Poisoning Our Way to a Better World?
Poisoning Our Way to a Better World?
By Leif LeBaron
I wonder how many people noticed the “Pesticide Use Notice” at Grassy Point (not to mention other areas along the shores of Hornby, Denman and Vancouver islands). The main information is transcribed here:
Permit #402-0689-25-25
Pesticide: imazapyr (Habitat Aqua)
Adjuvant (surfactant): Poly(oxy-1,2-ethanadiyl),alpha-undecyl-omega-hydroxy- (AquaSurf)
Purpose: kill cord grass (Spartinha spp.) in Baynes Sound
Contact: Becky Brown, Ministry of Forests, 250 739 8206
The notice also states that treatment areas are designated with yellow flags and recommends staying out for at least 48 hours, and those who might harvest sea asparagus should refrain for the calendar year. Children and animals are likely to be curious about these flagged areas and ironically attracted to them. Will these flags remain in place for the calendar year? It also seems essential to post a full notice at each treatment area, rather than a single notice posted distant and out of sight.
In any case, such precautions may help humans, but not the killdeer who nest in those areas, nor the other wild animal and plant inhabitants.
Imazapyr is non-selective, water-soluble and persistent. A 2004 Swedish study on railway spraying detected it in ground water eight years after application.
Glyphosate has also been deployed locally by the Coastal Invasive Species Committee in quiet complicity with local invasive species activists.
My personal experience with those who perpetrate and promote the deployment of biocide to combat invasive species has shown an alarming complacency. It’s not easy when they are indignant to criticism, high on their own good intentions, but I bid those of us who do recognise the folly of poisoning our way to a better world, please reach out and encourage alternatives.
Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. The biocides have changed but the proud pathology persists.
Shucking Oysters: Pipe Dreams
Shucking Oysters: Pipe Dreams
By Alex Allen
“Beautiful British Columbia” our licence plates proudly display. “Super Natural British Columbia” our brand announces. One campaign years ago featured a print ad showing three orcas surfacing against a majestic mountain backdrop with the tagline: “So many of our visitors return in Spring.” And so it is with supreme irony, that Alberta premier Danielle Smith finally gets her southern pipe dream.
Under the proposed route, the pipeline will move one-million-barrels-per-day of crude oil to the soon to be built Robert Banks Terminal 2 in Tsawwassen. The entire Roberts Bank terminal facility will span almost 640 acres, including a brand-new causeway and jetty that could be five kilometres long and an artificial island about the size of 330 football fields. Put another way, it could handle an additional two million 20-foot shipping containers each year.
The product will then be loaded onto the aptly named “Very Large Crude Carriers” that are three football fields long, six highway lanes wide, and 20 storeys tall. Each of these vessels will have a capacity of up to two million barrels of crude oil, with traffic increasing to 408 tankers a year (up from 60). In contrast, the current Aframax-size tankers have a capacity of 750,000 barrels.
The oil tanker’s route will go through the home waters of the endangered southern resident killer whales and Western Canada Wilderness Committee’s Lucero Gonzales said that unless the route is changed, the species could be pushed to extinction.“It’s my worst nightmare. It’s an ecological nightmare. I don’t think a lot of us expected it,” Gonzales shared ominously.
Last year, a federal court judge dismissed a lawsuit by the David Suzuki Foundation, the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee that said the expansion project would destroy vital chinook salmon habitat, threatening the very survival of southern resident killer whales. The pollution, light, noise, dredging and physical obstacles will “starve the estuary” and impact the entire ecosystem environmental groups warn.
The impact assessment found there would also be impacts on Dungeness crab, barn owls, western sandpipers and many other species. Yet after the assessment, while the-then Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault concluded that the project would have significant adverse effects, cabinet approved the terminal expansion anyways arguing that the public interest “superseded the impacts,” and therefore the project was justified. The judge determined that as long as mitigation conditions are “rationally connected to the likely adverse effects on the whales,” all is well with the world. Say what?
As many know, Guilbeault made no secret of his opinion that the Carney government was headed in the wrong direction on climate and left cabinet last year in protest of the Memorandum of Understanding Carney signed with Alberta.
American Lovel Pratt, marine protection and policy director for Friends of the San Juans, warned: “This would significantly elevate the risk of catastrophic oil spills, vessel accidents, underwater noise pollution, and harm to endangered marine wildlife.” The increase in oil tanker traffic, Pratt added, “is especially alarming for the critically endangered southern resident killer whales, whose population currently numbers just 74.” Marine traffic noise and lights impact the whales’ abilities to hunt and communicate through echolocation. A large container ship can reduce a southern resident killer whale’s echolocation range from 400 metres in quiet conditions to just 60 metres.
