Undustrialism

Today, our search engines went on strike. Our encyclopedia started job action and our video players took a pause. A very large chunk of the internet took part in protests today, blacking out parts of their front pages in symbolic protest against the new American anti-piracy bills, SOPA and PIPA. This blog stands in solidarity with these efforts and others like them in battle against internet censorship.

I could post a long list of the noble companies who supported the protests, but I won’t. Instead, here are a list of corporations who support SOPA, and some contact info. Please consider calling one of these toll-free numbers and letting them know what you think, at their expense.

Trash is something of a passion of mine. It’s an absolutely fascinating social phenomena, from the middens of ancient archaeological sites to the treasure-rich dumpsters up the street. Among my many unfinished projects is a book draft detailing about a hundred kinds, and the host of ways each can be recycled on a household basis into anything from food to clothing to housing itself. After a few hundred hours of research into the topic, one simple thesis became apparent – there really is no such thing as “garbage”, at least in an objective sense. The entire notion is totally socially constructed, and every bit a part of our industrial economy. As a society and economy, we act more like a single digestive tract than an ecosystem, devouring and disposing of resources on a colossal scale without much thought to using any of them efficiently or sustainably. If three words sum up the industry, they would be “mining in reverse”, and it’s every bit as destructive, toxic and wasteful. Garbage represents an enormous untapped resource which our current municipal “recycling” efforts only begin to scratch the surface of.

A few recent stories have caught my attention on the matter, from the recent three-piece series on littering to the new controversy regarding a council suggestion to ease recent bag limits on garbage collection. In the latter, especially, people are quick to complain that reducing waste and sorting garbage is far too much work. Having put my garbage out tonight after the rest of the house went to bed, I can’t say that I find it to be an “unbearable burden”, even when compared to basic tasks such as dishes or sweeping. Also, since we often produce less than a full bag a week of garbage (I cleaned the basement until my second bag was full), unscrupulous neighbours are often taking advantage of the curb in front of my house – not something I mind terribly until it starts putting my home over the limit (something they clearly don’t mind). Though I’m never totally sure who did it, it’s more than one neighbouring house, and none of them ever seem to have blue boxes out…

These resources are not cheap. We may pay highly subsidized prices for things like paper, metals and plastic, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t broader consequences which come with each and every piece of trash. Beyond the obvious environmental issues there’s the question of supply – particularly pressing now as most resources have been rising in price and declining in avialability for most of the last decade. Then there’s the human cost – all the work which goes into extracting the materials, producing the goods, shipping and retailing them, then finally collecting and disposing of them. Also, since both extraction and disposal (as well as other stages) tend to be quite toxic, they often have huge and undocumented costs among neighbours, particularly indigenous and third-world peoples. Locally, the Six Nations battle against the Cayuga dump expansion would be a good example of the kind of environmental racism here, as would be broader issues like E-waste, mining and energy.

Many argue that because this process “creates jobs” that it provides additional benefits. The fallacy here is to assume that any of us are really gaining by working more only to have those wages turned over to the price of disposing of our goods and re-producing them. Whether we pay these costs through taxes, increased prices or a generally falling standard of living, it’s clear that a huge cost comes attached to these “jobs”. Employing a few poor people at the price of gouging the rest of poor people for the purpose of a needless and destructive task does working people no favours. It’s work for the sake of work, and we all know who the actual winners are. By this logic, there’s no reason to own anything past the first day, and we might as well regularly burn down our homes. Any system of economic measures which ignores the ongoing benefits provided by goods which aren’t being replaced is deeply flawed. Then again, our standard of living’ was never really the point, was it?

If this entire process takes place for the sake of one “use”, then the entire process can become twice as efficient by using something twice. This kind of economic activity multiplies the real-world benefits many times over. There are some issues of diminishing returns as things break down, but there are additional benefits if it can be salvaged for spare parts or materials. As most people know, these things always tend to seem like useless clutter until you have to pay $40 for a replacement cog the day after you throw a whole box of them out.

