Rocks, Rodents, and Reckonings

Can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we deal with the seeming contradiction that comes with despoiling the earth to extract the resources that everyone wants and increasingly needs? This clichéd question about cake — once you eat it, you no longer possess it — is central to This Rare Earth: Building the Dams, Mines and Megaprojects That Run Our World. The author, Jeremy Thomas Gilmer, spent twenty-five years working for some of the largest mining and engineering companies on the planet. He has witnessed first-hand the impact that humans can have when they are determined to plunder. Mountains get moved, rivers get poisoned, wetlands and farmers’ fields are taken away.

Now, from the serenity of Saint John, he contemplates what he observed in all those projects. He wants to understand what he was doing in remote places, whether in South America, Africa, or Canada. “How do we depend on these activities, while making things better?” he asks. “How do we heal our planet while also taking what we need?” In posing the question, it’s almost like he’s aiming a laser pointer at those who think they’re doing their part by driving an electric car — but who don’t consider the ravages caused by mining for lithium, the key element in their vehicle’s battery.

This Rare Earth is unsettling. It is partly a vividly written memoir of Gilmer’s career in megaprojects and partly an exposé of those same developments. Sometimes it is both on a single page. Gilmer recalls a time in Antamina, Peru, high in the Andes. His team was “blasting a hole through the guts of a mountain” to build a “decant tunnel” to divert surface water away from the ponds where tailings — the waste material of crushed rock, water, and chemicals that remains after a valuable mineral is removed — were stored.

As is often the case in such endeavours, the crew was led by Canadians who honed their chops drilling the hard rock around Sudbury, Ontario. As he walked the tunnel, Gilmer was filled with reverence for the ancient geology that surrounded him: “I could feel grit and dust of rock that had been buried for hundreds of millions of years, once part of an ancient seabed and pushed up over eons to form some of the world’s highest peaks.” In the next paragraph, however, he describes what it was like to watch a team on the other side of the mountain blow apart the product of millennia. “After each blast, a thunderous crack shook the rock beneath our feet,” he remembers. “If you looked up, you could see the shock wave shoot up the tunnel, bits of rock being knocked loose ahead of the pulse.”

Gilmer knew that moving a mountain from one place to another was a relatively common task. But as he watched the top of this one drop lower and lower, he fretted about his role in the Anthropocene, the geological era in which humans have become the dominant force in shaping the planet. As if anticipating the disapproval of the reader, he emphasizes efforts to deal with the many engineering and environmental issues: “I think readers will be surprised not by the obvious damage done by that industry, but by the reality of many of the complex decisions made by people trying to balance engineering and environmental conditions, politics and public opinion, and human demands upon the fragile ecosystems we all depend on.” He describes mitigation — the practice of extracting what we need while minimizing harm — as “a kind of moral choreography.”

Gilmer writes of a trip to Brazil in 2025 to assess the decommissioning of an iron ore mine. In two recent incidents, millions of cubic metres of mine tailings and debris had swept through adjacent towns and killed hundreds of people. Surprisingly, he saw what he believes is an upside of the Anthropocene: a landscape re-engineered in the wake of the tragedy to be safer and stronger than what nature had made. He can’t sustain this optimism, however. He knows the mission of scientists like him is to stop catastrophes before they happen. They have the tools, intelligence, and ability to think abstractly about the existential crisis of climate change, for example, but he worries that most are culturally trained to look metres ahead into the future rather than kilometres. “We can learn from history, understand its context, and apply it to the present,” Gilmer writes. “Or we can keep our heads down, working blindly, never pausing to understand the systems that shape us or our place within them.”

It’s not clear by the end of This Rare Earth whether Gilmer thinks we, collectively, are up to the task or whether the catastrophes caused by megaprojects will continue. If the latter is the case, perhaps we should start taking some lessons from our national animal: the beaver.

The author of The Beaver Manifesto, Glynnis Hood, is an unabashed fan of the world’s second-largest rodent. (The greater capybara, native to South America, is twice as big.) She has been in close contact with Castor canadensis throughout her career, first as a Parks Canada warden in Alberta and later as a professor at the University of Alberta.

This edition is an update of Hood’s slim volume from 2011. “Beaver research is alive and well,” she writes, “and has become much expanded to include camera and infrared drones, tri‑axial accelerometers, passive integrated transponders (PIT tags), high-resolution remote sensing technologies, advanced genetic techniques, environmental DNA (eDNA) and a much-needed integration of Indigenous expertise.” Backed by all this, she elegantly sketches the calamitous but triumphant history of the beaver in North America since it first encountered Europeans about 500 years ago. There were between 60 and 400 million beavers on the continent at that time. The European beaver — Castor fiber — was already a thing of the past.

An abundance of beavers combined with a fashion trend favouring felt hats created what Hood calls a “mammalian gold rush.” Hudson’s Bay Company records show that 4.7 million beaver pelts arrived at British auction houses between 1769 and 1868. The commercial trade eased partly because the species was on the verge of extinction by mid-century, from hunting and the expansion of settlements that drained the wetlands and diverted the rivers that beavers needed to thrive.

By the twentieth century, some conservation efforts were undertaken — the North American population has stabilized now at about 10 to 15 million — but Hood gives much of the credit to the determination of the beaver itself. She sketches how its engineering genius has allowed it to survive drought and create suitable new habitats for itself.

Of course, the beaver’s fondness for water and its skills as a lumberjack drive humans crazy, and many of us see the animal as a pest rather than as a triumphant eco-warrior. But nothing, it seems, will doom the species. “The fact that beavers still exist in North America, and Europe for that matter, is nothing short of a miracle,” Hood writes. “Their tenacious nature and ability to survive major geologic and climatic shifts are amazing in their own right, but their ability to survive a level of overexploitation that would have crippled many other species is a testament to their ecological adaptability.”

Hood poses a cake-or-eat-it dilemma like the one that Gilmer offers. Can we enjoy the rich landscape that sustains us, or will we abuse it by devouring too much of it? “Our consumption of resources appears to be insatiable at this point,” she observes. “New ‘must-have’ products and consumables are released onto the market at a frenetic pace, and much like the beaver hat they become an essential commodity for an increasing number of the world’s population. When we see a product in a shiny plastic case, we rarely connect it with the land that was cleared to mine and extract the minerals and petroleum products behind that innovation.”

Although they cover different topics, these books converge on a central conundrum of our time. And both conclude with nervous trepidation. In his last few lines, Gilmer says that he believes everyone must work to stop the next catastrophe before it happens —“because in the end, we all share this place.” In her final sentences, Hood wonders whether we can learn from the beaver’s ability to survive everything that’s been thrown its way: “Whether we take the time to learn from other species depends on our own adaptability and willingness to see our world and the resources within us in a new light.”