zipping across H2O

18 Jul 2008 from PEACEWORK's MySpace blog

Current mood: blissful
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

just when you think, "oh no, that was a split second too late or too early", feel yourself tipping over backwards already calculating whether it's going to save damage if you jump off and where the mast is going to go, you see the horizon tilting and the board turning into an alligator under your too fast and/or slow moves with your greenhorn cut up barefoot soles - THAT is when the sail catches you and the boom pulls so hard in your fists that the chalice in your palms will disguise your formerly fragile hands within two days. Shovels, that's what I have now. "Pull the gas in slowly now", he yells across the water, and my body tells me to step out both feet and lean into the wind to come up with the least against that pulling wind that carries me FOR FREE, while the board divides the gusty river with me on it. I f..g did it. I am wind surfing.

Yeeeeehaaaaa!

And when you're in it, it's fast. No thinking, just feeling it move you, feeling where it wants to be on the sail, moving, tilting, changing, adjusting your position, careful, not to hurt your feet on the router end.

The board so tippy, the possibilities of a freely turnable mast endless, the adrenalin rush under full sail doesn't compare to much other. There is no stable position on that board except under wind. Tip the mast to the front it turns downwind, tilt it back u go into the wind. What a fine line that is, and how little can throw u out of it... it's like dancing, though: don't look at your feet, just never let your sail out of focus. The wind is your friend, just gotta feel out how to ride it... wow, riding the wind. How lucky am I that other people invented all that already??

This whole mast-boom-sail-board-and-router-thing is such a genius cohesion, but actually very simple when you look at it. Brilliant, really. I love it.

Scott showed me how to turn behind the sail in tipping the mast over to the front of the board - in weak winds, but nonetheless - to-tal-ly cool. I haven't tried it yet, but just because of the stupid thunderstorms and the wind dying down yesterday.

Pride or some triumphant feeling in my chest. Standing on shore with the legs straight first since an hour and shaking. Maybe just coming off the a and trying to breathe, too. I knew all along that I wanted to do it and that I would like it. The first time I remember trying it, I was in an English class on Malta, with my mom and brother. We lived in families, they together in one, me in a different one. I remember the really big cockroaches on the streets at night, tea and toast with orange marmalade for breakfast and lots of salty water down my nostrils while trying to cross over to an island with my things over my head - I turned around... back? In any case, I never made it to the island, didn't drown either, though. We had access to some kind of beach club close to the school, where they had some boards. The ones I tried had the mast coming out of the lock while trying to pull the sail up, so I gave up pretty fast, not without wrecking my back. The whole thing was free, but no lessons and pitiful equipment - tasted like a cheap copy of the real thing then, and it makes me so happy to have gone with that instinct and kept on looking for it...

I remember my disappeared dear cousin Elmar inviting me for lessons, he spent a lot of time windsurfing when we were still all living in G... he is blond, so blond, his hair is so fair...

I never went. Now I feel like going to Mexico (where he was last seen) just to try to find him, do something instead of just sitting here. I am debating if a facebook page would help finding him... it's like admitting that he's lost when u start your search. It's like believing that u can still find him at the same time...

The younger sister of my grandmother (my mother's mom's sister) and her husband, my favorite uncle Mietek once taught me some sailing lessons in an optimist - I must have been a kid then, the wall was still up and everybody needed to get through these nasty border controls while traveling to Berlin or Szcezchyn, where the daughters of the couple live. I can still feel the water on my arse, while some blond almost-man pulled me back to shore off some lake, rope-attached to his motor boat, I was silently dying of shame while his stone grey-blue eyes stared into the open. I didn't speak Polish, and I don't remember him saying anything in German to me...

Except for the day when I managed to cut my feet up pretty painfully because I couldn't get it together in that kind of super wind and drifted around more or less wasting myself on trying to pull the sail up in the gusting winds, I caught myself thinking "yeah, aunt Renate and uncle Mietek would be proud of me now if they were still alive", when they were probably feeling really amused at best to watch my total failing which demonstrated sufficiently how I had not grasped any of the sketches on the chalk board concerning wind direction, turn line, tacking and so forth, that they wasted on me during that theory lesson.

