The North West Passage

Early in November, I offered to donate all the November royalties from my novels to Save Our Water, an environmental charity working to protect the watershed of my hometown from corporate exploitation. How did it go?

Here’s a screenshot of the Kindle ebook sales:

And here’s the paperbacks:

After excluding the non-fiction titles, I sold 43 books in total. At an average royalty of $2.50 per Kindle title, and $1.50 per paperback, that’s $90.50 that I profited this month. Seeing as there’s still two days left in November, I’m just going to round up my donation to $100 and send the money in.

For a self-published writer, this is a very, very good result: and compared to my usual showing, it’s about four times better than usual.

Other observations: The huge spike in the middle of the Kindle sales graph happened when The Wild Hunt blogged about my donation. This produced what was probably my best social media reach ever: the article was shared hundreds of times, and I received about a dozen private messages asking for more information or thanking me for “stepping up”. Fellwater, the first book in the series, reached its best ever Amazon ranking: it was the 53,459th best selling book that day. Here’s a screenshot:

Also, I noticed with interest that among the paperback sales, Hallowstone outsold the other titles, even though it’s the second book in the series, not the first. But in retrospect, this might make sense. As one reader told me this summer, books 2, 3, and 4 make for an excellent trilogy in their own right, and book 1 could actually be read last, like a prequel.

So, there you have it. To those who bought copies of my books this November: thank you. May I encourage you to tell everyone you know about my books, and to please post your reviews to their Amazon pages and on other places, so that some day soon I’ll be able to do another charity run like this one, for other worthwhile causes. And naturally, I continue to encourage you to support environmental protection works, and to care for this good Earth we share, and for each other, in whatever way you can.

Click here for info about Brendan’s novels, and to purchase copies. Ebook and paperback.

I grew up in the village of Elora, Ontario. As a child I knew its trees, flowers, and berry patches, its creatures great and small, and the sharp edges of the river’s stone walls, and I sometimes felt that they knew me. The village was my field of fairy-tale adventures, as was the conservation park to the west, and the abandoned railway line that began across the road from my house and took me to the next town over the fields. As I grew older, that landscape provided the inspiration for my first adult thoughts. One particular spot, a raised ledge that my friends at the time called “Elf-top Plateau”, was the place where I wrote my first songs and stories, and the first place on earth where I perceived something resembling a spiritual epiphany. And in my full adulthood, thoughts of “my land” inspired my doctoral thesis on environmental philosophy. Although I haven’t lived there since 2006, I still think of it as my home town.

The Elora Gorge. My own photo, July 2014.

I set my fantasy fiction series, “The Hidden Houses”, in Elora and its environs, although I renamed it “Fellwater”. In those novels, a faction of villains work to control, or else destroy, a magical water well. In early 2015, Nestlé corporation submitted a proposal to extract and bottle water from the aquifer that feeds the village, and other communities downstream. (A curious case of life imitating art, perhaps; although I’m sure Nestlé’s intentions are merely capitalist, and not the same as those of my antagonists.)

This proposal was protested by local residents, who made three main demands:

1. Nestle should monitor local wells for two weeks prior to its main pumping test, in order to provide better groundwater baseline data,

2. Municipal and provincial authorities should impose a three-year moratorium on consumptive water-taking in the Grand River watershed, and,

3. Municipalities in the watershed should be granted the time they need to complete their Water Supply Master Plans and their Tier-3 Risk Assessments.

Protest marchers rally in Elora, 2015.

I think these demands are very reasonable, and I’d like to help give them some publicity. To that end, I promise to donate all the royalties from the sale of my novels, for the month of November, to Elora’s Save Our Water campaign.

Elora’s rich, diverse, delightful, and bountiful watershed, the very flowing heart of the real-world fairyland that I still love, is clearly threatened by industrial water extraction. The company plans to take 1.6 million litres of water every day. That’s almost as much water from the aquifer as the village itself takes; effectively doubling the demand on the ecosystem. Yet where Elora residents pay $2140 per million litres, Nestlé will pay only $3.71 for the same volume.

