7 Sediments (On the Anthropocene)
October 2019
1. I wrote this while flying on an airplane. I had a window seat, 8A. I have always loved watching the landscape slip by from the air – the pale and faded greens and browns punctuated by towns and settlements, clouds and the blue-grey of the ocean, all merging into what author Rebecca Solnit calls “the blue of distance.” I wonder how our perspective of the planet has changed since we gained the ability to view it from above. To view it from a distance. I remember the first time I flew over Vancouver Island, my homeland, and a contested territory shared by many nations. From the air I realized what I had imagined to be an endless blanket of trees, more trees than are truly comprehendible by the human mind, was nothing more than a slick façade. The logging companies had left thin strips of forest along the roadside – strips just thick enough to hide the clear-cuts and slash-and-burn pits that made up the majority of the scarred landscape.
2. Scene From my Window, mounted in January 2017, was my curatorial project WNDW Gallery’s 4th exhibition. Comprised of 7 hours of footage shot by artist Stefan Sollenius on an iphone through the window of a tree-planting crew truck over the course of 3 summers, and compiled by Sollenius and media artist Ana Carolina von Hertwig, the work layers individual video clips on-top of one another, playing both forward and in reverse simultaneously, creating a mesmerizing cycle of legibility and abstraction, green-blue-brown moving compositions that crystalize into landscape only to slip away again moments later.
Sollenius and I first met in Spring 2012, in a sculpture class at Emily Carr University, but we really got to know each other during a 6-credit writing course in the Autumn semester of the same year where he wrote very eloquently about his time working as a tree-planter. Our relationship developed over discussions of our observations about the rampant industrialization of Canadian wilderness, from our respective positions of wilderness guide and silviculture worker. We often talked together about the flow of capital in the form of raw materials from Coastal British Columbia east to Asia, the historical movement of sea otter pelts, the contemporary movement of entire trees, and the proposed movements of natural gas and bitumen from the oil-sands through contested pipelines projects to tidewater.
3. A letter to Rita Wong, Poet and Vancouver resident recently incarcerated for 28 days for violating a court injunction to peacefully protest the proposed twinning of the Trans-Mountain pipeline at the Westridge Terminal on Burnaby Mountain, in Vancouver BC.
Dear Rita,
Firstly, I’m very sorry I didn’t write earlier. Your sentencing and incarceration coincided with my trans-Atlantic move – I wanted to get a letter to you while you were still in prison, but it just didn’t happen. But that is about me, and this is about you.
Thank You. Thank you for sitting on the mountain that day and refusing to move. Thank you for continuing to insist that we respect the territories we find ourselves living on as guests, as settlers, as allies and most importantly as co-conspirators. Thank you for continuing to insist, that we conform to the laws of this land and not just the laws of our colonial state. When these laws are in conflict, I agree with your stance that indigenous law takes precedence, and your statement to this effect was as moving and as eloquent as your poetry. Thank you for using your time in Alouette to highlight the lived reality of being incarcerated in Canada, and for again being an ally and co-conspirator, this time with those caught up in the carcerial cycle.
Thinking of you and everyone on the mountain and thank you for being there while I can’t.
4. (Lim, J. “MMIWG inquiry calls on resource sector to address risks from work camps.” ipolitics.ca. published June 3, 2019, accessed October 14, 2019. https://ipolitics.ca/2019/06/03/mmiwg-inquiry-calls-on-resource-sector-to-consider-risks-from-work-camps/)
A national inquiry is calling on resource industries and regulators to consider the safety and security of Indigenous women and girls at all stages of project planning and development, amid long-standing concerns over the connection between work camps and sexual violence. Among the 231 calls for action in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’ final report are five recommendations for the resource-extraction and development industries.
