Canada is a nation of wild, legendary rivers. The Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Churchill, and dozens more all empty into our national identity. They flow through our landscape, history, and imagination. They are vital to any history textbook, Group of Seven exhibit, or gift-shop postcard rack.

Canada is also a nation of river-tamers. We revere our waterways—but we also dam them. Trudeau canoed the epic Nahanni and two years later presided over the opening of the mammoth Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam in Labrador. We are, as the Canadian Hydropower Association says, a “hydro superpower.” Almost 60 percent of our electricity supply comes from dams—compared to just 16 percent globally—and only China squeezes more electricity out of its rivers than we do.

The heyday of big dam construction in Canada began around the late 1950s. What followed was an exhibition of progress in the raw. Surveyors and bulldozers headed to the frontier. Mighty men tamed mighty rivers. Engineering prowess replaced natural grandeur.

As rock was blasted and cement poured, legacies were forged, both geographical and political. In Manitoba, the two largest rivers and three of the five largest lakes were dramatically re-engineered. In Quebec, 571 dams and control structures have altered the flow of 74 rivers.

The construction phase lasted through the ’80s, then slowed, even though the country’s hydro potential had only been half tapped. Now, after two decades of limited construction—with the exception of Hydro-Québec, which kept on building—the dam-builders are rumbling to life again.

In the next 10 to 15 years, Canadian utilities will spend $55 to $70 billion on new hydroelectric projects. This would add 14,500 megawatts to Canada’s existing 71,000 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. Most new projects are in Quebec (4,570 MW), B.C. (3,341 MW), Labrador (3,074 MW), and Manitoba (2,380 MW). The largest of these, Labrador’s 2,250 MW Gull Island project, will produce as much power as 750 train locomotives.

The extent and cost of construction will vary over time, but one thing is certain: the push for more hydro is on.

Most of these projects are driven in large part by the prospect of exporting power to the U.S. American interest in hydropower is linked, in part, to its low cost and its low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the push for more hydro is also a push by the industry to position its product as an answer to climate change.

Jacob Irving heads the Canadian Hydropower Association, which represents the interests of the hydro industry. He says hydropower is “a very strong climate change solution,” because it can displace the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. The argument is simple and compelling: use more hydropower, use less fossil fuel. The industry especially touts exports of hydro to the U.S., where 600 coal-fired plants produce 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, with another 24 percent fuelled by natural gas. The CHA says hydro exports already reduce continental emissions by half a million tons a year. They want that number to grow.

Given the dire climate prognosis—emissions in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else are well above levels in 1990, the year used as a benchmark in the Kyoto Accord—the urgency of reducing fossil-fuel consumption is great. Perhaps Canada’s wild rivers, if harnessed, can be our gift to a warming world. Maybe a concrete edifice nestled in a river valley is just as quintessentially Canadian as a lone paddler on a pristine river.

This presents a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario for Canadian utilities. They can build more dams—obviously still a cornerstone of the corporate culture—cash in on lucrative exports, and enjoy eco-hero status. But is damming more of our rivers an optimal strategy for addressing climate change?

Despite the virtues of hydro power, dams can only reduce emissions indirectly. Their climate value hinges in part on the extent to which they substitute for fossilfuel-fired generation, as opposed to displacing nuclear, wind, or other sources. Though displacement is hard to prove, Irving reasons that “were we not to be sending that electricity down to the United States, the next most logical source of generation to meet their load requirements would generally be natural gas and/or coal.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) actually predicts that over the next 25 years, 11 percent of new generation in the U.S. will be coal-fired and 60 percent natural gas (which is roughly half as bad as coal in terms of emissions).

In Canada, most new hydro projects are located in provinces with minimal fossil-fuel-fired generation, so limited displacement will happen here. Exceptions are Ontario, Labrador (where 102 MW will be displaced), Nova Scotia (which will import from Labrador), and possibly Saskatchewan, which could use hydro from Manitoba.

While the fossil-fuel displacement argument has obvious merit, it also has weaknesses. Utilities can argue that hydro exports help save the planet, but critics can say these exports just keep the most wasteful society on earth air-conditioned and recharged. They can say that hydro exports just feed an addiction with more and more cheap power, every kilowatt of which reduces the imperative to curb consumption. The basic argument is that reducing demand must be the obvious and dominant priority in energy policy, rather than endlessly ramping up supply.

Government agencies predict electricity demand in Canada will grow almost 10 percent between now and 2020, and in the U.S. by approximately 30 percent between now and 2035. Ralph Torrie says we can and must go in the opposite direction. “We could double the efficiency with which we use fuel and electricity in Canada,” he says. If you want to see how it’s done, he adds, “just take a vacation to Europe.” Torrie, whose energy expertise is internationally recognized, serves as managing director of the Vancouver-based Trottier Energy Futures Project. In contrast to Irving, who accepts that demand for electricity will grow, Torrie advocates a “new way of thinking about the energy future.”

“There is no demand for electricity,” he says. “Nobody wants a kilowatt hour in their living room.” We want the services that electricity can provide, and we must “focus on how we can best meet the underlying needs for amenity with less rather than more fuel and electricity.” That, he says, is the only hope for “anything we might call a sustainable energy future.”

“We waste half the hydro we produce,” says John Bennett, who heads the Sierra Club of Canada. The solution to climate change is “to use less energy,” he says. “That’s where the major investment should be.”

Torrie says large hydro is environmentally preferable to many forms of energy supply, but still, reducing demand can achieve the same thing at a lower cost, and without the decade-long turnaround time for planning and construction. He views conservation as a resource. “There’s almost always a kilowatt of electricity that can be saved for a smaller cost than building the ability to generate a new kilowatt.” Plus, the resource gets bigger with every new innovation in efficiency. As Torrie puts it, “The size of the resource goes up every time somebody has a bright idea.”

Cutting electricity demand by half would include a range of technologies, including LED lighting, sensor-driven smart controls that reduce daytime lighting in buildings, and continued improvements to virtually every device that uses electricity.

But even if we as a continent cut our energy use by half, we still need some energy—and should not a maximum amount of that come from low-emission hydro? Can’t conservation and new hydro be dual priorities?

According to energy consultant Phillipe Dunsky, total spending on efficiency and conservation programs in Canada is only about $1 billion per year. Despite that, Jacob Irving says, “energy conservation has to be forefront of all decisions.” Then he adds a caveat: “There’s a lot of analysis that says energy consumption will grow, and so we need to be ready for that.” Whether demand shrinks or expands, the simple prohydro argument—more hydro equals less fossil fuel— still stands.

But for Tony Maas, who works for the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, it’s not that simple. He says new hydro projects must be part of an overarching plan for “net reduction in GHG emissions.” He cites Ontario’s Green Energy Act as an example of a plan that commits to overall GHG reduction.

But, as John Bennett points out, “we don’t have a North American plan to reduce emissions,” so new hydro projects “can’t be part of that plan.” The EIA predicts that without policy change, coal use as well as GHG emissions from electricity generation, will continue to increase over the next 25 years. Bennett says building more dams to meet increasing demand is like doubling the fuel efficiency of cars so that people can drive twice as much.

In a release this April, Hydro-Québec, Canada’s largest generator and exporter of hydropower, said, “The major environmental challenge facing North America is to replace coal to generate power and oil used in transportation.” While climate change may be the “major” environmental challenge of the day, it is not the only one. Just because hydro dams do not have highly visible carbon-spewing smoke stacks does not necessarily make them environmentally friendly. Behind the question of whether dams are a climate solution lies a more fundamental question: is hydro actually clean, as utilities and governments regularly assert?

Jacob Irving says, “When people refer to [hydro] as clean, it’s in the context of air emissions.” But rarely is this specified. The categorical use of the term by utilities, without caveat or qualification, is misleading. Tony Maas says he gets “nervous” when hydro is called clean because “it almost implies there are no impacts.” But dams harm the environment. A dam is not an environmental improvement or solution for a watershed.

One of the main impacts is the disruption of the natural “flow regime” in a waterway. Maas says the natural fluctuations in water levels are the “master variable in organizing a river ecosystem,” giving key “cues” to other species. Thus, a WWF report says, “Dams destroy the ecology of river systems by changing the volume, quality, and timing of water flows downstream.” The evidence of this is visible in dammed Canadian rivers, as it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to mitigate and compensate for damages caused by dams. Manitoba Hydro alone has spent over $700 million to address damages from its “clean” hydro projects.

The WWF takes a more nuanced approach. It says some hydro projects can be built without unacceptable harm, but its 2011 global energy plan still “severely restrict[s] future growth of hydro power to reflect the need for an evolution that respects existing ecosystems and human rights.”

Similarly, a 2011 report about Canada’s boreal forests by the Pew Environment Group considers both pros and cons of hydro. In a section about hydro called “How Green Is It?”, the report says:

Although [hydro dams] are comparatively low carbon emitters in comparison to many conventional energy sources, hydropower projects have resulted in significant impacts to wildlife habitat, ecological processes and aboriginal communities.

In a later section, the report states:

While it is clear that allowing our societies to be powered by carbon fuels is not sustainable, this does not mean that alternative or renewable energy sources can simply be viewed as having no cost whatsoever.

