Nova Scotia (47 page)

   
In 1962, the people of Africville were offered alternative
subsidized housing outside of the community. If someone had legal
title to the land, they’d be offered something close to “fair
market value,” but as was often the case, residents who lived in
houses on untitled land were offered only $500. The city had
budgeted a miserly maximum of $70,000 for the purchase of all
property involved.

   
Africville residents remained under-represented in the whole
process, even though human-rights professionals and volunteers were
staging dozens of public meetings. These socially concerned
activists seemed to be generally in favour of promoting relocated
integrated housing as opposed to preserving the mostly segregated
Black community of Africville. This altruistic notion was not
necessarily in the best interest of those who loved Afrcicville and
didn’t want to move but rather hoped to see the community improved.
A meeting of community residents in 1962 led to an outright
rejection of the proposed city plan of
relocation.

   
The city decided to buy out as many residents as were willing
to sell and then immediately tear down their houses to impress upon
everyone else that redevelopment was already underway and that
complete relocation was inevitable. It would be the older people,
with deep emotional and historical roots in the community, who were
the most reluctant to give up their lifelong homes.
 

   
The first move took place in 1964 with a woman who received
her $500 cash settlement, free moving, public housing and payment
of an outstanding hospital bill of $1,500. Before the buy-out was
complete, the city had spent considerably more than expected in
relocating residents. The city spent a total of $550,000 for the
land and houses plus another $250,000 in resettlement and program
costs. Some residents of Africville were moved “free of charge” in
city garbage trucks, an insult that would reverberate for
generations to come.

   
One of the last hold-outs was Aaron “Pa” Carvery, who was
called to City Hall and then presented with a suitcase full of
money in hopes he would give in. He refused the money and walked
away. Eventually the city acted without his consent and bulldozed
his home anyway.

   
Of the Africville citizens relocated, seventy percent
interviewed in 1969 attested to some kind of personal calamity in
their lives as a result of having to move. Africville became a
powerful symbol for the entire Black community of Nova Scotia
through the 1970s and still is today. At the heart of the
Africville crisis was the issue of ownership of land and a
government’s right to revoke ownership of one’s own home. There was
a clear sense that Africville residents had been pushed around by
government because they were Black and because they were poor. The
message was clear: it should never be allowed to happen again. In
retrospect, the treatment of Africville residents fit into the
classic pattern of how Blacks in Nova Scotia had been treated from
the very beginning – as second-class citizens.

   
A newspaper account during the time of relocation uttered the
indignity that “Soon Africville will be but a name.” But that
hasn’t been the case. The trauma of Africville has remained alive
in the consciousness of Nova Scotia and comes back again and again
in the music of Four The Moment, in the writings of George Elliott
Clarke, Maxine Tynes, David Woods and Walter Borden. Reunions are
held annually at the site of the former community. In the summer of
1995, while world leaders gathered in Halifax at the G7 Summit, two
brothers in the Carvery family, who had grown up in Africville,
camped on the land that was once their home to stage a protest
covered by the international media and brought to the attention of
people around the world.

Chapter 42

Chapter 42

Of Oil and Herbicides

In
1971, per capita income in Nova Scotia was a modest $2,661,
compared to $4,019 in Ontario. Young men and women raised here were
still leaving for greener pastures in Ontario, Alberta and beyond.
Don Shebib’s 1970 movie,
Goin’ Down the Road
,
told the story of the dreams and the losses of Nova Scotians who
had to move west in search of employment.

   
There was hope anew, however, as Mobil Oil announced in 1971
discovery of oil and gas fields off Sable Island. The economic
bonus for Nova Scotians was never to be as big as expected and the
promise of reward is yet to be fulfilled. Oil rigs and oil
transport at sea, however, have raised even bigger questions
concerning the safety of the environment. What would be the price
of destruction, for example, if there were a major accident
involving the unchecked flow of oil to the surface around the
sensitive and unique aquatic and coastal environment of Sable
Island? 

   
Although this event was not associated with the
Sable Island oil fields, Nova Scotia had a taste of oil disaster on
February 3, 1970, when the Liberian-registered tanker
Arrow
grounded in Chedabucto Bay, ravaging the coastline with a
thick coat of oil that spread for sixty-five kilometres, killing
uncounted numbers of birds, seals and other aquatic
life.

   
In the forests of Cape Breton, another ecological disaster
loomed as a result of the chemical spraying of insecticides to kill
the spruce budworm and herbicides to “control” hardwood growth in
forests.

   
The first aerial spraying of pesticides took
place in Canada in 1927, and by the late Fifties and early Sixties,
the most popular and potent form of poison was DD*T. No one fully
knows the damage inflicted on the Nova Scotia ecosystem by DDT, but
mass-media attention to the problem brought on by books like Rachel
Carson’s
Silent Spring
alerted all of North America to the
crisis. At the very least, the spray intended to kill off pests was
killing useful insects, birds and fish. Bald eagles, higher up the
food chain and most likely to consume concentrated amounts of DDT,
were headed for extinction.

   
Local foresters were most worried about the ravages of the
spruce budworm. Fortunately, a biological insecticide, BT, was
developed to replace DDT and other more toxic chemicals and has
been in use for nearly twenty years.

