In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 Sacred Geography Wade Davis In a rugged knot of mountains in the remote reaches of northern British Columbia lies a stunningly beautiful valley known to the First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. There, on the southern edge of the Spatsizi wilderness, the Serengeti of Canada, are born in remarkably close proximity three of Canada’s most important salmon rivers—the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Nass. In a long day, perhaps two, it is possible to walk through open meadows, following the tracks of grizzly, caribou, and wolf, and drink from the sources of the three rivers that inspired many of the great cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, Carrier, Sekani, Tsimshian, Nisga’a, Tahltan, Haisla, and Tlingit. Keep on for another three days, and you will reach the origins of the Finlay, headwaters of the Mackenzie, Canada’s greatest river of all. The only other place I know where such a wonder of geography occurs is in Tibet, where from the base of Mount Kailash arise three of the great rivers of Asia—the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, vital arteries that bring life to more than a billion people downstream. Revered by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain, Kailash is considered so sacred that no one is allowed to walk on its slopes or climb to its summit. The thought of violating its flanks with industrial development would represent for all peoples of Asia an act of desecration beyond all imagining. Anyone who would dare propose such a deed would face the most severe sanctions, in both this world and the next. In Canada, we treat the land quite differently. Against the wishes of all First Nations, the government of British Columbia has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. These are not trivial initiatives . Imperial Metals Corporation proposes an open-pit copper and gold mine processing 30,000 tons of ore a day from the flank of Todagin Mountain, home to one of the largest populations of Stone sheep in the world. Its tailings pond, if constructed, would drain directly into the 286 Wade Davis headwater lake chain of the Iskut River, the principal tributary of the Stikine. Two other mining concerns would tear into the headwater valley itself, on a similar scale, with open-pit anthracite coal operations that would level entire mountains. The largest project is a proposal by Royal Dutch Shell to extract coal bed methane gas from the same anthracite deposit across an enormous tract of more than 4,000 square kilometers. Should this development go ahead, it would imply a network of a thousand or more wells, linked by roads and pipelines, laid on the landscape of the entire Sacred Headwaters (Davis, 2007a). Environmental concerns aside, think for a moment of what these proposals imply about our culture. We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land and have no history or connection to the country may legally secure the right to come in and by the nature of their enterprises leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape that is utterly transformed and desecrated. In granting such mining concessions—often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog—we place no cultural or market value on the land itself. The cost of destroying a natural asset or its inherent worth if left intact has no metric in the economic calculations that support the industrialization of the wild. No company has to compensate the public for what it does to the commons —forests, mountains, and rivers that by definition belong to everyone . As long as there is a promise of revenue flows and employment, it merely requires permission to proceed. We take this as a given for it is the foundation of our system, the way that commerce extracts value and profit in a resource-driven economy. But from the perspective of many other cultures that are touched and inspired by different visions of life and land, it appears to be odd and highly anomalous human behavior. We may have reduced our planet to a commodity, a raw resource to be consumed at our whim. But the anthropological lens reveals rather hopefully that there are in fact many other options, any number of different ways of orienting ourselves in place, landscape, and home. During the Renaissance and well into the Enlightenment, in our quest for personal freedom, we in the European tradition liberated the...

Share