There is no Empty Land
There is no denying it, syrup season is here.
The commercial makers and the fancy amateurs with their lines and pumps have been all set for a while. They are ready to flip the switch to begin pulling sap from the bush, gather and tip it into the reverse osmosis machine, before boiling and filtering the early, light syrup.
The sap run is a focal point of the late winter/early spring transition for some of us in this part of the world, but of course it is only one of thousands of processes that mark the most dramatic change of seasons we experience, here and elsewhere.
All of this stands in contrast to the way industrial processes look at the world, as a means to an end, a passage to something else.
The proposed Alto corridor is a dramatic case in point. In its utilitarian glory, it aims to create a 60 metre-wide straight line, from Ottawa to Peterborough in our region.
The political process that has roiled some of our communities in recent weeks, and the internal process Alto will undertake after that, is aimed at finding the emptiest land, the best and straightest line through, so a highly engineered piece of technology can be installed to travel at high speed through the landscape as it if was somewhere in space and not on land. In order for the train to work, the grade needs to be just so, the turns just so.
But land is not empty, it is full of life. This is the case in the villages and farms and trails and parklands in South Frontenac, in the forests and lakes and swamps in Central Frontenac, and in the Frontenac Parklands and hunting camps and iconic lakes in North Frontenac.
There is no way to build this rail line without having an impact on the way the land within and around the rail line functions, and the people, and wildlife, who live on that land.
No one seems to know with any certainty what route Alto will choose, but if the route running a bit north of 7 is chosen, it could very well run through a number of the most productive sugar bushes in Lanark and Frontenac County.
These sugar farms, and the Wheelers and Temples and Gemmils and Conboys who run them, are examples of the application of labour and technology, developed over years and decades, to extract and process the sap that is the lifeblood of sugar maples, into a commercial product.
The families who have developed these bushes operate in the same world as the people who put together the high-speed rail process, the world of dollars and sense, inputs and expenditures and returns, but with a couple of differences. For one thing, the maple business is immediate. Putting in a new reverse osmosis system costs money up front, and saves on boiling time which makes syrup cheaper to produce over time, so calculations on return on investment are made, based on real data and expectations about future costs and pricing.
Alto's calculations are longer term, speculative, and based on factors that are pretty fuzzy.
The sap runs every year. The maples have adapted, so far, to warm and cold winters alike.
In comparison, Alto is, at this point, merely an idea, based on a set of assumptions and projections about population growth and travel patterns that have not even been peer reviewed, much less tested by the cold reality of rock and snow, in maple country.
You can't build a railway line between Ottawa and Peterborough without cutting down some maple trees, and uprooting some people in the process.