This injustice stirs in me a hazy mixture of rage and despair. But what can I do, sitting here at my desk in west Quebec? This much, at least: I can help promote the cause. I can ask you to visit the Save Our Water website to learn more on your own. If you find their demands reasonable, please support the cause by talking about it with your friends. You can donate money directly to the group through its web site, of course. But if you would also like to experience a little bit of the magic that I felt, as a child and a young adult, living in one of Canada’s most inspirational ecological wonderlands, then you can read my novels. And my profit from the sales of these books, for the month of November, will all be turned over to the campaign. Every penny.

The four titles of The Hidden Houses main series.

Naturally I hope you like my books: click here to find out more about them. I hope you will share this blog post to all your friends, as well as the SaveOurWater.ca web site.

Let me give the last word to one of my novel’s heroines, chieftain Miranda Brigand:

“The world turned its back on us a long time ago. We know that. In fact we accept that. Even we ourselves don’t believe that dancing around the Maypole will make bad weather go away. But when the world left us behind, it also left so much more as well. The idea of the heroic life! Adventure, courage and strength. Generosity, friendship, and solidarity. Where are those virtues now? And what has the world embraced instead? Pop celebrities instead of heroes. Politicians instead of leaders. Teachers that promote conformity instead of knowledge. Law courts where justice goes to whoever has the best paid lawyer. And the people who work for change are ridiculed, ignored, sometimes attacked. Oh, we can see the nightfall of the earth, just as much as anybody can. But we are looking for the sunrise in the right place. That’s what Fellwater Grove is about! We don’t want to rule the world. We just want to live better lives. We’re all just people here, that’s all, just people. But people who care about friendship, and music, and all the things that really matter. We built this place to protect these things, and to make sure they don’t die. The world might want them back some day.”

Don’t get me wrong– I think space exploration is exciting. I think that when it’s at its best, it is intrinsically optimistic. But there’s also something desperate about it. Here I shall attempt to explain.

This past Samhain, an asteroid flew very near the earth, prompting (as often happens) a hand-wringing discussion about the likelihood that some day another asteroid will strike the earth and destroy human civilization, just as an asteroid once destroyed the dinosaurs. As I write these words, NASA is tracking 1591 “potentially hazardous objects”, meaning an asteroid with “potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth.”

With that context, space exploration seems prompted or demanded by a kind of survivalist thinking. We’re exploring space so that we can build colonies on other planets. The idea is that if Earth is struck by an asteroid large enough to destroy the ecosystem, then human life would continue on the colonies. For example, in a discussion about a large asteroid that came perilously close to Earth in early 2014, physics professor Brian Cox said “There is an asteroid with our name on it and it will hit us.” (sorry for quoting a tabloid as the source here, but I haven’t found a better source yet.) Similarly, Stephen Hawking, the well known physicist, said that space exploration is “life insurance” for the human race: “it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonizing other planets.” And here’s a third example: Elon Musk, founder of the private and for-profit space exploration company SpaceX, has said many times that the reason why it’s important to build permanent colonies on other planets is to become an “interplanetary species”.

“It’s the first time in four and a half billion years that we are at a level of technology where we have the ability to reach Mars… The sun is gradually expanding. In 500,000 million years—a billion at the outside—the oceans will boil and there will be no meaningful life on Earth. Maybe some very high temperature bacteria, but nothing that can build rockets.”

Elon Musk, quoted in Elien Blue Becque, “Elon Musk Wants To Die On Mars” Vanity Fair, 10 March 2013

This argument for space exploration worries me for several reasons. One worry is practical: it has to do with what is almost certainly a deeply disproportionate alarm directed at a very remote threat. The expansion of the sun will not be a problem for us for many millions of years. Regarding the threat of asteroid impacts, NASA itself agrees the threat is negligible. “No one should be overly concerned about an Earth impact of an asteroid or comet. The threat to any one person from auto accidents, disease, other natural disasters and a variety of other problems is much higher than the threat from NEOs.” The threat from near earth objects becomes significant only “over long periods of time.”

