The Early Years

Brian: Well... what happened was, in the sixties there was all this student foment, right? There was the civil rights movement, the Anti-Vietnam [War]movement, there was a whole bunch of stuff challenging educational systems. So, one of the responses to that at Dalhousie was to create a program where students could create their own classes, and all they needed was eight students and a prof and the administration would approve it. And then we had this grand idea of having five or six classes, and that would be our entire year. We were also living in an internally cooperative house that we were renting from the University. So, we had this grand idea but the only one that actually came out of it was this one called ‘Experimental Ecology’ or ‘Living Ecology’ class. Don MacDougall, who was the chaplain at the university, was the professor. And then we had a whole bunch of professors come and speak to us, and one of the requirements of the class was that you had to do some kind of an action at the end, and that would be what you would be marked on.

So, a bunch of us came up with the idea of setting up an organization. So Pete Ogden -- a couple of them were biologists from the Department of Biology, Pete Ogden was one of them, he was very, very good. Ian McLaren was another one, those are the main two that I remember, but there were a whole series. I think Don Grady was one of them, too, a sociologist. He later helped us get our free office space at Dalhousie through the department of Sociology, in the basement of the Forest building. As far as I recall, it was my idea, but there were several of us who were involved in it - it was definitely a collective action. We decided to establish an organization called the Ecology Action Centre, and one of its first issues could be recycling. So, there wasn’t anything that was like this.

Cliff: In fact, I think it was your idea, Brian, originally. And one of the factors was, in being able to do this, was that you discovered that there was a recycling program, a small recycling program for paper, and that we could focus on that and maybe make some money on that. What was happening at the same time was there was a government program that funded groups to set up some kind of summer operation. This fit in with what we were doing. We could apply for money from the government to fund a number of salaries to do this project of recycling. So, there’s sort of a number of things that came together at the same time. The other thing that really is important, I think, for the foundation was that everybody in the first year, that first summer, we were all living together in a co-op house that we decided to do. It wasn’t just that we ended up looking for a place to live, we also decided to live cooperatively, and that fed into the founding of the EAC as well.

Brian: Yeah, the student program was called ‘Opportunities for Youth’, and it was for students that summer, and it serendipitously started at the same time that we wanted to start the Ecology Action Centre so we applied and we got a grant. Rachel Carson had written ‘Silent Spring’ a few years earlier which created this modern environmental movement. In 1970, the year before we started, the first Earth Day happened. In 1970, the Arrow Oil spill happened in Nova Scotia. The tar ponds in Sydney were the most highly polluted place in Canada. They had just set up the Pulp Mill in Boat Harbour, right next to the Pictou Landing First Nation.

Anyhow, recycling was something that people were talking about nationally. There was a book that came out, ‘“The Limits to Growth,’” where they were talking about how we’re going to bump up against limits to what we can do with this constant growth that was part of the capitalist and the socialist systems at the time. And the Club of Rome was saying “Hey, wait a minute, there’s going to be limits to that!” and so that was one of the things that led to a lot of interest in recycling. Those were all in the air, while across Canada there were other groups like David Suzuki started this group in B.C., I think in 1968, and Pollution Probe started in Toronto, as well, around 1968, so these nationally were two of the first, really big organizations. There was also a very good one, now called Équiterre...I can’t remember if that is what it was called at the beginning, in Quebec. It was very good. And so we were part of this growing movement of organizations across the country that were trying to address the environmental issues that people were becoming more and more aware of.

Cliff: I think it can’t be ignored that this was also set in the context of an opening up of society, so young people like us really had a sense that change was possible. Not just environmental change but all kinds of change- political change, social change, the way people interacted with each other. So there’s this sense on the one hand, an unbelievable sense of freedom and also belief that change could happen. Young people suddenly felt that they could actually do something. They could actually break the rules and break the bounds, they didn’t have to follow the traditional way of doing things.

Brian: Well yeah. In the sixties, and even in the fifties, but in the sixties particularly the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. was in the news all the time with Martin Luther King, and all the incredible work that Black activists did in the Southern U.S. Also during the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, so there were lots of demonstrations and lots of foment. The Women’s Movement also grew in that period, another wave of the Women’s Movement. Of course, there had been the Suffragettes Movement in the early 1900s. Just as there had been an earlier version of the conservation movement, you know, when national parks were started, and there was talk about the Satanic Mills. And there’s actually a poem by William Butler or Yates or someone, talking about the Satanic Mills. There was incredible air pollution that people were aware of, it was terrible, when industrialization was first happening. So, you know, there’d always been that stream of thought -- questioning of what was going on. But it had various waves, and this was one of the waves that we happened to catch.

Cliff: And then one of the things, and again Brian, I think it was you who discovered that there was a market for paper. A small market for paper. Minas Basin Pulp and Paper who were doing a little bit of recycling.