It's all behind me now. If only my feet's cuts would stop burning... we used to jam in the morning, now it's more like: "What's the wind like, honey?"

Anybody heard the weather forecast?

After all that summer leisure I'd like to point out two things:

1. Merrickville residents saved so much water that the town is now raising the water fees. That sure is one hell of a policy in terms of motivation. Wrong signal, daddy-oh. Or are you trying to scratch up the lacking six million for the treatment plant? Meanwhile it can only appear decadent to flush your excrements with potable water instead of composting or fermenting to use the remaining energy...

2. I'd like to share Janet Stavinga's invitation to the next Source Protection Report SPC meeting (no idea about this abbreviation) on August 7th, @ 1pm in the Plevna community hall.

Janet is the chair of the Mississippi Rideau Source Protection Region located @

3889 Rideau Valley Drive, Manotick ON K4M 1A5
1-800-267-3504 ext 1147 or 1 613 692 3571

In the add in the Advance Weekender from today is a lot more interesting information and one can probably find out about that here
www.mrsourcewater.ca and here
www.ebr.gov.on.ca (u may wanna comment until deadline Aug 4th on proposed legislation detailing how to prepare technical assessment reports, registry 010-3873) and by emailing her here: janet.stavinga@mrsourcewater.ca,

but attend in any case, because "This meeting will be interesting as we hear from the Province as to whether or not uranium exploration is a significant threat to our municipal drinking water systems" (from Janet's invitation).

I can't wait to see whom they will send to tell those lies...

peace always, my friends, and a good night!

Algonquin leader fined, jailed six months

Second uranium mining protester also fined but released on 'compassionate grounds'
Posted By Sue Yanagisawa Whig-Standard Court Reporter, posted 2 days ago

The lawyer for a uranium prospecting company, frustrated by an Algonquin-led protest that disrupted the company's plans for test drilling north of Sharbot Lake last summer, said it gave him "no pleasure to ask for incarceration."

Yet Neal J. Smitheman asked for exactly that this week, the maximum jail sentence possible in fact, and substantial fines against Algonquin leaders who refused to 'purge' contempt charges by formally promising not to interfere in the future with his client, Oakville-based Frontenac Ventures Corp.

Yesterday morning, Superior Court Justice Douglas Cunningham gave Smitheman what he had asked for.

After observing that "they have not only engaged in a full-scale occupation of the Clarendon site, they have counselled others to do so as well," and telling those present in the courtroom that "compliance with the orders of this court are not optional," Cunningham ordered Ardoch Algonquin First Nation co-chief Paula Sherman and community spokesman Robert Lovelace jailed for six months.

Cunningham said the sentences could be discharged at any point if the two leaders agreed to purge their contempt. Until then, however, he directed the OPP to take them into custody.

About an hour later, Sherman returned to the courtroom with lawyer Christopher Reid, who represents the Ardoch Algonquins, and Smitheman told the judge that he and Reid had reached "an accommodation" on her behalf that was "motivated on compassionate grounds."

Reid was blunter.

"Ms. Sherman is sole support for three children and she will lose them if she goes to jail," he told judge.

Consequently, she had agreed to enter into an undertaking promising to comply in future with the "letter and spirit" of Cunningham's Sept. 27 injunction. The injunction requires that Frontenac Ventures have "unfettered and unobstructed access" to its mineral exploration claim - about 30,000 acres of Crown and private land in North Frontenac.

It specifically bars the Algonquin communities living in the area and "persons unknown" from "interfering with, disrupting or hindering" Frontenac Ventures, its employees, agents or contractors. Having agreed on the record to future compliance with the injunction, a process known as purging contempt, Cunningham discharged the custodial portion of his order against Sherman and she was not sent to jail.

At the precise moment she was being dealt with in the second-floor courtroom, however, Lovelace was being placed in the Quinte Detention Centre transport van at the rear of the Frontenac County Court House. Chanting and ululating from a group of supporters, who had gone outside, could be heard faintly through the windows on the north wall of the court.

