There's Something In the Water
Ellen Page’s documentary film, There’s Something in the Water, is a deeply touching exploration of environmental and social injustices that have been running rampantly throughout Page’s home province of Nova Scotia for far too long. Alongside her co-director Ian Daniel, the two travel across the province to examine the painful realities of pollution, the long term effects of adverse ecological poisoning, alongside severe problems of health and wellness among the community at large.
In this film, Page’s inquiries bring light to a bigger issue of environmental racism, where big corporate industries, backed by the Canadian government, place large, industrial, biologically hazardous plants, landfills, and salt caverns (to name a few) within lower income, remote communities. Unfortunately, the primary victims of these heinous acts of oppression and disregard are towards minority Indigenous and black communities. These problems caused by lack of concern for the environment and our neighbours continue to be a problem for many in the province.
As someone who has been raised in Nova Scotia, in the same county as the paper pulp mill (which Page describes in her second case study) I am proud of Page for speaking up on this critical issue and I am proud of the women and the water protectors who carry the bulk of these burdens. I can personally attest to the stench of the mill, which I remember one summer was so bad that I didn’t even want to go outside to play, the porous murky ocean bed which felt slimy and unsolid under my feet, the years where we were told we weren’t allowed to go clam digging, as life in the harbour was dead, the shellfish poisoned. It is not simple to fully understand the devastation that this has caused to the people and communities who depend on fisheries for a living. I believe Page and Daniels illustrated a number of these concerns within this film with much grace and sympathy.
On Jan 31st, 2020 the mill was finally shut down after much pushback. However, there has been some stir recently about it reopening in the future. I truly hope that this does not happen. In light of this pandemic, I believe there is no going back to the old ways of depleting our natural resources and raping our planet for material gain and corporate greed. As the world takes a pause to individually and collectively protect one another from the Coronavirus, we can take this opportunity to re-evaluate our priorities and how we want to imagine a new, more sustainable and eco-friendly way of doing things. As our skies and oceans clear up, as animals emerge from hiding away, we are learning how to personally diminish our individual carbon footprint, we now have the opportunity to re-think ways to reduce our industrial carbon footprint too.
This is not a one-sided issue however, as the out of work forestry industry is now buckling under the pressure from the mill shutting down. We need to think outside of the box to find new solutions. It is time to repurpose the mill to have less of a negative environmental impact and give it new meaningful life that won’t disrupt the growth of our communities, both socially and ecologically. To quote Michelle Francis Denny of the Pictou Landing first nations community in this film, “we hope to all heal from this, eventually… you cannot heal in the environment that made you sick.”