Allan Casey

Stirring the Lakes

Allan Casey wonders if most Canadians fully recognize the significance of lakes to our national culture and state of mind. Early in his first book, aptly titled Lakeland, the Saskatoon journalist and boat-builder proposes that the recreational use of lakes is ‘the national pastime’, one that forms part of the Canadian collective unconscious.

Once it is taken into account that roughly sixty percent of all lakes in the world are found in Canada, suddenly it seems logical that perhaps one of the true foundations for our national identity is our deep and quiet connection to inland waters.

It is provocative to find an author energized by the challenge of thinking of the country from a new perspective. “In so many ways Canada is still an undiscovered country,” Casey writes. “Though we have mapped every inch of it from space, we have hardly begun to gather the truth of this land we have caught in a great lasso of borders and called a nation. It is a delightful thing to be reminded that your own country is still young and innocent, the work of imagining it still not fully done.”

Casey suggests that there is a distinctive Canadian spirituality in evidence in our lake culture. This spirituality is deep-rooted but rarely acknowledged or articulated. What makes the book most effective is the way in which the author introduces a wide cast of characters nationwide that have formed profound attachments to the lakes where they live, work and play. Casey puts it this way: “I describe people in the book that have had their connection to some lake severed for some reason, through circumstances, and suddenly they start to realize what a ‘lakescape’ means to them personally. So yes, it’s very spiritual, but it’s also deeply unconscious, not an overt kind of spirituality that you can get down at a church or a temple.”

The forty-eight year old author takes readers to lakes across the country, from Lake Okanagan in British Columbia to the ‘ponds’ of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. Alongside points of historical detail and geographic interest, Casey examines some of the environmental difficulties that trouble many of these waters. One of the most fascinating chapters is called ‘The Citizen Ship of Science’. It focusses on the problems facing Lake Winnipeg, specifically the development and expansion of deoxygenated zones. We learn that neither the Department of Fisheries and Oceans nor Environment Canada officially takes responsibility for the health of Lake Winnipeg. Unbelievably three decades elapsed without any agency conducting substantial research into the vitality of the water.

Frustrated by the situation, a group of scientists from Fisheries and Oceans decided to take matters into their own hands, forming the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium. Casey describes how the scientists enlisted assistance from people living and working along the shoreline, including cottagers, commercial fishers, pig farmers, First Nations band councils, and citizens from a variety of municipalities. The immediate goal was just to gain a better picture of what was happening in the water by taking samples and analyzing them to help initiate and promote stewardship initiatives. According to Casey, the rise of this type of ‘citizen science’ is an interesting development and cause for optimism. It demonstrates the desire of concerned Canadians to take action in the face of government lethargy.

Perhaps there is some symmetry between our desire to protect the diversity of life that exists beneath the surfaces of the lakes and our desire to guard what is most central to our character as Canadian citizens.

In the following interview, Allan Casey talks about the spirituality of lake culture in Canada, the rise of ‘citizen science’, and the importance of figuring out how to ensure that new generations have access to wilderness areas. The conversation begins the same way as the book. The author reflects on a moment many years ago when he was lying on a beach with his fiancée on the Greek island of Santorini. All of a sudden he felt homesick and declared to his bride-to-be that he wanted to leave and return to his family cabin at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan. That moment kicked off a long process of discovery for Casey in which his appreciation of the wonders of the Canadian environment expanded gradually over many years.

CI: The book opens with a story of your own homesickness, a desire to cut short a vacation in the Greek Islands in order to return to your family cabin at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan. You write that, once back home, you felt ‘a great sense of belonging’. In that moment in Santorini, what startled you to make you suddenly feel the need to head home?

AC: Well, I don’t know if I was startled, but you know how it is – sometimes you need to go to the other side of the world to really get sight of what you’ve got at home. I think it happens to Canadians especially a lot. We go to other countries and we see how crowded it is, perhaps how hemmed in nature is in other countries, and we begin to understand, the first time we travel, the scale of this country. It is just unimaginably large by most people’s standards. I would hazard a guess that that is a common Canadian experience to have that happen the first time you go abroad. I was eighteen or nineteen maybe when I was on that beach, and you take a whole lot for granted, you know? Looking back on it, it’s not surprising. I chalked it up to homesickness at the time, but over time you put that kind of experience in perspective. I realized it was the landscape itself that was drawing me. It had to be because the person that I cared about the most was right with me. That was the beginning of a long process, I think, of appreciating this land, my home and native land, and it goes on today. I appreciate it on deeper levels all the time.