The sounds of outrage had been much louder, ringing in fact, an hour earlier when Cunningham's initial pronouncement of sentence was greeted by loud jeers of "Shame! Shame!" from the packed spectators' gallery. At its peak, a dark-haired woman from among the non-native supporters of the Algonquin leaned across the bar of the court, behind lawyers representing the attorney general, and berated the judge.

"This court is participating in the biggest public health disaster this country has ever seen. Do you understand that?" she yelled up at the judge.

Cunningham paused briefly, but didn't have her removed. Instead, he continued with sentencing, ordering that Lovelace pay a fine of $25,000, Sherman a fine of $15,000 and the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation $10,000 for past conduct. He set additional fines of $2,000 a day for every day they're not in compliance in the future and ended by ordering the Ardoch Algonquin statement of defence struck.

They are precluded from bringing any application or motion before him until their contempt is purged.

Reid, putting it in ordinary language after the proceedings ended, said "they are booted out of the court."

What that means in the short term, he said, is that his clients won't be allowed to mount their core defence in March when they return for a second round in these proceedings.

"The statement of defence," he explained, "challenges the constitutional validity of the Mining Act."

The perversity of the situation, he added, is that his clients are being punished for resorting to direct action instead of relying on the courts. But "they can't come to court now. Self-help is all that's left to them now."

At this point, Reid said he's talking to his clients about an appeal.

Cunningham, in explaining his reasoning for the sentence, said that the adoption of self-help flaunts the rule of law and can't be tolerated because "respect for our court system evaporates and our entire society suffers as a result."

His sentence, he added, had to send a message to others who might consider similar action.

Respect for the court system wasn't exactly inspired in the largely partisan crowd of spectators who watched as the two prisoners were taken into custody, however.

After Cunningham rose, those who weren't attached to Frontenac Ventures or the provincial Ministry of Northern Development and Mines stood en masse and applauded Sherman and Lovelace, some ululating, an expression in sound that can denote sorrow, celebration, honour, defiance or all of them at once.

Gloria Morrison - the wife of Frank Morrison, one of only two non-natives charged in the contempt proceedings - was seething in a quiet and dignified way. Her husband has attended the court case only intermittently when he's been obliged to but she's been a fixture since hearings began last summer.

The Morrisons own 100 acres of managed forest and marshland north of Snow Road, property crossed by the Big Antoine and Little Antoine creeks and a man-made stream, which all flow directly into the Mississippi River. They're opposed to uranium drilling and believe it endangers both the surface and sub-surface waters in the area.

They were devastated when they discovered that Frontenac Ventures had come onto their land without permission sometime in 2006, staked a prospecting claim that covers about 70 per cent of their holding, and that there was nothing they could do about it. According to Frank Morrison, the claim staking alone has destroyed the market value of the property.

It was Gloria Morrison who first alerted the Ardoch Algonquins to the sort of prospecting Frontenac Ventures was doing and asked them to get involved.

She's unhappy that her husband's case - like that of Christian Peacemaker David Milne - was severed from the main action against the Ardoch Algonquin earlier this week.

His Ottawa lawyers weren't provided in advance with essential documents by the Frontenac Ventures legal team, however. Consequently, his case had to be put over to March to allow for proper disclosure.

Gloria Morrison said she's been disillusioned by what she's seen since her involvement in this whole thing began.

At 57, she didn't have any experience with the courts before this, she explained. She had never even experimented with teenage rebellion or hippie culture: "I walked on green lights and picked up garbage off the street. I never smoked and don't drink."

She admits she had certain expectations about how things were supposed to work for law-abiding citizens. But after witnessing this case unfold, "it has not solved anything," she said. "It's painful and it has created a situation where many of us will follow."

Unlike Sherman, all of her children are grown and should it come to that, "I am fully able and willing to go to jail," Morrison said, "and no, I would not apologize either for protecting our air and water."

