The Oil Road - James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello

The vast fossil fuel reserves of present day Azerbaijan have been exploited for centuries. In the 7^th century CE camels were loaded with “bales” of oil for heating, light, warfare and medicine. Marco Polo told of a “fountain of oil…which is good for burning. In the neighbouring country no other is used in their lamps and the people come from distant parts to procure it.” As then, so too today. Azerbaijan along with Georgia, rarely figure prominently in the mind of the average European or North American, but they should. The two are part of the 2000km Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that pumps one million barrels of oil daily to be loaded at the Turkish port of Ceyhan on tankers bound for European markets. The Oil Road exposes the corrupt relationship between oil companies and governments that put millions in companies’ pockets while causing misery for those living in the pipeline’s path.

The impetus for the BTC – the Oil Road of the title – came from Washington, London and Brussels, all of which wanted an “energy corridor” that would both bypass Russia and guarantee the supply of oil and gas to the global market economy by giving governments via the oil company BP control over the supply route. In the early 1990s Azerbaijan was in a situation that Western governments and BP could exploit: the USSR had just collapsed, the local economy was depressed, and there was a desire for Western recognition as an independent country. Leader Heydar Aliyev was willing to mortgage the country’s resources to get hard currency and, hopefully, regain the land it lost during its war with Armenia. Georgia and Turkey had parallel reasons for signing on to the BTC project. The deal eventually agreed upon is referred to as the “Contract of the Century” and what the FT later dubbed “the most controversial pipeline project” in history, for what the host countries gave up and what BP was able to win.

Near the start of the authors’ journey along the pipeline route, in Baku, they spoke with a human rights activist about how oil projects allow authoritarian regimes to gain wealth from resources rather than citizens’ taxes, making the needs of the population irrelevant. “…Europe, the US and the companies wanted more oil. Heydar Aliyev offered to give them control over our oil and its export route, and in return got unlimited rights to rule this country as he wanted.” Those unlimited rights include using brute force to silence opposition to the regime on pipeline-related issues, and to remove citizens’ freedom of assembly. When in Georgia, residents told how the pipeline runs a mere 25m from their homes, and how digging the pipeline ruined irrigation channels for their crops. As they felt BP and government were not listening to their concerns, they decided to blockade the highway to their village. According to one resident, the police badly beat everyone protesting, including children.

Some people have lost much more than their freedom of assembly – they have lost the safety of their homes and land that is part of their livelihood due to pipeline construction and its security corridor. A quarter of the way into their journey an Azeri villager tells his story. During pipeline construction, a 40m wide trench was dug, the topsoil removed, and for several years until construction was completed farmers were unable to use their fields. They were meant to receive about $4000, roughly a year’s salary, but the system was not carefully administered by BP. Some families received compensation, while others did not, or the wrong people did. Similar stories arise at all points along the pipeline, with BP refusing to deal with the issues, claiming it was actually the local authority’s fault. In a small Georgian village further along, people are separated from pastures, forests and hot springs they have used for generation by armed government troops charged with protecting BP’s infrastructure.

Security along the pipeline is another feature of the “Contract of the Century”. Host Country Agreements outline the expectations of BP and show the weakness of the bargaining position of the three countries, all of which are responsible for defending the length of the pipeline using its own military forces. In Azerbaijan, this meant cutbacks to social services, agriculture and transport as funding the police and army take up close to 20% of the country’s yearly budget. In Georgia, a transit country for the pipeline, it means nearly a quarter of its budget is spent guarding a pipeline from which it receives no economic benefits.

The Host Government Agreements also contain evidence of how oil companies such as BP have been able to negotiate their way into situations where they are essentially above the law. In Georgia, the preferred pipeline pathway was to come uncomfortably close to Borjomi National Park, from whose rivers the famous Borjomi mineral water is bottled and sole, accounting for nearly 10% of Georgia’s export trade. The Georgian environment minister adamantly refused to sign off on the pipeline route until she was escorted late one evening to the president’s office and after several hours admitted that she had signed off on the route, explaining that pressure came from the company BP and was directed not just on her but to the president as well. Host Government Agreements guarantee freedom of petroleum transit, and as a result host nations gave up their power to protect their citizens from environmental damage and health hazards for 50 years. The agreements override all existing and future laws because the foreign companies want confidence.

