In my small town there are two areas of unwounded prairie wool. One is a portion of a boomtown rail yard and the other is a part of plot which has been the town's sports grounds since 1921. These small surviving tracts of native grasses were once fragments of the great expanse of prairie which provided food for immense herds of bison and for other animals which, in turn, provided food for the first people in North America. The bison herds were the basis of an economy that supplied human beings with food, shelter and apparel. It was an economy that, through photosynthesis, provided the energy needs of the inhabitants of Earth's land mass from the bright warmth of one year of sunlight. It was the ancient way of exploiting solar energy.
In the perilous present, we understand solar energy to be only a highly technical part of the total output of the electrical energy which is, or perhaps seems, to be essential to the continuation of human life. Through the process of photosynthesis, living members of the plant kingdom have been trapping the sun's energy ever since the first of their kind took root. The energy they trapped since the world was new now resides in the fossil fuels that are brought up from underground. When we burn fossil fuels to release heat we pollute the present with stored sunbeams from the past. In doing so, the indignities we visit upon the natural world threaten our own survival.
Photosynthesis is a time-proven process. If there are not a great number of scientists studying it, there ought to be. We need to discover and test every plant in order to discover which ones are the most efficient solar collectors. I think there might even be a remarkable untested plant growing among the native grasses that survive in my own town.
Certainly there are organizations that attempt to protect the natural environment. In Saskatchewan, environmentalists rejoice in the successful re-introduction of the Swift Fox in the Grassland National Park. All across Canada there have been other successes in protecting and increasing populations of endangered species. These noble efforts can never be enough. In fact, they will be meaningless if there is not a universal recognition that homo sapiens, despite and because of their numbers, should head the list of endangered species.
Governments, in bed with their corporate cronies, must be forced to seek a divorce, to realize economic growth should not always be more important than any other consideration. Middle-class citizens and the poverty-stricken benefit little from the wealth generated by the extractive industries. The corporate elite and their prominent shareholders take the lion's share of the bonanza. They loom so large that the rest of us live in their shadow. They are stealing our sunlight.
They are also stealing our heritage. Their strong boxes are filled with the inedible symbols of things that are real - currency, title deeds, stock certificates. This paper wealth is being used to purchase land in Saskatchewan. Very often the purchaser is identified as a numbered company. In one instance, a small Saskatchewan oil company was the subject of a hostile takeover. Its pump jacks are now imported from China. This is not something that has happened for the first and only time. We can't be sure what this portends, but governments ought to know and ought to tell us. If there is danger to us as citizens of a sovereign country, they should act to protect us.
