Wintersong. The Nickel Range Trilogy • Volume 3

by Mick Lowe

  It was these same gasses that had destroyed the local vegetation, denuding the landscape and burning the sinus passages, throats and lungs of Sudburians for generations. The huge stack, the height of the Empire State Building, was intended to act as a massive umbrella for the Sudbury District, shielding the area from the strongest concentrations of sulphur dioxide gas. It was hard to believe that in so brief a period it could already be having a visibly salubrious impact on local vegetation, Jake thought. The Superstack was perhaps the world’s tallest example of the old polluter’s maxim that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” By lifting the deadly gasses high enough into the stratosphere that they could be borne away by the jet stream (an expedient Jordan Nelson and his fellow members of Local 6500’s newly formed Research Committee had warned against as a quick-and-dirty solution) the most visible impacts of the pollution would be transported thousands of miles away to no one knew where, exactly—the Ohio River valley, even Scandinavia? And yet, and yet … there was the scrubby, scrawny brush, clinging to the rock cut, defying all logic and common sense, and as the lengthening days of April 1979 warmed the black rock of the rock cut, it began to show the first, tentative hints of green.

  In fact, Jake was witnessing one of the most remarkable reclamations of the natural world from all-out industrial devastation ever recorded. Or rather, he was on the cusp of it. This terrestrial reclamation had not had its origins on land at all, but rather in the water, when marine biologists had begun to study the effects of the fallout from the Copper Cliff smelter on nearby fresh water lakes. They discovered that the intense concentrations of sulphur dioxide gasses in Inco’s airborne chimney pollution resulted in a phenomenon they dubbed “acid rain.” This precipitation was toxic enough to tip the ecological balance in lakes in a radius of a hundred miles of Copper Cliff, depending on seasonally prevailing winds.

  The scientists learned the earliest impacts were on underwater plants, complex eco-systems that had flourished there for untold eons. Mortality quickly made its way up the food chain, until a lake was declared “completely acidified”—and well and truly dead. They were marvellous to look at: what had been thriving little northern jewels were still pretty, their pellucid waters now crystal clear, objects below now visible all the way to the bottom. But these were empty vessels, devoid of all forms of life.

  Scientists noticed something else: when it came to tolerating the effects of acid rain not all lakes were created equal. Certain lakes, usually those bordered by limestone, appeared to be more resistant to acidification. The logical inference: the lime leached into the water, offsetting acidity and mitigating PH imbalance. Could this natural phenomenon be reproduced through human agency as a way to mitigate—if not completely reverse—the acidification of northern lakes? Soon freshwater lake biologists began to tinker with the lakes. They introduced lime into the lakes by the barge-full. Water quality measurements revealed an almost immediate reduction in PH. But the remediation efforts were cumbersome and expensive. Far better to address the problem at its source.

  Jake was not alone in noticing the first, faint stirrings of the return of vegetation in the Sudbury spring in the post-Superstack era. Bill Lautenbach, a bureaucrat in the Planning Department of the newly formed Regional Municipality of Sudbury, the same new municipal formation that had spawned Curtis Southwind’s new Sudbury Regional Police Department. Lautenbach had a technical background, and he had followed the experiments with acidified lakes with keen interest. And, like everyone else in Sudbury’s Planning and Economic Development communities, Lautenbach was also acutely aware of the terrible hindrance the city’s physical appearance represented. With its outskirts—and even many of its inner-city neighbourhoods—ringed only by grim, barren black rock, Sudbury had long since become a cheap punch line for many a stand-up comedian: “Sudbury—Pittsburgh without the Orchestra”; “We’re giving away a door prize here tonight, folks; First prize, a trip, all expenses paid, one night in beautiful Sudbury, second prize two nights in beautiful Sudbury!” But the city’s “image” hit a new, all-time low at about the time of the strike when a reporter for Sports Illustrated arrived in Sudbury during a cross-Canada train trip and alighted briefly on the platform of the city’s aging passenger station. He took a quick look around at the notorious Elgin Street strip, the city’s skid row, across the street, reboarded the train, and described the Nickel Capital in his article as “a whore in a hovel.” Whatever else it may have represented, to Sudburians the city meant home, and they were fiercely proud of the place, jokes, insults, and all. But it stung.