It’s also worth considering what kind of value we place on these goods. There are many “theories of value”, and many distinctions within them. One can consider the work and resources which went into producing them, their “use-value” to you as an individual, judge them on aesthetic qualities or rate them their relative scarcity in the overall economy (usually with market pricing). Capitalists prefer the last option, and it’s easy to see how this leads to the widespread de-valuing of all kinds of goods while ignoring all other standards of value. When considered in a capitalist society where urban and residential land is highly priced, that makes storing ‘junk’ expensive, and drives people to throw out everything they can. Most other societies of nearly any kind one can name took the opposite view – using local resources as efficiently as possible first, and relying on distant trade goods second (if at all). There are very good reasons to do this – especially in terms of labour, the environment, economics and aesthetics as pretty much any hand-crafted goods show. These practices make the most use possible out of raw materials (instead of the least) and build diverse and decentralized forms of production, which are exactly what we need right now.

Of course, these views have consequences too. First, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to buy things which soon have to be thrown out, even if they’re “cheaper” (at the store…). Cheap manufacturing methods, low-quality materials and poor designs will soon render them useless for not only their intended task, but also most forms of re-use. Things which can be maintained and repaired, which are worth disassembling for materials and which don’t require specialized or proprietary parts. Questioning “garbage” means questioning the way our productive systems have been structured over the last century to produce mainly garbage.

Under our economic system, consumers bear all (accounted for) costs of the process, so it’s only natural to try to get us to consume as much as possible – if collecting the profits from this process is your goal. If you wish to use these goods, rather than sell them, this doesn’t do you much good. When you simply want a refrigerator which refrigerates, you gain nothing from having to replace it regularly, yet you do pay for it. Packaging often makes up close to half of the price of goods (especially at the supermarket), but it doesn’t give us much other than more to clean up. This isn’t a problem that city regulations can solve for us, it’s one we need to approach ourselves. The only point in this process where these goods get the attention necessary to really creatively re-use them. It’s also the point where they cost us nothing and involve the lowest transportation costs (negative in both counts if they don’t have to be collected and disposed of as a result). There’s an absolute wealth of materials flowing through our homes and neighbourhoods, and we’re the ones who pay for it if we don’t use them. Diverting “waste” in this way is only possible at the household and community level, and that’s exactly where it’s needed. We don’t have to blast apart mountains and acid-leach the rubble to get it, drill kilometres under the ocean floor or deforest large areas, but if we simply throw this stuff away, that’s what will have to happen again.

Right down the road in London, hundreds of workers are now fighting a bitter lock-out. Beginning on the first of the year, Electro-Motive, now owned by Caterpillar Inc., who bought the Electro-Motive Diesel empire along with all of Progress Rail from venture capital firms a few years ago, has given a “final offer” of less than half their former wages and benefits with no pensions if they want to go back to work. The workers, represented by the CAW, haven’t been back to work since.

By now, this is a familiar story. It mirrors the experiences of Stelco, here in Hamilton, which was bought up by venture capital firms and then sold off to US Steel, which promptly ended up in a bitter lockout that lasted most of a year. These union-busting tactics have become increasingly common in recent years, with large corporations seeking to break up the “uncompetitive” wages and benefits enjoyed by their competitors, generally by buying them out and playing hardball at the negotiating table. Companies like US Steel and Caterpillar can do that, since they have such large networks of plants elsewhere to which they can shift production.

What do these corporations gain by spending billions buying up and shutting down competitors? Beyond the obvious – ending competition, as Labatt did when they bough up and shuttered the Lakeport brewery, there’s a second, more insidious goal. Wages are the price given to labour on a market, and in markets, if you lower the price somewhere, it affects prices everywhere. Driving down the wages of workers at one plant will encourage other workers at nearby plants to settle for less.