The Oil Road brilliantly sums up the folly of a system bent on exploiting nations for profit, letting people live in poverty while millions of dollars in oil flows underground to far away markets. There are few books that have done as good a job at showing the links between companies and national governments, and providing all the evidence needed to continue the struggle against allowing this to continue. With many oil pipeline projects presently in negotiation, this is an important book for activists. While the authors do not put forward an alternative to this system, they certainly do not fail to provide motivation for the search.

An edited version of this review was previously published in Socialist Review magazine http://www.socialistreview.org.uk

Vladimir Krajina: World War II Hero and Ecology Pioneer - Jan Drabek

Few people live lives that would make for an interesting book, and not all those who have lived such interesting lives are well known. Vladimir Krajina, a Czech botanist who worked at the University of British Columbia in the second half of the 20th century, fits this description. Biographer Jan Drabek, himself a Czech émigré living in Vancouver, in  Vladimir Krajina: World War II Hero and Ecology Pioneer, has written an insightful and informative biography that will be of interest to both WWII and ecology enthusiasts alike.

Drabek’s biography is essentially two distinct parts, reflecting the dichotomy of Krajina’s life. The first follows Krajina’s life in Czechoslovakia as a member of the Resistance until his escape to London in 1948. The second part documents Krajina’s life in British Columbia where he worked as professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia’s botany department. What is similar in both halves of Krajina’s life is how important was the work he was doing, and how unknown it was – and still is – to the majority of people. For myself, I was aware of Krajina’s botanical and ecological work through my university studies, but had no idea of his experiences in WWII and knew little of the events in Czechoslovakia during this time.

Krajina was a student at Charles University in Prague when Czechosolvakia was a fledgling democracy after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and before occupation by first Nazi Germany and then as a Communist country under the influence of the Soviet Union. Drabek hypothesizes it was this time living in an independent democratic country that Krajina felt strongly about, and when it was threatened by Nazi invasion he was compelled to play a role in protecting it.

By 1939 the Nazis had closed all of the universities in Czechoslovakia, and Krajina was no longer a botany professor but full time Resistance member. Krajina became a leading member in a group pivotal in the encoding, sending and receiving of intelligence-related information between Czechoslovakia and its exiled government in London. For example, it was Krajina’s group which relayed the intelligence that the Wehrmacht was planning to attack British-controlled Egypt and the Suez Canal, allowing some two months’ warning for precautions to be taken.

Drabek explains that Krajina was an ideal person for this kind of work because of “his enormous self-discipline and strict observance of rules of conspiracy”. However, he also intimates that Krajina was like the character in the Disney film “Ferdinand the Bull”:

“…a magnificent animal chosen for the bullfighting ring. But Ferdinand prefers to smell the flowers instead of fighting and, eventually…is returned to his pasture…sitting there still, under his cork tree, quietly smelling his flowers. The flower-loving Resistance fighter may have been a thorn in the Germans’ side, but unlike many of his companions, he refused to carry a gun.” 

At one point in the war the author’s father had given Krajina a book of flower drawings done by Czech artist Josef Manes. When Krajina had to flee the Gestapo, he returned the book for safekeeping; the author’s father noticed that even during this dangerous time Krajina had made corrections in pencil to the names for each flower.

Between 1939 and 1943 Krajina was regularly on the run from the Gestapo, hiding in sympathizers’ homes, meeting intelligence contacts in the streets after dark, and somehow managing to send upwards of 6000 radio messages each year. However, by early 1943 Krajina was captured, interrogated and sent to Terezin concentration camp until the end of the war. Post-1945 Czechoslovakia saw political struggles as various ideologies fought for supremacy. According to Drabek, Krajina again felt compelled to be active politically instead of returning full-time to his botany work because it was important to him that Czechoslovakia return to the democratic nation it was before the Nazi occupation. Instead, Krajina found himself arrested and threatened with execution by the new Communist government unless he agreed to cooperate. Again showing his principles and courage, Krajina arranged to escape by skiing across the border to the US military in Germany. Once finally made his way to England he arranged for the escape of his wife and two children.

