Last issue, I talked about the idea of moving away from private ownership for some things, reducing cost, reducing environmental impact and reducing the number of crappy drills that we as a society would need to purchase.
This may smack a little too much like socialism for some people, and, while that idea might have been adopted by that political spectrum, it doesn’t mean that the idea doesn’t have merit. Indeed, it was the political right that gave us funding for libraries and many other institutions for the good of all.
Public libraries fall into a broad category of what might be called “The Commons.”
And no matter what your political stance, you are in favour of at least some of these things—be they cultural, political, or natural—being held in common.
To prove it, let’s do a thought experiment.
It’s your days off. So you load up your ATV and head out to go riding.
But sometime between the start of your shift and the end of your shift, Neoliberalism has finally totally and completely won out.
You head out to your favourite riding area, only to find the road is gated, and a guard sitting in a small building, scarce bigger or better than a box at the gate.
“I was hoping to do the Onion Lake Trail,” you say.
“Sorry, this is private land,” the spotty faced teen in the box says.
“But where will I ride?” You ask.
The teenager just shrugs his shoulders. “Not my problem,” he says.
Turns out the only place you can ride is on lands privately held by the forest companies. In order to ride your ATV, you need to pay them a fee to ride a couple old logging roads.
So you turn around and drive back to town. But as you drive, you come across a toll booth that has been erected since you left. “Five dollars,” says the pimply faced teen, who looks strangely like the previous teen.
“What the heck?” you ask. (Actually, you say something not quite so fit for a family friendly newspaper, but let’s pretend….)
“This is a private road,” says the teen, and, after many, many more of those words unfit for publishing, you finally decide to pay the five dollars. “It’s probably a good thing. You guys will finally take care of that place at km 35 where the road is falling apart.”
“Oh, no, sir,” says the kid. “That’s not our area. We’re taking care of this ten km stretch.”
By the time you finally make it home, you’ve paid $55 to a variety of private owners along the highway, and you still haven’t had a chance to ride your ATV.
You decide you’re going to go fishing instead, but by the time you get to Moose Lake (having racked up another $40 in fees), you discover that the lake is also under private ownership and the private owners are not allowing access to the lake. Returning home (another $40), you go to have a drink of water, only to discover your water is now being metered and sold to you by a private company.
It goes on, as one by one you lose access to all the wilderness areas that caused you to fall in love with here in the first place. All these areas—known collectively as crown lands—are closed to hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain biking and ATVing.
It sounds ridiculous, an Orwellian nightmare, a fiction created to support the idea. But even as we speak, there are places in BC where what should be public lands is under private ownership, and access is denied.
This is happening in a variety of places around the province.
In the Nicola Valley, for instance, a pair of lakes are stocked by the crown, but anglers would have to cross private land to get to the lakes.
If you want to fish the lakes, which are public and stocked for the public, you have to book a night at one of the Douglas Lake Cattle Company’s private cabins.
And on Vancouver Island, timber companies own the land, not merely the right to log the land. For years, residents have clashed with the company for greater access into the backcountry, into the mountains that drew them to the area in the first place.
So, holding things in common? Can be a very good thing. And it’s not just crown land, but local parks, the library, the Community Centre…all these places are designed as spaces where people who live here in Tumbler Ridge can gather together, to have fun, to meet with others and to enjoy these resources. They enrich us.
Of course, if something is held in common, the hope is that everyone cares for it. Unfortunately, what it often means is that nobody cares for it. Two thousand years ago Aristotle said: “That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common.”
Which is sad, because, while these shared spaces are great, one will still find litter tossed along the side of a trail, many kilometres from town. On the back road to Grande Prairie sits an abandoned work camp; when the company that owned the camp stopped making money, they just walked away, leaving a mess for who knows who to clean up.
In Alberta, they have suggested a $100-million credit to encourage companies—who, as part of their agreement with the government promised to clean up the mess they made extracting oil and gas—to actually do what they are obligated to do. But it’s public land so nobody cares if they don’t do it, until the entire landscape is littered with the debris of rapacious corporate greed.
The local ATV club has made it their mission to clean up the trash people dump in our wilderness areas. They, for one, have taken responsibility for this shared space, held in common for all of us..
Now we just need a way to figure out a way to get the rest of you to care….
On that topic, May 8-12 is Pitch In Week here in Tumbler Ridge, when a bunch of little kids are going to go out and clean up the mess that we have communally made. But they can only do so much. They need your help. You can register to pitch in at the Community Centre.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.