Brian: Yeah, they had a local guy collecting paper and selling it, in Halifax, and selling it. So, we thought it was possible to expand this sort of business enormously and reduce the amount of waste being thrown out and burned. It was all being incinerated at the time, so this was a way to cut down air pollution as well as saving the resource. We went up to visit and toured the plant and talked to them about the possibilities. They weren’t keen on expanding, unfortunately.

Cliff: Yeah, they were willing to take it. But they wanted to keep control of it, so they didn’t want to be forced to take more than they were already taking. They wanted to keep a lid on it and make sure it didn’t get out of hand. In order to do this, we needed a way of collecting the paper, so this is where Brian and I went searching for a truck.

Brian: This is once we got the summer grant.

Cliff: Yes. We found one in Dartmouth. My brother-in-law was a mechanic so we took it to him, got it checked out that it was okay, that it was good enough.

Brian: It was an old milk truck.

Cliff: It was a milk truck, yeah! And then I came up with the name of ‘The Paper Tiger’ for it. It was a well-known expression at the time.

Brian: Yeah, it was a pretty cheap truck.

Cliff: Yeah, I don’t remember what we paid for it, but there probably wasn’t a big market for old milk trucks.

Brian: One time I was going down Sackville street, you know, by Neptune Theatre and the brakes failed. I thought “Oh my God, I’m going to end up in the Harbour!” But fortunately the hand break worked just fine.

Cliff: We went to a big paper plant downtown. There was a large plastic container there and for some reason. Dick picked it up and took a sniff of it and suddenly he dropped it and he started gasping for breath. One of the guys from the paper company was out there. He ran in his office space and closed the door! And Dick was staggering around trying to catch his breath, so I got out of the truck and sort of calmed him down there and we drove him to the emergency room. By then, he was fine. It turned out he had picked up ammonia or something like that, and he had taken a big whiff of it.

Brian: This was a printing company or something like that. They had some of the best paper to recycle. And we also wanted to demonstrate that offices could separate their paper and create a whole bunch of paper that way for recycling. So, we went to Dalhousie and they agreed to let us do it. In the Arts and Administration Building. So, we had little separate cans by everybody’s desks that they could put the recycling in and stuff, so we could then say to everybody else: “See? It’s possible!”

Cliff: The other thing was that computers at that time were all instructed by punch cards. And a lot of companies that had inventory used these emerging computers to keep track of that, and the instructions were on these little cards. And because there was no ink on these cards, they were a prime product. So we got, I don’t know what we got for the regular paper, something like ten dollars a tonne. But with those we got twenty dollars a tonne. So they were a prime thing. Dalhousie was a good source of those, and one of the companies that supplied the pharmacies and stuff like that. We probably should say that it was good workout, picking up tonnes of paper a day and putting it into the back of the trucks!

Brian: I thought a couple of years later we started a Depot, where anyone could drop their paper off to on Saturdays. And that was, again, to demonstrate the level of public interest there was in it. During thethat first four years or so that I was involved, we got a contract with the city. We did presentations to the city council and they did a study that they hired us to do: to go and sort out the garbage and weigh it, and see how much of it was different kinds of material. We went down to the sorting station before the stuff was carted away and created some statistics about how much could be recycled. Then a few years later, the Ecology Action Centre got a demonstration grant to do actual door-to-door pickup out in Spryfield. And then I think in the eighties and nineties, there was this big decision that had to be made about what to do with the incinerator, and whether to have a new incinerator, or whether to change the system. And Howard, amongst others on city council and at EAC as an outside organization, were pushing for recycling instead of incinerating. Pushing for large-scale recycling instead. And ultimately that was successful. That was a big battle. I wasn’t part of that battle, but it was a big battle in the eighties and nineties.

Cliff: But those early battles, none of them were easy, they all took endless hours. At one point, Brian was working so hard that he put a bed in the office of the EAC.

Brian: I don’t have any recollection of this..

Cliff: Well I do!

Brian: But if Cliff says it’s true...

Cliff: He’d work late into the night and so he wouldn’t have to go home, and he’d sleep in the office.

Brian: So what happened in the year following… There was another grant program that was created for the winter period that was called the ‘Local Initiatives Program.’ We joined with a bunch of other groups under an umbrella group called The Movements for Citizen Action. There were something like twelve positions and we got three of them. So, that kept us going during the winter starting in January or so. But in the fall we were driving taxis on the side and getting EI.

Cliff: Brian and I shared a cab and we’d split the shifts. I think I quit the day I made 10 cents. One thing I think we should mention is that, I think, during the second year, relatively early on, urban renewal started across Canada and the Ecology Action Centre got involved in that, as well. Urban renewal or urban destruction as it happened at the time.

