[Social Nature] The Hydrosocial Cycle

At the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Boston in 2008, a session was held on the "hydrosocial cycle". Not to be confused with the "hydrological cycle", the "hydrosocial cycle" was defined in the agenda as follows:

"The 'hydrosocial cycle' is a way of representing the deepening entanglement of flows of water and social power relations (e.g. Bakker, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2004).  Unlike the scientific 'hydrologic(al) cycle', consideration of the hydrosocial cycle makes it impossible to abstract water from the social conditions that give it meaning, and from the people and the societies through which it flows."

I have found this concept extremely compelling in the way it follows from recent explanations of 'social nature' (Castree & Braun 2001). The tendency to want to force a divide between 'humans' and 'nature' is one that has prevailed for hundreds of years, if not longer. One can see, for example, in the medieval Chain of Being, a rationalization of the presumed superiority of humans because of their ability to reason in ways (then) thought to be particular only to homo sapiens. 

The Enlightenment only furthered this 'rational' divide between humans and nature! The Copernican revolution, rather than questioning the very way 'subject' and 'object' have been cognitively divided, instead focused on inverting their relationship. Wikipedia actually puts it nicely:

"Kant's Copernican revolution was the inversion of the traditional relation between the subject of knowledge and the object of that knowledge. Instead of the observed objects affecting the observing subject, the subject's constitution affects the way that the objects are observed. Following this transcendental idealism theory, the possibility of knowledge was thus to be found in the structure of the subject itself, instead of in an objective reality from which nothing can be said."

However, with the rise of new understandings of humans within (and constitutive of) nature, in particular through the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene, some have argued that we are entering into a new philosophical era and playing witness to the so-called 'Second Copernican Revolution' (Clark, Crutzen and Schellnhuber 2004). As Ignacio Ayestaran has written,

"The latter revolution is in a way a reversal of the first: it enables us to look back on our planet to perceive one single, complex, dissipative, dynamic entity, far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Such revolution strives to understand the Earth system as a whole and to develop, on this cognitive basis, concepts for global environmental management. From this new perspective, our planet is a global network of living information, provided by real, virtual, and global interfaces between the biosphere and the noosphere. In this geopolitical interplay toward a sustainable scenario, we, women and men, should not use the global (world-teletechnologies) to exploit the real (raw materials, environmental resources) to obtain the virtual (financial speculation). We must use the virtual (mathematics, software, biocomputering, Internet) to measure the real (biogeochemicalphysical) to obtain the global (ecological economics and human ecology in Gaia, our planet)" (Ayestaran 2005, 2006 and 2007).

What does this all have to do with water? Well, perhaps - as Jamie Linton has argued in "Hydrolectics" (Chapter 12 of What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction) - the entire way we've been thinking of water as some 'non-human' completely 'natural' element is problematic. As Linton shows so well, the entire idea of the hydrological cycle as we have come to learn about it in high school science classes has been conceived within the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of Enlightenment logic. Linton is worth quoting at length here:

“The case for the ontological relevance of the hydrosocial cycle is suggested in the fact that practically every body of water on the planet bears traces of human involvements in the form of minute quantities of anthropogenic substances such as chlorinated organic compounds. And almost everywhere it falls, snow is laden with particulates and other residues of human activity. The flows of water on the earth’s surface, moreover, are radically affected by people: In the Northern Hemisphere, some 80 percent of river discharge is regulated, or controlled, by dams. Combined with this vast scale of human diversion and regulation of streamflow on the earth’s surface, the systematic and global effects of anthropogenic climate change on hydrological processes mean that these processes are thoroughly and unavoidably involved with human ambition. The very nature of the circulation of water on earth, in other words, has to be described in social as well as hydrological terms” (229).

In our efforts to 'manage' environmental problems associated with water, it seems we need to recognize both that such systems are immutably complex (and thus we should proceed with extreme caution when influencing the flow or physical experience of any water body), but also that such flows and physical experiences are fundamentally connected to our social selves. Influencing social relations can thus have as much of an impact on the experience of water as can physical influences on what we know of the hydrological cycle.

[Geography in a Photograph] The End of the Line

A photograph of the train station (foreground, right) in St. Paul, Alberta; year unknown; taken by Ron Brown, and published in the 3rd Edition of The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: An Illustrated History of Railway Stations in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2008): p. 41.

