Old Growth
Writing Assignment November 28, 2023:
Tracing Material: Choose a material or commodity as your focus. Write a short text that discusses or examines or describes this material in relation to one or two
works of contemporary art or cultural production.
Old Growth
1993, 72” x 72”, acrylic
Robert Bateman, CM OBC RCA (born 24 May
1930) Canadian naturalist and painter, born in Toronto, Ontario.
This shows a back view of me with my hand on
an enormous tree stump with a big machine behind my head. It is quite a large
painting owned by the Victoria Art Gallery.
When the Artists for Nature Foundation was started, the idea came from the Carmanah Project, where a number of environmental organizations such as the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, brought artists into the Carmanah valley to paint before it was logged. The biggest Sitka Spruce in the world were growing there. This is the first time in the history of the world that a group of artists saved a significant ecosystem of the planet. A Dutch friend of ours, who is a nature artist impresario heard about it and thought it was a good idea. He founded the Artists for Nature Foundation. The first major project was the one in Poland.
We headed into the Carmanah valley for the painting session, past all the hideous clear cutting that was going on which was why we were urgently trying to save it. We had to go along the logging road to the end of the area and past this huge Sitka spruce that had been cut down. I show that picture in almost all of my talks as it was an old tree when Christopher Columbus came to America - and what is it now . . . junk mail or 2 X 4’s?
We don’t need junk mail, but we do need 2 X
4’s. People might be surprised when an environmentalist is in favour of
logging, loggers, and logging communities. I am, but not the way we are doing
it now. They have actually gotten rid of jobs in the logging sector because of
the big machines. It is not the environmentalists and other noble things that
are taking away jobs, but the over capitalization of the logging industry; that
is also putting some logging companies in debt to buy these great big machines.
My painting is really an attack on the kind of logging that we do.
Born and raised on the West Coast of Canada, I grew up surrounded by the temperate rain forest. As a child of the 60s I was aware of the environment, conservation and forestry practises. You couldn’t avoid that living in British Columbia where forestry was king. MacMillan Bloedel Limited was top of the heap and responsible for much of the clear cutting in the province at that time, often in contradiction of government guidelines for conservation on many projects. In 1999 they were acquired by forestry giant Weyerhaeuser - the world's largest producer of softwood lumber, market pulp, and packaging - for US$2.45 billion.
From the arrival of white men along the West Coast of North
America, logging became a source of wealth. The first harvesting by Europeans
was by necessity – to repair their wooden ships - then to clear land and build
their settlements, and from then on to create wealth for themselves. As usual
with colonizers they (or should I say “we”?) can’t just take what they need,
they have to rape and pillage the resources they stumble upon without regard
for the established civilization or inhabitants (human and non-human) or the
ramifications to the environment. Greed blinds them to the necessity to plan
for the far future, it always about lining their pockets immediately.
This painting, Self-portrait
with Big Machine and Ancient Sitka, by world renowned naturalist and
artist, Robert Bateman, contextualizes these logging practises. I’ve included
his own words (in italics) describing his work above.
Clear cutting is a blight on the landscape and is simply an
efficient and cheap way for logging companies to harvest. Selective logging
practises, which have always existed, are more expensive and the bottom line
for the forest industry is profit. It took a lot of work, protests, studies and
court cases to halt clear cutting on an industrial scale in British Columbia, but
it still happens. Money talks and governments can be influenced quite easily by
trade lobbyists and backroom deals.
In the past the clear cutting permits were often issued for
traditional First Nations lands – destroying traditional territories and
hunting grounds, even burial sites. With changes in attitudes, treaties being
honoured and, again, many court cases, traditional lands were returned to First
Nations tribes for their own management, which put them in control of their own
resources. There are still issues.
Illegal logging is common, and destruction and vandalism of
old growth and sacred sites still happens. One case was of the sacred golden
spruce, Kiidk'yaas, on Haida Gwaii. The old growth tree had a rare mutation and
was protected, and sacred to the Haida people. In 1997 an unemployed forestry
engineer took a chainsaw to the tree as a “protest” and killed it. He sent a fax to the Haida and the media
saying it was to express his "rage and hatred towards university-trained
professionals and their extremist supporters.” Public outcry was loud and
national. He was arrested and was to be tried in court on Haida Gwaii, but
disappeared on his way there. He had chosen to cross the straits in winter in a
kayak – his belongings were found on an island five months later and it is not
known whether he drowned, was murdered or chose to disappear. He’s never been
heard from again.
Old growth trees can bring large profits, simply because of
the huge volume of product that they can produce. The saddest thing is that
they usually end up as wood pulp, not even used as lumber to create something
that could last.
It still takes a concerted effort by environmentalists around the world to protect the forests, not always successfully to this point in time. Not just the temperate rain forests, but also the tropical rain forests and the boreal forests. Deforestation is threatening all of the world’s forest ecosystems. Our forests account for 75% of the production of the Earth's biosphere, and contain 80% of the Earth's flora biomass. Without them we won’t survive so the importance of conservation of our forests is critical. They can regenerate if we care enough to let them.
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