CBC's "The Current" visits Newfoundland and Labrador

The morning public affairs show on CBC Radio One is uniformly excellent.

Today "The Current" talked about the changes in the lifestyle of people in Newfoundland and Labrador resulting from the collapse of oil, gas, and mining revenues. Not exactly unprecedented, that collapse, and the resulting economic uncertaintly in NL has happened time and again over the last 500 years. Newfoundlanders move to where the jobs are, as best they can.

But they don't forget home, and many of them return for the short term or the long.

One younger Newfoundlander quoted John Crosby, a past prominent NL politician of national stature: "You can tell the Newfoundlanders in heaven. They are the ones who want to go home." I laughed and laughed -- that quip brought Crosby back to life.

I also noticed that the famous Newfoundland dialects seem to be fading out -- if the young and middle-aged interviewees are typical

Notes and pictures from L'anse aux Meadows, August 2010

Darrell Markewitz, the leader of the DARC Reenactment last month at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland -- a re-creation of activities at the Vinland Viking landing site now commemorated by a national historical park -- Darrell, I say, has posted pictures and notes at his blog, Hammered Out Bits which will give you some idea of the site, the landscape, and the activities.   Here are three pictures to tempt you to go see the rest.

Dean Bavington's Managed Annihilation is out!

Details here and here.

Upcoming book from Dean Bavington

Dean Bavington is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental History at Nipissing University. I expect his first book, from University of British Columbia Press in May, to have a big impact on resource debates.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse
Dean L.Y. Bavington

The Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery was once the most successful commercial ground fishery in the world. When it collapsed in 1992, fishermen, scholars, and scientists pointed to failures in management such as uncontrolled harvesting as likely culprits. Managed Annihilation makes the case that the idea of natural resource management itself was the problem. The collapse occurred when the fisheries were state managed and still, nearly two decades later, there is no recovery in sight. Although the collapse raised doubts among policy-makers about their ability to understand, predict, and control nature, their ultimate goal of control through management has not wavered – it has simply been transferred from wild fish to fishermen and farmed cod.

Unlike other efforts to make sense of the tragedy of the commons of the northern cod fishery and its halting recovery, Bavington calls into question the very premise of management and managerial ecology and offers a critical explanation that seeks to uncover alternatives obscured by this dominant way of relating to nature.
– Bonnie McCay, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University