Sometimes, ordinary photographs have an uncanny ability to capture our attention. This one (above) captured mine. I was leafing through Ron Brown's The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: An Illustrated History of Railway Stations in Canada, and came across this image, and my brain stumbled upon the caption: "The station skyline in St. Paul, Alberta, is typically dominated by the grain elevators. Photo by author." Grain elevators and a train station in St. Paul, Alberta!? I have been to St. Paul many times, yet I have never seen any grain elevators there. Nor had I ever seen or heard of a train station in town - this would imply passenger service. But here was a photograph of a typical prairie town, showcased in a book about abandoned train stations, chosen specifically because of its iconic prairie 'skyline' - dotted with not just one, but five of the multistory beasts! Was it possible that, despite the dozens of visits to the town, I had never come across the rail station and somehow failed to see the town's tallest edifices? Surely, a story was hiding behind this photograph, so I have spent some time trying to brush off some of the dust.

St. Paul, located about 200km Northeast of Edmonton, was settled by the Oblate missionaries in the late 19th Century as a mission for Métis peoples. The settlement was originally known as St. Paul des Métis (shortened to St. Paul in 1936, when the settlement gained 'village' status). In 1909 the settlement was opened up after the original mission project was abandoned, and the doors were opened for French-speaking families from throughout the region and Québec, as well as other European settlers (mostly from Ukraine and the United Kingdom) to move in and break ground. However, like many prairie locales, it was the arrival of the railway that really facilitated the growth of St. Paul into a town...

In the early decades of the 20th Century, even getting between Edmonton and St. Paul was a struggle. From St. Paul, one had to travel some 105 kilometers by horse and buggy to Vegreville, where one of the oldest railway lines in the province was situated, owned at the time by Canadian Northern Railways (CNoR). CNoR was started in 1895 in an attempt to compete with Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) - the company started building track in Manitoba and thereafter spread its network East and West. By 1905, CNoR tracks had reached Edmonton through a southern route (see Figure 1), offering an alternative to the CP's route. In 1914, CNoR began construction of a more Northern route to Saskatchewan, but as the Alberta Heritage Community Foundation notes, the war effort stalled progress:

"... railroad officials claimed there was a shortage of labour, and construction stopped at Spedden in 1919, 48 kilometres short of St. Paul. As did many communities on the Canadian Prairies, they banded together, and recognizing the importance of the railway to the town’s economic prosperity, the citizens of St. Paul volunteered to complete the last stretch of track that would join their town with North Edmonton. In 1920, the first regular service train arrived in St. Paul. J.A. Fortier was the first Station Master and lived with his family in the station building, which was to become an important economic and service centre. Trains not only allowed passenger travel, they also brought mail, equipment, and merchandise. The railway also meant farmers could transport cattle and crops to larger urban centres more easily." 

Figure 1: Map of Alberta Railways, from the Waghorn Guide, 1941

This railway map from the 1941 Waghorn Guide shows an extensive passenger (and freight) rail network, owned by a number of distinct railway companies. For emphasis, I have highlighted two sections of the CNoR lines in red, and one of the competing CP lines in green (the dark black line is the North Saskatchewan River). The town of St. Paul is highlighted in yellow; Vegreville in orange; and Lavoy in blue; Edmonton is at left. Today, the tracks of the more northerly CNoR route AND the highlighted CP route have been torn out, while the southern route is still maintained (now owned by CN) and used as a major trans-continental freight line. 

By 1918, CNoR and other railway companies were consolidated into the new crown corporation, Canadian National (CN). The roaring twenties were a time of prosperity in Northeastern Alberta.At the time, CN and CP rail lines criss-crossed the countryside like the arteries of the nation. Indeed, the growth of the railway network deeper into Canadian territory facilitated the growth of the nation long into the second half of the 20th Century. As Tom Murray's Rails Across Canada notes, "in the decades after the [Second World] war, Canada became a supplier of resources to the world - lumber, grain, sulfur, potash, petroleum products - and CN [and CP] carried them."

The first half of the 20th Century is perhaps the heyday of Canadian passenger rail service. With automobiles and fossil fuels still largely commodities of the elite, trains were a necessary aspect of keeping people and communities connected. The train line between Edmonton and St. Paul, which the community members had helped to complete, was by no means quick (see Figure 2), but it was nevertheless reliable and, arguably, the common person's primary connection to the outside world. In 1946, the train was upgraded to daily service, and was by then fast enough to allow those from small lineside communities such as Bonnyville to come to the service town of St. Paul for the day, and make it back home in time for early evening.