Is it worth it for Caterpillar to spend their profits this way? Perhaps, but that ignores the bigger picture. Caterpillar’s shareholders aren’t just shareholders in Caterpillar – they’re invested in many corporations, all which have an interest in keeping labour costs as low as possible. The loss of a month or year’s production at one plant is well worth it if it helps set new (lower) standards for compensation or serves to discredit the labour movement. Union membership has been waning for decades, especially in the US, and many of these corporations sell blood. Similar trends can be witnessed with the swath of states (like Wisconsin) which attempted to effectively outlaw public-sector unions last year, as well as the continuing attempts to close workplaces where new unionization drives succeed.

Nobody is safe from this kind of “vulture capitalism”. If your company is in trouble, expect the rescue effort to come complete with wage and benefit cuts. If you’re successful, you have to be wary of the owners simply selling it off for a profit, then facing much of the same. If you have a “good job” and “solid career” in the private sector you must watch for outsourcing and temps. If you’re in the public sector, you have to look out for maniacs like Rob Ford. Small businesses only hope to survive, current students can only hope to have jobs at all and those without jobs can look forward to far longer lines at the food bank. If this sounds like a coordinated attack on working people that’s because it is. Amidst one of the worst economic crises in a century and brutal, crushing unemployment which largely has yet to rebound, large corporations are making some of their largest profits ever.

The workers from a single plant can’t fight this on their own. A coordinated attack calls for a coordinated defence, and that’s something the labour movement’s been doing for a very long time – it’s called solidarity. A week from tomorrow, Saturday the 21st, people from all over Ontario will be heading for London, where thousands are expected to take part in protests against the lockout. This kind of support is crucial – locked out workers need to know that they’re not alone, and the public needs to know that this debate goes beyond the anti-labour rants so often presented by the media. We all have reasons to stand with these workers, and if we don’t, we’ll soon have even more.

Canada has officially left the Kyoto Accords on Global Warming. After a lackluster week in Durban, efforts are now looking grim for an organized and negotiated solution to the worsening crisis of climate change.

Take a moment to digest that.

It’s almost 2012, and we’re now farther from a real agreement with any hope of actually combating the crisis than we were ten years ago, or ten years before that. The effects of this crisis are beginning to show on foreign shores, and most of the latest reports have been utterly horrifying. The entire fate of the fucking planet is at stake and all that our leaders have done is bicker, dither and whine.

I chose the word “whine” carefully. Much of the debate has revolved around thoroughly misguided and superficial concepts of “fairness”. rapidly developing nations like China and India, who are (understandably) unwilling to commit to serious reductions until developed nations like Canada, America, who are unwilling to go any further until India and China do as well. Canada and America, of course, still emit far more per person and have been doing this for decades, but that part seems less important than the demand that somebody else pay for our lavish lifestyles. Closer to home, and especially in America, the “climate deniers” have been playing this same game, demanding equal airtime and media attention on the basis of being “the other side of the argument”. This extremely-well funded minority has managed to play a huge role in the American political paralysis over the issue, and has led to some truly outlandish conspiracy theories. Again, here, there’s no real discussion of the context. Those being left out of the discussion clearly aren’t rich white business executives and their pet scientists – they’re the millions of people living on Third World coastlines, who are now even more excluded.

In an age of increasing state powers, integration and overwhelmingly powerful international institutions, we’ve witnessing a complete breakdown of their ability to handle a crisis of any serious size. Be it the American debt battles, the European debt crisis or the global threat of climate change they’re hopelessly unable to act decisively, except to make things worse.

Mass protests, and the political use of police, courts and prisons, are exploding around the world. The environment is one of the major issues at stake. It demonstrates how thoroughly ruinous the behaviour of our state and corporate overlords has truly been, and how utterly unable they are to cope with the kind of crises they claim to exist to guard against. The Tar Sands and the associated “gigaproject” which spans our continent is a perfect example of the real priorities of our government – they’re willing to spend billions, write laws and shred international agreements for the sake of money, oil and development, but not to combat their consequences. International accords like Kyoto assume that our governments are allies or at least willing participants in efforts to deal with climate change. Sadly, they aren’t – they’re part of the problem, not the solution.

