Who Owns Our Water? 

Last fall, while running for the NDP in Ontario’s provincial election, I attended the tail end of the Nestle Waters “open house” in Aberfoyle.  I found myself watching their promo video, set up in a huge tent where they were giving away food and, of course, water in single serve plastic bottles. Their promo claims that they are an environmentally sound choice because their bottles are recyclable. Does this not beg the question as to how many of these bottles are actually recycled (I’ve heard 60%) and that eventually this plastic will end up in a landfill, even if it is turned into other products such as the windbreakers being worn proudly by staff and volunteers at the open house.

In one of their promo video segments, a mother is made to feel guilty that she gives her daughter pop to drink and then a Nestles water bottle appears over this mother’s head, like a light bulb of inspiration. She has a “great” idea and goes to a fridge packed with Nestle bottled water, by-passing the kitchen tap in the process. She hands the bottle to her daughter, convinced in her own mind, presumably, that she has fulfilled her role as a caring mother, in keeping with Nestle’s slogan: “The Healthy Hydration Company”.

            I looked around the tent at the Open House to see if I was the only one appreciating the irony of this, but no one seemed to notice. It was one of those moments when one feels lonely, even in a crowd of people.

            I couldn’t stop myself from trying to talk to someone about my concerns, so I started what I hope sounded like a casual conversation with a woman who was gathering up hundreds of yards of plastic table coverings and rounding up huge bags of plastic bottles from the recycling bins. Turns out that she had quite a lot to say. She works for Nestle and is proud of what they do. She pointed out to me that golf courses use more water than Nestle. If she was looking for me to defend golf courses, she’d picked the wrong person. I tried to understand the logic of this – it seems to go something like this: “There are corporations doing worse things than us, so we’re OK.”

            This same woman brought up the specter of Walkerton and she bet me that they must wish now that they had bottled water back then. I just listened – hard to argue with that other than the Walkertown tragedy sparked better water quality regulations and that one of the findings of the Walkerton inquiry was to limit the transportation of water resources out of individual watersheds. But I just wanted to listen.

She went on to say that she knows that the Wellington Water Watchers don’t like Nestles, but she likes bottled water because it’s convenient for traveling and she can send it in her kids’ school lunches. She appeared to know what I was thinking because she said: “I guess they could use the water fountain but what about all the germs.” I couldn’t help but point out that mouths only touch water at drinking fountains, but she asked, what about the handle on the fountain – all those grubby hands. She said she had a thing about germs and so I thought there’d be no point in asking her about how many door handles, desks and books would be touched by those same grubby hands and that somehow kids survive. I wished her all the best and let her get back to her plastic collecting duties.

            I have to admit that I was starting to feel down-in-the-dumps (no pun intended) and after 55 years of living with myself, I know that when I start to feel this way, it’s best to take some action, to try to do something, even if it’s a drop in a bucket (OK, pun intended that time).

So I asked around until I tracked down Nestle’s Director of Corporate Affairs, who was helping to clean up after the 2,000 visitors who’d come through the open house. I was friendly and he was friendly and he readily agreed to have a meeting with me this coming week. It will be interesting to hear his side of the story, I thought, on my way home, taking a drink of tap water from the reusable glass bottle I take with me on the campaign. As I drove, I couldn’t help replay the image of the Nestles worker arising to defend her employer as she dragged huge bags of plastic behind her.

I mean this sincerely when I say that I did not leave that event feeling “better” than the Nestles advocates I’d just met (working people who believe in what they’re doing) but I was feeling a deep resentment towards corporations that have made it acceptable (to too many people) to take what should be a public resource like water, bottle it and sell it back to us.

Why Would You Bother? Reflections of a Community Engaged Arts Practitioner Working with Youth in a Low-Income Neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada

By Dale Hamilton

It smacked me on the face the night before the performance, when only 3 of 8 cast members showed up for the dress rehearsal (and only random handfuls at previous rehearsals) that we’d be facing an audience the next day having never gone through all the scenes with all the cast, with all the costumes & props, even though the cast were all being paid for their participation. As I looked around at the room filled with costumes and not filled with cast members, I reminded myself never to do a community arts project again, bearing in mind that I’ve said this same thing at low points during every project over the past 20 years.

