in a pretty country inn made of stone, with good ale served at the little bar. Hadrian’s Wall was only a few kilometres south, close enough to reach on foot. Hugh and I had a few that first night and talked about what work I would be doing the next day. I assumed I would be a humble planter, but Hugh’s management partner had thrown his back out, and so they were short one crew chief. Thus I was promoted before work even began.

In the morning, it transpired that my vast age was my only real qualification for the job. Under the terms of Hugh’s insurance, only crew age 25 and up were allowed to drive the company vehicles, and so I found myself piloting an enormous (by English standards) van down a narrow (by English standards) stone-walled road trying to keep up with Hugh in the van ahead. Still jet-lagged, it felt like a rally race to me. I found it a little unnerving to be shifting gears left-handed, going down the wrong side of the road with the lives of a half dozen sleepy planters jammed in behind depending on me. But we reached the planting blocks as Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot was playing on the radio. Not a bad start to the day.

Having had in my mind the idea that I would plant trees in England and daydream all day as I had done one pleasant summer many years before working in northern Saskatchewan, I was disappointed to be relegated to management. But by the end of the day, I was profoundly grateful that Hugh had not sent me out with a spade and bag.

Planting is bloody hard. I planted a handful of trees myself just to remember the motion, which is easy enough. Watching these young guns banging them in, I remembered how hard it had been even in my twenties, to repeat that motion 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000 times a day while scrambling over the uneven ground. I recalled how knackered I had been those first few days back then. I realized that it would have been epic to plant all day — and possibly humiliating — despite my relatively high fitness level for my age bracket. Thanks for sparing me the indignity, Hugh.

As it was it was tiring enough. My job was to make sure the planters had sufficient trees to keep working. In Canada, crew bosses deliver trees along the rows by riding quads, and that is true in the UK sometimes. But this particular block had no accessible roads, and so Hugh and I had to haul in the bags by hand. The footing was incredibly difficult — over slash and deadfall, deep mud and soggy sedges, and large cones of heavy wet clay into which the trees were planted.

There was not room in the short Canadian Geographic piece I wrote to address how eerily silent and artificial these UK tree plantations are. Where once there were oak forests, these monocultures of sitka spruce and other new-world trees are propped up by herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and tilling machinery. They  are planted in rigid rows, ugly to my eye, and grow so thickly that no understory can get a toehold. As a result, virtually no wildlife comes into these ranks of evergreens. I never saw a vole or a mouse or a nything on four legs, nor even a bird.

Plantation trees do a great deal of good in modern-day England. But they are a pale substitute for the great forests that once covered the island.

Links

The full text of my Canadian Geographic piece is here.

David Brownstein of the University of British Columbia contacted me after reading the article. He studies the history of tree planting and maintain biodiversity in managed forests, among many other things. Check out his website for more.

Finally, if you are a Canadian planter who would like to try working the winter season in the UK — a good way to combine work and travel — visit Hugh Gilmour’s Flat Cap Forestry site for more information, including how to apply.

What was it like to win? I got asked that many times yesterday by ladies and gentlemen of the press. It was like this:

The laureates, as they grandly called us yesterday, had been given the good news by telephone about ten days ago — but were sworn to secrecy until the announcement. It meant that writers all over Canada had been sneaking around their friends and loved ones, telling vague, fishy stories about travel plans they were making. Sorry about that, folks.

You’d think knowing about the win in advance would have made us all calm as cucumbers. Some of us arrived that way. But the atmosphere at La Grande Bibliothèque, aka. the National Library of Canada, was electric. It was impossible not to be caught up in it.

While a few hundred rather sophisticated looking people took seats in an auditorium, we were lined up like school kids backstage at a play, instructed in French and English to wait for the applause, walk to our mark, shake hands, turn to the photographer, etc. We had been chummy over morning coffee, but once the hour approached we milled about silently, everyone re-reading their one-page speech, which had to be filed in advance.

The applause for the first laureate was shockingly loud. One by one we were sent through the curtains, and our very capable handler, Diane Miljour crossed another name off a sheet on the wall. We were being sent to the beyond….

I went out almost at the end, found my mark and grinned into the glare, clutching a little gold envelope. I have never made a speech before with a scrum of cameras flashing. I had to laugh, and did, briefly. It was a fun ride.

Immediately following the announcement, the aforementioned ladies and gentlemen of the press converged upon us. I had no idea how much media interest would come my way. Perhaps it was because of the subject of Lakeland — rather universal and accessible to a Canadian audience. I spent the next four hours doing interviews. Regina’s Dianne Warren, whose novel Cool Water won the English fiction award, was doing likewise across the room. Coteau Books also took a publisher’s award for Wendy Phillips’ book, Fishtailing, so it was a good day for the very literary province called Saskatchewan.

Well, back to earth . . .

The issues raised in Lakeland are still issues. If the GG award announcement has steered you to this page, and you’ve made it to the end of this post, I hope you will follow the trail a little further. Please take a look at newly-launched, not-for-profit website called smallredcabin.org. It is a forum to discuss our use of Canada’s wild spaces for pleasure — especially lakes. What do they give us, and what should we give back in return? Please visit, register, and contribute your views. You will not be asked for money, I promise. The site is just new, and needs only your ideas in order to grow.

I am even more grateful that any attention this may draw to Lakeland will help to keep access to pure, beautiful lakes a vibrant part of the Canadian way of life. For those who have not read the book, Lakeland borrows its title from a small, lake-filled rural municipality in northern Saskatchewan, where my family has been lucky to own a small, lake-front cottage for 50 years. Places like it exist in every populated area of Canada. Yet many such places are being destroyed by rampant over-development and our ever-increasing standard of affluence. The ready access to natural beauty that defines Canada is fast becoming a perk affordable only to the few.

Working on Lakeland, I got to experience some of our most beautiful and accessible wilderness, from coast to coast. While too much of it has been touched by the blight of material excess — folksy cottages supplanted by mansions, canoes rocked by wakeboats, game trails bulldozed by all terrain vehicles — the nation I now call lakeland is still occupied by plenty of insightful, thoughtful people who would have things otherwise. In fact, having met so many of them in the writing of the book, I would say that the majority of those who migrate to the Canadian lakeshore in order to be recharged by nature  — would welcome a moratorium on capital in our precious near-wilderness. For if we cannot achieve simple living at the lakeshore, then where?

The reasonable majority is a voice too often unheard. Money, meanwhile, screams rather than talks, as our guitar-poet B. Dylan reminds us. And so I pray that Lakeland, the book, can do a little to open up the debate about lakeland, the country. I wrote it to get people talking about access to nature and what role it ought to play in a country whose water-rich, still-glorious lakescape is the envy of a crowded, thirsty world. Who, among the current generation of Canadian children, ought to have easy access to nature? May every daughter and son get to wander the fringe of the wild that still exists not too far from the city, though some of their parents be not wealthy enough to afford a second house.

To paraphrase my hero, Edward Abbey, you cannot really fight for nature if you do not have a personal friendship with it.