While the Occupy Movement has captured much of the world’s attention, another has also suffered thousands of arrests. Lining up outside the White House, Canada’s Parliament and other buildings, enormous crowds fought the Keystone Pipeline by peacefully volunteering for arrest, for days at a time. In America, they managed to delay the decision on the controversial megaprogject which would carry Tar Sands oil to refineries and upgraders in the southern USA. In British Columbia, many are now fighting another pipeline planned for their province. Globally, there have been massive anti-nuclear blockades in Germany, anti-highway protests in Mexico City, and far too many others to name.

The questions which remain are, will it be enough, and will that happen in time?

Climate change will be one of the first real tests of our ability to organize across every kind of border. The world cannot last much longer under the oil-drenched lifestyles of the west, and with billions now signing up in nations like India and China, we’re seeing consumption and devastation on scales we’d never imagined. We all need a new way forward – one in which the First and Third Worlds are going to have to meet somewhere in the middle. We need a way that can work in the face of hostile governments and markets in turmoil. The time has come for a truly global movement to tackle this threat, and it’s up to all of us to make that happen.

(this is the second part of an ongoing series on Attawapiskat and Northern Development. Read the first part here)

Building homes and communities in Canada’s North is nothing like development in Southern Ontario. In a lot of ways, it’s more like trying to develop the moon. For starters. In Hamilton we enjoy the luxury of being on multiple trade routes, being close to the American border as well as having shipping access to the Atlantic. Despite this, about one in five of our population lives in poverty, a large number of whom are Native, Despite having some of the world’s cheapest food, people still starve. And despite being surrounded by quarries and other sources of building materials, we still have a large homeless population and thousands of homes which are literally falling apart. Take away all of these advantages, and what are you left with? Shipping costs through the roof, widespread labour shortages, forbidding terrain and extremely harsh climates.

A single house in Attawapiskat is estimated to cost around $250 000 to build. That’s 2-3 times the price of a comparable house around here. In regions where funding is so scarce and basic infrastructure so rare, this means that even with millions in funding, only a handfull of houses can really be built. The houses which do get constructed are standard models, built with pre-fabricated parts and generally of fairly low quality. Like cheaper, tackier cousins of the suburban homes so common around here, they’re often totally unsuited to these communities, either ecologically or culturally. Instead, they end up looking like some sort of cheap suburban cul-de-sac.

“Although Attawapiskat is nominally in Ontario, it really needs to be seen as the far north. Goods come in by barge until freeze up. Medical personnel fly in twice a week, “the Lord willin’ and the river don’t rise.” And the Attawapiskat River often rises. That is one factor that contributes to the infestation of mold in the houses. Most of the houses that look like real houses are built to an Indian Affairs design used from coast to coast to coast without regard for whether they are appropriate in an Arctic setting like Attawapiskat. Or in any other extreme climate, hot or cold. (When similar houses were shipped to Indigenous villages in Guatemala as part of Canada’s aid after a major earthquake, the plywood began to host insects as soon as the houses were put up. The people moved out and moved their livestock in.)
- Michael Poluns, Slaw magazine (“Dunkin’ the Victim: a Note on Legal-Political Background of the Current Attawapiskat Campaign“)

For obvious reasons, neither these homes nor this set of numbers has much of a future. Whether Attawapiskat can be saved from the worst of their housing crisis in the short term is one question, but these issues are not unique to one reserve, or even to reserves at all. Canada’s northern communities have a bitter history of neglect and exploitation, and that’s left us a problem which spans most of our country’s land mass. Even our water treatment systems are facing a national crisis, and there’s no telling where the money will come from to build all of this.

As I noted in the last article, attempts at “civilizing” the north with Southern Ontario styled cities have always been destined for failure. There’s no desire or need for that kind of metropolis in areas with population densities a thousandth of ours, and no hope for the funding or resources to make it happen.

If there ever was a better case for off-the-grid appropriate technologies, I haven’t heard it. Not only are these communities often thousand of kilometres from “the grid”, but Arctic and Sub-Arctic winters make substandard housing potentially lethal. Economically and logistically, sending out a million drywall panels on trucks from a few southern gypsum mills is destined to be a nightmare and does little or nothing for local economic development.