When we finally reached some of the absent cast members by phone, they told us that they’d memorized their lines so they didn’t think they needed to show up, even though attending the dress rehearsal was written right into the letters of agreement they’d signed months before and we’d reminded them frequently and recently about the importance of the dress rehearsal. I had to remind myself that in most cases this was their first experience being in a play (why is this, educational systems?) I guess I’d assumed that everybody knew the importance of a dress rehearsal. Another assumption down the drain.

That same evening we took the cast members (the ones we could find) over to a local bike shop run by volunteers who were donating bikes to the cast (to use as props in the play and then as community bikes, to be loaned out to residents.) Having just navigated an incident involving one of the cast members stealing gum on our way past a convenience store, a “teachable moment” for them (and for me) arose when a loud argument erupted amongst some of them over who got which bike and I reminded them that the bikes were going to belong to the neighbourhood and that everybody working in this bike shop is a volunteer. One cast member looked at me, incredulous, and asked: “So if they’re not getting paid, why would they bother?” This gave me an opening (about the size of a barn door) to talk about environmentalism and voluntarism without sounding too preachy, seeing as it was in response to a question in a real life situation. I like to think I saw a few light bulbs flicker on, certainly not full-fledged life-changing epiphanies, but maybe enough new light to see the world slightly differently.

The bike shop incident re-energized me to find ways to have these kids (and my own) experience more “giving” and less “getting”. Most social service workers/community artists/parents (myself included) focus on giving, and that can be a good thing, but I want to focus more energy on finding ways to co-create environments where “disadvantaged youth” find meaningful opportunities to experience voluntary giving. I don’t yet know exactly what that will look like, but it’ll be interesting to see if we can develop a spirit of voluntarism amongst young people who are accustomed to being the “target population” for well-meaning volunteers.

The next morning, hours before the performance, I reminded myself that I was just going to have to get through this day and then never do this again. This thought was reinforced when the musical director and I arrived to find jackhammers, pavement cutting equipment and other heavy machines working literally on top of our first performance area. I tried to talk to the construction guys about it, but they couldn't hear me over the ear-splitting noise. It was at this point that I seriously considered turning around and heading home (via the nearest liquor store).

But then things started to turn around. The workers agreed to hold off on the noisy part of their work during our performance. The sun came out and the wind died down. The cast all showed up for a hastily-called morning rehearsal and we did a stumble-through that ended ten minutes before the performance. And it turned out that most of them knew most of their lines and at the very least seemed to be getting the hang of looking to the prompter when they got lost.

And then, during the performance, the “influence” of live theatre took over (I won’t call it the “magic” of live theatre because that implies that getting there isn’t a hell of a lot of hard work). What I mean is that the audience and the performers came to be “under the influence” of theatre - the performers gave their best, the audience responded, the cast reciprocated and the creative to-and-fro began. And there it was, right in my face, tangible, I could almost taste it – the reason why I bother.

Despite all the hiccups (and there were many), there were enough moments during the performance that made it all feel worthwhile - like the moment when the audience quadrupled in size as people saw there was something crazy happening out on the street. Or like the moment when the single mother, on her way to work, stood in awe as her son rapped about protecting the environment. Or the moment when the little kid thought the guy in the tree costume was actually a talking tree. Or when the audience erupted into applause at the end and the kids in the audience rushed forward wanting to try on the costumes and re-enact some of the scenes.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the musical director and I ended up filling in at the last minute for two cast members who dropped out entirely about a week before the performance - one because she realized that performing brings on panic attacks and the other because she got a job (and didn’t let us know until we tracked her down). This “emergency” casting arrangement ended up being a blessing in disguise because it enabled the musical director and director (me) to keep things on track and keep the energy up between scenes. So from now on I'm going to build a couple of professional actors (not me whenever possible) into the casting from the beginning. Out of the ashes of crisis and chaos, some kind of creative order can arise.

I honestly don’t know if the youth really learned anything during this process. I like to think so, but I can’t say for certain and if they did, I don’t know how to measure it. I’ve been around the block enough to know that “success” is a relative thing and that small victories can add up, and that changing the direction of even one life out of, say, eight, is no small task.

I know that I learned something, even if they didn’t – one thing being that somehow I need to take the give-and-take “magic” that happened between the cast and the audience during the actual performance and infuse it into the process.