Reunited, the Krajina family made its way to Vancouver, British Columbia. Working in the botany department at the University of British Columbia, Krajina made his mark with his ecological approach to forest research and the influence this had on the province’s forestry industry. This perspective was unique at the time, as in a report Krajina wrote for a major forest company in 1954 he said: 

“Forest resources are natural resources which should not be exploited by the methods used in mining, where the products cannot be regenerated. Forest resources should be kept for a sustained yield through all generations.” 

Krajina went further, saying that virgin forests were rapidly disappearing without thorough analysis, and that a representative portion of them should be saved intact for future study, an important consideration when areas needed to be reforested after logging. This was the basis of Krajina’s research into what were later termed biogeoclimatic zones, 14 of which he identified for British Columbia and which are still referred to today. By the late 1960s the provincial government was discussing setting up ecological reserves under the models proposed by Krajina, passing the Ecological Reserve Act in 1971. For the rest of his life Krajina was an ardent campaigner for establishment of reserves to protect sensitive ecosystems, always having to argue for conservation over immediate logging / economic opportunities in the short term. In 1973 an ecological reserve was established on Haida Gwaii bearing Krajina’s name, its literature describing it as “an outdoor museum and laboratory available for botanical, wildlife and geographical fishery”.

Drabek’s biography is enriched by the closeness of the author to its subject. His father worked closely with Krajina during WWII in the Resistance movement, and the author was the same age as Krajina’s daughter and even attended the same school. Drabek has written a detailed portrayal of a man who spent his life engaged in principled struggles for democracy and the environment, from which and from whom much can learned and applied today.

Lillian Alling: the Journey Home - Susan Smith-Josephy

This past summer I tackled what I thought to be an ambitious hike on the rugged and isolated West Coast Trail, which runs for 75km along the west coast of Vancouver Island. All supplies had to be carried on my back, water was drawn from streams crossing the trail, and should there have been an accident help was only available at beaches often a long distance and many vertical metres over difficult, technical terrain from trail mid-points. My equipment was modern, and I knew that even if evacuation was needed, once there it would be by speedy boat or helicopter.

However, this trek compares not at all with that undertaken by Lillian Alling. For reasons known only to her, Lillian decided to walk home – to Russia or Poland – from New York City, a distance of about 7000km by plane over the Northwest Territories, starting in late 1926. She had little money, few supplies, and was traveling at a time where the western part of Canada was even less developed between major cities than it is now. In fact, cities like Vancouver were not even 50 years old. This, coupled with her intensely introverted character, is what makes her story even more compelling and resulting in her becoming the mysterious legend she is today.

Many articles and books have been written about Lillian Alling over the years, and Susan Smith-Josephy does an admirable job adding to the literature surrounding her life and travels by injecting her own opinions and inferences. Smith-Josephy also carried out her own research as she tried to unearth clues that might shed new light on Lillian’s life. However, it seems she was able to discover little more about Lillian from the time she entered Canada at Niagara Falls in December 1926 and when she turned up in Winnipeg in the spring of 1927, one source citing the date of 1 March. Smith-Josephy muses:

“…if she walked approximately eight hours per day through the rough up-and-down terrain of the Canadian Shield, it would have taken her at least two months to walk the 2100 kilometres from Niagara Falls to Winnipeg…Winter, however, was not the best time to be setting out on a journey through Canadian Shield country. Sudbury’s average temperature in January is -13.7C…while the average snowfall in January is 54cm…”.