  Further confounding the city’s image improvement efforts was a widely covered visit by the Apollo astronauts shortly before their successful mission to the moon. The true purpose for their visit: to study “shatter cones,” a rare geological formation NASA scientists expected the first human lunar landers to find on the moon. (Shatter cones were the result of asteroid collisions, which earth scientists were coming to believe had created the elliptically-shaped crater that was the Sudbury Basin. The same earth-asteroid collision had released such tremendous force that it splintered the earth’s crust all the way down to its core, releasing the earth’s molten mineral-rich magma, which bubbled up through the fissures, thus creating the fantastic Sudbury ore body.) But here, in Sudbury’s lunar landscape, were honest-to-God astronauts, attired in space suits, preparing for their imminent journey to the moon on the one place on earth that most resembled the back of the moon. The cameras rolled, the Apollo astronauts dutifully posed for their photo-op amidst Sudbury’s barren black rock. Seeing was believing. The inconvenient truth behind the training mission simply didn’t fit into a ten second sound-bite or a television news reporter’s fifteen second stand-up or the back of a matchbook. Seeing was believing. And the camera didn’t lie. The damage to Sudbury’s image and reputation was international, incalculable. But Bill Lautenbach and his plucky colleagues in the Planning Department simply refused to throw in the towel. What if Sudbury’s barren landscape could somehow be forced to regenerate itself? Could the liberal application of lime to restore aquatic flora and fauna be somehow replicated on land? The ultimate challenge, as one of Lautenbach’s colleagues would recall years later, was to determine precisely how much lime to apply per given hectare. Too little, and the buffering effect would be nil, and re-vegetation would fail to take place. Too much, and the fledgling vegetation, already stressed by the super-toxicity of the rock upon which the seeds were scattered, would be burned by the lime itself, which was a caustic.

  Lautenbach and his colleagues determined to use Sudbury’s sulphur-damaged landform itself as a test bed—a first there, and perhaps anywhere in the world. They began to mark off test plots on some of the most barren hills—one and a half metre-square grids were measured off and assigned numbers. Helpers were dispatched from City Hall to inspect each plot and carefully remove any sticks or stones that might hinder growth. Varying amounts of lime were assigned to each plot, and carefully recorded. The lime, mixed with a blend of plant seeds believed to be hardy enough to withstand the northern winters and high soil acidity, were scattered by hand on each plot. It was strictly low-tech stuff, but to everyone’s amazement it produced almost immediate—and quite astonishing—results. When the planners arrived the following spring to inspect their test plots they found varying degrees of burgeoning plant life already apparent. It was almost miraculous, and, clearly, liming was the key. It turned out that a light dusting had produced optimum results, which was good; lime was expensive and the area requiring reclamation was vast.

  But a huge challenge remained—how to apply the lime to the barren rock, some of it quite hilly and even remote—loomed over the city?

  Fortunately for the City Hall bureaucrats, the new Regional Municipality of Sudbury administered not only the police and planning departments, but also the Ontario Works program, which meant it was responsible for doling out welfare cheques. Marx’s “reserve army of labour” was pres
sed into service—in return for continued support, they were ordered to manually scatter lime and seeds over the barren Sudbury landscape.

  Willingly or unwillingly, thousands of unemployed Sudburians were told to assemble en masse early in the morning before being herded onto school busses which delivered them to a preordained site somewhere high atop the black hills that loomed over the city, bulking large like the backs of so many beached whales.

  And so began “the re-greening of Sudbury,” an audacious scheme to re-vegetate the city’s landform, and to rehabilitate its terrible public image. An aerial view of that morning would have revealed a few dozen humans moving about on the lumpy crests of the bulky black hillocks overlooking the city, interspersed with unmoving white shapes that stood out in stark relief against the black rock. These last were, in fact, bags of lime that had been spotted over the hills in roughly the proportion needed to properly neutralize the acidity in a given area.