My other worry is philosophical: it has to do with the nature of the logic of survivalism. There’s a striking similarity between the views of the high-tech space colonizers and the views of the low-tech “dropouts” (I do not intend this term disparagingly); that is, people who have decided that civilization is not for them anymore. So they gather friends and family with whom they can build sustainable eco-communities or religious communes or the like, and move as far as possible “away from the things of Man”. Both groups imagine that they possess the essence of humanity: one group regards that essence as having to do with simple, honest, back-to-the-land or back-to-God living; the other regards it as nothing more grand than the ongoing persistence of humanity’s population. Both groups often imagine they are on a mission to save that essence of humanity, either from corruption, or from destruction. My philosophical worry stems from my wish that the purpose, the goal, the objective, of human life, and indeed human civilization, should be something rather more ambitious than mere survival. Survivalism seems to me to denote a disturbing lack of imagination on the part of those who can conceive no higher and no more worthy a goal than the mere perpetuation of the physical existence of our species, or the mere perpetuation of a certain very specific or very narrow way of life. The good thing about living in a dynamic and progressive civilization, is that it is an attempt, even if a stumbling or a suspicious one, to do something more than merely survive.

Just a thought.

“Why do humans do science? Why do they do art? The things that are least important for our survival are the very things that make us human.”

~Savas Dimopoulos, scientist at CERN. From the film “Particle Fever”.

On most good-weather days, and in all seasons, I go walking in the Gatineau Hills Park. I do it because we human animals are made for walking; because forest scenery is good for stress-reduction and mental health, but mostly because it’s beautiful and that by itself is reason enough for me.

Here are some photos of my trek into the hills today. The autumn colours are in full bloom; the wind was chilled but not cold; the leaves fell about me as if quietly mourning the passing of summer; and it was a good day.

Just around the corner from my building is this entrance to the park. I often tell people I live next door to a forest; that statement is a slight exaggeration; but I do love that this view of the hills is there for me every day as I walk to work and back.

Just inside the park entrance.

Much golden light.

A carpet of gold leaves.

A meadow in the shadow of a cloud; a hill in full sunshine.

One of the many stony cliff-edges along the Gatineau Hill parkway. I love the birch tree here, clinging to the cliffside. It seems to say something about the tenacity and precariousness of life.

Here’s a sort of raised causeway through a swamp, with a hill full of colour on the other side.

Birch and juniper along the gravel path.

I didn’t go all the way to Pink Lake today, as I usually do. So this photo and the ones which follow were shot about three weeks ago. Here’s a lovely swamp full of dead tree trunks, on the way to the lake.

New life from old.

The good Pink Lake itself. Note that it is not pink. In fact, although this photo doesn’t reveal it, the lake water is actually somewhat green. (The name comes from the name of a family that once owned a farm here.)

At the water’s edge.

Finally, here’s a video of what it’s like at that meditation-place by the water’s edge. (1 minute 29 seconds). Watch it with patience; I’m building an argument here.

So, there you have it. The city of Gatineau, or the edge of it where my neighbourhood lies, is a comfortable place. But it’s far from my “home” and most of my friends and family. The more I walk this forest, the more I feel that I belong to this land and that this land belongs to me.

At least for a while.

I asked friends of mine to describe what they think are some of the biggest absurdities of modern life. Here are some of their answers.