The report, entitled “A Forest of Blue,” does not offer a simple verdict. Rather, it says, “We must understand as many of the implications and complexities of the issues as possible.” The candour and openness to complexity demonstrated in the report are exactly what is needed in the assessment of any climate-change strategy.

In keeping with the Pew report’s frank and thorough nature, it also discusses the role Aboriginal peoples play in hydro development. This is an essential part of any discussion of hydropower in Canada since virtually all hydro projects occupy lands to which First Nations have rights. In the past, Aboriginal people vehemently (and mostly unsuccessfully) opposed major dams. That has changed: in some cases Aboriginal opposition has succeeded. The $5 billion, 1,250 MW Slave River project in Alberta has been “deferred” after project proponents were unable to reach a deal with Smith’s Landing First Nation last year.

The proposed Site C Dam, a 1,100 MW, $7.9 billion project planned for the Peace River in B.C., faces resolute opposition from four First Nations in the area. But the outcome of that David-and-Goliath battle will not be know for some time.

Elsewhere, opposition has given way to participation—David and Goliath have become allies. Most recently, members of the Innu Nation in Labrador voted in June to allow the massive Lower Churchill River projects—Muskrat Falls (824 MW) and Gull Island (2,250 MW)—to proceed. In exchange, the 2,800 Innu receive $5 million per year to assist with their process costs during and prior to construction, up to $400 million in contracts during construction, and share of project profits thereafter (5 percent of “After Debt Net Cashflow”).

The broad Tshash Petapen (New Dawn) Agreement, in which these provisions are contained, also includes an agreement in principle on land claims and $2 million a year as compensation for damages related to the existing Upper Churchill Falls dam.

Meanwhile, the Inuit (distinct from the Innu), who are concerned about downstream impacts in their territory, say they have been largely left out of the process.

In Quebec, the James Bay Cree receive over $100 million a year in hydro, forestry, and mining royalties as a result of the 2002 Peace of the Braves agreement. In it they consented to the Eastmain-1-A/Sarcelle/Rupert Project (918 MW) while securing the permanent abandonment of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert project, which would have flooded 6,000 square kilometres.

First Nations near proposed dam sites in Manitoba have been offered lump-sum compensation packages, along with the opportunity to invest in projects. For instance, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, with its 4,500 members, will be entitled to a third of the profits of the nearly completed Wuskwatim Dam if they can come up with a third of the $1.3 billion cost of the dam. They also benefit from $60 million of employment training.

In June, four other First Nations joined Manitoba Hydro in announcing the start of construction on the 695 MW, $5.6 billion Keeyask dam. Like Nisichawayasihk, they will be offered the chance to invest in the dam, as well as employment opportunities.

What’s clear in all these cases is that Canadian utilities cannot ignore Aboriginal demands. “We can stop development,” says Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and the recently retired Chief of the Misipawistik Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. His community sits right next to the 479 MW Grand Rapids Dam, which floods 115,700 hectares. In reference to the water flowing through that dam, Mercredi’s message to the province is simple: “That’s not your water, it belongs to our people and we want a share of that money.” The dam’s 50-year provincial licence expires in 2015 and Mercredi wants licence renewal to be contingent on public acknowledgement of the harm, increased mitigation of damages, and a revenue-sharing agreement. In part, the message is that if utilities do not deal with Aboriginal concerns now, they will have to later.

Whether First Nations are defiant or eager for new dams to power their economic future, the broader environmental questions remain. While Aboriginal influence has led to a reduction in the size of dams and increased environmental mitigation, and First Nations consent improves the general ethical perception of a project, there is still no tidy way to pour thousands of tons of cement into a river.

No matter who is involved, the merit of the case for hydro as a climate solution can be tested by the assumptions it rests on. These assumptions are that hydro is clean; that demand for electricity will grow; and that the primary alternative to more hydro is fossil-fuel generation. Are these solutions part of the solution or the problem?

Ultimately, the solution to climate change, as well as to watershed health, may never be found unless we move past these assumptions and replace them with better, more accurate premises.

First, dams are not green or clean in themselves. To disrupt the flow of a river and blaze a transmission corridor through kilometres of forest is, in itself, bad for the biosphere. To solve one environmental problem (global warming) with another (pouring hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement in a free-flowing river) is counterintuitive. That said, desperate circumstances may require desperate measures.

Second, energy demand can and must be substantially reduced. The logical outcome of letting demand increase indefinitely and meeting that demand with ever more hydro and other renewables is to have every river dammed, the landscape saturated with wind and solar farms, and consumption still increasing. The ultimate, unavoidable solution is to use less energy. This must be the dominant priority.

Finally, dams do not reduce GHG emissions per se. They increase energy supply. Apart from a demonstrated continental commitment to dramatically reduce emissions (and energy demand), the case for hydro as a climate solution is, for the industry, a rather convenient truth. Hydropower can’t be part of the climate-change solution if there is no solution.

Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and to address it we may need to conjure greater creativity than just reviving electricity generation megaprojects conceived of decades ago. Dan McDermott of the Sierra Club’s Ontario Chapters says, “The age of big dams is over.” According to him, hydro proponents “have their heads turned backwards attempting to mortgage the future to maintain the past.”

The large hydro projects currently in the works were envisioned before global warming concerned anyone, in an era summed up by former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin when he rose in the legislature in 1966 and prophesied a grandiose future for hydropower, saying, “We can have our cake, we can eat it and we can make a bigger cake, and sell part of that.”

Though hydro prospects are framed differently now, dam proponents still appear to share Roblin’s belief in limitless, consequence-free development. Now the question of whether taming more of our iconic rivers will help the climate becomes a question of whether Roblin was right.

As of today it’s official: every province and territory across Canada is on board with the 350.org climate movement. This Sunday, 350.org events will be held throughout Canada and around the world.

Last year, we saw the beginning of this movement. On Oct. 24th, 2009, several thousand youth took over Parliament Hill in Ottawa to give our leader a strong message: that we want action now.

But the politicians on the Hill haven’t given us that. If anything, the Canadian government has done the opposite, subsidizing $1.5 billion to the fossil fuel industry and cutting investments in renewable energy. Even worse, as we all know too well, the Copenhagen Climate Summit was a complete failure. It took us years, if not a decade, backward in negotiations.

So what do we do now? Is there any point to fighting or should we just give in to this suicidal path we seem to be on? These are the questions that have plagued me since I left the summit last December. It’s fair to tell you that I haven’t written much about this recently because I’ve been in a kind of “eco-coma.” I felt so pessimistic about our future, as I’m sure a lot of us have, that I found it difficult to have even the slightest bit of hope any more.

But maybe that was my mistake. I placed too much hope on some political leaders changing it all. I realize now that we’ve got to get to work ourselves for the change we want. We can’t leave it up to the top-tier powers that are so obviously controlled by the fossil fuel lobby. Throughout history, this has always been the way. It takes strong movements of millions to make change. This year is no exception. Despite our corrupt government, Canadians and people around the world are not backing down. Our movement is only getting stronger.

On Oct. 10th, there will be events happening across the country. In the Yukon Territories, people will weatherize low-income homes. In Nunavut they will take the day to walk instead of drive. While in Prince Edward Island, they will cycle on hybrid electric bikes across the coastal shorelines to promote alternative energies.

In Pakistan, women are learning how to use solar ovens, students in Zimbabwe are installing solar panels on a rural hospital, and sumo wrestlers in Japan are riding their bicycles to practice.

Sure, solving climate change won’t come one bike path at a time. But as Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, wrote, “It’s a key step in continuing to build the movement to safeguard the climate.”

This is probably the most important year yet to preserver in our fight. We’ve seen devastating floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia, and a heat-wave around the world.

But with this movement growing globally, today I am proud to write that I have hope again.

Permaculture means taking more responsibility for knowing how your food got to your plate. Photo by Zorani/iStockPhoto; photo illustration by Dave Donald.

Trent Rhode looks great in a suit. The 27-year-old resident of Peterborough, Ont., seems perfectly comfortable standing before a long table of elected officials twice his age, lecturing them on the importance of environmental sustainability. His message is simple but powerful: he tells his audience they are not separate from the environment—they are the environment. Natural resources are dwindling, he says, and now is the time to act.

Rhode sits on the steering committee of Transition Town Peterborough, a non-profit organization that is working toward building a self-sufficient community less dependent on fossil fuels; at this particular meeting he is outlining some of the group’s ideas for Peterborough’s municipal officials and bureaucrats. His power suit says he belongs in this boardroom—but it’s not actually where he prefers to be.

When his business there is done, Rhode slips into a comfortable pair of trousers and an old blue t-shirt and digs his hands deep into the soil. In his job as a natural gardener, Rhode works the land at several properties in Ontario. He spends his time not only designing, but also implementing edible “forest gardens” at an eco-education centre in Colborne, a farm in Cobourg, and a residential property near Belleville. His hometown, which he obviously holds dear to his heart, has hired him to maintain gardens in Peterborough.

