Classic Documentary -Fourteen Dollars a day, Twenty-six dollars an acre
How things have changed for the farmer… or have they?
The best way to keep a gang happy is to set a good table.
It’s mainly women and girls who work the table gang, a few boys, but the work is so hard that they’re paid as much as the primers in the field.
The beautiful work of Terence Macartney-Filgate Shared via the NFB
Following the Money in The 905
Recently the independent, non-partisan community organization Vote Toronto published a study by York University professor, Robert MacDermid, “Funding City Politics”, citing the very strong connection between elected politicians and the development industry: nearly 70% of political campaign contributions to the winning politicians come from development related corporations, their friends and families.
And what if you’re a candidate who wants to slow down development and make it more ecologically sustainable?
“You’ve got a tough row to hoe:, says MacDermid.
More from CBC Ontario Today
Vote Toronto offers a comprehensive set of recommended Electoral Reforms
Dewatering for The Big Pipe
Stouffville, Ontario. Dewatering
Approximately 43°56′57.22″N 79°15′7.87″W, facing East, circa October 2, 2005
From my series: Elegy for a Stolen Land
As part of the extension of York Region’s $350 million mega-project known as the “Big Pipe”, a large sewer trunk passes through land along the 9th Line in front of this 19th century farm house. The land is dewatered so that workers can get deep into the ground, at or below the water table, to install the pipe.
This trunk of the pipe, to accommodate growth in Stouffville’s secondary plan, is to move sewage to the Duffin Creek Water Pollution Control Plant near Lake Ontario. Rates of dewatering range from 5,000 – 30,000 litres per minute, and the project stretches well up into the Oak Ridge’s Moraine, the natural aquatic battery for all lands southward to Lake Ontario.
On January 3, 2004 The Toronto Star’s Leslie Ferenc reported in an article entitled Close -up: The Big Pipe, that opponents, from the province’s environment commissioner right on down to farmers and individual farm owners, argue—and officials readily admit—that dewatering process has proven to empty aquifers, parch resident’s wells, bleed streams and fields dry, destroy fish and wildlife habitats, and draw effluent away from failing septic tanks into the wider water table. Proponents argue that they will be able to set things right later by implementing mitigating measures.
Such mitigating measures are planned on the assumption that such measures may yet be invented and successfully implemented.
This and other of The Star’s stories about the Big Pipe are no longer freely available on the internet, but you can find a copy of this one here. Environmental Defence and Lake Ontario WaterKeeper have archived some of that coverage. Otherwise they can be sourced through The Star’s paid archive service.
… Comin up next, “Following the money…”
Sensational Singles
Markham, Ontario. Real Estate Billboards.
Approx. 43°54′7.53″N 79°14′27.90″W, Facing south, circa May 5, 2005
From my series: Elegy for a Stolen Land
Before Europeans arrived, these lands were rich in freshwater and wildlife, and home to successive waves of first peoples who saw themselves and the land as one.
Later, due to a combination of soil quality, water availability and growing season—determined by latitude and proximity to the moderating influence of Lake Ontario—settlers turned these lands into productive class 1 farmland that would feed the city it surrounded for more than a century.
On the former pioneer family farm of John Raymer, real estate billboards promote the sale of roughly 2,500 homes on the lands of such former pioneer farmer neighbours as James and Adam Clendenen, and John Reesor. According to official documents filed in 2005: “the GTA/905 Regions of York, Halton, Peel and Durham have been and will continue to be the fastest growing regions in Ontario, collectively growing at twice the provincial rate of growth by adding more than 90,000 new residents each year.”
In a time of increasing global economic uncertainty and wildly unstable fuel prices, those and the other new residents of the past half century inhabit a new land crop of bricks and mortar, and are meanwhile ever more dependent on food imports from the USA, Latin America and Asia.
Statement (Short): Elegy for a Stolen Land
Forced by food shortages to emigrate, six generations ago my Scottish ancestors settled in Southern Ontario, a rich, natural environment that for millennia, and until not long before, had been homeland to successive waves of First Peoples.
When moving home after years in cities to raise a seventh generation in that same place I’d been raised, the sheer rapaciousness of human activity in Ontario’s countryside – the naked erasures of heritage, and our diminishing capacity for a secure local food supply– got me thinking about changes in the meaning of land.
How does one document shifting occupation? What is the distance from “earth mother” to “real estate”, and what evidence remains of aboriginal cosmologies or European animistic traditions, and colonial history? What are the implications for power over the cultural interpretation of land-human relationships imposed by such terms as “land use”? Which ways of thinking and being in relation to land are most suitable to sustaining life?
Exhibition: An Open Opening Invitiation
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Web Site: http://petersibbald.com
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Find It
Focus
A fermentation (a.k.a. Compost) of media, technology, social justice, art and the environment as experienced on the ground through the eye of one Canadian photo documentarian, intended to help fertilize the zeitgeist and yield a mixed crop of new ideas surrounding civic engagement.
Origins
Out on the land seeking moments and light, I’m often reminded of the similarity between the life and livelihood of a visual journalist/artist and that of the farmer.
To Wit
“Well Ed, the Fishers had their auction last Saturday morning. I watched as the neighbourhood descended on the place and picked it clean. After it was over, and the Fishers had driven off to their new house in town, the auctioneer walked over the property with me. His name’s Freddy. Interesting chap, friendly and outgoing. Runs a beef and dairy herd on the farm next door, plants corn, grain, potatoes, turnips, does auction sales some blacksmithing, small auto repairs and real estate. What I believe is called mixed farming.”
Letters from Wingfield Farm, ©1989 Douglas Beattie. (Act 1) Wingfield Farm
Ongoing Investigations
• The Meaning of Land
• Rurality
• The Nexus of Technology,
Implimentation and Power in
Visual Communication
• Legacies of Colonialism
• Sustainability vs. Resilience in
Socio-Ecological Systems