  There was some urgency to the swarm of human activity on the hilltops. Lautenbach guesstimated—based partly on his knowledge of the region’s weather patterns and partly on common sense—that there was a narrow optimal window for the scattering of lime and seed in summer, between the end of the spring rains some time in June and the start of the fall rains in August or September, either of which might wash away both seeds and lime on rock that was so bald and exposed that even the slightest precipitation could wash away the seeds before they had the chance to germinate. Indeed, severe erosion was a characteristic of Sudbury’s sulphur-damaged landscape. This schedule dictated that the toiling reserve army of labour was pressed into service under the blazing heat of the July sun, which baked so much heat into the absorbent black rock that it became hot enough to melt shoe leather. These nameless, faceless individuals, who remain so to this day, are the true heroes of the Sudbury re-greening initiative, though the city’s politicians (the same men who had upbraided the fiery Harry Wardell for the Sudbury MPP’s blistering speeches excoriating both Inco and the provincial government for their monstrous abuse of the Sudbury environment in the first place) would all be eager enough to junket south to Rio to accept prestigious awards at the United Nations Conference on Climate and Economic Development, otherwise known as “the Earth Summit” in 1992.

  By then the efforts of those anonymous toilers would come to be recognized as an unalloyed triumph of global, even epical, proportions after the following events had occurred on the black hilltops in rapid succession: the hardy, climate- and acid-resistant grasses seeded took root, creating a lush green mat that was renewed annually by the spring freshets; encouraged by this early, almost immediate, success, thousands of volunteers would fan out across the land to plant millions of trees, which would themselves seem to flourish, almost at once, creating a riotous, leafy jumble of understory that would, over the course of a few seasons grow into stately, mature shade trees.

  And so, with not a small amount of human agency, the first scrubby growth Jake witnessed in that rock cut would soon see the penetration of the great Canadian Boreal Forest into the City of Sudbury, over the great rocky interstices that jutted into the urban core like so many lumpy fingers.

  Following the rape of the Amazonian Rain Forest by impoverished practitioners of slash-and-burn agriculture, the Canadian Boreal had become the largest expanse of contiguous forest in the world, a vast living thing that extended in its immensity from Quebec and Ontario, through the Prairies, over the Rockies, and into the mountains of British Columbia, and it returned now into the heart of the Sudbury Basin with a vengeance, and with the orderly, stately precision of the natural world: the lesser hardwoods, more resistant to climatic and acidic stresses, came first—the coppiced birches and poplar, leggy willows, tag alder, Manitoba maple and then, gradually, the conifers—black spruce, blue spruce, cedars, and the white, red and jack-pines, which had once thickly studded the area, and whose relic stumps can still be observed in the bush even now.

  Oh, but it was a marvellous thing to be a part of—to age in place—in this place, and, maturing, to witness the return of the Boreal. Spring was always the best, because you knew you were experiencing not one rebirth, but two. It was the return of green, growing things, that annual miracle, yes, but also the slow, steady advancing thing, a second, even greater miracle, the Return of the Boreal. In the whole long history of the human race, few ever get to see such a thing, the wonderful, unpredictable unexpected resiliency of Mother Nature. Because eventually that was all that it was. The human interventions—the liming, the scattering of seeds, the tree planting—was quickly outmoded by the natural order and momentum of autonomous regeneration. The seeds of the living flora were soon propagated by the small creatures who found refuge in the encroaching dense cover of the natural world. The black cap chickadees, the voles, the field mice, all advanced the Boreal and were in turn advanced by it.

  But still all was not well. This was no Walt Disney World after all, for lurking unseen beneath the newly verdant veneer there still remained the most toxic residue of them all—a build-up of heavy metal depositions—mercury, cadmium, lead, mostly—that had accumulated over a century (the first ore was hoisted in Sudbury in 1885). Unlike sulphur dioxide gas, these especially nasty by-products of the nickel smelting process were emitted as particulates, or fine particles with the consistency of dust, and were not wafted thousands of miles away by the jet stream, and thus rendered harmless to the local environment. Instead, the heavy metals succumbed to the pull of gravity, falling back to earth within a few mile radius of the smelter, where they remained, in highly lethal concentrations, as a sub-soil layer beneath the lime, seeds, and grass that seemed to sugar-coat the once black rock.

