Conservation
Sydney Steel Corporation
I grew up in Cape Breton. Specifically, my family are from Glace Bay on the south eastern corner of the island. I grew up thinking the pink clouds emanating from the stacks of the steel plant were beautiful. The symbol of the industry that had supported generations of us for more years than I could understand and powered by the coal mined around town. Coal, steel and fish were to Cape Breton what the fiddle is now. I played on a hockey team called the Clippers, great ocean going trading vessels. We played against the Sydney Steelers, or some name like that. Industrial lunch cans, piles of coal, and a fine beautiful black soot that would cover the new snow on the first cold days of winter. Those days when your breath would hang in the air, suspended for a moment. A moment not unlike the industrial moment which had just ended. But we hadn’t noticed it ended. No one told us that coal was cheaper in Mexico nor that great Spanish trawlers were pulling in well past their legal quotas just outside the territorial limit. We heard rumours that the walls of the mines were getting soft, falling apart. That steel was coming to an end. That finishing was coming to an end. But no one would believe it. No one could believe it. The Santa Clause parade was coming up next week. Downtown Glace Bay, with its wooden hand-painted store fronts, beckoned. My breath hung in the air. This could never come to an end. If we only held out breath, this would never have to end.
But then it did.
We lost that place. Loss. This is not nostalgia brought on by the loss of childhood. This is the wakeup call that we collectively received when the we were told that the “Tar Pond,” the collected refuse of 100 years of steel making was a stinking and savage pit of death in the center of town.The loss that occurred when the actual ground started to give way and the streets, houses, and lawns began to fall into old long unused pits.
With the industries now gone it made sense to industrialize the culture. To market to tourists and to mine the imagination of musicians. Cultural industries without noting any irony. The industrialization of the environment led to unexpected and destructive outcomes for us. The expressions of local history, of place, of geographical features, of remembrance, of family, and of rage, were now shoveled into tourist machinery. Is this really unproblematic?
I perform for tourists and make a little extra money. My friends and I still play rock music but trad(itional) music is best for busking. I often feel like I am playing just a little bit country. Showcasing something I wasn’t. Hemming myself in and performing rural while reading Marx and experimenting with electronic music.
Then I heard Elizabeth May speak and learned about the Sierra Club. Conservation, I thought, that is an interesting idea.
I moved away. First with a country band and then a girl. Ottawa became home. I had so many conversations about moving back to Cape Breton. Many ended with a hopeless sigh and another beer. Perhaps.
I’m an ethnomusicologist now. I study music and culture and teach about the popular music industry and conduct research in music education and the impacts of industrialization on human culture. I live in Edmonton, Alberta and watch the industrialization of the northern parts of this beautiful province. I see images of Tar Ponds yet to be named.
The industrialization of music…
The industrialization of natural resources…
Industrialization…
This probably happens to all researchers at some time in their professional life.
One day Dr. Researcher woke up and sat at her desk and realized that she was working on a problem that had occurred to her first when she was a child. Then she couldn’t say what was bothering her. But now she realized that it is a question of
Conservation…
Health…
Sustainability…
Community…