As a five-year-old horsing around on his grandfather’s Belleville farm, Rhode couldn’t be bothered with the ins and outs of growing vegetables—he was much more interested in chasing the pigs and geese. But 12 years later, while researching agriculture for his journalism program at Loyalist College, he stumbled across a concept that would become the foundation of his future career and virtually every aspect of his life. The idea was permaculture.

“I became aware of how fragile agriculture is, and how it’s dependent on so many things,” he says. “I began to see how fragile the economy is for the same reasons. I became interested in what seemed to be a necessity. The future is uncertain—but what is certain is we need to eat.”

Rhode has applied to a master of science in integrative ecosocial design at Gaia University, a program that specializes in teaching people already involved in the “regeneration and world change fields.” Rhode is helping to organize an Ontario-wide permaculture convention to take place in Toronto in the fall, and evangelizes the principles of permaculture to just about anyone who will listen.

“The grocery store is the big box we go into and we buy our food,” he says. “There is no connection between the farm and our refrigerator. In this culture we take food for granted; it isn’t seen as the necessity it is. The way we think is fragmented and everything is disconnected, but permaculture seeks to integrate—it has a more holistic view.”

In other words, Rhode believes that putting these ideas into practice on the farm and in the garden can fix our ailing food supply; moreover, he believes permaculture can transform every aspect of our lives for the better. And he’s not alone.

So what exactly is permaculture? The term was coined in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and co-originated with another Australian academic, David Holmgren. Originally it stood for “permanent agriculture”: at a time when the burgeoning environmental movement was rediscovering ancient concepts like pesticide-free agriculture, Mollison and Holmgren bundled together these ideas into a complete design system for environmentally friendly food production.

Decades later, that design system has spread to many other fields, including architecture, economics, education, and spirituality, so that permaculture now really stands for permanent culture—a design philosophy for making every aspect of our lives truly sustainable. It advocates a dozen key principles, which include caring for the earth, caring for people, using and valuing renewable resources, integration rather than segregation, and using small and slow solutions.

Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren likens the system to a flower, with individual disciplines, the "petals," connected at the centre by a unified philosophy of sustainable design. Diagram design by David Holmgren; illustration by Dave Donald.

And if there’s one thing a permaculture advocate can’t stand, it’s waste. The throwaway, wasteful society we live in now, they say, can’t last: idling in the drive-thru to get a coffee from Starbucks, driving in our gas guzzlers the few blocks from home to the grocery store, all to purchase onions from Egypt, apples from Chile, and broccoli from Spain. Then, when we get home, it all goes in a power-sucking refrigerator to keep it from going bad.

“People often think, ‘The first thing I need to do is to change the way I move around in a vehicle or how I heat my house,’” says David Holmgren from his home in Victoria, Australia. “And those things are important. But we eat every day, and our decisions in what we eat, and how we eat, and how we get that food, are enormously powerful. Permaculture aims to redesign the whole food-production chain.”

That means more household self-reliance, such as growing some of our own food and doing some of the chores our grandparents did—food growing, canning, clothes mending, and DIY of all sorts—in order to reduce our environmental footprint and cut back on the wastefulness that has brought us to the brink of dangerous and irreversible environmental decline. Permaculture means changing more than just the contents of your fridge: it means altering some fundamental aspects of the way you live your life.

Which all seems like a bit of an undertaking, to say the least. But not to worry: permaculture is based on slow-and-steady change, starting, literally, in your own backyard.

The modern farm is an industrial marvel, a factory for growing as much food as possible in the smallest space at the lowest cost. But it can’t last: plants and animals aren’t cogs in a machine, and industrial farming is beginning to run up against some fundamental limits of nature. Drive around in the country, and you’ll pass rows and rows of monoculture crops planted horizontally. Behind the scenes, huge amounts of chemically manufactured nitrogen and phosphorous are pumped into the soil to prevent it from becoming infertile— these chemicals then leak into the groundwater and, inevitably, into the ocean. Modern farming requires about 10 calories of energy for every calorie of food produced, which means growing food isn’t actually production at all, it’s just another type of consumption.

If you wander into your nearest grocery story right now, the answer to this problem appears to be to label everything “organic.” See that well-heeled yuppie in the checkout line buying $10 organic oatmeal? Her great-grandmother would probably scoff at the label (and the cost) because the term would have been meaningless: organic was all she ever knew, and it didn’t need a fancy name. Her apples had spots on them because the chemicals and hormones that now bathe modern fruits and vegetables just didn’t exist. The “organic” label is a modern invention, a backlash against industrial farming. As a marketing tool, the word has been very successful.

But saying something is organic doesn’t automatically mean it’s sustainable. Permaculture and organic agriculture share some obvious traits, but it is possible to have one without the other. For example, those carrots at the supermarket might be labelled “organic,” but if they’re packed in a plastic bag and shipped from South America, they’re hardly environmentally friendly. You’d be better off buying non-organic produce from your local farmers’ market, because the food you buy there has less packaging and burned less gas to get to you. Similarly, you’d be better off buying the pork chop of a local free-roaming pig that got a few injections than you would that of a pig that has all the paperwork required to label it “organic,” but that lived in a barn eating processed feed pellets.

What this means, say permaculture activists, is that it’s simply not enough to throw some organic instant waffles in your shopping cart and get on with your life: it’s our responsibility to truly know what we’re eating and how it got to our plate. Individually, culturally, economically, spiritually, we really are what we eat.

The reason these questions are so important right now is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the world as we know it is in big trouble.

The chief scientific adviser of the U.K., professor John Beddington, recently said we are facing a “perfect storm,” where shortages of water, food, and energy sources will take a devastating toll on the world. He reckons we have about 20 years.

Holmgren, however, says the storm is already upon us. “We are in a continuous economic, energetic climate crisis,” he says. “The way that unfolds will be difficult to predict, but I think most of these statements that are being made by even well-meaning people at higher levels are enormously underplaying things.”

Steve Jones, an ecologist and permaculture teacher in Wales, agrees that the crisis is already here. He has a scary name for this historical period we’re entering: “descent culture”—a perilous time of scarce resources, declining standards of living, and social breakdown. What goes up, he says, must come down.

“It is a basic law of physics and therefore inescapable,” he says. “It will change everything. It will change the way we think. The next generation will look back at us thinking we were crazy or naïve. At best we will be leaving them a world scarred by fossil fuel use and dependent on cheap energy that is no longer there. It is going to be very tough over the next few decades whilst we figure out how to respond.”

Jones emphasizes that oil is at the root of the problem. He says no other energy source can rival petroleum in terms of energy density, ease of access, and sheer usefulness.

But it is not sustainable. He doesn’t believe we’ll run out of oil entirely, he says, but “we have probably used half the available supply that is in the ground, the easy half to get hold of. So at some point, possibly quite soon, the world supply will peak, and the rate at which it can be extracted from the ground will go into a decline that cannot and will not be reversed.” Permaculture advocates say we’d be better off modifying our way of life now than waiting for nature to do it for us. Holmgren, for instance, doesn’t see much point in trying to build an environmentally friendly car when the sanest choice would be to, well, just drive less. The point isn’t to build a better rat race—it’s to get out of it altogether. We might as well accept these changes with a positive outlook, Holmgren says, because “whatever we do in the future, we’re going to have a lot more success by figuring out how to not do things than desperately trying to create ways to maintain current patterns of living that just aren’t going to work.”

The view at Yves Zehnder's Sacred Sueños farm in Vilcabama, Ecuador. Photo by Jenn Hardy.

Two-and-a-half hours walk up a mountain in Vilcabamba, Ecuador, lives a 34-year-old red-headed farmer named Yves Zehnder. He is a farmer in every sense of the word: this is no side project, and he has no additional day job. He works hard every day from sunrise to sunset (and sometimes beyond) managing the 10 hectares of land he lives on.

Fearing that his frustration with our society might turn him into an eco-terrorist, Zehnder left his home in northern Ontario 14 years ago, and five years ago decided to live sustainably in the south of Ecuador. A mere $1,400 in his bank account gave him residency and home became a tent on top of an Andean mountain. He lived in the tent for six months while he single-handedly built the adobe brick communal facilities the farm labourers now use.

At first, life at the farm, called Sacred Sueños, was hard. When he arrived at his mountainside property nothing would grow except bracken fern. The soil, because of the unsustainable slash-and-burn farming in the area, was basically infertile. In retrospect, would he have chosen land with better soil? “No,” he says. “It taught me patience and perseverance. It was an ethical decision to change poor soil into something fertile. I didn’t want to be a frivolous white boy who buys good land and has it all. This way I have been able to find solutions to big problems and share that knowledge.”

Slowly, but surely, he put permaculture’s techniques to work on the farm. For example, he uses a composting toilet. One of the permaculture principles is that in nature, there is no such thing as waste. So Zehnder has a “humanure” system, turning every bit of human feces back into soil. Once a guest uses the lovely mountainside-view toilet (a glorified bucket under a seat) he or she scoops up a coconut shell of sawdust (happily donated to Zehnder by a sawmill down the hill) and covers the mess. The last to fill the bucket empties it in the appropriate pile.