So-called “man camps” — temporary housing set up for predominantly male workers that accompany mining, oil and gas development projects — have been considered a safety threat to local women, particularly for Indigenous women and girls who live in more rural and isolated parts of Canada. The 1,200-page final report officially released this morning stated the national inquiry had heard testimony and examined evidence that suggested resource projects can drive spikes in violence against Indigenous women and girls… …A 2017 report by the Firelight Group, a consulting firm that conducts research in Indigenous communities, found a 38 per cent increase in sexual assaults reported to the RCMP during the first year of construction on an industrial project in Fort St. James, B.C. The report also noted a “sharp increase” in sex trafficking in Alberta’s Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie which it connected to the rise in “increased incomes of young men, social isolation from families and relationships, and the hypermasculine context of camps.”
5. The last time I spent anytime in Northern Alberta it was over a decade ago. I was working for The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, screening films about mountaineering, rock-climbing, skiing and mountain culture on a tour across Western Canada. In an attempt to offset our carbon footprint while driving films all over BC and Alberta we bought a 1984 Mercedes’s Turbo-diesel sedan, and converted it to run on waste vegetable oil. In a ridiculous fit we decided to call the car George Oilwell. For more than 2 years George was a fairly trusty companion, despite the odd break-down or two, and the fact he temperamentally refused to start if the engine was too warm. This meant either very long breaks, or taking advantage of the fact I could remove the key from the ignition without turning the car off, and leave him idling while I took a break. I spent a lot of time learning about how to purify vegetable oil once its life in the fryer is done, and also leaving caches of oil with friends and acquaintances spread across Western Canada. At one point I remember leaving Vancouver with over 300 l of treated-vegetable oil, my trunk and foot wells all full of the viscous golden substance. Apparently when Rudolf Diesel’s first engine experiments designed to run on coal-dust failed, he switched to designing for Vegetable Oil, hoping its ubiquity would encourage farmers to adopt his machines- the idea of combusting plant-based oils in by no means new. The only downside, other than having to lug hundreds of litres of oil around with me everywhere, is that the fuel becomes an index of its prior life, permeating the car with the scent of burgers, fries, fish and chips, curry joints and doughnuts. I gained at least 10 kilos driving that car.
6. It’s late July 2019. I’m sitting in PLOT, a project space at Access Gallery in Vancouver BC that is currently housing my friend Caitlin’s curatorial project Far Afield in its current iteration, entitled “Under the Beating Sun, From Summer to Summer.” We are at Oakland-based artist Elia Vargas’ performance entitled “Oil Rituals for the Future #35.” Vargas is currently a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz, and his research looks into the potentiality of oil as media, mining the history of human relationships to the substance to look for ways forward within our petro-obsessed world. He is talking about the relationship pre-colonial American cultures had with oil, talking about the rampant spiritualism related to early oil exploration, talking about the potentiality of oil as a material during its early life as a commodity. He is holding a bottle of crude oil in his hand, telling us that in the wild-west of snake-oil sellers and unchecked medical claims the notion that crude, and particularly Pennsylvania Sweet Crude (with its very high paraffin content), was often sold as a scalp treatment. He is telling us the only way he could get his hands on raw crude was to buy this product, which is unbelievably still being produced and sold today. He is looking for a volunteer to receive a free scalp treatment. When he uncaps the bottle and hands it around for us to sniff, I have a startling flashback to my childhood, to my mother washing my hair at least once a month with this very same shampoo. After Vargas’ performance I immediately call my brother to confirm my memory – and he agrees, although neither of us can remember the reason why. My father thinks its because she thought it would take chlorine our of our hair that accumulated from our weekly trips to the swimming pool. When we ask my mother about it she claims it never happened.
7. I finished writing this text while doing laundry. 2 loads. One (30 degrees) delicates – mostly underwear and silk, the other for everything else (40 degrees). I hung everything up to dry in the drying cabinet shared by our building. While I was folding clothes I remembered hearing once that the dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction. That the largest creatures that ever walk the earth produced so much methane that they affected the climate so much it eventually became inhospitable. This is probably not true, or maybe I heard it in a Jurassic Park movie? In any case the dubious nature of this anecdote is irrelevant – the dinosaurs couldn’t have known what they where doing. And even if they did they couldn’t have stopped. I wonder if someone invented this story to make themselves feel better about they ways in which the anthropocene will leave a lasting mark on this earth. I wonder if I invented this story.