Image credit: City of Timmins
These are the lands and waters that raised me. But unfortunately, some of those lands and waters no longer exist due to this above-ground mining project.
This visual poorly conveys the full scale of impacts and actual size of this mining operation. It might help to know that the rock pile’s elevation brings sunset 30 minutes earlier for the residents at the south end of the lake compared to those who live on the west side. The open pit is about 900 metres wide and about 350 metres deep.
Image credits: Kelleigh Wright, 2021
About 15 years ago, I moved 6 kilometres away from where I grew up. This home has an urban food forest and a red sit spot chair. Summer brings borage flowers (which taste like cucumbers). After the cedar waxwings have left their nests, an orchard of twelve sea buckthorn trees is ready for picking in the fall. Salads used to be made with a diverse range of plants, roots and vines which grow in this place.
Image credit: Northern Ontario Business, 2010
I moved to the west side of this lake, pictured in the upper left-hand corner of this image. A few years after the move, a new mining project began at the end of my street. It is a 10-minute walk from my home.
Image credit: Mark Joron (drone footage) May 2022
The water tower is present on the left-hand side in the before and after photos. This hole is 1.5 km long and about 500 metres wide. The permanent berm encircles the operation butts up to residential backyards in three separate locations.
Climate adaptation ‘solutions’ are not neutral when they require mined minerals. Hence, the word ‘radical’ is a relative term in climate adaptation orientation and climate communications.
The previous photos convey a lived reality at the neighbourhood, municipal and regional levels. However, none capture the emotional depth and breadth of the situation like the following digital image.
Image credit: ‘Betrayal’ by Mario Sanchez Nevado, created for the exhibition “Empathy” of the international artistic collective Hysterical Minds, 2012
This image presents tensions through colour, emotions, gender, power dynamics and violence. Symbolism and metaphors are used with waterfalls, birds, skyline, red lips, scalpel/gun/city, a burning hand and a partially cleaved breast of land/trees. Implied complex relationships are suggested by the positions of the three entities and their ecosystems.
Much of what is currently being confronted in climate communications are predicaments and processes (as depicted in the above image) with outcomes and not problems with solutions.
What if climate communication ‘dream teams’ worked on outcomes from a mindset of potential with a ‘palette of practices’ to mobilise and evoke meaningful and ongoing bioregional awareness campaigns? What if these teams expanded conversations, contributed to relationship restorations and offered alternatives to the dominant neoliberal, techno-optimist paradigm? These teams could contain the following skills, talents and beings:
- vessels of water, wagons of soils and buckets of rocks;
- visionaries, regenerative engagement/conversation designers, linguists, provocateurs, contrarians, raconteurs;
- traditional ecological knowledge keepers, medicine wheel teachers and mythologists, immersive storytellers;
- JEDI activists, wise community elders, youth;
- researchers, data analysts, subject matter leaders;
- systems thinkers, speculative designers and transformative/transition designers;
- social media designers and strategists, calendar content planners, campaign & event coordinators;
- graphic, mixed-media and visual performance artists, photographers, videographers, musicians and sound technicians;
- copy writers, song writers, comedy writers, screen writers, policy writers;
- print, video, photo and sound editors;
- well-resourced funders and kick-ass legal representatives.
“There’s no such thing as an unsacred place. There’s only sacred places and desecrated places.” ~Wendall Berry
Ecology of Influences on my Thoughts this Week
- Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check | Manhattan Institute
- Golden hope for a wasteland – Northern Ontario Business
- Pedagogy of agency and action, powers of 10, and fractal entanglement: Radical means for rapid societal transformation toward survivability and justice
- Design in Perspective: Transition Design_Monograph
- Systemic Design: Live Discussion
- Irresistible movie, available on Netflix