EclecticLip

I’ve been contacting folks from various sectors in the past couple months to get a better understanding of what authentic sustainability implies.  Having started correspondences with folks in manufacturing, I recently turned to mining.  And so it was that I had lunch last week with a friend of a friend — or technically, an acquaintance of an acquaintance — with the purpose of learning about the environmental considerations (or lack thereof) in mining nowadays.  Somewhere along the way, we got sidetracked and at one point wound up discussing the difficulties early Mahayana Buddhist missionairies had translating their sutras from Sanskrit to Chinese, given that the former is an alphabetic Indo-European language and the latter, pictographic Sino-Tibetan.  I can only imagine how much they struggled with chopsticks…

Turns out he’d majored in Sanskrit and minored in (classical) Chinese back in the day.  As you might imagine, he had noooooo idea about technical matters, but gave me the names of several folks who do know that stuff, to follow up with.  He paid for lunch too, which was great; though if he’d told me in advance, I’d've ordered dessert. 

I did find out that a mid-nineties American poll ranked mining companies even lower than tobacco companies in public perception — and that was fifteen years of environmental devastation ago!  Also, Rio Tinto Alcan (generally regarded as one of the world’s most progressive miners nowadays, they even got kudos from Jared Diamond in Collapse) takes its name from a region in southern Spain, where mining has gone on since Gilgamesh wrestled Enkidu in ancient Sumeria.  (In fairness to Enkidu, Gilgamesh was an unwelcome wedding crasher.)  The Tinto River is so acidic that after the medieval Arabs discovered sulfuric acid, they named the Tinto the “river of vitriol” in its honour.  Extremophile microbes are actually responsible for the acidity, which drops the river pH down to 2.0 — three times as acidic as Coca-Cola!  (Coke has a pH of 2.5, but pH being a logarithmic measure, a pH change of 1 unit represents a tenfold acidity difference, and 0.5 units a roughly threefold difference.)

That said, we who recoil most at scabrous mine sites — open sores on the world’s natural splendour — are generally the greatest recipients of their bounty, through our laptops, iPods, autos — even our electrical wiring and indoor plumbing.  To misquote Al Gore, it’s an irritating truth.

Last weekend, we ventured to Salt Spring Island.  Though Canadian, it has strong American ties, having been a haven for American peaceniks in the 1960’s … but also a refuge for African-Americans escaping racism in 1850’s California.  Many Hawaiians also settled there in the 1800’s, all of which means it’d be the perfect site for a future Obama family reunion. 

Aya didn’t want to fly in a float plane, so we took the ferry.  We made landfall seven hours and five minutes after leaving the apartment, clocking up an average speed trip of… nine-point-five km per hour, or half the speed of the guy who won the Vancouver Marathon the other week.  On the bright side, I got to catch up on some reading — so much so, that I ran out of book before I ran out of time.

We stayed in Ganges, which, as befits any small town (the town centre could easily fit inside Metrotown) has some quirk in its character.  For one, our hotel had an attached farm.  No roosters, though, to our relief.    The Salt Spring Saturday market, which looked much the same as any other, except for the preponderance of hemp products on sale.  We perused the Italian deli, whose magazine collection included a few copies of Bakers’ Journal (”official magazine of the BC Baking Industry” or some such), and sticking with the Italian theme, one of the soap shops sold bath crystals as “body gelato” — a clever rebranding.  Maybe not as ingenious as when Marlboro’s went from women’s cigarette (”Mild as May”) to cowboy’s cancer-stick (”Marlboro Country”) but clever none the less.  Oh, and blue used to be a baby girl colour, too. 

The teenaged attendant at one of the tea retailers helped us select a couple blends they’d discovered at the World Tea Expo, held every year in that world-reknown tea capital, Vegas.  He then turned his attention back to what appeared to be Star Wars: Force Unleashed, dispatching some foes with bloodlusting gusto.

A few years back, some enterprising souls at the Chamber of Commerce came up with the idea of issuing a local currency, featuring the work of area artists.  So the Salt Spring Island Monetary Fund was formed, and issued a series of bills backed 80% by Canadian dollars and 20% by gold.  Essentially gift certificates, they figure it’s kept millions of dollars on the island, as tourists bring the bills back as novelties to show their friends, and never wind up spending them on the island.  I only got $10 worth, myself. 

Demand for the $50 and $100 Salt Spring Dollar bills comes almost exclusively from numismatists, or coin-collectors (correction: rich coin-collectors).  The SSIMF recently released a $50 half-ounce silver coin with a killer (whale) design, all the better to exploit those rubes (correction: wealthy rubes).     At today’s prices, that’s an entire eight dollars of silver.  Adding in two bucks of processing and other costs — surely an overestimate — and the SSIMF’s profit margin is a sweet 400%.

Ninety-plus-percent of businesses on the island accept the bills — even the banks (!) — meaning it’s a fully functioning local currency.  You can presumably use it on the island’s two taxicabs, and bus service.  (The latter consists of a bus.)  But lest any of you entrepreneurial types perceive a business opportunity in photocopying knock-off Salt Spring Island Dollar bills, they do in fact have holograms and the like.