He also uses a “chicken tractor.” His five hens don’t have to do much heavy lifting, but they are penned in a large area, and their natural scratching and digging for grubs turns the soil under their feet. Chicken poop is also an excellent fertilizer that prepares the ground for plants when the “tractor” is relocated a week later.

Zehnder strategically plants trees to help him create shade during the four-month dry season and others that prevent erosion during the rainy season.

He and his partner, Jennifer Martin, keep chickens for eggs, donkeys, a horse, and goats for milk and cheese. They grow delicious native fruit like naranjillas, which often come from “volunteers” as he calls them—seeds that blossom out of the “humanure.” (He has also had the help of human volunteers who come to work on the farm.)

Yves Zehnder with Sacred Sueños' two donkeys, Bonne and Posito. Photo by Jenn Hardy.

The homemade shower is heated by a black tube coiled to attract the sun, and it has the same beautiful valley view as the toilet—which leaves everyone fighting over the opportunity to be naked outside.

Natural building is a part of the permaculture design system that often uses a material called “cob,” traditionally made of clay, sand, straw, water and earth, an easy combination to find when building a straw-bale house somewhere like Canada or the U.K. Finding straw up top a mountain in Ecuador, however, is more of a challenge. True to the system he follows, Zehnder has gone one step further with cob. He sees the use of an organic material such as straw as a waste and instead uses shredded plastic bags to bind the material together.

Though he now has much better soil, his work is far from finished. A friend has recently purchased the 40 hectares of neighbouring land, and Zehnder will make use of it for rotating pastures and reforestation. Aside from the daily chores that come with running such a large piece of land, Zehnder is building an educational centre at Sacred Sueños, where he will teach permaculture not only to rich Westerners who can make their way down there, but also to locals who can take the course with scholarships.

It’s easy to see that permaculture puts an emphasis on human manual labour. This is why critics often call it uneconomical or impractical when it comes to large-scale farming. But the manual labour is exactly what permaculture adherents like about it. For them it’s about taking your life into your own hands.

Grégoire Lamoureux is another farmer who is putting permaculture into practice. On Spiral Farm in Winlaw, B.C., where he has lived for almost two decades, Lamoureux says permaculture is “looking at design issues and implementing them in human habitat—where people live and taking into account places for every living being as well. It doesn’t exclude other living creatures.”

Growing up on a dairy farm in southern Quebec, Lamoureux quickly learned what he didn’t want to do when he grew up. He didn’t want to be involved with large monoculture farming. He first learned about permaculture in the ’80s, and now on his farm, on the western bank of the Slocan River, he grows a diversity of plants, fruits, nuts, useful trees, and vegetables, mostly for his own use. He dries and cans food to keep himself going all year round. Lamoureux teaches other people at Spiral Farm, but also takes his knowledge on the road and teaches courses across the country.

The movement has spread through such courses taught by people like Lamoureux. They are now available all over the world, adapted to different climates and skill levels. Some introductory courses are taught in a day, although there are also two-week intensive design courses that grant certificates and qualifications to teach.

A typical permaculture design course covers the essential principles and elements, as well as some hands-on experience. In the two-week course, you learn about the ethics of sustainability, building soil fertility, natural building design, waste recycling and treatment, and water harvesting, among others.

And it’s not all about back-to-the-land living of the type Yves Zehnder is doing; some courses are designed for curious urbanites. Lamoureux, for instance, teaches one for people who want to start a container garden on their balcony. “Some people feel the negative sides of living in a city,” he says. “The course can empower you to feel more comfortable where you live. People can take information home and apply the ideas.”

For Sandra Storr, who runs Romany Rest, a 120-year-old farmhouse bed and breakfast, using permaculture principles in P.E.I., it made the most sense to get her certification online. She says online study was not only economical, but it meant she didn’t have to fly across the world to do it. (Anyone who is serious about the environment, she says, avoids flying as much as possible.) Storr isn’t only concerned about reducing her carbon emissions, but reducing—period. That was her first aim when she and her husband, Fred, immigrated to Canada from Wales in 2006.

The bed and breakfast uses solar power for showers and the swimming pool. While a solar electricity system is a bit out of range at the moment, they have looked to low-tech permaculture solutions such as passive solar—renovating their farmhouse to include big windows that face the sun, and, in true DIY fashion, they made reflectors out of plywood and aluminum emergency blankets, which double or triple the amount of sunlight, and therefore heat, that enters the building. The property features 26 micro wind turbines.

Storr says her solutions are “cheap and cheerful”: she’s covered some of the non-essential windows in bubble wrap to keep heat in.

The couple rarely visit the grocery store, even to keep the B&B operating. They keep a few chickens running around and some sheep. Like Lamoureux, Storr teaches on-site and does her own bottling, canning, and dehydrating. She is most interested in beans, cooked grains, wheat, and seeds, and she keeps a root cellar. And thanks to the provincial government’s forest regeneration scheme, the property now has a hectare of new native trees in its backyard.

“I had heard of permaculture years ago, but thought of it as simply another form of gardening,” says Storr. “We already had an organic garden in Wales and I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It wasn’t until five years ago that I realized it was about so much more—a whole system designed to mimic natural systems and function efficiently.” She explains that it was studying permaculture more intensely that taught her to bring everything together.

“When we first got here we didn’t think five acres was big enough. But, because permaculture is such an efficient system, now I think, what do we do with all this space?” In a permaculture garden, you don’t see row upon row of the same crop. The system discourages monocultures and promotes the use of vertical space. That means that permaculture gardens often end up like a chaotic mess, with plants tangled in amongst each other—the way they are in nature.

“Instead of transforming the environment to fit your needs,” Lamoureux says, “you have to use the existing environment and adapt your needs to it.”

What a lovely idea this permaculture is. Lovely perhaps, but maybe not too practical. We don’t all have the time or money to leave our lives behind and start a full-scale farm. Even if we could afford it, not everyone has a burning desire to be a farmer and live off the land. Similarly, many people living in an apartment or a house with a small garden just don’t have time to grow tomatoes. We like eating grapefruit, mangoes, and bananas year-round. We like to listen to our iPods and drink Starbucks from disposable cups. Plenty of us like our Land Rovers! This is normal life for most of us, and the general feeling is no one has the right to take that away.

And no one is taking it away—just yet. But no matter how you slice it, big changes in energy and economics are coming soon. If we clue in to the idea that capitalism, and all the wonderful things that come with it, are not sustainable as they now exist, we may be able to make small changes in our individual lives that could mitigate the crises still to come.

It may require some effort, but there are many ways to implement permaculture into your life now. Changes can be made slowly and relatively painlessly. Don’t want to grow your own food? Then why not participate in Community Supported Agriculture and buy a weekly food basket from a local farmer? Or challenge yourself at the grocery store to search for food that was produced in your own country. If it ain’t broke, don’t buy a new one. If it is broke, fix it. For too long we have lived as if we were characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, happily reciting, “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.”

To the chagrin of Greenpeace activists everywhere, not everyone actually cares about the environment. Not everyone believes the earth has a soul and we should worship her in all her glory. What most people do care about, however, is their wallets, and the truth is, virtually everything about permaculture is about saving cash. (Saving trees, seeds, and the world might come next on the list.)

Permaculture devotees generally come in two camps: the ones who see it as a kind of spiritual devotion and the ones who see it as a scientifically rigorous system.

23-year-old Sara Bresee is definitely in the first category. She learned about permaculture while going on a spiritual retreat in Spain. On top of a mountain, she lived in a teepee, sat in sweat lodges, and danced barefoot with her hippie self. While building a mandala in the garden, she met a man who introduced her to a few permaculture techniques. “I thought, ‘That’s the smartest thing in the world,’” she says. And it was something she could take back with her to her urban life in Montreal, where she is studying to be a nutritionist and a yoga teacher, and works at a raw vegan restaurant.

Bresee and her three roommates share a community garden a five-minute walk from home, where they grow their own vegetables. They also support Community Supported Agriculture, a world-wide network which gives urbanites the opportunity to support local food growers. The roommates opt for a family-sized vegetable basket, which provides them with local organic food year-round. Bresee says it is the perfect way to create community links between the city and the country.

It is this spiritual connection that interests Bresee most: “Permaculture, as a way of life, has acknowledged that no man or woman can do everything on their own, and thus community is undeniably important. This holistic view, to me, is what makes permaculture sustainable, what makes everything come together in the end.”

As a basis for spirituality, Bresee says permaculture’s spiritual message is “let’s care for ourselves, care for each other, and care for the earth. It’s simple, beautiful, and true.” Across the Atlantic, 27-year-old Faye Tomson falls into the science camp. Tomson, who is completing her masters in environmental engineering at the University of Leeds, is specializing in renewable energy and low-energy housing “in a bid to try and restore the balance,” she says.

“Working in such a field is twofold,” she says. “Not only is it useful—and necessary in the transition to a low-carbon economy—it’s also lucrative. My family has no money and is unlikely to in the near future. My dream is to earn enough to move us all away to some far-flung place away from the masses when it all goes tits up—which I don’t think is going to be very long from now.”