Figure 2: Passenger Rail schedule from Edmonton to St. Paul, 1925

The schedule, from the 1925 Waghorn Guide, tells us that four return trips per week connected St. Paul and Edmonton. The train took an astonishing 10 hours to traverse 200 kilometers!

Vehicular Homicide: Killing Passenger Rail
The 1950s and 1960s marks a dramatic decrease in rail passenger demand (and supply of services) in North America, notably correlating with the post-war boom and the rise of the family automobile as the primary means of mobility. With each successive decade from the 1920s to present, a map of Canada's passenger rail service would get thinner and thinner (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Canadian Passenger Rail in the 1920s and 2000s compared

Compare the images above and below: The above 1921 map [digitally stitched together] shows CN's passenger rail service lines stretching throughout much of the country and into the United States. The map does not even include the competing service by CP, which also provided passenger service in the first half of the 20th Century. The present-day map below shows VIA Rail's only passenger service lines. Today, passenger rail does not pass through many major Canadian cities such as Calgary, Fredericton, and Regina.

The passenger rail service between St. Paul and Edmonton continued to be offered by CN into the early 1970s, but it was then quietly discontinued; the age of cheap oil had facilitated the rise of the automobile - and today the automobile is the only functional means for people to get in or out of St. Paul (aside from the Greyhound bus, which travels twice a day).

From Tracks to Trucks
For the meantime, freight services would take over as the main function of the St. Paul railway. As Brown's photograph attests, freight played an extremely important role in this largely agricultural region's economy. It is only after speaking with my partner's uncle Wayne, a longtime farmer from St. Paul, that I have come to begin to understand the centrality of the freight rail service (and the corresponding grain elevators) to the rural way of life: First, the rail service provided an efficient and cheaper way of bringing important farm inputs, ranging from fertilizers to heavy equipment, to the region. Second, the local grain elevators (and the agglomerations of farmers who owned them) provided local farmers with a sense of ownership and control over their product. They had a say in the local wheat pools, or at least knew who was serving on the regional board, and could make important decisions about their produce based on the buyer, the going price, and it's final destination (farmers like Wayne were even involved in loading their own rail cars with their own goods, for which they were paid a higher share of the product). Third, the elevators served as a rallying/ meeting point for local farmers. As Wayne put it: "We would come together and meet there, share ideas, discuss and network with other farmers." But as the past tense tone used here suggests, these important socio-economic functions of the regional freight railroad (and the grain elevators) are no longer available... they are no longer available because, within the last two decades, CN began to discontinue its freight services in parts of the region. Today, the evidence of a former era has been removed: The grain elevators have been torn down; the rails have been ripped out.

Covering Their Tracks
Now, it's one thing to discontinue passenger and freight rail service; it's quite another to rip out the tracks and dismantle the infrastructure! But this is precisely what would eventually happen in St. Paul, in a decision that Wayne describes as "beyond shortsighted". Today, the iconic prairie image captured by Brown's photograph is completely obliterated in St. Paul and many small agricultural towns like it. The previous landscape has literally been erased: The rails have been removed, buildings torn town, and power lines replaced (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: No more prairie skyline

It may be hard to believe - but this present-day photograph is taken from roughly the same vantage point as Ron Brown's original photograph above. The train station is gone; the five grain elevators are gone; the tracks have been uprooted and shipped away (by truck); new power lines have been put up to service the new housing developments; and as the photo shows, the municipality now piles excess snow where formerly there were train tracks. Photo by Laurie Krekoski, 2011.

How did this happen? Well, there are a myriad of reasons and forces which have come into play, some of which I will briefly touch on here. In some ways, the death of Brown's photograph is a parable of the local impacts of globalization. As mentioned above, the 1960s and 1970s saw the growth of automobile-based infrastructure. Similarly, by the 1980s, freight companies such as CP and CN began to feel competing pressure from the trucking industry. The rail companies began to discontinue service in more remote areas, in order to cut back on losses to the trucking companies.

The privatization of CN in 1995 didn't help either. Thereafter, CN began looking into ways of downsizing services and increasing profit margins. In 1993, as CN eyed its future fate as a private corporation requiring new sources of finance capital, it put up secondary lines like the St. Paul rail corridor for sale. The idea was to keep servicing the area, but to raise funds by selling the valuable property to municipal stakeholders. The corridor was purchased by the County of St. Paul. Nevertheless, thanks to heavy lobbying efforts by recreational snowmobile and all-terrain vehicle (ATV) groups, a plan was floated to consider turning the corridor into a 'linear park', a trail to be used for such recreational purposes. Meanwhile, the trains kept coming to St. Paul, collecting agricultural products and delivering various goods.