   
Unfortunately, the forestry industry, in an effort to make
Nova Scotian forests “more efficient,” has continued aerial
spraying of herbicides to kill off hardwoods in favour of the more
commercially useful softwood trees. The long-term effect of such
spraying is still very much a controversial matter, but residents
who live near affected areas fear the consequence to themselves and
their children and argue for safer means of forest regeneration –
labour-intensive selective cutting and more holistic avenues of
harvesting the forest. In some parts of Cape Breton,“ environmental
activists, in an effort to protect not only wildlife but the health
of children living close to the affected areas, have led successful
campaigns to reduce or eliminate the most toxic of the chemicals
used.

Poison from the Rain

The curse of acid rain became most
apparent in Nova Scotia in the 1970s and 1980s. The result of
sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from burning fossil fuels, the
acids in the sky are carried by the prevailing winds, and driven
toward Nova Scotia from as far away as industrial Indiana and
Ontario. Although some of the acid is generated right here in the
province from automobile exhaust and coal-burning power plants,
more than eighty epercent of it comes from away. Nova Scotia has
become an indiscriminate dumping ground for Upper-Canadian and
American airborne pollutants.

   
As a result of acid rain, more than half of the lakes in Nova
Scotia are considered to be highly at risk. As the waters become
more and more acidic, plant life dies off and so do fish. The end
result is the outright extinction of some water creatures. The
higher elevations in the area stretching from the Annapolis Basin
to Chedabucto Bay have been the hardest hit. Salmon cannot
reproduce in waters with high acidity, and many streams and rivers
have seen the disappearance of salmon and other fish. If these
species cannot migrate to other less acidic rivers, they too will
eventually die off for good in Atlantic Canada.

   
Acid rain also has the problematic side effect of leaching
metals like aluminum out of the soil and into the water. Aluminum
and other toxic elements from the soil can harm the fish but also
the human population that dearinks water from these natural
sources.

   
Almost anything that finds its way into the air eventually
finds its way into the water as well. This is most worrisome not
only because of the acidity of the rain but also because of a whole
range of chemicals that are carried aloft from combustion. PCBs and
lead are but two of the deadly chemicals that eventually fall back
into the rivers and the sea, some produced locally, some drifting
from a thousand kilometres away.

   
Nova Scotian communities continue to dump tons of raw sewage
into the waters. Pulp and steel mills disgorge solids, and other
chemicals as well. In the early 1980s a section of Sydney Harbour
was closed to lobster fishermen because of high levels of some very
exotic chemicals –* cadmium and “polynuclear aromotic
hydrocarbons.” The problem has continued to spread, with shellfish
being perhaps the most affected. In 1940 about thirty shellfish
closings were posted in the entire region, but by 1987 310 areas
were closed because of contaminated shellfish. But the shellfish
problem might be only the tip of the iceberg.

   
The worst of the pollution exists in what is known as the
Sydney Tar Ponds, an environmentalist’s worst nightmare. The tar
ponds contain something like 700,000 tons of sludge, laced with
PCBs and heavy metals, that has drained here from the Sydney Steel
mill for nearly a hundred years. Run-off from the tar ponds
eventually finds its way into the harbour and into the sea. In the
1980s, the province and the federal government realized something
had to be done, so they invested more than $52 million in
constructing a pipeline and two incinerators to burn the deadly
goo. Unfortunately, the incinerators never worked effectively. In
early 1996, Sydney still had a monumental environmental problem and
one of the highest cancer rates in the country. In a time of
declining government dollars for health and environment, the best
the government of the d*ay could suggest was a proposal to encase
the ponds in cement and leave the problem to be solved in the
future.

Twenty-five Million Gallons of
Gunk

The early French and English
explorers had a clear mandate to come to Nova Scotia to exploit for
profit the resources that were here. Sometimes a resource, such as
cod, would be harvested for a few hundred years until these fish
were simply all gone. Sometimes there are by-products of industry
or populations that wreak havoc on this beautiful and fragile
environment. And we simply chalk it up as the price of
progress.

   
I have a deep personal love for Nova Scotia and realize that
all of these many generations of immigrants, myself included, have
probably done a lot more harm to this place than good. Economic
factors have more often than not dictated how we treat this
maritime environment that has sustained us. As a result, we have
delivered back to our host the least desirable of gifts, for our
skills in cleaning up after ourselves are poor.

   
Along with our international guests who fish these waters, we
collect and consume the marketable life of the sea until it
disappears. And in line with global market forces, we clear-cut the
forests, dig up the land and ship off the trees and the minerals
without significant regard for the damage that is left behind.
Economics dictate that it is often “inefficient” to clean up after
ourselves, so we leave problems to following generations who we
hope will magically be better equipped than we
are.

   
Despite the mistakes, Nova Scotia has been spared some of the
massive environmental damage that ravaged much of New England and
the Atlantic states as well as the Great Lakes region of Canada.
With a relatively low popuulation density and a minimum of heavy
industry, we’re not as badly off as, say, New Jersey, where I was
born. The forests and fields of my youth are long since buried by
concrete, houses, shopping malls, highways and industrial parks.
But change is coming to Nova Scotia and the mythical good economic
times that always seem just around the comer may prove to be worse
for this northerly haven than anyone has
reckoned.

   
In recounting a history, there is the hope that it is more
than just a good yarn or a tale of power struggles, heroes,
corruption and battles won or lost. There’s always the prospect
that something is to be learned from history and that such
knowledge will bring about change for the better. In one sense,
however, the tradition of crimes perpetrated by the early English
elite and military men who battered this rural wilderness into
so-called civilization are continuing as we do damage to the very
land and sea that make this such an attractive and nourishing place
to live.