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The following is excerpted from The Once and Future Great Lakes Country by John L. Riley.
The Great Lakes country ‒ our first wild west ‒ now supports a population of more than forty-five million and a shared annual economy of more than $1 trillion. It is a place that is open to the continent, and now to the world, more of a crossroads than anything separate or insular. From west to east are Chicago, Sault Ste Marie, Sudbury, Detroit, Cleveland, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, Buffalo, Toronto, Rochester, Kingston, Montreal, and Quebec City. Farther east, twice this many people occupy the Atlantic seaboard. One of the world’s most egalitarian and wealthy societies evolved in the Great Lakes region, and it was there that North American manufacturing and consumerism were invented and perfected, and where a new post-industrialism is emerging. There is a massive $350-billion annual cross-border trade but deep down it is a region of quiet wealth. Amusements are built for visitors and newcomers, but most of its wealth is invested in youth, education, physical comfort, and modern enterprises both within and beyond the region.
Today, the migration of people and the manufacture of land ownership remain as defining industries. Over the next twenty-five years, for example, the number of residents in the Toronto area will increase by more than three million to a total of eleven million, requiring new construction about the size of Greater Boston. Well over half of Canada’s growth in population will occur here. Migration is different now only by degree, and by place of origin. Just as in the 1800s, land companies negotiate for lands that are once again undefended, this time by their low value as farmlands. The landscape continues to be fractioned into ever smaller ‒ and now tiny ‒ parcels. And, as before, the profit flows to the agencies and companies expediting the migration and construction. The names change, but the results are the same. The modern version of the land treaty is the “option to purchase,” and the modern face of the old land companies the “official” or “comprehensive” plan. Modern forensics says to “follow the money” but, in this case, we will “follow the land,” and its environmental consequences.
This book is about Great Lakes country, le pays d’en haut of New France, and its various arrival coasts and corridors linking it east, west, and north. It has nurtured humans for thousands of years, and it is where we hope to live for thousands more. Before the arrival of Europeans, it was a land of diverse Aboriginal peoples, successful hunters, fishers, harvesters, artisans, and traders, many of them belonging to farming nations. In the first part of the book, The Land and What Happened to It, Aboriginal land use is explored, in particular as a guide to an ancient circle of relations that is of increasing interest today. After European contact, the region suffered an extraordinary period of disease, warfare, and genocide ‒ followed by a century and a half of ecological wilding. It then suffered the birth pains of our modern states, whose settlement and industrial occupation we take such pride in. Many nations called this place home, and many nations contested it. Today, two nations ‒ Canada and the United States ‒ have cohabited it in peace for a remarkable two centuries.
The second part of the book, Voices of Nature Past, revisits the trauma that occurred as the result of our assumption of the region’s lands and waters, fish and wildlife, and forests and prairies. It gives voice to its first peoples, visitors, explorers, and surveyors, who left us first-hand accounts of a series of profound ecological transformations. At centre stage are the world’s largest freshwater seas ‒ les mers douces they were called. Nowhere else on Earth is there so much fresh water in the planet’s livable temperate zone. To the north is the mineral-rich boreal country of the Canadian Shield; and to the south the lower lakes, with their warm and fertile Paleozoic plains, moraines, and shores. It is an extraordinary endowment of immense geopolitical importance, and its natural capital will continue to make it a magnet for human endeavour. Two arms of the ocean reach Great Lakes country up the corridors of the Hudson and St Lawrence rivers, and another connects to James and Hudson bays. Beyond the lakes, into the continent, other well-watered lowlands lead south and west to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and the prairies, all of them corridors of power and culture, now and for thousands of years past.
A hundred years after contact, the first permanent white settlement beyond the Atlantic tides at Montreal and Albany was Detroit, the achievement of the French explorer Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac. His report home in 1701 was rhapsodic: “This country, so temperate, so fertile, and so beautiful it may justly be called the earthly paradise of North America.” It was, of course, customary for adventurers to sing the praises of their discoveries but, in this case, Cadillac put his claim to the test and brought his own wife and family, and others, all the way from the St Lawrence to settle. The English echoed Cadillac’s opinion soon after they defeated the French. In 1759 the army officer William Lee wrote of the land around Niagara: “It is filled with deer, bears, turkeys, raccoons and, in short, all sorts of game. The lake affords salmon and other excellent fish. But I am afraid you will think I am growing romantic. Therefore, I shall only say it is such a paradise and such an acquisition to our nation that I would not sacrifice it to receive the dominion of any electoral prince in Germany.”
The book’s third section, Nature’s Prospect, poses the emerging questions. How does the Great Lakes country today compare to the paradise of Cadillac and Lee? The Native founders had achieved a modest, stable level of material and spiritual accomplishment, and the newcomers’ mission was nothing less than to convert the place into a new and better Europe. We have harvested, grown, and orchestrated resources far beyond anything contemplated, and are now committed to a second remarkable migration, with more than 80 per cent of us now living in cities and towns, the exact opposite of a century ago. This reorganization of matter and energy to meet the just-in-time needs of intensifying city-states is, at current scales, similarly unpredictable and unprecedented. Major costs of all kinds, including environmental and social costs, are paid forward by both city-states and donor countrysides, in precarious imbalance.
(…)
The old stories help us frame and measure the pace of change as we are now experiencing it. Like every generation, we think that the changes happening now are greater than ever before, but this place has gone through much more massive transformations in the past. Great Lakes country was almost totally different in 1800 from what it was in 1600, and then totally changed again in 1910. It will be a different place again by 2050. The changes that occur in Nature, large and small, come on relentlessly like waves on the shore. Human nature, by contrast, looks for security, and every generation projects its own illusions of stability, based on its own fears and flight responses. Charles Darwin left us a famous metaphor, the “entangled bank,” in the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species: “These elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.” Natural selection was the law that he described, the engine of irreversible change. An unavoidable corollary of natural selection is that Nature never repeats itself. Indeed, Nature cannot repeat itself. Some may find this unsettling but, given the near total change that this place has witnessed, and will again, equally as many should find in it comfort, and a new respect and humility.
To learn more about The Once and Future Great Lakes Country, or to order online, click here.
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