Tree Huggers on Easter Island (updated)

It seems easier to get started this year.
Looking back over our seventeen years in the bush here we can see the dramatic ways our environment has changed.

Nobody had lived here for several years. The small cabin, with all its windows shot out, had been taken over by swallows and mice. A half dozen wrecked vehicles dating back to the fifties, dilapidated outbuildings, and old, weathered garbage strewn throughout.
But aside from the small stain of human's existence, this spot on earth was peace.
We cleaned, patched up the cabin, re-used the wood from the outbuildings, but kept the wrecks around for parts and art.

We're coming out of a very long winter. Spring is here but slow. The lake is still covered with ice. The garlic and parsnips coming up slowly. Fruit trees are showing signs of life. Should be a bountiful season.

Seventeen years ago we camped on the land. For a cool, rainy week in September we relaxed here. The mornings were enveloped in mist. There were hundreds of ducks and geese sliding through the mist, into and out of the reeds that surrounded the small lake. We were going to stake as a place to live. Isolation.
Around the lake there was a mature lodgepole pine, spruce and Douglas fir forest and there was an incredible display of mushrooms. Enchanted. Easy forage for oyster mushrooms, boletes, field and horse mushrooms.There were dozens more we could not identify.

Since then pine beetles and the mills have taken all of the mature forest. Left a few mature firs here and there. The mushrooms, bats and now the moose have mostly disappeared with the forest.
The province has a bounty on wolves. Anyone with a hunting license can shoot a wolf any time.
The science behind the wolf cull is so flawed. It's all about votes and money.

No

doubt we’re are going to burn every drop of oil and burn every pound of coal. A forester once told us, when we were trying to stop the mill from cutting the forest around the land we live on, that there is not a safe stand of trees in Canada and that it’s only a matter of time before they’re all cut.

10% of the world population owns 85% of the world's assets and half of the population of the world owns barely 1%.

Terrorism, fighting for freedom…We haven't seen the worste yet. Blaming it on fundamentalists and extremists while hanging onto our decadence.
You would fight to save yours and who exactly are the extremists.

Our standard of living was built on the backs of slaves.The Conquistadors.
It’s not complicated.

Tree huggers unite but watch your backs

or you’ll get eaten.

Aki and Scott

Our business.
http://www.caribooblades.com/

Reflection

With freezing rain soaking the foot of snow on the ground we are .....“slushed in”.

Trees are falling over from the weight of ice.

I was 36 and Aki was 32. Until then life had been easy. Both coming from middle class families. I had a career in film, Aki as an artist. We knew we could do anything we wanted, how lucky we had been to be born on the planet in the situations we were in.

We both had the same yearning to live the way we live now.

We loaded up the school bus and moved into the bush in the spring of 1997. When the money ran out that fall the camping trip was over. That is when our survival started.

We had our first roast rabbit feast at about this time 12 years ago by candle light and accompanied by our rosehip-bearberry-rice wine.
We had 7 snares, a squirrel pole and 2 bird traps set.
Two chickens, one laying. We kept them at night in an apple box on the porch of our cabin.
Iraq was refusing U.S. weapons inspectors.


Moose everywhere. Wolves were close.
Lots of clear nights. The moon was so bright it was hard to sleep. Aurora Borealis.
The sauna was one of our first projects . We took lots of saunas that winter. Saunas and homemade wine got us through a few winters.

Rabbits - we ate rabbits, rabbit stew, rabbit curry, teriyaki rabbit, hare soup, roast hare.
By the end of the winter we could snare rabbits very effectively. For some reason rabbits seem to want to be caught, we just have to help them a bit.

We skied on the lake, snowshoed, read, painted and wrote. Drank lots of home made wine, hauled water from the lake, hauled and melted snow, cut and split wood, hunted for our food and thought about what we had got ourselves away from. No idea, at the time, where we were heading except that we were tasting freedom…. Just ahead of us. We would run into its dulcet smell, stop to savor its taste and it would disappear.

Sounds like a good time but there were some rough spots.
We both got “fall down couldn’t get back up sick”. It was between -30 and -40 for two weeks. Truck wouldn’t start. Everything was freezing.

One day it went to zero degrees, sun came out. El Nino had kicked in. Within a week or two we were outside in our t-shirts.

Determined we were.

I = E x R and P = E x I

www.caribooblades.com