Many years ago, in an effort to increase business, I approached the Western Canadian Wilderness Committee and asked them to consider some of my photographs for their calendar. I was aware of some of the environmental hot spots in Western Canada of the time – the Stein Wilderness, Clayoquot Sound, the Tatshenshini Wilderness to name a few. However, I was not interested in jumping on a bandwagon already loaded with accomplished photographers. Instead I hoped to introduce the WCWC to a new area of interest. The previous year I had visited the Great Sand Hills of Saskatchewan and had learned that oil companies were interested in drilling and setting up oil donkeys. The local towns took a special pride in their unusual environment and were opposed to the idea of drilling.
I placed my slides on the light table in the east downtown side office of the WCWC. A young man in his late-twenties perhaps – short hair and clean shaven – looked over the shoulder of an older shaggy bearded fellow and together they looked at my slides. I had done my best at the time to capture the low sand dunes in a way to give the impression of a vast dune sea and was not thinking of conservationism when I made the exposures. The two men looked at each image and finally the hairy one cried, “But there’s nothing here!” The younger man concurred, saying, “What is there to conserve? There’s only sand.”
This both surprised and disappointed me greatly. Here were two avid conservationists, supposedly knowledgeable in areas of ecology and naturalism, and they could say such a thing as, “There’s nothing here,” about an area known for its sand dunes. Anyone who knows anything about ecosystems knows that there is no place on Earth entirely devoid of life. The harshest deserts and coldest polar regions can still provide a home for highly specialised species who have adapted to those environments. When rain fell in Chile’s Atacama desert for the first time in 11 years the desert erupted in a profusion of flowers, attracting insects that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
As for the Great Sand Hills, they are a far cry from the Atacama and other equally harsh climes. The dunes themselves do not belong to a desert environment but are part of the Prairie grasslands. Like many other sandy regions in Canada, the dunes are leftovers from the ice age when fierce winds blew away the pulverized materials deposited by the retreating ice sheets. The fine grains of sand were deposited where the wind naturally lost its strength to continue carrying the grains and they piled up. Over the millennia, the grasslands have slowly colonized the dunes until only a small area still boasts active dunes.
As anyone can tell you, the grasslands are not empty at all. There are coyotes, rodents, raptors, snakes, insects, cactus, sage, various grasses and flowering plants, and a plethora of other species living together to create a balanced ecosystem. That there are sand dunes in the area only adds another niche for species to occupy. During my visit I saw the side-winding tracks indicative of a rattlesnake’s passage. I photographed a highway of beetle tracks in the sand and a plump porcupine nestled in a bare tree. I saw the eyes of coyotes flash in my headlights at night and photographed the silhouettes of cottonwood trees in the dunes, their roots reaching deep into the sand to the water table below. In the museum at Sceptre I saw a stuffed kangaroo rat, a rare find (this one dead on the road I was told) in Canada.
In the office of the WCWC I tried to explain that there were grasslands all around – a healthy ecosystem – that was threatened by the exploitation of the area by oil companies. Oil donkeys would be bobbing their big iron heads up and down all over the place. (I actually like oil donkeys because they seem like some enormous silent beast feeding, their churning wheel looking like some black perpetual motion machine. However, I didn’t want oil donkeys in the view of the dunes, and as it wasn’t a protected area and also an unusual environment in Canada I felt something should be done to keep the oil companies away.) I told them about the kangaroo rat and the rattlesnakes (which, by the way, were at the time considered a threatened species) but nothing I said could dissuade them of their opinion that there was nothing worth protecting there.
A year or two later I saw a Western Canadian Wilderness Committee calendar and there was a photo from the Great Sand Hills of Saskatchewan. The caption said that the area was the home of the kangaroo rat, a rare species in Canada, and was threatened by oil drilling. I was rather unimpressed. The photo was ordinary, nothing like what I had presented them with. But more so was the fact that they had rejected everything I said, saying there was nothing of interest and later turned around and decided that what I had told them was true and a worthy cause. What had changed? Had a better “salesman” approached them with a more convincing pitch?
In any case, I still heard there words ring in my ears for a long time – “There’s nothing here” – and I started to believe that environmentalism was not strictly a just cause to help save the Earth from our destructive behaviours but that there were politics involved as well. I lost a little faith in the environmental movement and as I followed the news over the years I began to see environmentalism as a new form of politics. Conservation and ecologically friendly living were important for sure. But I did not want to be associated with the radical and often irrational behaviour of the politically motivated environmental activist.
More on that to come.