Northern Washington first nations strongly opposed the previous Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and oppose this one as well. They argue that the large increase in vessel traffic endangers their treaty rights and threatens vital fisheries. If there’s a spill in the area, Pratt points out, “Oil knows no boundaries.”
The Union of BC Indian Chiefs also voiced concerns to the southern route. “If governments have accepted the longstanding opposition of Coastal First Nations on the north coast, they cannot simply move the proposal south and expect a different outcome,” said elected Chief Councillor Linda Innes.
“We have anxiety about the impact of any new pipeline project, period, on British Columbia’s coast,” Premier Eby told reporters. Eby acknowledged that permitting the new oil pipeline falls under federal jurisdiction and BC does not have the power to stop it. Carney said: “This is a representation of what we are all trying to accomplish to make Canada more independent, more resilient, more prosperous, more sustainable.”
“The decision to uphold the north coast tanker ban and not proceed with a northern pipeline is a huge victory for the many coastal First Nations, businesses and concerned residents who have spent years fighting to protect it,” said Flossie Baker of Sierra Club BC. “However, Alberta and Ottawa’s pivot to green light a pipeline to British Columbia’s southern coast is a repeat of a dangerous and economically misguided decision: the infamously over-priced TMX pipeline.”
Both Alberta and the federal government reaffirmed their commitments in the Memorandum of Understanding, including completing a trilateral MOU with the Oil Sands Alliance on the Pathways Project and the controversial oil pipeline expansion. If the project moves forward, construction could start as early as September 2027, at an estimated cost of $43 billion. How it all unfolds we shall see. As former US diplomat Alan Eyre said, “a memorandum of understanding is as comprehensive of an agreement as a Tinder date is to marriage.”
Two Arrows
Gabriel Jeroschewitz, May 11th, 2026. Dedicated to and in memory of Joan Vollmer and Jack Kerouac
Two Arrows
The first arrow flies fast and true, and there is nothing we can do.
The second arrow – that is ours alone.
I first heard about the shooting in a jazz club in Greenwich Village, though “heard” isn’t quite the right word. The news of Joan Vollmer’s death travelled in silence through the Greenwich Village table of poets to those who were fond of William. They whispered of the murder in Mexico City and William’s unrelenting obsession with his wife, Joan. The man who perpetrated this crime on his sweet wife had killed her with a game of William Tell. He had drunk too much whiskey that fateful night in Mexico City and discharged his pistol into her head in an act of drunken misadventure that resulted in her death. This happened in 1951 when I was still very young. It would take years of exposure to the lives of other Beat writers to understand how the arrow of self-inflicted pain was aimed at ourselves over and over again.
I first encountered Jack Kerouac in 1956, when The Dharma Bums began travelling throughout the United States on their journeys of self-discovery. Jack moved through the world with a sense of wonder at existence and a longing to understand life’s meaning. He was also a man enamoured with Buddhism and the Eightfold Path as described in the sacred Buddhist texts, or sutras. In a conversation about his reasons for becoming interested in the religion, he told me of the tale of the arrow.
“Suffering is the first arrow,” he said, recalling the tale of the Zen master who told his students that while the first arrow of suffering would find them, they would release the second and aim it at themselves.
“Yes,” he said, “Over and over, we aim.”
He spoke with the authority of a man who knew the Buddhist teachings well. Yet I knew the Jack Kerouac before me was a man who chased enlightenment in his travels and in his habit of drinking bourbon into the early hours of the morning when his wife would often find him awake, wandering into the hallway with a glass of the amber liquid.
I encountered William Burroughs as an intellectual of the Beat Generation. A man who studied at Harvard University and penned the celebrated novel Naked Lunch, which would come to be considered a masterwork in the canon of Beat writers. Yet, the true masterwork of his mind was on the topic of his self-inflicted wounds.
On the night of the murder of his wife in Mexico City, I found William at an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Paraphernalia of his quest for self-annihilation surrounded him. He spoke of his marriage to Joan with cool detachment. He spoke of the difficulties in their marriage. He confessed to having killed Joan in the act of his cruel, drunken, “William Tell” game. He insisted that he did not do it intentionally.
Yet, when he said these words in my presence, the air of the apartment became polluted with the truth of what a man had done for his own gratification at the cost of another’s life. Yet, he would serve thirteen days in prison in Mexico City for the crime of murder. His family would purchase his release from prison, and William Burroughs would walk free from the legal system that had targeted him for his violent act.