She jokes that she’s anticipating some Armageddon-style scenario—but she’s only half kidding. “When the shelves are empty,” she says, “people are going to fight and riot and steal and hurt each other. I want to be far away by then. With my family.” For Tomson, it isn’t only new technologies that will be important in the future, but long-lost crafts and trades like horsemanship, woodwork, knitting, sewing, and leather tanning.

“People of like minds really need to get together—leave egos at the door, and start building arks,” she says. There is urgency in her tone. “Save seeds that haven’t been messed up by companies like Monsanto, and learn as many skills as possible. Learn how to keep bees and preserve and store food for winter months. This is serious. Agriculture is dying, and the old ways have gone. We must relearn them—and fast.”

Trent Rhode can’t argue with Tomson’s desire for immediate change, although he doesn’t share her survivalist viewpoint. But while Tomson and Yves Zehnder may choose to build lives outside the city limits, right now Rhode is comfortable working in an urban setting.

“How can you be a hermit and live by yourself in the forest, when your air and water quality is affected by people on the other side of the world?” he asks. “We are not independent in that sense. We drink the same water and breathe the same air.” Rhode believes it would be possible for people to grow almost all of their own food within city limits, if all the available land were put into productive use.

“If cities were actually consciously designed to take into account all human needs through time, the possibilities would be endless,” he says. “There’s this idea that somehow human civilization is diametrically opposed to a healthy environment and that somehow we are separate from the natural world.”

His goal is to help urbanites realize that our cities are as much a part of the natural world as a beaver dam or beehive: “It’s the very perception that we are somehow separate from the environment around us, and that our actions toward the environment have no consequences to us, that leads to the creation of such destructive human habitats.”

Rhode would like to own a farm one day. But he hopes to own it collectively, with the thought that you can learn so much from other people and their experiences. Like a natural ecosystem, he says, living in a community makes everything stronger and more resilient.

“It’s exciting and energizing to be with people who understand what’s going on in the world and understand what we need to do to live in harmony and to live, period,” he says. “The most important thing is to give people hope.”

It is my birthday this week. As I turn 25, there is one question I face: do I have a future? My life from here on out, and the lives of my generation, will be shaped by the choices we make now. The choices we make depend on one word: energy.

We are at a precipice. We either make a paradigm shift in the 21st century with our energy consumption. Or we stand to repeat the 20th century with “fossil fool” reliance and be doomed. Essentially, I either have a future or I don’t.

Energy sourcing will be the most important issue in the next 10 to 20 years and will shape the remainder of this century, as well as beyond. Presently, 86 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels — oil, coal and gas. These energy sources ave shaped our way of life in the 20th century, providing us with our technological advances and many creature comforts along the way. But running cars, heating up our bathtubs and blaring TV sets come with a price tag of more than just money.

The price could be the my generation’s future. Fossil fuels are destroying landscapes with strip mining (such as what’s happening in the Appalachian Mountains for coal), polluting air and water, and is the number one contributor to anthropogenic climate change.

Yet there are reasons for hope as U.S. President Barack Obama has shown great strides in changing energy practices. The president plans to make sustainability “the centerpiece of a new American economy.” He aims to implement a “Green New Deal” that would double solar, wind and biomass energy sources and cut U.S. dependency on oil with fuel-efficient auto standards. These transformations can create jobs and make for a more energy-secure superpower.

However, developing countries like China, India, and parts of the Middle East will still account for 80 percent of future oil demands. Therefore, “fossil fuels will continue to meet 80 per cent of global energy needs for the foreseeable future,” Thomas Axworthy recently wrote in the Toronto Star.

And if there is no global plan to reduce emissions, scientists are now stating there is a 90 percent probability that temperatures will rise between 3.5° to 7.4°C on the earth’s surface. This will have a horrendous impact on all life on the planet.

Hence, there needs to be a global energy shift. Some argue that this shift comes in the form of nuclear. Jeremy Nelson makes this argument in the current cover story of This: that to battle climate change, he says, it’s not renewables we need to turn to, but an older generation of power, nuclear. He argues that solar and wind energy is unreliable because they fluctuate, and still lag in development, while nuclear energy is zero-emissions now.

Despite grudgingly agreeing with Nelson that to be a pro-environmentalist today might mean being pro-nuclear, there is still a mighty can of worms being opened with nuclear power generation.

Nuclear might in fact be used to accelerate Canada’s desire to become the next fossil-fuel superpower: It will be used for the energy needs of the Alberta tar sands, says Andrew Nikiforuk in his book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. Nuclear would assist in the production of the unconventional oil that already emits three times more greenhouse gases than a conventional barrel of oil does.

So ironically, increasing nuclear power in Canada may actually increase fossil fuel emissions, rather than lowering them. There are some benefits to shifting now to a low-emission nuclear — but nuclear is not the be-all-and-end-all for energy. At best, it might be a temporary solution for action today, this year, even perhaps for the next 10-20 years on climate change. But for the remainder of the century, other means of energy need to be considered.

We, as humans, think we know it all. But perhaps we don’t know what the energy of the 21st century will be yet. Perhaps it is in research and development that we could find it. The Obama administration has recently given stimulus to R&D with 3 percent of the nation’s GDP — that is US$46 billion annually — put into prospects for the future.

Is my sense of urgency premature? I am, after all, only 25. But this is the year, a make-it or break-it year, with the Copenhagen Climate Conference. A year that is our next, and probably final, chance for a climate agreement to make fossil fuels history. We either have a future or we don’t: the answer depends on shifting energy — and shifting now.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine‘s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

I’m sitting in a Calgary courtroom looking on with disbelief at what is happening. No fewer than six lawyers are bickering back and forth, representing three different parties. There’s oil multinational Chevron Resources, several Cree Indian bands and the federal government. And everyone is suing everyone else.

Five or six different lawsuits are afoot, all concurrent. The oil company is suing the government and the Indians. The government is suing the Indians and the corporation. And the Indians are suing the other two. It’s a legal free-for-all, a nightmare of judicial procedure and accusation. People are arguing and interrupting each other. And the judge is doing his best to keep track of everything.

Calgary’s provincial court of Queen’s Bench has become the setting of a bizarre melee of lawyers. The dispute is about oil money. Sometime during the mid-1980s, Chevron allegedly overpaid on royalties from several oil wells it operated on Cree land. The money was delivered to Indian Affairs and deposited into a trust fund for each of the four Indian bands involved. It was spent—disappeared. Chevron eventually noticed money missing from its coffers and filed for $10 million.

Despite the fact that the federal government was the primary contact, managing land leases and handling money, Chevron filed suit against both the federal government and against four reserves located near Hobbema, Alta. The four Cree bands-the Samson, the Ermineskin, the Bobtail and the Louis Bull—launched counterclaims worth $50 million against both Chevron and the federal government, based on their own calculations of outstanding royalties and faulty accounting.

It’s a messy collision of the kind of vested interests that now characterize Canada’s Indian country. Counsel for the Ermineskin nation accuses the federal government of betraying the Indian bands and siding with American-owned Chevron. “What interest is the Crown being found to protect?” he asks. “The Crown, by choice of its counsel, is pursuing us.”

He has a point. You’d think that a company such as Chevron—with over $3.5 billion in Canadian assets—wouldn’t need any help throwing its weight around. Why is the federal government trying to collect misplaced corporate booty from Indians—especially when it is bound by the Indian Act, as a trustee, to act in their best interest?

There is more sniping. The government, for its part, claims that it is doing what is legally prudent: honouring the independence of the First Nations by treating them as a separate legal entity—in good times and bad. These Indian bands are the richest in Canada, notes the Crown lawyer. “The status quo gives them everything they want,” he charges, “and if the Crown is in a conflict, it’s because the bands tried to put them there.”

Herein lies the clue to understanding the next several decades of Canadian-aboriginal relations. Faced with a choice between an American multinational and some uppity Indians, the government’s lawyers chose the corporation. But then, that’s because the government itself has been named defendant in nearly $200 billion worth of First Nations lawsuits. In plain terms, the federal government cannot afford to be seen as plugging aboriginal interests or conceding ground that might resurface in future lawsuits. Chevron unwittingly stumbled into a battle much bigger than it imagined.

In all this, the largest of the four bands, the Samson Cree, is strangely subdued. With 51 percent of the Hobbema Cree population, they have the largest stake in the Chevron case. Yet they keep referring to another lawsuit, something they call Victor Buffalo.

Apparently, this Buffalo person they are talking about is quite popular. Soon, all the lawyers are talking about him. Afterward, nobody will comment on Victor Buffalo. A trip to the federal clerk’s office reveals that the Buffalo case has been sealed to the public—a case so confidential, in fact, that no one can say quite why the court documents are closed. There’s not even a statement of claim, the most basic of court documents. It is a lawsuit that makes the court clerk nervous.

This much is clear: Victor Buffalo is a Samson chief, who, in 1989, launched a massive civil action for $1.38 billon in damages against Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Despite the high security around the case, aboriginal leaders, lawyers, judges and bureaucrats all have their stories. Several sources disclose that the case, active since 1989, will begin trial in April 2000. Over 150,000 pieces of evidence have been collected. And most of an office tower floor in downtown Calgary has been reconstructed to fit a special, high-tech courtroom that will accommodate this single, massive legal proceeding.

