(The following article is from the August 1-31, 2007 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)
By Karin Larsen, Hamilton
Imperialism, the dominant socio-economic system, parasitically exploits the Earth and all her species. The times of great ice storms, hurricanes, melting of ancient glaciers and droughts has provoked even scientists in the service of the empire to recognize that a parasite will die if it kills its host.
While the bourgeois media and state infrastructure bicker over the accounting costs of responsibility for implementing even the most anemic of regulations, working class citizens of all colours, cultures and ancestry are moving away from the destructive behaviours we acknowledge within the present socio-economic conditions.
The recent Haudenosaunee Environmental Forum, held at Six Nations Polytech, brought together voices from the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Grand River Conservation Authority and the Six Nations Band Council in a call for unity in action.
Since initiating the land reclamation of the small patch of land between the Six Nations Reserve and the suburban town of Caledonia, since the infamous OPP attack which drew broad and distant pledges of solidarity with our brothers and sisters on the front line, the bourgeois media have bombarded workers with the message that our wage dependency, in this period of constructed job loss, requires us to do anything that might bolster this rapacious "development" driven economy.
At the forum, the two presenting organizations funded by the Canadian state offered solid facts and figures identifying specific problems with waste management and water safety, accompanied by specific local actions to stem the tide of destruction. Yet their message remained couched in defeatism, a mindset that we will have to respectfully challenge as we struggle for a united front.
Incisive speeches from members of the ACT, which works with Indigenous people in conserving biodiversity, health and culture in tropical America, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, spoke to the need to marry twenty-first century scientific technology with ancestral wisdom of this land that too many still call the New World.
Organized by the Public Awareness and Education Side-table, part of the Confederacy/Canada negotiations, the Indigenous Elders and Youth Council, and the McMaster University Indigenous Studies Department, the Forum discussed the pressing need for building the same level of love that many Canadians have for the Amazon and directing it towards the reforestation of the Carolinian Forest.
Looking at computer images of the Americas taken from on high (Google Earth) we can see that the Six Nations Reserve is a small patch of dark green surrounded by yellow crop land, which itself is being lost to the expanding grey concrete jungle. This surviving square of the Carolinian Forest is a home for animals, food and medicine plants that once grew along eastern North America, 80% of which has been destroyed but can and must be brought back. Today 25% of Canada's population lives on the filled swamplands and clear-cut woodlands of the Carolinian Forest. We, in the cities especially, must take up the responsibility of learning to respect, restore and live in harmony with our natural world.
The ACT presenters, who live in Colombia, explained that they, like the Haudenosaunee in Canada, have semi-autonomous reserves which they are in the process of expanding in a similar reclamation strategy. The next step, which will require the broad support of a united front, is to develop cultural and biological connectivity between these divided territories.
Anticipating the bourgeoisie's attempts to divide us, the forum was a reminder that if we want our future generations to live to build socialism, we must bring back the Carolinian Forest now.