The final death-knell came in 1999, when CN announced it would abandon rail service in Northeastern Alberta. Two years later, the county held a referendum on the following question: "Do you support a municipally-regulated public trail on the soon to be abandoned CN railway right of way?" Three affected rural municipalities voted on the resolution, and a slight majority voted in favor - totaling the "Yes" vote to 54.1%. There was no legal requirement to obtain anything more than a simple majority, and thus the recreational park - later to be ironically dubbed the "Iron Horse Trail", began to be constructed shortly thereafter. Today, the trail is marketed as a tourist destination.

In St. Paul, the rails were removed and oddly, the grain elevators and historic station building were demolished (forget heritage status!). For Wayne, the decision to rid of the grain elevators was symbolic, and could be interpreted more sinisterly as a way to pit farmers against one another and consolidate the control of large multinational grain companies. Today, small-scale farmers do not have it easy - they are likely the ones who have lost the most from the disappearing railways and grain elevators. They have to arrange (and pay for) their own private transport of such inputs and their own agricultural output (by truck). Bringing in heavy equipment is extremely difficult and costly. Rather than have a say in coordinating the flow of their product with fellow collaborators at the regional wheat pools, they are all too often "told what to do" by the companies who own farmer's debts. This is the focus of Ingeborg Boyens' Another Seasons Promise.  As one review of Boyens' book notes:

Another Season's Promise explores the farm crisis not as a series of occasional individual losses caused by poor growing seasons, but rather as a perpetual structural phenomenon composed of many villains. Family farmers face down multinational agribusiness, pressure to grow genetically modified foods, the perils of factory farming, massive dependence on pesticides, and an increasingly distant federal government more interested in pleasing international trade bodies than supporting Canadian farmers.

The loss of the local elevators and railroad have played a small (but significant) role in this complicated process... but ironically, the way out of this mess would be much facilitated by the very infrastructure which helped build such farming communities in the first place. We must recognize that these hardships are being experienced in an era of relatively cheap oil. What will happen when the price of inputs and shipping skyrockets as a result of a higher oil prices? What will happen when we decide to take climate change seriously, and enact policies that limit the amount of fossil fuel use? How are small rural Canadian towns like St. Paul going to facilitate the mobility of people and goods when fossil fuel based automobiles and trucks are no longer a viable mode of transportation? It is thus clear why a local farmer and longtime community member like Wayne would see the dismantling of the rail infrastructure as shortsighted. This is not to suggest that a recreation trail is a bad thing (quite the contrary, publicly-owned recreation areas, and people coming together to have fun and be healthy is a good way to build community). The shortsighted aspect is that the replacement of rails and agricultural buildings clearly does not take into consideration the long-term community implications of losing such crucial infrastructure - the type of infrastructure that has played a pivotal role in the foundation of rural life in Canada.

[Urban Geography] Ottawa’s Spatial Crisis

The City of Ottawa is suffering from what I suppose we could call a ‘spatial crisis’. Yet the crisis is largely a manifestation of human decisions. The problem is partly of our own making – and as such, the solutions will partly have to come from us too.

What are the problems?

For one, getting around is a major problem in Ottawa. Traffic is a nightmare. Aside from the city’s world-renowned ‘transitway’ (special highways for buses only), getting around on public transit is extremely costly, inconvenient, and slow. The almost complete lack of incentives to take public transit has lead to an extreme overuse and reliance upon automobiles, which has the numerous consequences of further congestion, emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, traffic fatalities (a leading cause of death in Canada), inactive people, and continued dependence on a valuable but non-renewable resource (putting upward pressure on its price).

Another problem is sprawl. Ironically, the city’s (also world-renowned) greenbelt was designed for the very purposes of limiting sprawl. Jacques Greber – a ‘landscape architect’ who proposed many of the city’s ‘natural’ recreation areas now owned and managed by the National Capital Commission (NCC) – proposed the greenbelt in the 1950s and soon after land was expropriated for the urban containment project. Today, the greenbelt plays a very important (and beneficial) role in Ottawa, as a) an area of outdoor recreation; b) a source of some local agricultural production; and c) in a very limited sense – a protectorate for the functioning of certain ecosystemic processes (such as the conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen and the provision of habitat areas for various species). The irony, however, is that the greenbelt (or more specifically the way in which city plans have unfolded around the greenbelt) has actually served to exacerbate the level of damage resulting from transportation and sprawl problems.