The second arrow has no enemy. William Burroughs did not need anyone but himself and the whiskey to commit the murder of his wife. This is the hidden architecture behind the Beat Generation. Yet, Jack Kerouac understood the dangers of self-inflicted wounds. In his novels, he portrayed many aspects of William Burroughs’ life – the cruelty and the pathos – the man who pursued enlightenment and self-actualization at the cost of everyone and everything in his life. For Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs was a man who sought both enlightenment and annihilation – the same impulse in two directions.
William Burroughs’ arrow burned brightest in the minds of his wife in Mexico City and in the lives of the generations of men and women who followed his path. Yet, when Jack Kerouac died at the age of forty-seven, the arrow had found him too. His last years of life were marked by bitterness and loneliness as he succumbed to whiskey. In comparison, William Burroughs endured another forty years of life as a celebrated, grand old man of letters whose most celebrated work was the murder of another human being and getting away with it.
Now, in the later years of my life, I often think of the arrow of suffering – the first arrow – and the second arrow that we aim at ourselves. The first arrow includes the deaths of our loved ones, the losses in our lives, and the betrayals of those who share our lives. These are unbidden tragedies of life. We cannot stop them. The second is our contribution to the arrow of suffering.
William Burroughs aimed the arrow at himself and his wife and fired the gun. Joan Vollmer died. The Beat Generation built monuments to the man who had taken her life. Kerouac dreamed of simple words to define the nature of existence and enlightenment. For Jack Kerouac, simple words came hard to find, and enlightenment eluded him throughout his life. Yet, the arrow of his self-inflicted wound eventually found him in whiskey and bitterness. He had understood suffering and enlightenment in his novels – yet could not escape it in his life.
The first arrow of suffering comes fast and true. The second?
The second arrow of suffering – we arm ourselves, point the gun at ourselves with trembling fingers – and we justify it to ourselves as an accident, an inevitability, the way things are. We pursue enlightenment and seek annihilation at the same time. Yet, what the Beat writers taught us – what we learned from their deaths and their lives – is the following truth:
Joan Vollmer died because a man aimed a gun at her head for amusement. William Burroughs died in prison, but walked out of jail and went on to become famous. Jack Kerouac wrote about Buddhism, but he died of whiskey. And the rest of us, who merely watched it all occur – the great cultural phenomenon of the Beat writers – we learned of the true path to hell and the arrows that we can fire into our own hearts over and over again.
Two arrows. Only two. And both of them are ours.
The Call Is Coming From Inside Our House
The Call Is Coming From Inside Our House
By Keith Porteous
Humanity is taught to fear rivals across borders, where we imagine civilization ending in mushroom clouds launched by adversarial powers, or in environmental collapse driven by distant factories and faraway governments. Yet the greatest danger does not come from some external adversary at all. It emerges from those who have accumulated extraordinary economic, technological, and political power within our own societies. The call is coming from inside our own house.
Over the past few decades, a new class of billionaires have risen alongside the digital revolution. Their companies build the software that mediates public discourse, the satellites that enable military weapons and communications, the cloud infrastructure that governments depend upon, and the artificial intelligence systems that promise to reshape every aspect of economic and political life for the human community. Their innovations have produced remarkable advances in military capabilities, which has also translated into unprecedented political power.
The tech-billionaires have been handed 100s of billions of dollars in military and surveillance contracts.
The concentration of wealth and power in a relatively small number of individuals creates incentives that deserve intense public scrutiny. Governments increasingly outsource critical infrastructure, intelligence capabilities, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and weapons technologies to private corporations. Military budgets have massively increased in response to manufactured geopolitical tensions, while those same tech-oligarchs and their corporations receive contracts worth tens of billions of dollars.
The net worth and influence of tech-billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others has risen tenfold in the last 5 years, with their market capitalization now measured in trillions of dollars.]
The industrialists of the twentieth century supplied tanks, aircraft, steel, and oil. Today’s military industrialists increasingly supply satellites, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, DRONES, surveillance technologies, and advanced semiconductors. The products have changed, but the economic incentives have not.
These same billionaires shape public opinion with think tanks, media platforms, and lobbying organizations, while political actors benefit from portraying the world as being in permanent crisis, vilifying every geopolitical rival, with military expansion unfolding as the inevitable response. Fear is very profitable, while war generates unprecedented fortunes alongside its crimes and tragedies.
