A summer feature is far from novel in the newspaper world. Usually they’re stuffed full with gardening how-tos and lawn care tips, reviews of the best snack shacks, the hottest summer reads, and barbecue recipes for the grill. It’s all useful information, some of it critical, really, to a summer at the cottage.
But for this week’s special summer edition of THE EQUITY, we did things a little differently. This newspaper is filled with stories of people from the Pontiac, or otherwise connected to this region, who feel a duty of care for this place, and have acted on it. We didn’t set out to find stories with this theme in mind. And yet each member of the newsroom, following their own curiosity, gravitated towards stories that somehow explored it.
The legacy left behind by a longtime Chutes Coulonge volunteer. The man who stepped up to manage the chaotic and once seemingly untamable Lac Dumont. MRC employees who found jobs that got them out onto the land they already loved. The Otter Lake couple who took it upon themselves to restore an abandoned, centuries-old log cabin built in the heyday of the lumber boom. The whitewater paddlers who grew up guiding on the Ottawa and have found a new way help people explore a world-class stretch of the river.
Each story, in its own way, highlights the important work happening in this community to invest in and protect one of this region’s greatest resources – our nature. The question is, what do we do with it? What is the balance between enjoying it and making sure it’s still around for future generations? What can it offer as an industry, a driver of economic development for this region? And how do we pursue this growth without losing what is so special about this sliver of the country, which still offers massive expanses of undeveloped wilderness only an hour from the nation’s capital?
Conversations around tourism development often focus on figuring out what we need to do to be attractive to others and looking at ourselves through somebody else’s gaze, the perspective of somebody who does not live here. What story can we tell others about ourselves that will peak their curiosity enough to draw them here to experience this place first hand?
What the stories published in this summer issue highlight, though, is what the work of protecting a place can tell us about ourselves. The Pontiac is filled with people who care deeply about this land, the water, and who are accountable to and invested in their neighbours, the people they share it with. While this commitment to geographical location is at the core of what it means to live here, I believe it is rare.
I recently heard a woman by the name of Zita Cobb speak on a panel that was trying to answer the question of what defines prosperity in today’s world. Cobb hails from Fogo Island, in Newfoundland. Her family was forced to move away after the collapse of the inshore cod fishery. She went on to study business, and then returned to the island as an adult to revive her home’s local economy. Through her creation of the Fogo Island Inn that highlights the unique culture and history of the community, she was successful in this mission. In 2016 she was made a member of the Order of Canada for this work. At the core of her approach to development is a leaning into place-based economies.
“Humans, all of us, are embodied, social, and meaning-seaking. Place holds all of these things,” she said.“The love people have for the places they live is a source of national wealth. We just need to figure out how to enable it.”
The love people have for the places they live. Pontiac has this in spades, and this, above our nature, may be our greatest asset. Globalized markets work to accumulate wealth elsewhere, pulling it away from the places that generate it. As Cobb explained it, financial capital has a natural tendency to concentrate and move away. In this context, investment in place, a determined rootedness in and commitment to building that which cannot be taken away, will be key to prosperity. The people highlighted in this week’s Summer Special are just a few of the many across the region already doing this work.