CI: Throughout the book there is an interesting tension between your emphasis on scientific explanations for the challenges facing lake ecosystems across Canada and also a spiritual dimension to your thoughts on nature. It struck me, as I read the book, that as essential as it is to have solid empirical evidence and data to identify environmental problems and potential solutions, it may be impossible to lessen the harm that we inflict on nature without having some renewed sense of reverence for it. Have you found in your travels that there is some sort of homegrown Canadian spirituality around our lakes?

AC: You’re touching on a few different things at the same time there: science versus spirituality, and is there a Canadian spirituality around the land – that’s really the question, isn’t it? I think the answer, when talking about whether there is spirituality around this Canadian landscape, I think yeah, sure there is, but that doesn’t mean we’re real conscious about it. Quite the opposite! I argue in the book that it’s often a very deeply unconscious process.

That’s why lakes are a very shadowy kind of backdrop in our literature, but they never take centre stage. If you look at the symbolism of a lake, like all water, it’s a symbol of the unconscious itself. There are these stirrings underneath the surface that you can’t really see but you know that there is life there. Lakes symbolize the unconscious, and we’re very unconscious about them in our uses of them in Canada. We love them. We like to go to them. The using of lakes for pleasure is an experience that a lot of Canadians can relate to. Are we terribly conscious about it? Maybe not so much, you know? On the other side of the world on a beach in Santorini, maybe that jogs your consciousness. I describe people in the book that have had their connection to some lake severed for some reason, through circumstances, and suddenly they start to realize what a ‘lakescape’ means to them personally. So yes, it’s very spiritual, but it’s also deeply unconscious, not an overt kind of spirituality that you can get down at a church or a temple.

CI: You mention this idea of the lakes as a reflection of our unconscious thoughts and desires. There is a section early in the book where you even throw in a mention of Carl Jung and the idea of the ‘collective unconscious’. Just out of curiosity, do you have a bit of a background in philosophy and psychology? It shines through in several places in the book.

AC: I’m not sure if I should feel complimented by that or feel like a charlatan! I have no background in psychology or philosophy. But the kind of writing that this book is, I think right now this book is fitting into this category called ‘creative non-fiction’. I think all non-fiction that’s good is pretty creative, but anyway it’s this new label, and I think sometimes what people mean by that is you get to stir around a bit of the look of the unconscious in the work that you are doing. Along the way of writing about more mundane things or scientific things, you can take the reader, step aside with the reader, and say ‘hey, let’s look at the unconscious meanings of these things and see if that sheds some light’. That is always fun to do. It’s a great liberty to take. It teaches us different things. We can have a very practical understanding of something, but if we combine that with something subconscious, something maybe spiritual or psychological, you see it in a whole new way.

CI: One phrase that pops up often in the book is ‘proximate wilderness’, that bit of nature that is within easy reach from our cities and towns. You lament that increasingly the emphasis is put on buying up parcels of land and colonizing the lakefronts and the woods, and not merely visiting them. This is a quote from you: “we risk raising the first generation of Canadian children to grow up without any particular attachment to wilderness because their families cannot afford membership.” What ideas out there have you found most compelling to try to keep the ‘proximate wilderness’ open to as many people as possible, particularly the young?

AC: Well I think that money and the cost of that access is what has really changed. The lakes haven’t gotten up and moved. We’ve thrown a kind of fence around them. Sometimes it’s a literal fence – often it’s a literal fence – and sometimes it’s this weird kind of fence – it’s a set of expectations. It used to be that a family could pile into the proverbial sixties station wagon and make a weekend or a day trip to a lake, and have some fairly low budget fun, and that was considered just fine. I think now when you go out there, and when you’re surrounded by mansions and powerboats that are worth an average Canadian family’s annual income, you feel out of place sometimes. That proverbial station wagon starts to look just not good enough!

The proximate wilderness – it’s the near wilderness. I think it’s an overlooked aspect of the wilderness. There are threats to the Nahanni and the Arctic, a lot of places that Canadians care about but they are probably not going to see. It’s the slice of wilderness that they can see that is really quite important. It’s the one that we actually interact with and we quite take it for granted! We’ve all accepted that this very accessible and lovely wilderness that you can still access from virtually any populated area in Canada, you can access it quite easily in distance but we’ve accepted that it’s kind of become a gated community. The only key to get in there is money. That’s a threat to a relationship with nature that say an inner city kid here in Saskatoon might have. It’s just less likely that they’re going to get access to the lake.