After further digging, it becomes apparent that Buffalo is merely the first of several Samson lawsuits worth somewhere between $30 billion and $40 billion—lawsuits that claim mineral rights for a large swath of land across central Alberta. Victor Buffalo is also at the centre of a constellation of major aboriginal challenges that claim extensive off-reserve resource rights—land that natives say they never signed away—and other rights across Canada, worth upwards of $190 billion in retroactive damages. (The federal government has appraised its current liability at the significantly lower figure of $8.4 billion.)

With 10 out of 12 of Canada’s largest cases, Alberta is the ground zero of this aboriginal effort to gain shared control of oil and gas, timber and mining resources on Canada’s Crown land. In addition to the Samson, the Blackfoot, Peigan and Stoney of Treaty Seven have already files suit for the mineral rights of southern Alberta—and Treaty Eight bands are positioning themselves in the North.

No wonder the government hid behind Chevron. I tour the empty courtroom with a federal security guard. The carpet smells new and the paint looks fresh. The judges and lawyers have large, cushy seats and computer consoles. It is a modest, 100-seat amphitheater, designed and decorated with the same bureaucratic sensibility that governs most office buildings.

Samson lawyers won’t return my calls. The government won’t release its court documents. And the Samson tribal administration won’t talk to me about the Victor Buffalo case, unless their lawyers say it’s okay—which obviously isn’t happening.

In search of answers, I manage to contact several Samson Warriors, the self-appointed official opposition of the band’s tribal government. They agree to talk—but no tape recorders or cameras are allowed. The reserve is off-limits, because they can’t be seen talking to journalists. “Too much trouble,” says one.

We agree to meet at Tim Hortons in Wetaskawin, 20 minutes down the road from Hobbema. It is lunchtime when they arrive. Six large Indians enter the doughnut shop dressed in jeans, powwow windbreakers, boots and moccasins. Several tote cell phones. It’s a long way from W.P. Kinsella’s famous fictional Hobbema of whimsical Indians and their kooky hijinx. These people mean business.

The de-facto spokesperson is the Warriors’ only female member: Deborah Nepoose, school bus driver and grassroots activist. Nepoose
, like the other Warriors, can’t tell me much about Victor Buffalo, but she gets to the point quickly. “We’ve been screwed by everyone: the government, social services, consultants—everyone who was supposed to help us,” she says. “Screwed. That’s the Victor Buffalo case right there.”

To understand why, you have to go back several decades. In the 1940s, the Samson Cree discovered they were sitting on a gold mine: underneath their reserve was one-third of a vast oil field that, at its prime, would account for 10 percent of Canada’s national oil output. When private oil companies applied to drill wells on the land, the federal government unwittingly got into the oil and gas business, negotiating royalties and contracts. At Samson, as at a number of other resource rich reserves, Indian Agents—and later the federal trust company, Indian Oil and Gas—were given power to manage millions of dollars of natural resources.

Between 1980 and 1989, the federal government collected over $783 million in oil and gas royalties for the Samson Cree, almost $200,000 for every man, woman and child on the reserve. Taken from bountiful on-reserve oil fields, roughly half these funds were held in trust. The remaining money was distributed to members and spent on various projects.

Canada’s richest Indian nation has been blessed by its affluence: today, large modern homes dot a reserve that, until the late-1980s, was the suicide capital of North America. To any stranger that passes through Hobbema, there is little evidence of the deep despair and social decay of that era. Driveways, strip malls and recreation centres give the Samson reserve the look of a misplaced suburb. There are teepees, to be sure, but few of the hallmarks of poverty one associates with Indian reserves—broken-down cars, broken-down homes. A local high school’s billboard provides the only clue to any trouble: “Respect Other’s Property: School Under Video Surveillance.”

Nevertheless, the Samson were also cursed by their gift. Between 1985 and 1987, the male suicide rate was 83 times the national average, one of the highest rates in the world. Kids were dropping like flies in the community of 6,000, with over 300 suicide attempts each year. At the time, families were collecting roughly $3,000 in royalties each month and teenagers were given $30,000 cheques on their eighteenth birthdays. The massive influx of oil money, co-administered by Indian Affairs, came closely on the heels of residential schools. The community is still recovering in all sorts of ways—auto wrecks are common enough that the Canadian Auto Association attempted to de-insure its Hobbema drivers in 1999.

This is what angers the Warriors: the Samson have had more opportunity than any other First Nation in Canada, yet they still suffered 10 years if drugs, alcohol and violent death and suicide. “The government knew what was happening,” says Nepoose, “but they didn’t care.” Indeed, a 1984 study commissioned by Indian Affairs found that sudden wealth was indeed causing serious social disruption among several of Alberta’s oil-producing bands. But money management and social programs were low official priorities for the government, even though these bands had no experience with money. “Nobody thought about counseling when this money came in,” said the report’s author, Joe Dion, in an interview at the time. “I think the department was remiss and irresponsible.”

The Warriors are frustrated by the government’s failure to address these problems—problems that were only exacerbated by the rapid devolution of government from Indian reserves, which also precipitate a series of tribal financial crises. (In 1999, following several years of large deficits, the Samson entered into a co-management agreement with Indian Affairs to have an accounting firm run their finances.) Allegations of neglect, corruption and mismanagement of Indian money are all familiar to Indian country. That’s only more so at Hobbema. So it comes as little surprise at the very core of the Buffalo case is a damage claim about money, that the Samson allege, was poorly negotiated, misappropriated and mismanaged by the feds. The government, they charge, was an absentee guardian and negligent trustee.

Other Indian bands are also raising such concerns, but the Samson Cree are one of the few nations that can actually afford to challenge the government. The Warriors report that the band will probably spend upwards of $30 million on legal fees, research and other court related expenses over the course of a decade.

In the end, the Warriors can only confirm that the Victor Buffalo claim is indeed huge and that the band has been amassing an army of lawyers to challenge Indian Affairs on nearly everything that has happened from the 1940s to the present. They’re surprisingly short on details. “You probably know more about the case than we do,” admits one Warrior. “Our leaders don’t say anything—you have to fight for answers around here.”

A year later-January 2000-I’m lounging in the posh Calgary offices of the Samson legal team. The search for answers is getting easier. Before me is Terry Munroe, longtime advisor to the Samson nation. He’s agreed to talk because he feels the Samson have a strong case—and because the details of the case were leaked to CBC radio a few months earlier, in part thanks to some digging I had done. I’m the first writer they’ve let in the door.

Munroe explains that the Buffalo case is what is known as a breach-of-trust proceeding. The Samson charge that between 1946 and 1989, $1.38 billion of oil and gas revenue were lost by the feds due to faulty accounting. Not only had Samson assets been poorly managed, claims Munroe, but the government used band assets to fund Indian Affairs programs, as well as serve as a low interest loan fund for other federal government programs—between S100 million and $400 million was borrowed. In other words, Indians were lending the federal government money that, had it been managed by a private trustee, could have delivered significantly more returns.

It is a challenge that has been about three decades in the making. Until the 1970s, Canada’s Indian Act granted vast discretionary powers to Indian Agents in the administration of aboriginal business interests, children, housing and land on the 600-odd reserves across Canada. But many Agents just weren’t qualified to cut multimillion-dollar deals with oil corporations or ensure money was accounted for. Nor was Indian Affairs necessarily equipped to deal with the massive business operation—or its social ramifications. Inevitably, mistakes were made. “They didn’t have the players and didn’t have the resources and basically played the tune of oil and gas companies,” Samson lead council James O’Reilly explains to me later from his office in Montreal. “They were an absent caretaker-it would have been a fluke if there hadn’t been problems.”

Federal documents from the 1980s seem to bolster the Samson argument. One Indian Affairs memo sent to deputy minister Bruce Rawson in 1985 reported that Indian assets were being managed in a haphazard way. Resource offices were understaffed and employees were under-informed. “It is almost inconceivable that any organization, public or private,” said the memo, “would not generate basic and essential resource management information.”

One of the largest aggregations of oil and gas assets in Canada was being managed by an office of the Ministry that, as Indian Affairs Minister David Crombie reported in a 1986 memo, was “devoid of a proactive plan and lacking in resources and authority.”

Samson elders and councilors began asking tough questions about their assets when Indian Affairs transferred a degree of self-government to reserves in the
1970s. Few answers were forthcoming. In 1989, after failed attempts to negotiate a return of Samson trust funds to the reserve, Chief Victor Buffalo filed his lawsuit against the government in federal court. The case has since been locked in pre-trial motions, evidence collection and other things that happen when you sue the government for $1.38 billion.

But money aside, it’s the potential precedent of Buffalo that makes it so controversial. If the government’s breach of trust, both financial and other, was widespread—and Indian bands across the country allege it was—then what, in fact, is the meaning of the Indian Act? Did the trustee have the authority to act unilaterally and without liability? Or could it be held accountable for errors—vast, system-wide errors to the order of millions of dollars? And just how accountable?

