ACTIVISM OVER AWARDS
AUTHOR TREVER HERRIOT A FIRM BELIEVER OF ACTIONS ARE STRONGER THAN WORDS
Trevor Herriot notices things most people don’t.
When photographs are taken for this article by a creek near his Regina home, the naturalist instantly remarks that the railings on the footbridge are too tall for kids to have a view of the creek. Nearby, he spots that the wire mesh on creekside trees, which should be keeping beavers at bay, is old and worn.
“We’re losing trees,” he says, shaking his head in wonder that city authorities can’t do better.
The Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild has just awarded Herriot the 2017 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence, saying his body of work — five prairiethemed books in 17 years — takes an urgent look at a land that “our modern society, blinded by colonial arrogance and corporate greed, has so sought to dominate and push into the background, to our loss, personal and collective.”
Now, as an author pushed increasingly towards activism, he wants us to do the same.
In his latest book, Towards a Prairie Atonement (2016) Herriot lamented that Saskatchewan is a province, “where 80 per cent of the natural cover on the prairie has been scraped away …” and “some endangered species are now at less than 10 per cent of their populations forty years ago.”
“And the worst of it is that damned few people seem to notice,” he wrote.
Whether it’s on the prairie or further afield, he says sitting crosslegged on his couch after the photo shoot is done, we don’t notice the richness of what is all around us, or what we stand to lose if we continue to put profit before the environment.
“I think if I have any goal it’s to continue to awaken more and more people to the beauty and value of our prairie grasslands and wetlands, and (to) see why we need to protect them from the market forces and bad policy that drive (their destruction),” he says.
The praise for Herriot’s work in the Kloppenburg Award’s preamble is fulsome, but when asked what he thinks of being labelled, “the preeminent prairie naturalist of his generation,” he shoots back wryly that, “the prairie is a sparsely populated area.”
“I’m always a little cautious; whether it’s criticism or praise, I try not to take it too seriously.”
His increasing activism — both overt and subtle — has extended beyond environmental issues. Among his “wins” he counts a Chaplin wind energy project blocked in 2016 after he and others led a charge against it.
When, in March, the province dropped a budget that included swinging library cuts, he used his national profile and then-role as writer in residence at the Regina Public Library to take a swipe at Education Minister Don Morgan, who had questioned if libraries should be seen as human sanctuaries.
“Anyone who thinks a library is merely a collection of books either missed the history of civilization or is actively engaged in dismantling it,” Herriot said in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail.
Some $4.8 million in funding was restored days later after an outcry by Herriot and many others.
“As cranky as somebody like me can be with the powers that be, I’m grateful that I live in a place where I’m allowed to speak out, oppose the government strongly and do that freely,” he says.
“If enough people oppose something like the library cuts, or the Chaplin wind project, then (politicians) will listen. People have to wake up to that … and get out there and say something, talk to their MLA. The more voices that speak out, it makes a difference, good things happen.”
Yet it’s clear the natural world is where Herriot is most at home.
In Towards a Prairie Atonement he tells how his co-founding of the action group Public Pastures – Public Interest began when he received an anonymous package from a federal employee.
The note asked him to “help defend the birds and other creatures being placed at risk” by the Harper government’s 2012 ending of the community pasture program, which saw prairie grassland ecosystems, protected at the federal level since 1935, cut adrift from such oversight.
When the Canadian government had established the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act to try to tackle the dust bowl calamity, among those affected were the 250 Metis inhabitants of Ste. Madeleine on the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border. They were pushed off their land in 1937 and 1938 to make way for a government program that would eventually span 80 grassland pastures across 9,300 square kilometres of the prairie.
Although they robbed the Metis of Ste. Madeleine of their land, the government also wound up providing perfect grazing to those who followed, as well as protection for plants and animals.
Now, with that program gone, Herriot is fighting the privatization he fears could follow — none of the province’s 62 pastures have fallen into private hands yet — and says the land’s initial inhabitants need to have more input into its future direction.
“The work of decolonizing, of atonement, begins with the act of recognizing and honouring what was and is native but has been evicted from the land — native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures and languages too,” he writes in the book.
Herriot feels atonement could best be delivered if we adopt what he calls the Metis communities’ “third way” – a middle ground between all-out capitalism and a system in which there is no private claims to land. He learned of this compromise when he went to Ste. Madeleine with Metis elder and University of Saskatchewan special lecturer Norman Fleury.
What the Metis people call the “hay privilege,” or “the right to cut the hay” offers a template that would allow both conservation and individual prosperity, he feels.
“This is the crazy thing,” Herriot says, becoming animated when the province’s remaining native grasslands are brought up.
“This is Saskatchewan’s and one of Canada’s rarest, most important and most threatened landscapes, but it’s also one of its least protected. So you would think that would motivate you, as a government, to go out there and do an inventory and find out what you have left, so you’d know. Nobody’s done that for decades.
“The data we use now, where we say there’s roughly 20 per cent of our native grassland remaining, 80 per cent’s gone? That’s based on really rough research that was done in the 1990s.
As the decades have passed, Herriot describes how the prairie has become a “sacrifice zone” to agricultural and oil interests.
