The Anthropocene Disruption by Robert William Sandford

Author:Robert William Sandford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Wisdom in an age of climate crisis

“Point your toes, Herb,”

you can hear him saying,

“we are going in deep.”

— Jan Zwicky

Michelle Atterby, a colleague at Vancouver Island University, recently alerted me to a new book of philosophy related to the climate threat and recommended it for my consideration and that of the wider climate research community. Learning To Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis immediately attracted my attention because it was co-authored by two intellectual powerhouses, Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, both of whom have had considerable influence on the public imagination in this country and abroad. Of the two I know Bringhurst best. I first encountered his work almost exactly 25 years ago when I first visited Haida Gwaii – or what may still be known in some circles by its colonial name, the Queen Charlotte Islands – off the west coast of Canada. I remember being deeply moved by the eloquence of Bringhurst’s interpretation of Haida artist Bill Reid’s masterwork, which he offered in his 1991 book The Black Canoe. This is from a journal entry of mine from Tuesday, February 2, 1994:

Today I began reading The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii, by Robert Bringhurst with photographs by Ulli Steltzer. The book is about a sculpture commissioned by architect Arthur Erickson for the “Canadian Chancery” in Washington, DC. Once I started to read it I couldn’t put it down. Bill Reid is an American of Haida ancestry. His return to native sensibility and his masterful advancement of traditional Haida art forms has made him one of the most important artists in North America. This, however, was not an easy or natural thing to do, as Bringhurst so articulately explains:

After a century and a half of racial discrimination, political oppression and missionization, Reid‘s family connection to the Haida was undoubtedly helpful to his acceptance within what remained of the Haida world. But we misunderstand his accomplishment and trivialize the challenge faced by Reid and other Haida artists if we suppose that his racial connection with the Haida made it “natural” for him to make art in the Haida Gwaii, or conversely that “true” Haida art can be made only by someone racially pure. The visual language, like the verbal one, is spoken only by those who have learned it. In the present world, neither language is mastered without conscious choice and labour.

Bringhurst is obviously correct in his interpretation of how difficult it is to master any artistic language. His additional remarks about Reid, however, cut across very sensitive cultural lines:

Reid has lived in or adjacent to the colonial white world all his life, and he has always worked or toyed with European as well as Haida artistic forms and conventions. But little by little, he has also enacted within himself a slow and reluctant process that North American culture as a whole may have to undergo if it has any future at all. He has learned a Native American tradition from the

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