After more than 150 years of assorted Indian Act legislation, nobody actually knows the answers to those questions. The relationship between aboriginals and Canada is still alarmingly fuzzy. Among other things, the Buffalo case will address the complicated legacy of the Act—and today’s increasingly antagonistic relationship between government and Indians. History is being put on trial.

This brings up the other reason Terry Munroe may have agreed to talk to me: he’s impressed with my breeding—specifically with my long-dead relative who authored Canada’s first comprehensive Indian Act in 1876 and negotiated several prairie Indian treaties. The one who got this whole thing started.

In 1877, Victor Buffalo’s ancestors made treaty with my ancestor, Rt. Hon David Laird, Governor of the Northwest Territories and agent of the Queen. Chief Bobtail, representing the Bear Hills Cree, today’s Hobbema bands, signed his adhesion with Laird. It was a momentous event, heralded as Canada’s historic accession of valuable western territory.

Treaty Six covered the vast expanse—some 276,000 square kilometres—of what is now central Alberta and central Saskatchewan. In return for agreeing to share the land—or surrender the land, depending on whose version of the treaty is being told—First Nations such as the Samson were to be put onto reserves and allowed certain rights and annual dispensations. Of course, while officials such as Laird were scoping out potential coal and gold deposits for European ownership, part of the real prize was mistakenly given away to aboriginals.

Laird’s Indian Act and Treaty Six are fodder for the Victor Buffalo case and for a whole generation of Indian activism. Indeed, there is a reckoning afoot, an aboriginal effort to rectify disputes that go back further than Confederation. From the government’s perspective, it’s Oka without the guns: Indians are fighting the Indian Act, Indian Affairs and even private companies with sophisticated legal challenges, in an effort to win back assets, land and natural resources lost since the 1800s. For the natives, it is about more than money; it is a fight for self-government on aboriginal terms: not the welfare encampments of most Indian reserves, but quasi-provincial jurisdictions with the inevitable power that comes from sharing and controlling natural resources. There is a funny story floating around Calgary’s oil patch. It goes like this: an Indian band was informed by Indian Affairs that it had been short-changed by a major oil company on its royalties. It was a claim, they were told, that was probably worth millions. But they’d have to get it back themselves. The government made it clear it wasn’t about to go commando on a big corporation and get mixed up in a series of messy lawsuits.

So Indians—the Stoney Nakoda nation, precisely, southerly neighbours to the Samson Cree—took the company, PanCanadian, to court and won an award of $6.2 million. The company appealed; the government was nowhere. The Stoney played hardball and sent provincial court bailiffs into PanCanadian’s posh, downtown lobby to seize assets. Expensive artwork, tasteful furniture and desks were all tagged by court officers, to be carted off in lieu of payment. Within about an hour, steaming PanCanadian executives agreed to meet their obligations. Payment for $6.2 million was made to court. And now, the federal government arrived on the scene—and claimed the money as aboriginal trustees.

The Stoney case points to the litigious future of Indian-corporate relations. Indian bands will sue corporations in exactly the way that companies currently litigate against each other. The Samson have already filed actions against Imperial, Amoco and Chevron.

But the real story is this: why is it that in one courtroom, the federal government refuses to act on behalf of Indians, while in another it’s suing them—and then in yet another courtroom, it’s claiming money on their behalf? As litigant, defendant and trustee, the federal government increasingly places itself in a conflict-of-interest position. This is the essence of Indian Country in the year 2000: a government that’s on the hook for $200 billion in damages is also responsible for the long-term welfare of the plaintiffs. Sworn legal enemies are bound by treaty and law to find solutions to a long list of historical and political disputes.

Meanwhile, many Indian bands are still falling apart. A 1998 Indian Affairs study found that if bands were ranked as independent countries, the average quality of life on Canada’s Indian reserves would fall below that of Mexico, Kazakhstan and Malaysia, based on the United Nations human development index. While aboriginal court challenges and land claim victories accelerated during the last decade, the social and political status of First Nations is actually slipping, relative to the rest of the population.

In many ways, the Buffalo challenge gets to the heart of this problem: what is Canada’s responsibility to native people? Certainly many pundits already have their answer: we don’t owe Indians a damn thing. But federal law and Canadian history aren’t that simple. “Samson is a good testing ground for the whole federal challenge of the Indian Act,” explains Samson counsel James O’Reilly, who engineered the historic victory of the James Bay Cree against Quebec Hydro. “Can the feds do what they want? Or do they have an obligation to provide some level of services and standards?”

When David Laird launched the 1876 Indian Act in Parliament, the politician and former journalist was thinking about government responsibility for First Nations. “Indians must either be treated as minors or as white men,” he said. Until aboriginals were self-sufficient, Laird reasoned, the government had a duty to ensure their well-being and to protect their interests.

What inextricably binds Canada to First Nations is a thing called fiduciary duty: the fundamental responsibilities that stem from that Canadian-aboriginal partnership. With the Indian Act in 1876, Indians, treatied or not, became literal wards of the Canadian state; likewise, their lands, assets and mineral rights came under the trust of the federal government. As defined by Canada’s courts, the federal-Indian relationship is sui generis: unique, because it is a trust that exists at a deeper level than any business contract or public law, not quite like any other legal entity.

Of course, if everything had worked to the government’s original assimilation plans, there wouldn’t be any more Indian reserves or bands. Nor would there be a growing pile of claims and lawsuits. As it is, today’s government is saddled with a complicated web of obligations and responsibilities, partially due to the Indian Act’s original, all-controlling designs.

Fifteen years ago, this legacy found its way into Canadian courtrooms. In 1984, the Supreme Court took a long, hard look at the Indian Act and delivered a landmark precedent. The case: the federal government had leas
ed Indian land from the Musqueam nation to a Vancouver golf club, at rates well below market value. The Indian band found out, sued the government, and won. It was awarded $10 million for breach of fiduciary obligation. The decision, known as Guerin v. The Queen, proved that the government could be held to a higher standard than anyone had previously thought. The kids could sue the parents for substantial damages.

Musqueam sent a shock wave through Ottawa. “The government realized just how vulnerable it was, how exposed it was on numerous different fronts to charges,” says Rick Ponting, University of Calgary professor of sociology. It also realized, Pouting says, that it “had to start making its way out of the Indian Affairs field. And [so] we have the various models of self-government that the federal government has negotiated in an attempt to basically off-load federal government responsibilities and activities onto First Nations governments.”

Immediately after the Musqueam decision, federal Minister of Indian Affairs David Crombie sent a confidential memo to deputy minister Bruce Rawson to inquire about the implications of the case. The internal document outlined a number of questions that required answers “without undue delay.” A number of questions focused on the failure of government to protect aboriginal interest. “Instead of defending Indian rights or prosecuting incursions on Indian lands, the Department of Justice has often done nothing, or has actually acted against the First Nation interest. Is the Federal government violating its special obligations… ?”

Money was another question. “The trust accounts do not have returns which an informed and prudent trustee should be able to earn,” noted Crombie. He called for an immediate, independent assessment of Indian Affairs and its management practices. When reports came back in 1985, the results looked somewhat grim: “The Indian Minerals West office … cannot effectively perform some of the most basic resource management functions.”

Another 1984 Indian Affairs report advised that trouble was imminent: “Potential consequences … are real,” noted the document, “and the exposure of INAC [Indian and Northern Affairs Canada] is high.” By 1986, the Treasury Board had reported that “as a result of the present situation, the Department and the Crown are in a very vulnerable position and the consequences could be devastating.”

In all fairness, putting history on trial is messy business. As chief Crown counsel Barbara Ritson points out, even if mistakes were made, “We’re looking at things that happened 40 years ago.” In the 1940s and 1950s, she says, oil and gas companies frequently operated at standards that would horrify today’s corporations. It would be wrong to judge the legacy of Samson oil and gas by today’s sophisticated levels of financial and technical expertise. Moreover, the Indian Act didn’t authorize agents to place band monies at risk in pursuit of a higher rate of return, as might a private-sector trustee.

In other words, the legal issue in Victor Buffalo isn’t whether or not the government made mistakes, but to what standard we should judge the conduct of a large bureaucracy over the span of several decades. “Just because you have a fiduciary responsibility,” she continues, “doesn’t mean you have a duty.” The Crown has a strong case of its own, and the $1.38 billion claim is by no means a sure bet. Neither is the $190 billion in damages claimed in other aboriginal lawsuits.

Nevertheless, government ineptitude was well known among insiders at Indian Affairs. Robert Laboucain, former Alberta regional director for Indian Affairs, was fired by Indian Affairs in 1986 for asking tough questions about disappearing Indian money and bureaucratic inefficiency. “My God, you can’t imagine how the government wants to avoid this,” says the Metis business consultant about the Samson case. “They’re actually going to be challenged by Indian bands. For what? Maybe $1 billion? They’ve got the government by the balls and they know it.”