What is actually known is based primarily on what was put in writing by Lillian herself or by others along the way in their journals, letters and newspapers. Occasionally Lillian checked in with the RCMP, stayed with families in their farmhouses, worked in kitchens, and even spent time in Oakalla Prison in Vancouver after an officer arrested her to prevent her from hiking northern BC’s mountains through the winter. Constable George Wyman recalled that:

“…she was so scantily clad and had no firearms or anything to see her through that country…When I first saw her, she was wearing running shoes. She had a knapsack with a half-dozen sandwiches in it, some tea and some other odds and ends…”

 

As Lillian traveled north along the Telegraph Trail from BC into the Yukon, she was often assisted by those she met. People shared their cabins, rustic as they were, and gave her food and clothing and companionship even though it seemed like that was the one thing Lillian needed least. The last known offers of assistance in the Yukon came from a job working at a hostel throughout the winter when she was unable to travel, and a boat to take her downstream on the Yukon River to a point where she could then walk to the Seward Peninsula and Nome. It is not surprising that she was given assistance despite her awkwardness and the fact she was a stranger as in remote, rugged and dangerous places people look out for each other regardless. The courage – or the determination – Lillian must have had to climb mountains, ford raging rivers, and accept possible grizzly encounters is amazing.

What Smith-Josephy did with this biography that makes it effective for a reader is interspersing throughout the narrative archival photographs and brief descriptions of the small towns in BC, Alaska and the Yukon through which Lillian did – or most likely – pass through. It provides a sense of the difficult lifestyle of the people living here and gives insight into why there is so little evidence of Lillian’s presence there. My only complaint with this book, a minor one, involves these historical anecdotes. The book’s format meant placing the anecdotes mid-chapter broke up the narrative, and I often was flipping a few pages forward to continue a paragraph before reaching a good place to stop to read the anecdote.

To say any more would be a spoiler, and I think that anyone who loves adventurers, mysteries and history should read this book. Lillian Alling was truly an extraordinary woman.

Cascadia's Fault: The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America - Jerry Thompson

First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest have passed down stories for generations about a winter’s night when the ground shook terribly and an enormous wave hit the coast and wiped out entire communities. The Europeans who began to populate this region in the 1800s did not pay attention to these stories, nor did few others until the mid to late 20^th century when it turned out that these First Nations stories were rooted in fact, and that this part of North America was not a special aseismic region of the Ring of Fire. “Cascadia’s Fault” is the story of the decades-long multi-disciplinary search that led to the scientific evidence and conclusion that one day in the future the Pacific Northwest will be struck by another devastating earthquake.

Journalist Jerry Thompson begins the story of the search for the Cascadia Fault by explaining where it started. For a long time earth scientists and residents believed that because the region from the north end of Vancouver Island to the Oregon-California border had been essentially tremblor-free in all of recorded history (since European contact), because there was no obvious fault line or trench, it was assumed that the two tectonic plates were moving smoothly past each other and there was no danger to the region. It was the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City that got West Coast geologists questioning whether this theory was correct as the fault off the west coast of Mexico was also deemed aseismic…and was very similar to Cascadia, except shorter.

This questioning led researchers back to 1964 when a tsunami hit the small Vancouver Island town of Port Alberni after the 9.2 megathrust quake in Prince William Sound off the Alaskan coast. There were incredible changes to the region: an area the size of the states of Washington and Oregon combined had heaved up or dropped down, the sea floor appeared to have lifted more than 15m, and the land also stretched horizontally up to 20m between the city of Anchorage and the edge or Prince William Sound. This quake was surprising because after it happened no one was able to say which fault had ruptured and why this fault had gone undetected for so long. However, because the scientists studying this earthquake were doing so just at the time that the theory of plate tectonics was becoming more popular, it took many years for scientific conclusions about the geology of the region to be accepted: that off the West Coast of North America were subduction zones (horizontal cracks in the earth’s crust).

All of this led scientists back to searching for clues along the Washington and Oregon coast that might shed light on the seismic history of the Cascadia fault. The remainder of the book concentrates on this research. Thompson describes how surveying engineers had set up geodetic markers on mountaintops and were using lasers and GPS co-ordinates to determine whether or not there was any movement in the peaks. There was – the mountains of Vancouver Island were being squeezed landward, towards the mainland, about 20cm in less than 40years. Hundreds of kilometres worth of mountain rock were being pushed horizontally yet even then selling the idea that a subduction zone was locked and building up energy for a future earthquake was difficult. More evidence was needed to show that there was plate tectonic activity here and that it had led to past earthquakes.