And I re-learned that relationship-building takes time and I shouldn’t forget that this play is only a step in a longer, larger process.

From the perspective of a community-engaged artist, I re-learned that we, as a community of artists, really need to find ways to make this work less labour-intensive. The problem is that I don't have time to do the work necessary to make the work less work, if that makes sense (I think I’m over-tired). I guess I’m still working on how to do this. And, yes, I’ve already broken my promise to myself to stop doing community-engaged arts.

Name of Column: Ear To The Ground

Name of Columnist: Dale Hamilton

Possible Headline: Creating an Environment

Word Count: 811

Welcome to my first blog. I don’t really think of it as “my” blog, so much as a point of contact for creative conversations between neighbours. So, whether you’re reading this at your desktop in the comfort of your home, or on your laptop amidst the caffeinated buzz of your favourite wireless hot spot, I hope you’ll join in this conversation by sending me your comments and your stories.

I’ve called this blog “Ear To The Ground” because, in my mind, good conversations are about people listening and responding, in precisely that order. So my intention is to keep my “ear to the ground” for stories and issues of interest to local people, particularly stories about improving the natural and social environment of this place we call home. Please send me your thoughts - I want to hear about the things that keep you awake at night, the things that drive you around the bend, and (literally or figuratively) drive you to drink. But mostly I’m interested in hearing about inspiring people who are making a positive impact on our natural and social environments.

Most good conversations begin with some context, so it seems only fair that you know a bit about me before we enter into this “relationship” of sorts.

I was born near Rockwood about five decades ago. I come from long-time Wellington County farm families on both my mother’s and my father’s side. My mother’s family (the Beswethericks, Elliotts and Mackenzies) farmed on the Elmira Road in Guelph Township and my father’s family (the Hamiltons, Wares & Benhams) on the 4^th line of Eramosa Township, a stone’s throw from the Rockwood Conservation Area. I grew up on the family farm, pioneered 6 generations ago by the Northern Irish branch of the Scottish Hamilton clan. My ancestors are buried in the Eden Mills Cemetery, under a limestone monument describing them as “Natives of Ireland” and also in the Woodlawn Cemetery, in the big box shadow of Guelph’s sadly misplaced Walmart.

I travel a fair amount with my community development work and when I’m away, I miss the humans, of course, but I also crave the natural landscape here in escarpment country. There’s something about conjured-up image of cedars and limestone in the late afternoon sun that sends me into fits of home sickness, no matter how much beauty I’m faced with somewhere else. After six generations, I guess it’s not surprising that I feel a deep indisputable connection to this part of the planet. It’s a connection that defies the laws of logic and even sometimes the laws of gravity, as I resist the occasional urge to move away from here. When I was in my late teens, I had to move away and then move back to really appreciate that my roots do not have to be my ruts.

Due to an apparently random combination of good luck, good timing and hard work, I now own 16 wooded acres and a very modest abode, which I inhabit with my two children, just downstream from the original family farm. This acreage stretches between the two branches of the Eramosa River so, technically, I live on an island, surrounded not only by water but also by the irrepressible and infectious community spirit of the going-carbon-neutral hamlet of Eden Mills (more on that in future blogs).

For the past two decades (you know you’re getting “mature” when you measure in decades, eh?) I’ve devoted myself to creative community development, my primary tool being “Community Engaged Theatre”, a crazy, chaotic, all-inclusive theatrical form that can build community spirit in ways that meetings with flip charts and power points can’t touch. Slowly but surely it has become a movement across Canada, spawning community arts funding at all levels of government and more than one university program teaching the arts as a tool for social change.

At this point in time, my focus is on a Toronto neighbourhood called Rivertowne, where I’m employed as the Community Development Coordinator. Our funders include the City of Toronto, Toronto Community Housing and the Metcalf Foundation. Rivertowne is an experiment of sorts-Canada’s first deliberate mixed income neighbourhood, with market rate condominiums, gentrified single-family homes and public housing tenants all trying to co-habit the same neighbourhood. Our goal is to help the residents create the social infrastructure that can in turn engender a healthy cohesive community. It’s exciting, challenging, exhausting and ultimately rewarding work. And it will provide raw material for some of my future blogs.

You can also find me on Facebook and/or follow me on Twitter (@dalechamilton). I look forward to our creative community conversations.