Renovations

American artist Gregory Euclide creates his stunning miniature ‘held within what hung open and made to lie without escape’ landscape installations from trash collected and recycled from local parks.

The installation includes a landscape painting that measures 7ft x 5ft (2.13m x 1.52m) with a running river, made from paper, that leaves the canvas and flows into a riverbed. Real park boulders provided mold shapes that became rock outcrops made from paper, and sliced-open plastic bottles, filled with sand, became a paper forest.

The recycled paper, plastic, foams, hair and rocks form dioramas that the artist sees as the ‘same kind of fake control over nature that allows us to be comfortable with the destruction of it’. Other materials used by Euclide included acrylic paints, acrylic caulk, eurocast, fern, goldenrod, hosta, lawn fertilizer, moss, pencil, and sponge.

Long considered “socially inoperable” due to local opposition, now the mixed-age forests of Cortes Island may be on the chopping block. A visit from Island Timberlands’ operations manager is described in vivid detail here. (The manager seems to be suffering from a touch of social operability himself.) Island Timberlands has offices in Nanaimo and Vancouver, but the company is now owned by Wall Street conglomerate Brookfield Asset Management.

Cortes Island is known as a cradle of the early Greenpeace movement and home to Hollyhock, the influential eco-wellness institute. Yet our forests are under threat. Islanders were notified last year that logging would begin in mid-January. Saxifrage says she is “cautiously optimistic” the efforts of residents and supporters will thwart that plan. Two groups, WildStands and Island Stance, are promising spirited protests if the logging goes ahead. On January 14, Ken Wu of Ancient Forest Alliance released a report on groves of rare old-growth trees on Cortes Island.

On January 12, 2012 activists Tzeporah Berman and Carrie Saxifrage delivered 6200 petition signatures to Brookfield’s corporate offices in London, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney and Toronto, the Vancouver Observerreports.

The battle is just beginning, but the troops are gathering and many thousands of people are standing together in solidarity against the destruction of the Cortes Island forests.

Zoe Blunt is a well-known Canadian activist and writer and we hope to include more of her blogs in the future to keep people updated on the increasingly heated battle on Cortes Island to protect the forests.

Via ClearCuts.Blogspot.com

Sometimes the world of high finance and the centers of capitalist accumulation can seem a long way away from us here on this far-flung coast.

Then, at other times, the world becomes very small. Brookfield Asset Management—a corporation with investments in the real estate market and resource industries—has achieved notoriety recently for evicting Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park, which the company owns. A seemingly distant and nebulous embodiment of the sort of wild real estate speculation that brought the financial industry to its knees in 2008, Brookfield is now making its presence felt in our own British Columbian back yards.

Brookfield owns Island Timberlands, which is about to log old growth forest on Cortes Island, an area comprising much of the last remaining 1% of the original ancient Douglas Fir forest that once blanketed the coastal region. This is a clear and blatant example of ecological destruction in the name of excessive profits—old growth forest sacrificed for the out-of-control growth of the market economy.

Brookfield boasts $150 billion in assets. Their website touts that “Turnaround investing is in Brookfield’s DNA.” This means that Brookfield is in the business of buying up underperforming companies and wringing quick, short-term profits out of them. The profits to be gained by logging Cortes Island are a mere drop in the bucket for a corporation this size—and yet that isn’t going to stop a machine built to extract profits at any costs, from any place, no matter what the consequences.

We don’t think the last 1% of old growth Douglas firs should be used to help line the pockets of the economic 1%. We call upon all concerned to stand in solidarity with the Ancient Forest Alliance and the residents of Cortes Island. We stand in solidarity with a view of the world which would hold economic and ecological concerns in balance, and which would not sacrifice our environmental future for short-term profits today.

Logging is slated to begin in the coming weeks but the people of Cortes Island are organizing to oppose Brookfield and Island Timberlands, and members of Occupy Vancouver will be joining them in direct action. Together we can save what remains of the coast’s old growth forests. Together we can say no to Brookfield. As the saying goes, another world is possible. But only if we don’t completely exhaust, despoil, and destroy this one first.

Please sign the on-line petition: http://www.ancientforestpetition.com/

Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which, On the Material (Talon Books 2010), was the recipient of the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Forthcoming books include A History of Change (vol.1): Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012) and To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013). He teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University, where he is a 2011/12 Shadbolt Fellow; since October he has been involved in Occupy Vancouver, writing for occupyvancouvervoice.com.

Wales based Dulas, a commercial subsidiary of the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth, mid Wales, the United Kingdom, have recently installed the largest solar power project in Wales, at the National Trust’s Grade I listed property in Llanerchaeron.

The new installation generates a peak output of 37.5kW and works with an existing installation of 7.5kW of solar photovoltaic power, supplying half the power the National Trust house consumes.  The Llanerchaeron house is an 18th-century Welsh gentry estate with walled gardens and home farm. The villa was designed in the 1790s, has its own service courtyard with dairy, laundry, brewery and salting house, and walled kitchen gardens, ornamental lake and parkland. The farm is a working organic farm with Welsh Black cattle, Llanwenog sheep and rare Welsh pigs.

The National Trust has committed to reduce their fossil fuel use by 50% within eight years, cutting carbon emissions from heat and electricity by 45%, beating the government’s target of a 34% reduction in CO2 by 2020. The Trust will also reduce water use and develop its own energy sources such as biomass.

Wales is not synonymous with sunshine, in fact it is just as likely to be raining, foggy, overcast or windy and stormy, as it is to be sunny, but this also gives Wales its natural beauty and it’s a people a sense of humor. Let’s hope a big ray of sunshine illuminates the Dulas installation and make it a resounding success.

Visit: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/llanerchaeron/

Via Dulas