we environmentalists, we really take it on the chin. after a decade, after two or more, it's tempting to just want to give up. not give up and join them, necessarily, although when it's convenient ...... don, one of the street newz writers, was laughing out loud as we contemplated our mining opportunities. chris joined us, and then larry and lise, and our imaginations carried our newly formed 'bare mountain bonanza corporation' to dizzying new forest defending heights.
it seems ingmar, undoubtedly one of vancouver island's most beloved/despised earth defenders (depending who you talk to), is now the proud owner of the mineral rights to all of bear mountain, including the interchange site many of us worked (in our many and diverse ways) to protect this past year.
apparently the bc government has stream-lined the process, and
someone forgot to renew bear mountain's hold on the mineral claim.
whether
or not we really have the right to excavate within 300 feet of any
dwelling, as ingmar suggested, remains to be seen, but what's clear is
that the monstrosity known as bear mountain has some management
issues. someone 'forgot' to renew the mineral license? thank you,
whoever you are.
ingmar picked me up in his evil gas-spewing
car saturday morning (i acknowledge that sometimes they are handy
creations), we got chris out of bed, stopped for morning coffee, and
picked up a couple of 'raccoons' - jesse and luke - from their communal
home. luke was tired and grumpy, he said, because he'd just moved all
the food not bombs cooking supplies from one kitchen to another, in
preparation for sunday's serving (who says anarchists are unorganized!)
and he hadn't had coffee yet. luckily jesse had a fresh jar of his own
local herbal tea and i brought lots of trail mix and fruit to share, so
luke was happy enough scrunched in the back seat, off on the day's
adventure.
and so this motley crew of 'bare mountain
bonanza corporation' prospectors decided to put ingmar's new mineral
claim to the test. we parked the car, the guys donned mining gear, and
we were off. 'we need to go somewhere over there,' ingmar pointed, to
a far away mountain where the now famous spaet cave might still exist.
we walked through the 'village' along the road out of town (which, it
turns out, is another big cut into what was wilderness, making way for
more pavement and energy guzzling houses) and then turned into the
wilderness. up a hill and confronted with the golf course - we had no
intention to interrupt the game. we waited until it was safe and then
crossed the chemical green spongy course, crossed the little golf cart
road, and proceeded up another hillside alongside a human made dry
creek with a red strange line and arrow running alongside it, pointing
downhill (so the water knows which way to travel, we deduced).
we
found a garden nestled into the woods - presumably they're growing
ornamentals - and carried on to cross the golf course again, found a
couple of skull remains up another hillside and then onto the gravel
road that connected from the village. massive rock walls exposed a
variety of mineral resources. we hiked up the road a ways. it's
around here somewhere, ingmar said, and sure enough it was - right at
the top of the road and over the gravel pile, there it was. none of us
had ever been to that cave, but we found it. i believe we were guided
there by the spirits of the place, those restless souls who once
inhabited a sacred wilderness and are now displaced for a playground of
the rich. whose side do you think they're on?
the cave
itself is surrounded by clearcut, and roads leading to, presumably,
more monster home development sites. it had two tires in its watery
entrance, and there were a stack of tires alongside it. i've since
learned that the other cave was filled with tires before it was blasted
so who knows how long this one will survive. this spaet cave was, i
understand, an integral part of native culture for thousands of years,
hundreds of thousands of years, until len barrie claimed it for his own
and left it like a gaping sore on the peak next to his mountain top
home.
we looked down, from the cave site, to len's mansion
and swimming pool. like a king on his throne, len oversees the entire
region all the way to washington's olympic mountains. we tried to
explain to the security guys, who arrived shortly after we found the
cave (and about an hour after our initial arrival, after we'd crossed
the golf course twice and climbed two different hillsides) that what
ingmar has done is nothing different from what len had done. at one
time all this land was nothing other than wilderness, until some
representative from the colonizing/imperialist white government came
along and drew some lines on it and gave it a zoning label and put a
real estate sign in it and proceeded to cut and build. ingmar's mining
corporation is no different -- it's not his fault that the colonialist
government has separated mineral rights from land claims, streamlined
the process to attain mineral rights, and put it all online for anyone
in the world to access.
when len barrie first wandered
into the wilderness and drew a line around the land he wanted to own,
there were no security guards to tell him it's not his and he'd have to
leave. in fact, it seems he had stew young and the langford municipal
council on his team, ready to help him with rezoning and bylaw
rearrangement so his plan could proceed. the two security guys who
escorted us out first threatened to call the rcmp, until i suggested
our work was done and we'd leave peacefully. (ingmar had told us about
the guantanamo bay style hoodies he'd seen inside the vehicle when they
drove him away from the interchange site and i want to go to cuba later
this year but i'd rather avoid the us run guantanamo torture prison).
these new security boys didn't believe that we had any right to be
there, and were downright rude and obnoxious, attempting to label us as
unemployed good-for-nothing trouble makers.
i thought
about the first white colonialists to arrive on this land, and how the
native inhabitants welcomed them with friendship. these new landowners
were very disrespectful and i think they owe the bare mountain bonanza
corporation an apology. all we were doing, as ingmar likes to point
out, is working in the way the government requests - get in there and
do that mineral extraction in a good capitalist way, as fast as
possible.
why, when gordon campbell's liberals turn our
publicly owned and tax-paying bc hydro, and all the rivers in the
province, over to former enron executives, why is that either ignored
or portrayed as good for us in the corporate media?
there's a short video of our adventure at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVWUmPpLkuE
Writings 
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