Reid was clearly upset by the outcome of the sentencing.

"I was expecting there would be a period of incarceration. I don't think anybody expected six months," and described it as "pretty draconian," he said outside the courtroom.

He was also unhappy with Sherman's predicament and the pressure such a lengthy sentence had imposed on her. "If her kids were now adults, she'd be in jail right now," he said, "but she can't deprive them of a mother."

As for the fines "you might as well make it $10 million, as far as the ability to pay goes for these people."

Bluntly put, Reid said, "Bob Lovelace is a political prisoner. He's done nothing violent. He hasn't hurt anybody. He's in jail because of his beliefs."

suey@thewhig.com
Article ID# 906107

Open letter to Mr. D. McGuinty

Mr. D. McGuinty 2 August 2007
Premier, Province of Ontario
Queens Park, Toronto

Dear Mr. McGuinty,

We, the Community Coalition Against Mining Uranium (CCAMU), are writing to request urgent action for the Ontario government to immediately stop uranium mining exploration and development in populated and environmentally sensitive areas of eastern Ontario.

A very large cross-section of eastern Ontario voters is extremely upset about the health and environmental hazards from uranium mining, which is considered a serious threat to current and future land use in our area. Thousands of eastern Ontario voters have already signed a petition.

A number of First Nations bands, who are upset about unwanted exploration on crown lands that are the subject of current land claims, have already taken physical action by blocking access by mining companies to their drilling sites. The local media has been covering this issue and, if it is not resolved quickly, it will soon explode onto the national scene this summer just before the October provincial election.

Following is a summary of the issues:

Over a hundred claims were staked by prospectors during 2005-2007 on about 30,000 acres of privately owned land and traditional territory of the Algonquin First Nations in the area east of Bon Echo provincial park and Crotch Lake, and near populated areas in North Frontenac and Lanark Highlands townships. Active exploration is currently in process, including ground and aerial surveys, road-building and initial excavation of drill sites. Drilling for core samples is scheduled to start in July-August 2007.

The Ontario Mining Act allows mining companies to conduct this prospecting and exploration activity without the knowledge or permission of property owners. There is also no requirement to notify or consult with the Crown when exploration takes place on unpatented Crown land. The exploration process itself can and has in the past done serious damage to property. The Ontario Mining Act allows excavation of thousands of tons of material in the exploration stage without environmental assessment and without a requirement to restore the land. The drilling process itself has risks … the planned depth of ~400 meters causes drill holes to become “wells”, which have to be filled to prevent upflow of contaminated water into the watershed. Drilling can also affect the stability of underground water aquifers that supply clean drinking water to wells in our area.

If exploration leads to an operational mine, ore is removed by strip-mining and shipped to a processing site, usually located as close as possible to the mine site. Uranium ore is crushed and leached using large quantities of water. The sludge or tailings, which still contains substantial quantities of radioactive material, are dumped into special tailings ponds. Reports in 1980 by the Ontario Environmental Assessment Board on Elliott Lake solved many of the problems, but cited significant residual risks in the area of long-term viability of these tailings ponds. More recently in 2003 and 2006, Cameco in northern Saskatchewan, which is the world’s largest uranium producer, suffered three major flood-related spills, in spite of new technologies in tailings pond management. In North Frontenac and Lanark, mining and processing of uranium ore is of special concern since a pond failure or accidental spill could cause toxins to flow into the Mississippi River watershed, thereby impacting tens of thousands of people in villages, towns and cities downstream, including the City of Ottawa.

There are hundreds of cases where mining companies have walked away from mines or processing facilities leaving a mess for the province to clean up. In December 2005, the Ontario Auditor General identified, out of 5400 abandoned mine sites in Ontario, at least 250 are “toxic waste dumps, leaching acidic, metals contaminated drainage into water-courses and aquifers”, and the AG strongly criticized the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines over their failure to protect the environment and Ontario taxpayers from the long-term impacts of mining.