Thompson then introduces two Washington scientists: Brian Atwater and David Yamaguchi. Atwater, in 1986, discovered what he calls the ghost forest not long after his discovery of another region northwest of Seattle that showed layers of sea sediment and plants above layers of land sediments and plants:

This was no gentle or gradual transition zone from one geologic era to another. The peat had a sharp upper boundary caused by an almost instantaneous and probably cataclysmic change in the level of the land and sea. Was it physical proof that the ground had slumped during an earthquake, that the plants of a marsh or forest meadow had been drowned quite suddenly by the incoming tides and possibly buried under the sands of a huge tsunami?

Good question, and the ghost forest raised another that tree scientist David Yamaguchi attempted to answer: when did this forest end up swamped by salt water, killing the spruce trees? By studying the tree rings, Yamaguchi managed to narrow the timeframe for the last earthquake along the Cascadia Fault to sometime between 1680 and 1720. Despite cutting and counting rings on both dead and witness trees (those living at the time the others died), Yamaguchi could get no closer. However, in 1994 a Japanese geologist who specializes in subduction zone and tsunami research, Kenji Satake, learned of these dates and their association with an earthquake and was immediately intrigued. While North America did not have written records at that time, Japan did, and it was in those records that Satake made an amazing discovery. In historical documents found in four separate town there was mention of a 5m tall tsunami in 1700, and the only place it could have originated was from the Cascadia fault. By calculating backward, the quake was estimated to be at least magnitude 9. They were also able to calculate even more. As Satake wrote in Nature:

The earliest documented tsunami arrival time was around midnight on 27 January, Japan time. Because tsunami travel time from Cascadia to Japan is about 10 hours, the earthquake origin time is estimated at around 5:00 on 27 January GMT or 21:00 on 26 January local time in Cascadia. This time is consistent with Native American legends that an earthquake occurred on a winter night.

Finally, by 1997, it became a known fact that Cascadia is an active fault whose next rupture would have major consequences for at least five North American cities. This is why Thompson’s book is so important. This information is barely 15 years old but has already been taken seriously, but perhaps not yet seriously enough because there just seems to be no reliable way to predict when an earthquake will hit. There have been some efforts to make BC, Washington and Oregon earthquake disaster ready, but there is still a long way to go to both raise public awareness and emergency response standards to a level that would be able to deal with events on the scale of the 1995 Kobe quake and the 2004 Sumatra tsunami.

Every person in the Pacific Northwest should pick up this book and both enjoy the history and explanations written in an interesting and accessible manner for even those with the most minimal knowledge of geology, as well as the implicit and explicit warnings that it has happened before and will happen again, so we had better be prepared.

Emergency Management BC website with information about earthquake preparedness: http://embc.gov.bc.ca/em/hazard_preparedness/earthquake_preparedness.html

Locavore: from farmers’ fields to rooftop gardens – how Canadians are changing the way we eat - Sarah Elton

Sugary processed foods full of cheap calories linked to increasing rates of obesity and diabetes. Fruits and vegetables whose durability for traveling long distances is more important than their flavour and nutrition. The environmental cost of using fossil fuels to ship food worldwide. The ability to provide food security to a population. These are a few of the issues Sarah Elton explores in her book Locavore as she argues for sustainable local food systems.

It was a plastic-wrapped pig cookie covered in pink icing with the words “Made in China” at the end of its list of ingredients that led Elton to question just what was happening to Canada’s food supply system. While thousands of Canadians accept that year round there will be all types of exotic fruits and vegetables in the stores, she found it disturbing that foods were being imported that could be easily made locally.