CI: In your chapter on Ajawaan Lake in Saskatchewan you make some intriguing statements on national parks in Canada. I thought that was interesting and I wanted to touch on that, on what the role of the parks should be. You note that, in some ways, parks promote the uses of nature that they are meant to stand against, just because the land around them becomes valuable for people to purchase and build on. How do you envision the role of national parks in Canada moving forward? What do you think would be the ideal circumstances?

AC: Well, I don’t want to derail the question, but I’ve got to be careful. I don’t want to speak about national parks and what they ought to be because that’s quite outside of what I know and what I talk about in the book. I do know what the future is of parks, and what their trends are; again, that’s a little bit outside what I actually put in the book. … I just don’t want to start riffing on that topic.

How can we come at it? I can certainly talk about – and this is definitely my approach in the book – I can certainly talk to you about the limitations of parks as we’re using them now. It’s just that they are honourable. They are honourable institutions. We have some of the oldest national parks in the world here in Canada, but people have looked around, me included, and said ‘hey, if we’re doing just absolutely the right things and maintaining this little block of thirty miles by fifty miles of Prince Albert National Park, for example, in its pristine and untouched state, it sort of gives people all around the boundary of the park permission to act another way outside the park.’ It’s kind of like ‘well, that’s protected, I can act with impunity out here, outside the boundaries.’ If you look around the country, that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s happening.

Parks right now are up on this. They know this stuff as well as I do. They have given up the fight to operate in the proximate zone. They’re not trying to save the proximate wilderness for us Canadians anymore because they can’t afford the real estate prices! Their strategy is now to move way, way beyond into the true wilderness, and start saving parcels of land on the shore of Hudson Bay or in the high Arctic and places like that – and that’s laudable as well, that’s great, but they’ve washed their hands of the proximate wilderness. Frankly they’ve kind of given up on it. That leaves it in whose hands? Well, it’s in your hands and it’s in my hands. People have to reassess their values in the proximate wilderness. We all as a community, or as a bunch of communities, have to come up with a different set of values that will protect those places. We’ve got to do it ourselves.

CI: One chapter that I found especially interesting is the one called ‘The Citizen Ship of Science’, which focusses on Lake Winnipeg. There are a lot of facts in that chapter about that lake that I think most readers would find surprising, from the sheer size of the watershed to the fact that funding for research into the problems with the lake has been scarce, the funding has been scarce. At the end of the chapter, after outlining a lot of problems in the lake, including the threat of deoxygenated areas, you strike an optimistic note because of the potential of the sort of ‘citizen science’ undertaken by the ‘Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium’. I was just curious about this idea of ‘citizen science’. What are the main reasons for your optimism on that front?

AC: Yeah, that’s right, you do have to rationalize your optimism in the face of some of this stuff, which can start to look pretty bleak! Number one, I think I’m optimistic because the scientists that I met there remain optimistic. They’re excited about the contribution of citizens to their work, the injection of spirit and spark and passion that it has brought to Lake Winnipeg.

Lake Winnipeg has a series of problems that are exactly the same as the series of problems that overtook the Great Lakes in the sixties and were identified there. In turn, lots of ocean bays and other waterways around the world have the same set of problems, so it’s really nothing new. It’s kind of heartbreaking. It feels like we’re repeating an old mistake over and over again. What I think is exciting, and what I’m optimistic about in Lake Winnipeg, is that citizens are just not waiting anymore for governments to do stewardship for them. They realize that it can’t be a finger-pointing thing. You cannot assign easy blame. You can’t wait for Ottawa, or in this case Winnipeg, to save us from ourselves. We’ve got to do it.

The money for the science that is getting done there isn’t enough, but it’s coming from a real exciting source: citizens! This whole term ‘citizen science’ is interesting because I thought I had invented the term when I wrote the book. It’s cropped up all over the place now. You see it all over the internet. I’m working with Saskatchewan writer Trevor Herriot, who lots of people will know. He is real excited about citizen science. It doesn’t matter where the term comes from. It’s just exciting that people want to participate in the actual doing and managing of science.

I don’t want to take you too far away from your question, but citizen science is a way of involving people in nature and letting them feel like they are actually doing something meaningful – and they are doing something meaningful. It’s a great thing to mail off ten bucks to a cause, but to go out and help some working scientists collect their data, be a volunteer field worker for them on a Saturday, that is something else again. It’s quite exciting and there’s a lot of that going on.