What would a successful housing strategy need? First, it would have to be almost totally decentralized, if it were to have any hope of spreading through the vast and remote north. Secondly, homes would need to be simple enough for local people to build them, to avoid the need for huge imported construction crews. Third, they’d need to be able to suit their respective environments, and that means very different things for Saskatchewan, BC and Nunavut. This means being built out of local materials and being able to withstand local climates. This also means being culturally appropriate for the communities they’re being built in, especially on Reserves (and again, this would mean different things with the Haida and Haudenosonee) . Finally, and most importantly, these homes are going to have to exist in most cases independent of any kind of municipal infrastructure (gas, water, power, sewers etc).

Resource crises like Peak Oil will hit northern communities exponentially harder than here. Not only will the price of coal, oil and gas rise, but so will the price of transporting it. Faced with issues of scarcity, heavily consuming southern communities will continue to demand exports of oil, such as those from the Tar Sands or Alaskan reserve drilling, bringing a host of other ugly local consequences.

There are many forms of housing available which could meet some of these needs. Earthships can supply all their own water, heat and power, but most were designed for places like New Mexico, which are a far cry from the North West Territories. Most earth-built and earth-sheltered designs aren’t terribly appropriate for places where the soil only goes down two inches before hitting bedrock. That being said, these areas are far from naturally poor, and the amount of lumber, stone or straw-bales lying around for anyone with a truck is often colossal. What’s needed here is ingenuity, and adaptable open-source designs. When Earthbag builders travelled to Haiti to help with the reconstruction, they started using bags filled with gravel and crushed rubble from wrecked buildings. That kind of ingenuity and resourcefulness is what’s needed here. At the moment, a number of northern options are getting a lot of attention, from those of renovation show host Mike Holmes to others which use shipping containers or other locally produced panels for durable, long-lasting mould-free homes, and help build local economies and skill bases.

Most of Canada’s landmark buildings were constructed long before jackhammers and concrete. One need only look at the history of early settler cities and farming communities to see what kind of brilliant architectural legacy can be built by ordinary folks with simple tools. These architecturally brilliant structures often still stand today, and would be very hard to accomplish today with modern financial realities. Most First Nations, too, have a far longer history of ingenious building styles using locally available materials, from the Longhouses of Six Nations to the “pit houses” on British Columbia’s coast. Green building visionaries have long emulated indigenous designs for these reasons, and it’s hard to imagine where green building would be today without ancient designs from Arizona to Yemen. Surely, there is some interesting potential in the Canadian north.

As essential as off-the-grid technologies are, the issue of appropriate technology also comes up. Where imports are scarce and expensive and skilled workers often must be brought from thousands of kilometres away, giant wind-farms and solar arrays aren’t always going to be an option. They’re expensive, exotic imports which require a lot of highly specialized skill to keep running. Perhaps wind generators can be built with old car alternators, or gas-powered generators run off sewage bio-digestion processes or woodgas. In areas where so much heating still takes place by wood, accessible high-efficiency wood-stoves are a must for reasons of health, work and ecology. These and other options can be built and maintained locally, using parts which already exist there – and the designs and knowledge needed to reproduce them is far easier to ship, whether electronically or personally. Teaching these skills lays the groundwork for both local self-sufficiency and the growth of local community-based economies. Given the unbelievable distances involved, a network of small operations, whether machinists or builders, will always be more efficient, and give more back to the communities involved.

Any strategy which is going to work in the north will have to put northerners and their communities first. So far our government’s strategies have done a far better job of producing a steady steam of cheap workers and resources for the rich and populated south. If these communities are going to survive, it won’t be by way of becoming more integrated with and dependent on far-off markets. Autonomy, self-sufficiency and above all, recognition and respect are needed. It’s time to give up on the idea that we, as southerners, need to “fix” life up North – that’s not something that’s in our power. All we can do is stand in solidarity and offer assistance as the people of the North fix it themselves.