1. Wealthy people who praise the value of the “rustic” and “simple” life, and who claim to want such a life, but without sharing the burdens of poverty nor empathizing with the suffering of actual impoverished people. Marie Antoinette running her own hobby farm at Versaille Palace, for example.
2. Excessive displays of social status and prominence: rich teenagers photographing themselves in a bathtub full of Perrier water.
3. “Dozens of people sharing a city bus, but none of them sharing a conversation with each other.”
4. Food which is saturated with processed sugar but does not actually taste sweet: the sugar is added to give the food a superficial texture, a ‘weight’.
5. the huge variety of pre-packaged or frozen food available in grocery stores, which are not in fact a variety of real food choices but are only a variety of brand names, packaging graphics, and minor differences among the additives. These give the illusion of freedom of choice, but actually make the consumer less free (to say nothing of how the loss of the ability to cook for oneself makes one reliant on the choices made in advance by food-tech companies, and again therefore less free.)
6. Religions whose doctrines promote peace, charity, and neighbourly love, but whose practitioners actual behaviour involves violence, racism, and unquestioning obedience.
7. “That civilization dupes us into thinking we are somehow better for abandoning our ‘base’ instincts in favor of contrived and often damaging social constructs and social rituals.”
8. Pocket-sized, mass-produced, and cheap-to-buy computers, each more powerful than those which helped put twelve men on the moon, and able to access without delay the sum of human knowledge through the internet, but which are used to play time-wasting games or to watch videos about cats.
9. Consumer products that save no one any time or work, which create no new possibilities for human life and action, and which are designed to be thrown out after very few uses. Shaving cream, for example. (A totally pointless product; all you need is hot water.)
10. The entire “war on terror”, in which the United States and its allies fights an enemy it indirectly and perhaps accidentally created.
11. Plentiful government money for war-fighting and for monuments to commemorate past wars, but little or none to care for wounded, dismembered, or psychologically traumatized soldiers returning from the wars.
12. Political slogans or jargon words which mean the very opposite of what a first-glance, out-of-context impression would suggest. “Right to life”, for instance, is not a blanket obligation on all persons to abstain from murder. It actually means government regulation of a woman’s use of her own reproductive organs. “Right to work”, as another example, doesn’t oblige employers to hire anyone, but does prevent workers from going on strike to protest their badly-paid, health-destroying, and mind-numbing jobs.
13. Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man standing trial in Britain for terrorism, had the charges against him dropped when it was revealed that British intelligence agencies were supporting the same force Mr. Gildo was accused of joining. In the words of his defence lawyer: “If it is the case that HM government was actively involved in supporting armed resistance to the Assad regime at a time when the defendant was present in Syria and himself participating in such resistance it would be unconscionable to allow the prosecution to continue.” (Source.)
14. In June of 2015 a terrorist bearing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa stitched on his clothing entered a church in South Carolina and murdered nine Black people. Nevertheless the governor of the state, Nikki Haley, declared that “we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” (Source.)
15. The 1970’s anarchist punk rock band, The Sex Pistols, recently licensed artwork and graphics related to their brand for use by a line of credit cards. (Source.)
16. The global industrial and economic dependency on petroleum as a fuel source for almost everything, despite the fact that it’s non-renewable and that there will be none left in the world by or about the year 2048. At the same time, efforts to introduce alternative sources of energy are deliberately suppressed by major players in the oil industry. (Source.)
17. In a society full of opportunity, wealth, comfort, political freedom, widely available education and medicine and (let us admit it) distraction, nonetheless many people find suicide a preferable alternative. 2,728 Canadians took their own lives in the year 2011. (Source.) By contrast in low-tech, pre-civilized societies, suicide is exceedingly rare.

These examples perhaps say as much about the priorities of the people I polled, as they do about modern society. (The last five, the ones with the web links, are my own contributions to the list.) But I’m sure you see the point. Life in an urban, organized, technologically-intensive society involves accepting and even making private peace with inexplicable, unintentionally comic, and seemingly self-contradicting situations like these. I might accept them if I imagine I will benefit from them, or if I fear that those who benefit from them will retaliate against those who criticize. Or, perhaps people accept them using a kind of personal cost-benefit analysis. They’re willing to put up with a city mayor who regularly gets drunk in public, utters racist slurs against his own constituents, and who ignores a police investigation against himself, so long as he cuts taxes. They’re willing to put up with a government that arrests people without charge and imprisons them without a fair trial, so long as the same government keeps the trains running on time.

Friends, I invite you to suggest more examples of absurdities like these. Yes, this is serious philosophy here. 🙂 And I invite a conversation about how best to explain them, and what, if anything, can be done about them.