I'm a vegetarian, and have been for several years. I see no reason to start eating meat, but I don't necessarily have a problem with anyone who does (unless they are trying to convince me to). I understand vegetarianism can be more unhealthy and more unethical than meat eating.
But I do, ultimately, believe in my own vegetarianism. Going to university, vegetarianism is often par for the course, and a student has little to no trouble finding meat-free products. A big city, too, is easy for vegetarians - as long as there is a Taiwanese immigrant or two who sets up an all-vegetarian restaurant, an Indian immigrant community, or a falafel place somewhere in the area, even the celiac vegans will find food.
North Battleford, on the other hand, does not offer quite as many options to vegetarians.
When I first moved here, this was one of the many reasons I considered myself to be a "city person." A small reason, to be sure, but an important one in that it deals with self-identity. I love the buzz of a city at night, the anonymous crush of people wandering the streets late on a Friday, the buses roaring to and fro. For much of my life, this has been home.
But a strange thing happened when I moved to North Battleford. Against all odds, I started to fall in love with small-town life. Despite there being no nightlife to speak of and few events around town, I found myself busier than I had ever been in a big city.
I still love city life, and love to return for visits. But I'm finding more and more reasons to want to live in a small town. I could devote countless columns to these reasons, but today, I'll focus on what was, to me, a surprising one - the hunting community.
By the hunting community, I am not referring to American tourists who come up to Saskatchewan for a weekend to shoot some animals raised in captivity and have them stuffed and mounted. I am referring to the many hunters still in Saskatchewan who have a deep relationship to the earth around them, cultivated over decades of patiently spent quiet time.
In a big city (and the world is, increasingly, urbanizing), it is difficult to have any connection to nature. I was lucky, growing up across from Edmonton's mostly undeveloped river valley, to climb to unreachable heights on trees, explore secret paths through the forest, and even venture, cautiously, onto the frozen ice in winter. Though city sounds are inescapable, it is still possible to go to places near my house where one cannot see buildings.
But all of my childhood exploration was a far cry from a sustained, developed connection to the natural world. This connection used to be something essential - in an agricultural society, understanding seasons, wildlife, and natural rhythms could mean the difference between a failed and successful crop. But the last century has seen people drastically cut off from the earth that sustains us. Almost everybody, now, relies on supermarkets for food, and most of our products have been produced form such a variety of natural materials that they are essentially untraceable. An iPad, for example, comes from so many factories, assembly lines, and diverse raw materials that it couldn't ever be produced locally anywhere in the world.
Of course, we still rely on the Earth, more now than any other point in human history. Even our so-called artificial products like plastics are ultimately created from petrochemicals - ultimately crushed, fossilized plants and animals.
But along with our increased reliance has come a decreased sensitivity. City life cuts us off from the natural processes and rhythms that sustain us in unexpected ways. Urban agriculture is all but impossible on a large scale in many places - city dwellers do not have the time, arable land, or even the legal right to be self-sustaining. The Battlefords, despite an abundance of large vegetable gardens and large, yappy dogs, do not allow residents to keep their own chickens. Byzantine laws and regulations mean that consumers rarely even know what is in a simple vegetable or cut of meat - whether it has been genetically modified, injected with hormones or antibiotics, sprayed with chemicals - let alone the contents of a food product.
To me, this lack of a connection can only lead to abuse and poor treatment of the earth. If we don't understand, intimately, the importance of all life to our well-being, then we are liable to hurt the whole world for short-term gain. While global warming is one of the most well-documented examples, focusing too much on global warming distracts from the many other ways in which our treatment of the planet has been, often, shockingly callous. A recent story in the news was that scientists were trying to change the rules for naming species, because many around the world are becoming extinct literally faster than they can be named. Humans have also polluted the air (the very definition of a public resource) to outrageous levels. Beijing's air quality, as the worst example, is so bad that it is literally off the charts, according to the U.S. Embassy measurements. In the tar sands, we are trading clean water for oil - a good investment to be sure, but not a moral one.
These are large problems, stemming from economic systems and bureaucratic structures as much as from people. But a part of our callous disregard for the earth undoubtedly comes from our lack of a strong connection to it. Hunters have been so interesting for me to meet because a great hunter (and there are many great hunters here) understands the private lives of animals, the effects of a clear-cut. More fundamentally, a hunter, like a farmer, understands intimately that whatever heights we might collectively soar to as a species, whatever depths we might plumb, we are still dependent on the earth for everything. Make the planet unhealthy, by killing off species, pumping chemicals into the air and burning down forests, and we, ultimately, hurt ourselves. But phrased simply, a great hunter spends enough time away from human civilization to have an accurate picture of what it relies on.
Despite killing wildlife, the best hunters understand this basic fact. We were recently contacted by a hunter lamenting the irresponsible way logging operations have treated local forests. Had he not been in the bush in the first place, he would not have seen the abandoned culverts, pails, and tires left behind. And if he hadn't had an understanding of a forest ecosystem, he might have considered the garbage to be inconsequential.
So here's to hunters, from a vegetarian. Probably the only time that sentence will be published in this newspaper.