CI: It is an interesting idea. In Manitoba this was something that was kicked off by Mike Stainton and his colleagues from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Is that something that they just stimulated by going door-to-door in neighbourhoods around the lake, or is it something that happened through schools? How does something like that even get started?

AC: I think it started with them because they’re all government scientists, the guys in that chapter, but when they decided to actually get working on Lake Winnipeg, they didn’t do it through the office. They realized that their own department, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, was just never going to do anything about the problems in that lake. They were frantic about it. So they said, ‘let’s work on it on the weekend. Let’s start our own group’. They are officially government scientists when they’re at work, but it wasn’t in that capacity that they decided to ride to the rescue of Lake Winnipeg. It was completely in their capacity as citizens. I think they led by example. I think when Aboriginal groups on the shore saw that they were excited about it. It was ‘hey, these white-hat scientists are not just swooping in, doing something ineffective, and then leaving again. They are here as fellow citizens’.

I think that empowered a lot of people to join in. Money is part of it. Money is sort of everything in a way. These citizen groups do contribute money. I’m not suggesting that just going out and helping them have a field day is all that’s required. Yeah, money is required, for sure, but I think those guys led by example.

CI: Near the heart of the book there is a section outlining your journey to the lakes of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. I thought that chapter was intriguing and a little different from the others in the sense that you didn’t turn up the environmental hazards that you reveal in other chapters, and at the end you come to the revelation that Canada is really ‘Lakeland’, that the history of the country is truly written around all the shorelines, big and small. I’m always interested by all things Newfoundland – what were you initially hoping to find when you travelled there?

AC: Like most places, I tried to go with an open mind and not a real big agenda. There were some obvious issues that I knew were going to crop up here or there. My mind was pretty open. I guess what intrigues me about nature and about the country are commonalities more than exotica. It’s wonderful to travel to the tropics and see a pretty bird with lots of colourful feathers that you don’t see in Canada, but I’m fascinated by going five time zones and seeing Saskatoon berries, seeing birch trees that I’m familiar with, seeing familiar Canada geese – to me, those things are touchstones. It’s the commonalities that link us together. Going to Newfoundland, I wanted to see if those things exist. I was ready to have this whole concept of mine, of ‘Lakeland’, not really stand up, but it did stand up by being in Newfoundland.

CI: In the epilogue to the book, where you describe the back-and-forth in your own mind about what to do with the family place at Emma Lake, the decision ultimately comes to fight for the preservation of the area as best you can, especially because your children don’t want the place to go and you don’t want to deny them that experience of coming back and having the same sort of revelations that you had a generation previously. At the same time there are people who would read the book, and some of the concerns that you outline in the book, and argue that there is not really anything to fight against, that this is just part of our domain to be able to build along the lakes. What has the response been like to the book?

AC: Hmmm, nothing to fight against – in a way, that’s right. We’re talking about what happens on private property. You can’t make rules about the stuff that I’m talking about in the book. It’s a matter of looking inward and asking ‘what do you need’ versus ‘what do you want’. The whole point of going to lakes for many people much of the time is to have an experience of living simply. If that gets turned into a five thousand square foot house then I think you have to start to ask yourself a bunch of questions. It’s not just about the lakefront in Canada. We have to ask ourselves that question on a much broader scale than ‘Lakeland’ Canada. We have to ask ourselves those kinds of questions on a global scale.

It strikes me that ‘Lakeland’ is a very forgiving place to go and practice some sustainability, some actual reduction of footprint. Give it a try at the lake because we have a much bigger task ahead of us. It would feel kind of a modest demand. I’m really not preaching to the choir in this book. I’m really trying to nudge people, upper-middle class people I think they would like to call themselves, into thinking just a little bit more deeply about their actions. Because it’s at the lake, where we go to experience its beauty, for its non-mechanized reality, then maybe they are going to be a bit more open to it. I hope they are.

In the book I kind of make a brag, I guess, or dare myself now that I have written this book and I still have to do something. I still have to be a citizen at Emma Lake, my little corner of Lakeland, and do something about it. Now that the book has ended and the process of doing the book is behind me, I’m getting involved with councilors up there and the local advisory committees, the stewardship councils, the kind of people that I wrote about in other parts of Canada. Now I’m doing that, and that’s great. I think that’s what we’ve got to do.

Date of Interview: 04/15/2010
Location: On the phone from Saskatoon, SK
Link: www.allancasey.ca