“I’m afraid that if somebody goes out there and does the work and finds out, that we’re going to be at something like 15 per cent left. And no government wants to take a good look because they’d have to admit that they were at the helm when Saskatchewan lost another five per cent of its prairie.”
There are serious issues to be examined here, Herriot feels, and what the Kloppenburg Award’s $10,000 in prize money will do is allow him to invest more time into his work.
“Writers don’t take it for granted at all. It’s not just an honour to receive it, and a recognition of the effort that you’ve made throughout your life as a writer, but it also serves a real economic purpose for writers to get these gifts,” he says.
On his living room table is a draft copy of Islands of Grass, a collaboration with the nature photographer Branimir Gjetvaj, slated for release in October. It’s beautiful, but these things don’t happen overnight. After this, he has an even longer-term project on the horizon.
“I’m writing a book that I know is going to take me probably four years,” he says. “The last two books each took me about a year to write. This book I bet will take me three or four, unless by some miracle I speed up. But it’s a longer project, so this (award) came at just the right time.”
Fleury, who guided Herriot through history at Ste. Madeleine, knows first-hand about the time he puts into his projects.
“It was magnetic from both sides,” he says of the bond they built up over the book. “Trevor’s heart is not only with the land but with the people; the protection of the people and the land.”
“We’ve got to test each other out as human beings,” Fleury says of their initial interactions. “There’s too many people out there with monetary (agendas). They have no heart, no feeling for the life of that situation. I could feel that this man had that connection.”
“I could see he recognized the sounds of birds around there. He had that relationship already; he knew, he studied, he researched, his heart was with it. He wanted to make sure that he was doing things right.”
Herriot would argue that if things are done right, more people might sit up and take notice. Take notice of what they stand to lose.
On environmental issues, he feels we would be better served if we were more aware of and less shielded from the nature all around us. For example, going camping in a big RV is not really going camping at all, he says.
The work of decolonizing, of atonement, begins with the act of recognizing and honouring what was and is native but has been evicted from the land — native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures and languages too,. —Trevor Herriot
People are going to have to give up the resistance to the idea that climate change is upon us. It’s happening because of human activity, it’s just not an accident of nature, and it not’s too late for us to do something. — Trevor Herriot
“If you are insulated by a big house you drag with you on wheels, your experience of nature is going to be degraded. Then as you mature, you have less capacity to pass that experience of nature onto your own children.”
“It creeps up on us generation by generation,” he says of the damaging detachment from nature that follows.
Thankfully, he says, people are starting to become more aware. The events of this summer, from Florida and Texas to the wildfires in our own province, brought the living world and its imperilment into focus.
“This summer, every newscast is about some natural disaster,” he says. “A fire, a flood or a hurricane. I think it has to be seeping into our minds. People are going to have to give up the resistance to the idea that climate change is upon us. It’s happening because of human activity, it’s not just an accident of nature, and it’s not too late for us to do something.”
Nor is it, he feels, too late to make up for the damage done to communities like those at Ste. Madeleine.
“What I would like to see is some respect for that more communal understanding of the value of land, and a sense of the commons, coming from Indigenous, First Nations and Metis people, and have that seriously come to the table,” Herriot says. ”Not just in lip service, but really listening and bringing those ideas into policy.”
“I think that will help us with creative solutions that we need to deal with these very entangled problems like climate change and habitat loss and degradation or the loss of species biodiversity.”
Fleury agrees.
“What used to be the community pastures, now the government lets that go and says to the people you can do what you want with it? They should have done their research,” he says. “They should have said ok, let’s give the first chance to those people that were removed from there, if they’re still interested.
“We’ve always been conservationists,” Fleury adds of his people. “All they knew was living with, and off, the land, and having a relationship with it. You’re born with that; you cannot take that away from a human being.”
Herriot would clearly balk at the idea that he is a sort of Naomi Klein on the Great Plains — “I wouldn’t use a word like that,” he says when asked if he is a type of “guardian” of the land. But though his most recent book would fit in the palm of your hand and her climate epic This Changes Everything could hold open a heavy door, the two authors stress the urgency of now.
“We are not in a place anymore where we can afford to think about economics outside of ecology. The ‘ecos’ overlap, and we need to bring them together in every policy decision that we make,” he says.
“There is a lot of resistance to carbon taxes as we know here in Saskatchewan, but it’s a reality that we’re going to have to deal with,” he adds, giving one contentious example.
“(Carbon tax is) an important tool in the climate change mitigation belt that we can’t just toss aside because of the oil and gas industry.”
We will be collectively awakened by one major shock, Herriot feels. When we finally come to our senses, we should hope the planet hasn’t warmed by five degrees by the century’s end, but has merely warmed by two, as some experts predict.
“If it warms by five degrees, we all know some very bad stuff ’s going to come down the pipe,” he says.
“I’m not sure if I’m going to live to see us make much of a (change). I’m almost 60 years old now. But I have great faith in human ingenuity,” he says.
“Will the world have 11 billion people all living in a sustainable way?" he asks of another 2100 projection.
"That might be tricky. I can see us losing a good portion of that population, one way or another.”