  As a result, the newly generated vegetation, while lovely to look at, was not at all healthy, but highly stressed, vulnerable to soil acidity, which remained high, and to the vagaries of the Sudbury climate, its short growing seasons, and, as we have seen, its brutal winters. Tissue samples of the local flora analyzed by researchers at the city’s Laurentian University would confirm their worst fears—present in the roots, branches and leaves of the returning Boreal were staggeringly high levels of lethal heavy metals which had been absorbed by root systems and then travelled upward and outward to the branches and leaves of the deciduous vegetation, whose fallen leaves, composted over many years on the forest floor, would eventually decompose into humus, creating fresh, loamy topsoil that would finally bury the harmful heavy metals deeply enough that they would no longer pose a hazard. How long would this take? Generations, even many decades? No one knew, but it would have been fatuous to believe that Mother Nature, for all her marvellous resiliency could have been truly remediated from a century of greed and often-malicious neglect by simply scattering lime and a few seeds over the landscape.

  A big part of the problem was, and always had been, absentee ownership. The first investors in the Sudbury mining play had not been Canadians at all, but Americans—a brace of wealthy Cleveland industrialists who little knew—or cared—what environmental devastation their nickel smelting operation created for Sudbury and it earliest inhabitants. But when word reached Sudbury that one of the Cleveland grandees had sued an Ohio railroad company because its locomotives were belching fumes and soot over the back garden of his mansion the irony was not lost on bemused Sudburians.

  In one essential for all life, at least, Sudbury’s natural environment was not lacking: thanks to generous levels of annual rainfall and an abundant snowpack, fresh water was both reliable and ubiquitous. As a result, groundwater was present in copious quantities and so, absent sulphur, the Sudbury Basin’s natural tendency was toward a profusion of verdure.

  Surface water was present in such plenitude in the form of fresh water lakes, in fact, that Lautenbach’s Planning Department once observed, only half in jest, that Sudbury was one of the few cities on earth with sufficient shore line that every household in the place could enjoy its own lake frontage.

 
Despite everything, however, Sudbury’s blighted image was destined to linger. Its reputation as a bare-knuckled bruiser beer and hockey town would also last, even after that reality, too, had begun to fade, not least because of the titanic labour battles fought here. They weren’t a revolution. But they came close, most notably for a group of strike participants whose meeting was about to get underway.

  * * *

  *The story of the Superstack is told in The Insatiable Maw, Volume 2 of the Nickel Range Trilogy.

  21

  The Wives, Embattled

  Could it be that, not so long ago, this group had indulged in a group hug?

  The community organizer pondered this sorrowfully as her beloved Wives group limped into the spring. They were on the verge of splitting, acrimoniously, irrevocably. Things had gotten so bad in the meetings that she’d had to abandon the consensual approach to decision-making so dear to her. Decision-making was now, often as not, conflict resolution, and the conflicts were real, lacerating, vituperative affairs, spiteful and ugly, that threatened to split the group down the middle. As the person most often in the chair, she had watched, powerless, as things spun out of control again and again. They were all on the verge of nervous exhaustion, sick at heart by the grinding poverty of the strike, but the group’s dynamic had assumed a conflictual life of its own, breaking along generational lines that pitted a more traditional woman’s role against a more activist, feminist view. Whatever their ages, the community organizer knew, the cleavage stemmed from a sense of profound impotence. To the older women, perhaps, their inability to help support the family financially was a long-established matter, a social custom, almost. They had long since come to accept that their role was in the home with their husbands the principal breadwinners. But the younger women chafed under this timeworn convention, and the simmering differences broke into roiling, difficult conflict again and again. The younger women were frustrated by the absolute lack of decent work for women in the Sudbury economy. In another sense money—and the nature of the Wives’ organization in relation to the Local Union—had been a flashpoint almost from the beginning of the strike, when, on a bitterly cold and windy November morning, the Wives had unilaterally decided to appear on a fundraising drive at the Falconbridge plant gates. Despite both the frostiness of the morning and the fraught historical relationship between the striking Steelworkers and the workers at Falconbridge, who had voted to remain members of the old Mine Mill Union when the Steelworkers had raided, and nearly decimated Mine Mill, the Wives were warmly greeted at the gates, and the fundraising effort had proved a roaring success.