Extinction Portraits: the Political Economy of the Grizzly Bear

The first teachers are the Animals. Creation Stories, field observations, relationship to Home/Land, is the Indigenous Environmental Bioregionalism of Place, successful for millennia too old and long to count, in modern spreadsheets.  Extractive industries (i.e; the reap and rape of the commons), with its colonial imposition of man camps, drugs, alcohol, sex for hire slavery, and complete environmental destruction of Home/Land, leaves a spoiled land unable to support life, marginalized down wind and downstream, extinctions, and a population of completely dispossessed persons, now unable to live sustainably. Open-pit mining, clear-cuts, and other so called ‘development projects’, as they have been mostly practiced in the Americas, create three things: 1. Massive wealth and power for the few; 2. Extinctions;  and 3. “Skid Row”s of all major cities, world-wide, populated by dispossessed Indigenous peoples who no longer have a Home/Land to whom to return. Promises of economic parity, justice, are just that. Remediation is a dream. The birthplace of the nuclear bomb in the American southwest, Alberta’s tar sands, are all omnicidal realities. No one, no matter whom, can live, dream, on these landscapes, destroyed in geologic terms, by political economics fuel by lawless expediency, imperialist goals; the ‘Greed Sickness” of our time.