A member's reflections on NGA Principles:

Ecological Wisdom

Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature. We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society that utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must practice agriculture which replenishes the soil, move to an energy efficient economy and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

Many of us are children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of pioneers who came to Saskatchewan to make new homes. Many people came to Saskatchewan to be farmers or to work in the forest industry. The cultures from which many of these pioneers came often were based on an ethic that valued the "conquest" of nature.

When my grandfather homesteaded in the parkland of Saskatchewan, bluffs of trees and potholes of water were obstacles to his efforts to farm the land. Native grasslands were to be turned over and trees cut and stumps uprooted to make way for the breaking plow. When I visit the land that my grandfather farmed I cannot find a single tree, nor any sign of where he built his home and raised his family.

Now there are large areas of field adjacent to the road that are covered with scarce and stunted canola or wheat. The soil is now reduced to gritty clay and sand.

I remember being a child going to school in the spring as the snow melted. The large opened fields melted rapidly. Huge pools of water formed, and then rushed across the fields and over the municipal roads. When the waters receded, you saw deep eroded gullies and topsoils washed away. I remember the stories told of the crops taller than a man, with yields that challenge the imagination of farmers of the land today.

My grandfather conquered the land, and in doing so, he destroyed it. In less than one hundred years, the land is hardly able to grow anything. In the past, new generations of farmers might have moved further afield to find new lands to be "broken." Today there is no other place to go, and we look around us and have trouble imagining what this land once was.

I live in a small pocket of sensitive forest just north of Christopher Lake. The only reason this small area of forest is still here is that under a few inches of forest litter, the soil consists of rock clay and gravel that cannot sustain cultivation and farming. If it had been capable of supporting even marginal agriculture, it would have long since been stripped and barren. Much marginal land in the forest fringe areas of this province has been destroyed due to unsustainable and uneconomic practices.

For many years the ability of a Saskatchewan farmer to sell his grain crops was based on a quota system allocated on the total number of cultivated acres he operated. Because quotas were often small, it was to a farmer's short term advantage to clear and cultivate lands that could not really support agricultural development. The extra acres of destroyed forest added to his ability to sell the crops he grew on other fields.

In more recent years the lumber industry has been putting a lot of pressure on cash-strapped farmers in the forest fringe area to sell their remaining forested lands for clear-cut logging. Because the trees are being cut on "private lands", these lumber companies are not held responsible for any reforestation efforts, and many acres of good productive forest lands are lost forever.

A friend of mine who did historical research on the North Saskatchewan River once told me that during the high point of the lumber industry in Saskatchewan, the Prince Albert Lumber Company harvested and milled a million log feet of trees that , in the spring, had been floated down the Little Red and Shell rivers and gathered into booms and ferried to the mill in East Prince Albert. These were giant spruce trees that came from the areas that now have few of no trees at all.

Think of this. In one century of development based on the idea that success consists of the defeat of nature, much of the productive capacity of Saskatchewan's farming lands have been mined to the point where crops are grown in nutrient and texture-degraded land that produces crops only under the pressures of chemical injection into the soil, and herbicide kills on the surface.

Lands that produced great forests and giant trees now barely support hay fields or pasture lands. In less than 50 years the forests that stretch north of the parklands, have been largely clear cut and in some places, replaced by mono-culture tree plantations that an insensitive industry and politicians refer to as lands that have been "reforested". These tree plantations resemble a true forest as much as a field of canola resembles the native grasslands on which huge herds of bison roamed in the previous century.

Why is it that peoples who came to this land have brought such great destruction in less than 150 years, while native peoples lived with the land for many centuries in a sustainable manner. The difference lies in technology and in the values that the different peoples brought to their relationship with the earth. This once was a land rich. This once was a land that held such great promise for the future.

The promise lasted barely a generation. Present and future generations are faced with the stark choice of just packing up and leaving this land, or of finding a whole new way of thinking about nature and the land's relationship to human habitation.

I am an optimist. I believe that the earth is forgiving if we come to our senses and try to respect nature and try to work with nature in a sustainable manner. It was a rich land, and it supported many peoples. It supported many families and many villages and many towns. Most of these towns are gone or are empty, while a few cities and Alberta grow with the people who are leaving the land each year.

We can listen to the elders of our aboriginal friends and neighbours to find a new way of relating to the earth. We can work with the knowledge gathered by science and research, work with the power of new technology, and add it to the experience of generations of Saskatchewan people and together find a new and better way to live on this land. Would it not be just great to live with the land in a manner that allows you, with a new confidence, to tell your children and grandchildren that their future can be here in Saskatchewan, because we have found a better way? Would it not be just great to live in a land that has finally elected a government that believes in ecological wisdom?

The New Green Alliance believes in the principle of Ecological Wisdom. Vote for the New Green Alliance Party of Saskatchewan.

Gerald Regnitter at Friendly Forest

Box 289 Christopher Lake, Sask. S0J 0N0

friendlyforest@inet2000.com

www.friendlyforest.ca

(306) 982-3614