But traffic and sprawl and their socio-ecological consequences are just a taste of the problems that we can expect to come. Given the realities of climate change and peak oil, the procurement of healthy food, for example, is bound to become a challenge for the average citizen of Ottawa if these regional spatial patterns continue unchanged.

Originally, the city was contained to the area within the greenbelt. In 2001, however, the region of Ottawa-Carleton, including the municipalities of Nepean, Kanata, Gloucester, Vanier, Cumberland, and the townships of West Carleton, Goulburn, Rideau and Osgoode were all amalgamated into the City of Ottawa. Although this political transformation theoretically had the potential to offer the new city council the ability to block urban sprawl and focus on increasing density in the core and maintaing regional agricultural lands for such purposes, the opposite has occurred. It became the prerogative of councilors to provide transportation infrastructure to connect those areas outside the greenbelt with those on the inside – but rather than focusing on building public transit infrastructure, the city chose instead to prioritize automobile travel. Railway lines were ripped out or abandoned, and multi-lane highways from the city core to areas in the West (ie. Kanata) and East (ie. Orleans) facilitated the suburban lifestyle, with its required commute from the place of living in the ‘outskirts’ to the place of working in the ‘city centre’…

And who wouldn’t want to live in a large five-bedroom, five-bathroom house with a fenced-in backyard and a double-car garage and access to a nearby park and all for less because the house is located an hour’s drive from your place of work and, after all, in real estate, location, location, location is everything!?

So it was that the rural areas of the Ottawa-Carleton region, which had for many decades produced much of the food consumed by those inside the greenbelt, were re-zoned along residential purposes. The agricultural lands were razed –literally flattened, bulldozed, erased – and converted into new communities where thousands of similar-looking pre-fabricated houses were placed along winding dead-end streets. The suburbs were filled, and for the most part the localized economies of former independent municipalities were integrated (and thus became dependent on) the jobs, services, and sources of goods procurement found in the urban core (reversing the traditional dependence of the core upon the periphery for agricultural products).

The people we elected into office allowed this to happen, but the influences of global capitalism played a role too: The opening of borders, the construction of global trade networks and free trade agreements, the intensification of large-scale industrial agriculture, the extraction of global supplies of hydrocarbons, and the belief in the neoliberal imperative for economic growth have temporarily facilitated this process. While it has been hard to get around, it has nevertheless still been possible to do so; and while the food of Ottawa’s citizens now comes from other climates, the main barrier to putting food on the table has thus far been one’s income, not one’s physical distance to the source of production. The high output of agricultural products from industrial farms put downward pressure on many crop prices, which in turn put pressure on small scale farmers to either go big, or get out of the business altogether.

Yet here’s the rub – while this entire structure relies on cheap fossil fuels, global supplies are beyond their peak (which happened in 2006 according to the conservative estimates of the International Energy Agency), meaning the age of cheap oil is over. What's worse, the very fossil fuels we've been consuming in ever larger quantities each year up until now have definitively to altered the biogeochemical processes of the Earth, forcing us to adapt to new weather patterns and ecosystemic realities. Numerous popular intellectuals from both the left and the right have made the point in some way or another, from George Monbiot to Al Gore to David Suzuki. Bill McKibben put it starkly, when he noted that “the entire industrial food system essentially insures that your food is marinated in crude oil before you eat it.” Or as Toronto filmmaker Gregory Greene has implied in his film The End of Suburbia, the reality of peak oil and gas means that the cost of fossil fuels can be expected to skyrocket, and thus getting around and feeding oneself (not only because of the transportation of food, but also the reliance upon natural gas for the production of agricultural fertilizers) are going to become increasingly difficult for the average citizen as a result.

The spatial configuration of the Ottawa area has been continually transformed since the beginning of this planet's history. Long before human settlement, natural climatic changes, tectonic shifts and celestial movements caused changes in the land and its surrounding conditions. Undoubtedly, the indigenous peoples who lived and subsisted for thousands of years in what is now known as the region of ‘Ottawa’ (so named after the Algonquian ‘Odawa’ nation that lived here at the time of European colonization) also influenced the space around them. Yet it has been settlers and their descendents who in the last sixty years have overseen a radical and high-paced transition of the spatial reality of the city to its present configuration – a set-up which shows signs of extreme vulnerability to the expected changes in climate and the declining global supply of oil and gas. Those of us who make decisions affecting Ottawa’s spatiality – including not just city councillors and civil servants but us everyday common citizens as well – arguably have a responsibility to take the future seriously, and that means thinking about the ways we shape and produce the spaces around us.