Intermission: Pausing subscriptions for the month of March

For a bunch of reasons, including that I’ll be away, I have decided to put the Quaking Swamp Journal on pause for the month of March.

This means that all paid subscribers will have their billing cycle frozen: monthly subscribers won’t be charged until the newsletter resumes and all annual subscribers will have their subscriptions extended by whatever duration the newsletter is paused, in this case for a month.

There have been a number of new paid subscribers recently (thank you!) and this pause will also give you some time to peruse the archive — there are more than 80 articles available.

The pause will not affect new unpaid subscribers — so please continue to share the posts and encourage folks to sign up. While these new readers will not be able to purchase a subscription during this time, like everyone, they will continue to be able to access the complete archive of articles, and will still be able to share them.

I’ll be away on a long-anticipated journey, and where I’m going won’t be a mystery for very long. I’ll be posting a photo essay on this Substack about it when I’m back.

But here’s a little (well, actually big) hint:

Photo: Linda Pannozzo

Also coming up in the weeks ahead is a story about public health warrior Rosalie Bertell. As I’ve written here previously, I had the honour of meeting Bertell many years ago — on Frederick Street in Sydney, Nova Scotia when I was helping Elizabeth May with some research for her book about the tar ponds, one of the worst toxic waste sites in North America. I later interviewed Bertell for a piece I wrote for The Coast about workers who had radiation exposures at the Phalen mine.

Bertell died in 2012 but her legacy lives on. She was a feminist, scientist, author, peace and environmental activist, and is probably best known for her work raising awareness about the health hazards from radiation. In the 1990s, Rosalie shifted her focus from radiation and nuclear weaponry to what has been described as “radically new American war strategies that involve the planet itself as a weapon,” and in 2001 she published what would be her last book, Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War. In this book she raises very worrying, but legitimate questions about how war and military testing are disrupting the natural patterns both on earth and in the protective layers of the atmosphere. This is a longer-term project, but I hope to publish an article about her here in the weeks ahead.

I’ve also got another Freedom of Information request in about the government’s underhanded downgrading of Wetlands of Special Significance — another example of their contempt for democracy — and will be reporting on that once I have more information. They wanted to charge me what feels like gazillions of dollars for one of the requests, so I had to narrow the scope and am now waiting to find out if they will have the decency to waive the fees.

I’m also working on a story about the farmer protests in Europe and elsewhere. It’s turning out to be a really complex story — most stories are if you’re willing to spend some time — but I hope to publish sometime in the spring.

There is also a limited series I’m hoping to introduce to this newsletter. But more on that later.

Driving by burned trees in winter. Photo: Linda Pannozzo

Finally, I want to leave you with one of my favourite poems. It’s by Mary Oliver titled, “In Blackwater Woods.”

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

on the ponds, and every pond,

no matter what its name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.