Ecological collapse continues to accelerate, with rising temperatures, biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, soil degradation, and increasingly destructive weather events that threaten the long-term stability of societies across the globe. The U.S.-NATO alliance is the single biggest carbon emitter on the planet.
Climate resilience efforts are unable to compete politically against military spending, with the U.S., Canada, and the NATO alliance increasing their spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, refusing to finance more renewable infrastructure, disaster preparedness, ecosystem restoration, or climate adaptation. This reflects the political priorities of an elite class of billionaires and their political operatives in government and media.
Western society’s most serious long-term threats are not rival nations, but systems of economic and political organization that reward short-term profit over collective survival. The irony is striking.
Artificial intelligence and digital platforms enable the hoarding of wealth, data, and political control on an unprecedented scale. Technological power is inseparable from political influence, where billionaires who control communications infrastructure, own major media platforms, finance political campaigns, advise governments, and shape public opinion while securing military contracts, occupy a position unlike any private citizen in human history.
Democratic institutions are not designed to manage high levels of concentrated economic influence, but to enable them. These dynamics can be found wherever economic power becomes sufficiently concentrated to shape legislation, regulation, media narratives, and public priorities. Oligarchic influence is unrestrained by democratic oversight, independent journalism, or resistance to regulatory capture.
Power has become self-legitimizing simply because it arrives wrapped in innovation. The greatest mistake would be to imagine that civilization collapses only through dramatic events like a nuclear exchange, or a catastrophic environmental tipping point. Decline is unfolding as neoliberal capitalist society weakens, and economic inequality widens. Citizens have rightly lost trust in democratic processes, while discourse fragments into algorithmically optimized outrage.
Military expenditures rise while ecological systems deteriorate. Each development is unmanageable on its own, but together they are catastrophic.
Civilizations don’t fail because they misidentify every existential threat, but because they overlook the internal arrangements that slowly erode their own foundations. If humanity is to avoid war, climate change, and technological disruption simultaneously, it must be willing to examine the incentives embedded within its own political and economic systems.
The greatest danger is not outside the walls. The call is coming from inside our house.
Against the Generals
Against the Generals by Cylon2036 We/Us
The cannon mistakes itself for the sun.
We reply with pockets full of popcorn.
The ministries polish their guns with bone dust
and call the hour necessary.
We release phantom birds into the gears.
Every feather strikes against the algorithmic empire.
Down with the architecture of obedience.
A flower has never recognized a frontier.
Rivers refuse visas, the moon salutes no flag.
Let us become worthy of such companions.
We declare a conspiracy of doors opening themselves,
of bread multiplying without permission,
of sleepers defending barricades
made from laughter and impossible archetypes.
No masters. No conquered.
Only the wilding spaces of ungoverned desire,
where every embrace is an insurrection
and every act of tenderness sabotages the engines of war.
The bugle sounds, a child answers with a song.
History won’t forget which voice endures.
(*Image credit: Napoleon in the Wilderness. Max Ernst 1941)
Scarytale
Scarytale pt.2 of 3
By Quinn Ireland
Lawrence:
Scary and I enter the woods at about one AM according to my old rusty watch. It has been a gift for my eleventh birthday, which was only three years ago, but as my mom always says;
“Lawrence, can’t you keep something new clean for a day?”
I soon realized that scary wasn’t by my side. My heart began to beat, my hands began to shake.
“Scary… Larry where are you?”
My voice carries into the night and echoes around the thick old growth woods. I turn back and walk toward the dim moonlight waiting at the edge of the woods. I then begin to run. But a hand grabs my shoulder as I break the undergrowth. I scream. The thing screams. Just before I faint from fear, I notice a black ball cap with striking Yankees crossings meeting my eyes in the dim moonlight.
“Ha ha! Gotcha!”
Scary was laughing hysterically while rolling around on the ground.
“I got you good!”
“No, you didn’t, buster”
I said with gusto.
“I knew it was you the whole time!”
Scary continued to laugh and roll around;
“The look on your face! I finally got you, after all those years, damn, that was good!”
“Laugh it up!”
I gritted my teeth. I hated to admit it, but he had gotten me. He had gotten me good. In fact, I don’t think that I had been that afraid since third grade. But that’s a separate story.
“That was a waste of time, Larry. Let’s find this place.”
“Well, you’re in a bad mood. Why were you scared, the place is fake anyway.”
“I’m fine, let’s go!”
“And… you called me… Larry.”
He continued to press me, so I gave in;
“Okay! Fine! I startled you would too if something grabbed your shoulder in the middle of the woods past midnight!”
