Talk to anybody employed in forestry and you’ll likely hear the term “working forest.” That’s where feller-bunchers and chainsaws convert living forests into trucks loaded with logs – most of northern and western Alberta, in other words.
Global Rangelands, an outreach initiative sponsored by colleges and universities in the western US, extends the concept to everywhere else: “When we talk about working landscapes we are talking about the areas between cities or towns and natural areas with limited continuous use by people. Rural areas, which often are dominated by intensive or extensive agricultural, forestry or other natural resources–based economies, are generally a part of a working landscape.”
The working landscape is a concept that appeals to our materialistic culture. Why let things go to waste if they can be put to work generating profit? “Deep ecologists” – who see humans as just one of many equal components of nature – may scoff at the idea, but more pragmatic environmentalists seem comfortable enough with it. The late Francis Gardner, a respected foothills conservationist and rancher, once described his family’s ranch to me as a “working wilderness.” He and his wife Bonnie saw their role as stewards of an intact ecosystem, and the wolves and grizzly bears living there as indicators – albeit challenging ones – of their success.
Advocates of the working landscapes concept argue that we can make productive economic use of the land while still retaining its biodiversity and ecological functions. That’s an attractive ideal, and one worth working toward. The results, unfortunately, sometimes fail to match the rhetoric.
Just as a working person is better than an idle one, and working parents often get more respect than those who stay home to raise their kids, the idea of a working landscape attaches economic and cultural worth to a landscape that many would otherwise see just as idle scenery. But it’s predicated on a value system based on domination and subjugation. The darker side to the “working” metaphor, when applied to living places, is that it assumes a moral right of corporate interests to colonize and repurpose whole ecosystems. If it’s a working landscape, then by implication the logging companies, oil and gas industry and livestock producers who put it to work should get to decide what happens there. Others – especially Indigenous people, environmentalists and recreationists who might like it the way it is – should butt out, or at least be grateful when the dominant class grants them the chance to offer humble suggestions.
Another dark side of the working landscape concept is that it’s founded on the conceit that leaving land alone is somehow wasteful. Corporate interests and their political protectors, for example, often describe establishing parks as “sterilizing” the land – a deliberately hostile verb. In truth, land is only truly sterilized when buried under roads and asphalt, or cropped so hard its soils can only be kept fertile with chemicals. Sadly, our working landscapes include a lot of that kind of land.
None of those working landscapes ever applied for the job. But in a society that accrues material wealth by exploiting natural resources, land is simply forced to do work we’ve assigned it. The same business interests who are so enamoured of “working landscape” also love the term “multiple use” and often mention both in the same breath. We expect land to do several jobs at once: produce wood for mills, surrender oil and gas to be burned, feed cows and be mined for its gravel, coal and other subterranean assets. So these aren’t just working landscapes – they’re multi-tasking ones, toiling away at tasks they never signed up for.
When a human being is given no choice but to work at a job he or she never asked for, that’s called slavery.
By that definition, there are no working landscapes, only enslaved ones. The only free landscapes would be our parks and protected areas and the remaining bits of the rest of the province that haven’t yet been indentured to one or more resource companies. Far from having been sterilized, protected areas are places where land is allowed to do its real work.
Because every one of those landscapes was already hard at work. They work at capturing rain and snow and filtering it through green vegetation and spongy soils into groundwater aquifers that feed springs, rivers and downstream communities. They grow diverse plant communities that pull carbon dioxide from the air and put oxygen back in. They work tirelessly at providing habitat for native plants, animals and fish, and spiritual renewal for many thousands of people. They hold memory, meaning and life.
Alberta’s enslaved landscapes were never unemployed to start with. And most of the jobs we force them to do impair their ability to do their real work. That’s how slavery works; it makes bosses rich by stealing the energies of their slaves.
Kevin Van Tighem 