In terms of documented health risks, the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Act states: “primary cancers of the trachea, bronchus and lung among workers previously employed in uranium mining in Ontario are recognized as occupational diseases under the Workplace Safety & Insurance Act. They are both characteristic of uranium mining and result from exposure to ionizing radiation relating to the uranium mining industry”.

In relation to the government’s new Clean Air and Clean Water Act, we are concerned about the impact of potential uranium mining pollution on the water supply of hundreds of thousands of people in villages, towns and cities downstream on the Mississippi and Ottawa River systems. We do not want a repeat of Elliott Lake and other uranium mining disasters throughout the world. Airborne radioactive dust is carried by winds and will directly affect not only mine employees, but thousands of Ontario residents in Frontenac County, Lanark County, Tay Valleyand the City of Ottawa other area townships.

Farmers and rural businesses are very concerned about the effects of uranium mining on tourism, agriculture and other traditional rural businesses and land uses. Property owners have already suffered a negative impact on property values and in many cases have indefinitely delayed plans for property purchases or improvements at a substantial cost to local economies.

Nova Scotia has already enacted a province-wide moratorium on uranium mining due to serious health and environmental concerns and the poor environmental record of the mining companies. British Columbia is presently considering a similar moratorium. Nova Scotia’s moratorium was prompted by contamination from exploratory drilling.

The root of the problem is that the Ontario Mining Act is over 150 years old, and is long overdue for a major overhaul. Over the last few years, many proposals have been submitted to the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines (many at the request of the Ministry), but to date no substantive changes have been made to the Act. The unfairness of the current Mining Act and its extreme bias toward mining company rights over the rights of property owners and First Nations people is encouraging uranium mining exploration and development that is completely incompatible with current land use in our area.

We request that the Ontario government enact an immediate moratorium on uranium exploration, mining and processing in eastern Ontario and initiate a public review of Ontario’s Mining Act.



We would appreciate your support … please Email your position on our request for a moratorium to j.s.kittle@sympatico.ca or mail it to J.D.Kittle, PO Box 1050, Snow Road, ON, K0H 2R0. Thank you.



Please note that this letter is being sent to the following recipients:



Federal: Prime Minister of Canada, Federal Minister Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Minister Natural Resources, Minister Environment, MP Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, Liberal Leader, Liberal Environment Critic, Liberal Indian Affairs Critic, Liberal Natural Resources Critic, NDP Leader, NDP Northern Development/Natural Resources Deputy Critic (Energy), NDP Aboriginal Peoples’ Affairs/West Coast Fisheries/NDP Deputy Whip, NDP Environment and National Parks Critic, PQ Leader, PQ Environment Critic, PQ Natural Resources Critic, Green Party Leader

First Nations: Chief AFN, Chief Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, Chief Shabot Obaadjiwan Algonquin First Nation

Provincial: Premier Ontario, Minister MNDM, Minister of the Environment, Minister of Natural Resources and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, MPP Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, Minister of Energy, Leader PC, PC MNDM Critic, PC Environment Critic, Leader NDP, NDP Environment Critic, NDP MNDM Critic, MPP Liberal Ottawa West-Nepean, Ontario Environment Commissioner, Auditor General of Ontario

Municipal: Mayor North Frontenac, Mayor Central Frontenac, Mayor South Frontenac, Mayor Lanark Highlands, Mayor Carleton Place, Mayor Mississippi Mills, Mayor Perth, Reeve Tay Valley, Reeve Beckwith, Mayor Drummond, Warden Lanark County, Mayor Ottawa

Associations & Individuals:

Lanark Landowners Association, Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority, Ontario Federation of Hunters and Anglers, Ducks Unlimited, Land O’Lakes Tourist Association, Lanark County Tourist Association, Buckshot Lake Cottage Association, Dalhousie Lake Cottage Association, Bedford Mining Alert, Mining Watch Canada, International Institute of Concern for Public Health, CCNR. Executive Director and Counsel of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, Mississippi Valley Field Naturalists, Ontario Nature, Mississippi Lakes Association, Tom Jackson, Buffy Ste. Marie, Graham Greene