Scary nodded slowly and considered this before lifting me up and saying;
“All right, let’s go investigate.”
So, they trudged through the woods. Just two boys searching for an old circus tent.
Larry:
There is no way for us to tell where in the forest we were. Every tree, shrub, or stump all looks the same. Only our bright flashlights carry us on through the dense forest. Lawrence still whips around at every branch that brushes his shoulder. I guess I scared him bad. It is funny though, I always thought that Lawrence was a chill guy, I never expected him to be afraid of anything. After a couple of minutes of trudging along in silence, he finally spoke up;
“You did get me good, Scary.”
I felt surprisingly good after hearing that, along with the punch on the arm that came shortly after.
“But you better watch your back, I’ll get you when you least expect it!”
We both laughed and kept trudging along through the muddy, thick woods.
Lawrence taps me on the arm;
“What’s that?” he says in a hushed tone.
Strait ahead through the trees, is a thin stretch of light that is cutting through the forest. I start to think; “Maybe this funhouse is real?”
Lawrence:
Scary looks at the dim yellow light shining through the clusters of trees. My eyes follow his. I blink and still see it there, making a path. “We’re just imagining things, Scary. I mean, why would there be light at one- thirty in the morning?” “I don’t know,” he says. “But let’s go find out.” I gulp as we approach the light. Soon we are about one hundred yards away. Moments later, I step on grass. I’ve stepped into a clearing. Then I see it. It’s covered in weathered blue and red paint. It has old glowing lamps on the ground surrounding it. It is sitting in the middle of a massive field. It is a circus tent.
Letter to the Editor – Suzanne La Rose
hello islands grapevine,
i am a hornby island resident and just wanted to let you know that i thoroughly enjoy the islands grapevine. i enjoy all the regular contributions and letters to the editor, – all so varied and interesting and want to thank you also for including every time a small article from caitlin johnstone, always so clear and to the point and informative.
thank you.
suzanne la rose
hornby island
Why I Hold Out Hope For Humanity
Why I Hold Out Hope For Humanity
I hold out hope because people aren’t buying the propaganda like they used to.
I hold out hope because trust in the imperial media is at an all-time low while our ability to attack and discredit the official narrative is at an all-time high.
I hold out hope because more and more people are realizing that capitalism simply does not work.
I hold out hope because empires don’t last forever.
I hold out hope because Iran just kicked the shit out of the US and Israel.
I hold out hope because China is showing the world that a nation can use its wealth and resources to improve human quality of life, harness renewable energy and expand scientific innovation instead of using the wealth and resources to wage wars and turn billionaires into trillionaires.
I hold out hope because Gen Z proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is morally superior to any generation which came before it with its forceful and uncompromising opposition to the genocide in Gaza.
I hold out hope because even as Israel keeps increasing its propaganda budget and Zionists keep expanding their influence over news outlets and social media, Israel’s worldwide approval rating keeps plummeting anyway.
I hold out hope because I’ve seen too many miraculous and inexplicable things in this life to believe revolutionary change is impossible.
I hold out hope because I know from my own personal experience that humans have vast untapped potential within themselves just waiting to be unlocked.
I hold out hope because I’ve seen so many longtime teachers of spiritual enlightenment say they’re getting more and more people coming to them after having spontaneous radical awakenings without any prior spiritual seeking.
I hold out hope because I’m seeing more and more chatter online about a strange phenomenon I’ve been experiencing in which people discharge deep psychological conditioning and energetic fixation points from their bodies using burps and dry heaves.
I hold out hope because a huge number of our problems are caused by doing way too many stupid things for stupid reasons we made up in our heads, so all that’s required is to stop doing them.
I hold out hope because fuck ’em, that’s why.
I hold out hope because the bastards who are destroying our world don’t want me to hold out hope.
I hold out hope because the most obnoxious propagandists are always telling us that revolutionary change is unrealistic, that environmental catastrophe is just a reality we all need to get used to, that AI is inevitable, that socialism is a silly pipe dream, that capitalism is the only system that could ever work, and that a better world is not possible.
I hold out hope because I refuse to give them the satisfaction of bending my will toward hopelessness.
I hold out hope because all our problems are ours to solve, and we can solve both our inner and our outer problems in the same way: by getting real with ourselves about what is true and what is fear.
I hold out hope because we live in wildly unprecedented times, and in unprecedented times, hopelessness is an irrational position — because nobody knows what’s going to happen.
I hold out hope because, from where I’m sitting, it truly looks like the only sensible way to be.
___________________
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