Watershed Blues

Intermission (4) Spring is coming. Do you remember? In the thick of the winter, encased in ice, is there still a trickle, somewhere, down below?

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This is (so-far) last page of the updated Watershed Blues. If you’re dying to see how it ends, the original version picks up from this point here.

Watershed Blues

Intermission (3)

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Watershed Blues

Intermission (2)

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Watershed Blues

Intermission (1)

Dear Kitchissippi, We have covered your name, Great River – with the name of another Nation – exonym tokenism run amuck. And it’s more than one of colonialism’s casual cruelties — the right to be ignorant. It’s the right to name, to christen, to seize not just the land, but the mind.

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Watershed Blues

#3-4 Consumers need 'green' playgrounds even if the car has conquered transit. Rail is rising again but this only feel like progress if you don't look too far back.

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For what it’s worth, you can read the (near-identical) original version of this comic here, as it appeared in The Leveller newspaper.

Watershed Blues

#3-3

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You can read the original, 1-page version of these last two pages here, which shows how the comic first appeared in The Leveller newspaper.

Watershed Blues

#3-2
Today if it's lucky, an old rail-line is gentrified into a 'multi-use trail.' It might be plaqued and christened, corporate-sponsored, websited…

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Watershed Blues

3-1
In Ottawa, like the rest of the West, we've outsourced our production and pollution. So our rivers no longer run brown. So opportunistic weedtrees reclaim our industrial wastelands – squatting like hardy crustpunks, creeping along fencelines, and up abandoned rail tracks.

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Read the original version of this comic here, if you want to see how it first appeared in The Leveller newspaper.

Watershed Blues

Three

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Watershed Blues

2.5
And once the topsoil has been poisoned and stripped away, developers can move in, and keep burying farmland under pavement and plastic homes.

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Watershed Blues

2.4
It’s all a government-subsized net-loss ponzi scheme.

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Watershed Blues

#2.3
Of course we burn more oil farming ethanol than we produce. (Go ahead – Read that last sentence one more time. (Go ahead – Read that last sentence one more time. (Go ahead – Read that last sentence one more time.(Go ahead – read that last sentence again)

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Watershed Blues

#2.2
Family farms were expropriated to make the Greenbelt. Ironically, some of it is now rented out for farming. Modern farming. They're usually fields of corn – seed custom-brewed in a chemist's lab, worked by diesel-belching machines, maintained with petro-fertilizers, and grown to make ethanol. Just a ruthless attempt to 'farm' oil with oil.

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Read the original version of this comic here, if you want to see how it first appeared in The Leveller newspaper.

Watershed Blues

#2.1
Our 'Greenbelt' is the relic of some Euro-architect's grand vision – Jacques Gréber's doomed scheme to check the city's sprawl. But it just threw the suburbs farther out, channelling their relentless land gorge into the kind of progress which chews up countryside and shits out parking lots, faceless subdivisions, and rubber teens.

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Read the original version of this comic here, if you want to see how it first appeared in The Leveller newspaper.

Watershed Blues

Chapter Two

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Watershed Blues

#1.2
They're infant ecosystems, regrowth after loggers and lumber barons, settlers and sowers, shipped the old growth away.

Start from the beginning of this comic series, Watershed Blues, here.

Watershed Blues

#1.1 Almost all of the forests of the Ottawa Valley are new

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Watershed Blues

Chapter 1

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Watershed Blues

#0.1
Once upon a time, there was a relationship between language and land. Map out language, culture, or politics and you would outline watersheds, bioregions, ecosystems.