Elton began asking questions and got some surprising statistics in return. Newfoundland grows less than 10 percent of what it eats. Vancouver Island used to produce 85 percent of the food it needed, but that has dropped to 10 percent as well. Industrial agriculture has allowed a modern farm to, per hour of labour, produce 350 times more food than a subsistence farmer would have produced on the same soils. A large amount of the food that feeds Canadians is imported because it is cheaper to produce elsewhere.

Elton argues that every country should be able to feed itself through a sustainable local food system, arguing: “Drought in some parts of the world is devastating crops, while storms cause extreme flooding in other regions. If turbulent weather or a severe drought caused grain or rice crops to fail around the world, millions of us would starve.” She also questions what would happen if trade routes were to shut down due to war, environmental destruction, or petroleum shortages and rising transport costs.

One issue Canada would face in a local food system is climate. Elton visited what she calls “four-season farms” in Ontario where many farmers are innovating greenhouse agriculture. Greenhouses can be incredibly productive, producing 600 000 pounds of food per acre per year when a single outdoor acre will produce 90 percent less food since it can only produce one crop a season. While greenhouses use a lot of energy for grow lights, the majority of the energy demand is for heat – the energy coming primarily from electricity or coal. Some local greenhouse farmers have found that they can reduce the need for electricity or fertilizer inputs for their crops simply by changing planting times, developing hardy varieties, and using innovative methods such as aquaponics (combining fish farms and greenhouse gardens) which both conserves water and provides nutrient inputs for the crops.

Mike Shreiner, leader of Ontario’s Green Party and sustainable food system advocate, says, “We have the technology and the capacity to operate greenhouses in environmentally friendly ways. Now, whether the marketplace allows us to do it on a cost basis is to be seen.” The vagaries of the economy is always a major risk, and, as Elton points out, “no greenhouse is sustainable unless it is economically viable” so as long as imported produce stays so cheap, Canadian greenhouse growers have little chance of contributing to a local food system.

It is this same market system that put pressure on Canadian farms in the 1970s and 1980s as first the oil crisis and then a glut in the world food market meant that farms were no longer making enough money to pay the debts incurred as they rushed to expand the size of their farms during the boom years. Thousands of farmers went bankrupt, and farming in Canada never recovered. Farming is no longer the profitable industry it once was, and fewer are entering the profession today. There are fewer farmers than ever trying to feed the largest urban populations ever. Those who have stayed in farming are forced to become innovative business thinkers, and are finding ways to be successful enough to continue.

Donald and Viola Daigle are from New Brunswick and their family farm is part of the Really Local Harvest Co-op, which has been credited with saving many farms in the area. As farmers struggled to find stores and restaurants to stock their produced, often selling at a loss, a group decided to work together (instead of competing) to sell their crops directly to the consumer. The co-op developed a mandate whereby members assist each other to increase profits while selling an ecologically sustainable product at a fair price. As well, no member farmer is permitted to sell at a loss. Over time, the co-op’s success grew as the community realized they were getting a better product from the local farmers than the non-local produce at the stores: it was higher quality, better tasting, and that made it worth the extra cost.

Larry Yee of the Association of Family Farms in California describes organizations like the Really Local Harvest Co-op as attaching worth to qualities beyond money, “You are producing a different food product that has qualities people are looking for.” Elton argues that food is a personal issue and “by making consumer choices that support the creation of a sustainable local food economy, we are helping to create solutions” and perhaps to “create a new food order”.

It might seem simple enough to “vote with our forks” but the effect this has on the global system of industrial agriculture is small. There is nothing wrong with Elton’s advice to shop from farmers markets from local farmers, to buy organic and fair trade, or even to simply avoid purchasing processed foods. However, these cannot be the only thing people do, and are often only possible by those with higher incomes anyway. Buying flour made from locally grown grain will not stop the worldwide overproduction of grain, nor will buying locally grown corn stop the proliferation of processed foods made from the excess corn. As long as farmers must continue to struggle to make a profit it is unlikely that a truly sustainable food system can be developed. That said, Elton’s book is engaging and readable, and gives hope and ideas for the future of the world’s food systems.