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Benefits and Pensions MonitorMagical Money Mystical ForestsBy Diana Beresford-Kroeger Secrets, magic, and windworne things, these are gifts of the gods. Tall trees in cathedral canopies are more. Nature in a wide embrace tells us the stories of ourselves, who we are, and what we will become.
Recently, I was in a magical place. It was in the Saguenay where the salt sea air fixes a face with the fresh waters of the St. Lawrence. I stood, it seemed, suspended over time. Both feet were on a metal deck, but my head was touching the clouds. The north wind had swept a clean path born out of the boreal. Hummocks of sunshine clouds piled up overhead and jockeyed along. They seemed to kiss the horizon. The great whales were underfoot in those turbulent waters filled with oxygen. I could feel them there, hard-breasted mothers nursing their young, plunging through the crystal depths. They were filled with life. They transfixed me with awe, that great feeling of unity. No money on earth can buy such a rush that comes from nature. And besides, money is a newcomer on the block. It has been around for only 2,000 years, while nature is still counting down in billions. Money is, after all, only an artifact of the Roman Empire – when the big boys took the gold and silver they had looted and stamped it with a manly profile. All of this was done in great honesty under the pert nose of Juno Moneta, their most treasured goddess. But that was not good enough for their legions who roughed it out under a hungry sun for raging global dominance. They were paid in salt. The gold came afterwards as a gift, stamped, as is only proper, with the prim head of the top honcho. Nothing changes. But something is. That great state of nature that sustains life is changing. The global forests are coming down, the seas are empty of fish, the atmosphere is filled with killing particulate pollution, even the water from the tap is foul. It is racked with chlorine to kill the rampant bacteria, if we are lucky. The oxygen levels of the atmosphere are faltering because this stuff comes from trees and the carbon dioxide is in an upward swing. This gas comes from the death of every tree, everywhere. The balance has been broken.
Money, that hard nose item that has strangely enough, in itself, become a trading commodity, can save the day for the natural world. Money sits in great piles all over the world as pension funds. It has been earned over the lifetime of the ordinary and not-so ordinary Joe. It sits as accumulated global wealth. This money can be considered to be the engine that motivates the machinery of banking to move. At the moment, there is no driver. There should be. This driver is you – you and your choice of destination, or to put it in other words, you and your choice of investment, good or bad. The good investor goes to his or her banker or money manager and asks questions. This state of affairs may come as a surprise to your investment banker. And it will no doubt come as a greater surprise to you that the investment banker cannot answer your questions, despite the company of electronic wizardry in the room. Pension money is taken and added together. This is invested in business which is, in turn, subdivided into other businesses, vertically integrated into corporations so that the funds of a lifetime of some little teacher somewhere can now be used to wear the fingers off a child who is locked in a sweatbox to work. Or salvage organs from the living. Or cut the Boreal forests for toilet paper. Or drill in the birthing grounds of the great whales for oil. These are bad investments for you, for your children, and your grandchildren, simply because they take away the future. So keep asking questions and then demand some answers. Is your pension fund being managed in a socially responsible manner? If it is not being managed in this way, you now know what to do. There are lots of banks out there and there are even more money managers. Your request will force the ʻWorld of Moneyʼ to pull up its socks. You are the power. After all, you are the driver of this money machine. And nobody should be chauffeured, here. This is your bag. Little Bag Of Pension Funds All of this reminds me of a number of years ago when I went to the bank with my little bag of pension funds. I had done my research. The fund manager was well-dressed. Her suit was expensive and her perfume a delight. She had a cadré of machines humming at her elbow. She tried not to look askance at my gardening fingernails. She opened her portfolio. She placed a bright red fingernail on a line and huffed. I said “no, that conglomerate might be doing well in the car business, in fact my father-in-law had known the owner in a different world, but they had an ownership of parts of the Amazon forest.” Their story was not good. The next item was in the food multi-national transnational supersonic business. Here again I objected – genetically modified food was a black hole in science and I wasnʼt going down that road. The fingernail lingered on the agrifood industry. I pointed out that bone meal from Britain entered the U.S. Then there is the so-called freedom of NAFTA and we can expect Jacob-Kreutsfeld disease to rear its head in Canada. She went lower down to medicine. I told her that bone transplants were not tested for AIDS and many other nasties. She stopped at her own bank. I said “no, they were using call centres in places like Manila.” I wanted Canadian jobs to stay in Canada to fund our own health system. She looked up at me and offered me a candy and sent out for coffee for both of us, sugar and two creams. She re-inspected my nails. She polished hers on her suit. She was getting worried about me. I was going to be her problem of the day. While we waited for our refreshments I asked her if she had children. She said “yes.” In fact, she even had a little granddaughter who was only a month old.
In This Thing Together I smiled at her. I relaxed. I began to explain to her that we were in this thing together, this thing called life. I had worked hard in my scientific life. I had made many important discoveries and had even written books. I told her that my meager pension funds were not going to be part of the problem. They were going to be used carefully and ethically with the greatest socially responsible splash I could afford to make for a greener world for that little grandchild of hers. We made another appointment. She promised me that she would do further research. She told me that nobody asks the kind of questions I had asked. I responded that I had full confidence in her management skills, I might be the first, but I most certainly would not be the last. “You see,” I explained, fanning out my garden hands, “I love secrets, magic, and windworne things. These are gifts of the gods. I am not alone.” Diana Beresford-Kroeger is a scientist, author, and lecturer. She has studied classical botany, medical biochemistry, organic and radio nuclear chemistry, and experimental surgery in Ireland, the U.S., and Canada. Her scientific publications appear in journals such as The American Heart Journal, The Canadian Heart Journal, The Journal of Microscopy, etc. She has lectured at University College Cork (Ireland) and at Carleton University and received a fellowship at the University of Connecticut, and worked as a research scientist at the Canadian Department of Agriculture and the University of Ottawa School of Medicine, as well as the aforementioned institutions. In the area of popular media she has regularly contributed to, written for, or hosted programs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio, National Public Radio (USA), and Canadian Television (CTV). In 2005, the CBCʼs flagship program, “Ideas,” aired “The Ideas of Diana Beresford-Kroeger.”Her books include A Garden for Life (2004) (originally published as Bioplanning a North Temperate Garden, 1999), Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest (2003), and a collection of short stories, Time Will Tell (2004). Her book, “Arboretum America,” has won the American National Arbour Day Foundation Media Award in 2005, for an exemplary educational work on trees and forests. Her current work is The Global Forest, a collection of 40 essays which will be published in 2007. She is also being profiled for an upcoming issue of the New York Times. |
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