November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
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One frustration of pushing for social change or the preservation of our environment is that all the computers sometimes seem to belong to the other side. The concerned citizen may have a very strong suspicion that the facts and figures in that latest government report or glossy corporation brochure simply don't tell the whole tale...but, more often than not, he hasn't the time, energy or money to run down the "other side of the story" (even if he knows where to look).
Which is where a magazine like Alternatives comes in. This quarterly journal (subtitled "Perspectives on Society and Environment") is published by a group of faculty members and students at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario...and if you're cultivating a backwoods distrust of academia these days, a look at any issue should convince you that scholarship is a sharp tool in the hands of committed people.
A good example is Volume 2, Number 3 (Spring 1973), which is devoted entirely to a study of the International Nickel Company's enormous mine and refining complex at Sudbury, Ontario and the effect of that operation on its employees, neighbors and surroundings. (As any driver of the Trans-Canada Highway knows, the landscape for miles around Sudbury resembles Tolkien's Mordor or the lunar surface.)
Alternatives examines INCO, and the place of nickel in Canada's economy, with a thoroughness that far surpasses the studies in the average ecology publication. The issue also includes two detailed, closely documented articles on "Atmospheric Composition and Precipitation of the Sudbury Region" and "The Effects of SO2 on Vegetation in the Sudbury Area". What the environmental damage in question means in human terms is brought home in an interview with Elie W. Martel, who represents Sudbury in the Ontario Provincial Legislature and has fought many years for a cleanup at the refinery.
All this information, of course, is ideal ammunition for the voter, taxpayer or activist...but Alternatives' INCO issue is far more than the expose of a pollution problem. In his editorial, Robert Paehlke examines the social organization that compels us to extract ever-increasing amounts of exhaustible resources at a terrible human and environmental cost, and concludes that only a deliberate limitation of economic growth will get us through the next century without catastrophe. Canada, he believes, can serve as an example to the rest of the world: "Can we not come to realize that someone must begin? If not us, who?