The Musqueam case also helps to explain why, at the height of the Hobbema suicide crisis in 1985, the federal government chose to keep its distance from troubled Cree reserves, in keeping with a policy of strategic neglect. So badly did Indian Affairs want to remove itself from long-term obligations that a suicide epidemic couldn’t bring them to action. “I got into a number of confrontations with the senior management,” Laboucain recalls. “It wasn’t my place to express concern for the people who were really at the losing end of department policy.”

In 1986, with a violent death happening every week at Hobbema between 1985 and 1987, Laboucain made his concerns public. It was a dark time for the department. “I’d been there for close to two years. Even the most basic human concern by the Department of Indian Affairs was totally absent. It just wasn’t there: the cynicism, the constant criticism, the discrimination was profound,” says Laboucain, sadly. “And I don’t see any changes in how these bureaucrats respond now [versus] 13 years ago. It hasn’t changed at all.”

At the height of the Samson suicide crisis, Indian Affairs was spending roughly $2.8 billion each year. Now that the department spends upwards of $7 billion annually, the stakes are only higher.

It is important to start at the beginning, says Victor Buffalo, chairman of Peace Hills Trust and former Chief of the Samson Nation. We are sitting at a meeting room on the tenth floor of Peace Hills’s Edmonton building.

Fine, I say. The beginning, then. I get the feeling Victor Buffalo finds it funny that I am here in the executive offices of Canada’s largest Indian-owned bank. A year ago, his lawyers wouldn’t return my calls. And now, as Laird’s distant offspring, I’ve come crawling back into Samson territory to find out what kind of war plans they have in store for the Queen. Despite Buffalo’s mirth—“You don’t look like him,” he says—I get the feeling it’s payback time. Not for the last dozen years, but for the last hundred.

As Buffalo explains, there have been broken promises and bad faith ever since the Samson signed Treaty Six in 1877. When a massive food shortage ravaged prairie Indians between 1878 and 1883, the federal government ran a mandatory work-for-rations program, despite an explicit Treaty Six “famine clause” that guaranteed free supplies in an emergency. Hobbema chiefs wrote an angry appeal to John A. MacDonald in 1883: “If no attention is paid to our case now we shall conclude that the treaty made with us six years ago was a meaningless matter of form and that the white man has doomed us to annihilation little by little.”

Buffalo recounts these details matter-of-factly. After more than a decade, his case has become another part of day-to-day business. As a young man in the 1960s, Buffalo worked at a chemical plant and then took training in oil and gas at college in Calgary. His off-reserve time opened his eyes to the white world of business. You have to learn how to take care of yourself. While serving as chief, Buffalo launched Peace Hills Trust in an attempt to ensure the long-term security of Samson assets, some $400 million, currently held by Indian Affairs. Under its own steam, the institution has amassed Indian-owned assets of over $450 million.

Around us hangs a collection of modern First Nations art, something the Samson elder points out with pride. Look, he says with a wave of his hand, this is why Indians mean business—we never stopped being aboriginal, despite everything else. “The Indian Act never expected that Indians would have a huge amount of money,” he jokes. “They didn’t expect us Indians to get into business.”

Indians never expected to get into business either—but even the affluent like Samson are having to think about the future. “I remember the elders saying that we’ve got to have something in place when the oil and gas is gone,” says Victor Buffalo. “When we talk about self-government, we’re talking about self-reliance.” The plain truth is that the Samson nation can’t rely on the government as a partner—nor can it go back to buffalo hunting or the dwindling oil supplies beneath its reserve land. Its $400-million trust funds will only last so long, given the high unemployment on the reserve. David Crombie himself observed in his 1984 memo, “the distribution of trust assets, as they now stand, is not an adequate financial base for First Nations self-government.” As with many First Nations, the future is closing in.

“We just want to exist, not be beholden,” Buffalo says. “We can’t hunt. We can’t fish—everything is regulated. We’re surrounded.” The solution could lie in the mineral rights that the Samson, like many bands across Canada, claim they never ceded. “It’s the resource wealth of Canada that made it the way it is,” explains Buffalo. “Lumber, fish, oil: the resources of this country. That’s what we’re talking about. There’s got to be an equitable distribution.”

Sometime in the next decade, the Samson nation will attempt to clarify its claim to off-reserve mineral rights. These proceedings, filed separately from the Victor Buffalo lawsuit, are years away from court. But the total of $30 billion claimed against both the federal and provincial government poses a tough question: if treaties didn’t include sub-surface rights, then who really owns Canada’s vast resource economy? And if Indians have a fair claim, then how do we work out an equitable solution between business, government and First Nations?

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, treaties that were assumed to be historical surrenders of the existing provincial landmass have become current again. “It was never our intent to relinquish or extinguish our rights to the lands and resources,” explains Laurence Joseph, vice chief of the Saskatchewan Federation of Indian Nations. “That’s what we’re asserting today without malice: to get back our traditional territories and stewardship of the land and resources.”

The precedent set by the 1997 Delgamuukw Supreme Court decision, which acknowledged the validity of oral history in a court of law, may provide First Nations with a mass of new evidence and testimony. Across Canada, elders have told their stories about how treaties were negotiated. Often, their accounts differ from the official written version—notably on the point that treaties were, in fact, peace agreements and partnerships, not land and mineral rights surrenders.

According to oral histories of Treaty Six, for example, elders present at treaty signings understood that mineral rights were not up for grabs. “I used to listen to my grandfather,” Ermineskin elder John Buffalo recalled in 1975. “They were told that … anything underground would not be given up, only six inches, enough for settlers to grow crops…. ‘If anything is discovered below the surface of the land, half of its value will be towards your benefit,’ the treaty commissioner said.”

Many First Nations argue that the delegation of resource rights to the provinces by the federal government was done illegally and contravened the spirit and intent of the treaties. “Now, these guys are going to war,” says Robert Laboucain. “If you can prove original aboriginal title, then what about the retroactive payment of royalties on what has been extracted for 75 years?” Laboucain suggests that the leadership won’t go after national parks, provincial parks or private property, but when it comes to Crown land—“that’s up for grabs.”

Consequently, governments and companies have begun to take these concerns seriously. The federal government has reopened some treaties; recent agreements have included resource-sharing clauses on oil and gas revenues, notably with the Vuntut Gwitchin of the Yukon, who now collect 25 percent of all royalties on their traditional lands. For its part, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has been holding discussions with prairie First Nations about mineral ownership. “We look to government for direction and clarity on the rights we have,” explains David Luff, vice president of CAPP. “What it will come down to is an interpretation of the treaty, a definitive reconciliation of rights”—including the resource rights of the provinces and of companies.

The emerging aboriginal reality poses uncertainties for everyone, not the least in negotiating the next several years without a small war breaking out. The government tendency, so far, has been to delay and sublimate the natural resource question, strategizing damage control. Meanwhile, the judiciary has been increasingly affirming indigenous rights and land tide. As governments dither, many aboriginal leaders— excluding Ottawa’s moderate Assembly of First Nations—are increasingly defiant. “Now they forced our hand,” says Laurence Joseph. “They’re going to have to contend with us.”

Victor Buffalo himself has misgivings about big lawsuits. They are expensive, antagonistic and messy. And court action doesn’t always solve the problem, even if you win. “The whole thing should have been done on a negotiating basis,” he says. “I didn’t want to take the government to task. And I debated whether we should file claim. But the government keeps hiding behind regulations and laws,” says Buffalo. (To date, the federal government has made one settlement offer on the Buffalo case—a nine-figure sum that all four Hobbema bands promptly rejected in 1998.)

The Samson Cree have plenty of their own troubles to worry about, ones that lawsuits probably won’t fix. Already, the federal government has challenged the authority and credibility of reserve politicians. “We’ve got a lot of skeletons in our closet, too,” says Buffalo. “And they’ll come out.” With intensive community work and programs, the Hobbema suicide rate had dropped 74 percent by 1988. But political scandals have regularly rocked the reserve in recent years, leading to a series of inter-Samson lawsuits over election results, alleged money-for-votes schemes, as well as the misappropriation of band funds by elected officials.

The issues come up when I reconvene with the Samson Warriors, a year after our Wetaskawin meeting, at the Ponoka Tim Hortons in January 2000. There are roughly 10 active Warriors at Samson these days (plus back-benchers) and they are preoccupied with trying to build Indian democracy. The Warriors report that the tribal government situation has improved, but band elections are a complete mess. Indian Affairs too hastily downloaded self-government provisions and neglected to work with aboriginals to leave a functional democratic process. “Indian Affairs are the ones who approved the election laws,” says one Warrior, “but why did they approve them without a code of conduct or a code of ethics?” It’s a too-familiar set of themes. “They turn their cheek when there is trouble,” says another. “They’re trying to shy away from their fiduciary duty.”

While landmark cases such as Victor Buffalo are slowly moving through the legal system, First Nations across Canada are faced with a difficult situation: they must endeavour to improve reserve conditions with an all-powerful government that has demonstrated a somewhat limited interest in their long-term welfare. According to history, law and treaty, they must cooperate with provincial and federal governments that have also been named as defendants in major lawsuits. Whatever the outcome of Victor Buffalo v. The Queen, for now, this is the reality of Canadian aboriginal life: there is no alternative to the federal government.