Brian: Well, a lot of that had already happened. They had already destroyed a large part of the North End, just north of the downtown which became Scotia Square, and they had already destroyed Africville, which was one of the most famous parts of urban renewal that was happening in Halifax. The city was working on a new master plan, and we got quite heavily involved in trying to create a more liveable city, basically. And also to encourage citizen participation because there wasn’t all that much of it until then. But that was something that was happening all across the country, it was a movement for citizens to have a lot more say in the kind of planning that happened. This is in 1973, that was our boom year, we had seven staff under one of these local initiative program grants. There was a big public meeting at the QEH High School that had about 500 people at it, and we produced this little leaflet that kind of changed the entire agenda of the meeting. Because we said “Whose plan is this?!” and it talked about various issues with the plan. We put them on every chair in the auditorium and it really, kind of, changed the agenda of the thing.

The city had approved a kind of massive re-development of the old orphanage and convent on Quinpool Road, but the original proposal was for three, like, three, thirty or fourty-story high-rises with a whole bunch of commercial development. And then, after a lot of pushback, they changed it to four, twenty-story buildings. But we took it to the planning appeal board, and that was sort of the most controversial thing we did during those first four years we were operating. And we lost. But it created a huge amount of public awareness about the issues, it created a lot of public conversation. Some people thought it was going beyond what we should have been going into, because it wasn’t as strictly environmental, but we thought it had to do with the living environment in the city and it was important.

It’s interesting, because at that time we were advocating against having this really high-density development and nowadays the environmental movement is in favour of density because it reduces transportation and that kind of thing.

Cliff: Harbour Drive was this massive highway - four-lane highway - coming from the bridge (at that time there was just the one bridge) to the downtown and smashing through the downtown, knocking down historic buildings and looping around to another bridge that was going to go over the Northwest Arm. That was all part of it. And the Cogswell Interchange was all a part of that. So, the Cogswell Interchange got built, and some sections of the highway got built. There was a movement: 'Citizens’ Voice and Action,’ a sort of coalition of groups, [they] did a lot of work against Harbour Drive, and EAC was part of the coalition. A lot of the work we did was in cooperation with other groups, it wasn’t us being the spearhead, and this was an example of that. So we were one of the groups that opposed this, and Heritage Trust was also very much against it because of the destruction of those buildings.

Cliff: And Brian, you remember Lou?

Brian: Lou Collins.

Cliff: Lou Collins, who was championing the saving of the heritage buildings along the waterfront there, and he did a huge amount on that. Even after the original Harbour Drive was truncated, they still wanted to put in a multi-lane highway from the bridge to downtown, which suddenly would come to this... wall of these buildings. I remember being in the office of the city planners at the time, because there were still houses along the East side of that part of Barrington Street. It doesn’t make any sense, you know? Why are you going to tear down all these houses when there’s nowhere for all this traffic to go? And I had a revelation, because there was this guy named Bud Dodge who was in charge at the time, and he kept arguing “Oh no, we still need to do this, we still have to do this,” and I realized at the time, one of the things that occurs in those situations is generational. He was an engineer. He had been taught how to build highways. That’s what he knew. And so he wanted to build a highway! It was his job. In the end, he didn’t care!

It was stunning, really, to sit there in the office and it’s something that since that time, I’ve come across people that are trained certain ways and they’re trained to do certain tasks, and some of them never get beyond that. They want to do what they were trained to do, whether it makes sense or not.

Brian: We think of the EAC as getting started in recycling, and that’s true for the first year or two, but in 1973 when we got this much bigger grant, and had seven people, we actually expanded to quite a lot broader range of issues.

In late 1973 the oil crisis happened. The price of oil went from three dollars a barrel to twelve dollars a barrel within a few months, from October ’73 to March ’74. So, it was this huge international crisis amongst Western countries, and we were promoting, you know, transit and energy conservation and stuff as part of the response to that. So we published a ‘Time for Transit,’ that was a really good publication that we did at the time. And there was also this book that we published called ‘Stop It,’ which was about using law to deal with environmental issues.

Cliff: I was, coincidentally, the chair of the transportation committee at that time. One night, in our house, our last cooperative house that we actually owned, we had a young woman visitor. I offered to walk her home afterwards, and she lived in Dartmouth. So we went over to Dartmouth. She didn’t invite me to stay, so I had to come back home, but it was after midnight by then. The ferries stopped at midnight. The old bridge, the MacDonald bridge, was under repair so it was blocked off. You weren’t allowed to go across there.

Brian: Just overnight?

Cliff: No, all during the day too. And the new bridge, the Mackay bridge, had no provisions for pedestrians, and I didn’t have enough money for a taxi. So I was kind of stuck in Dartmouth with no way to get back to Halifax.

So I went to the MacDonald bridge, and I climbed over the barriers, and I started to walk across the bridge, perfectly safe, and one of the guards came out, a young guy, to try and stop me saying “You can’t go across the bridge, it’s closed.” I explained the situation: “ I’ve got no other way of getting back to Halifax, there’s no holes in the bridge, I’m going to walk across”. I don’t know if I intimidated him or not, it didn’t feel very intimidating, but anyway, he didn’t know what to do so I said “I’m going. ” I walked across, I was about halfway across, just about at the top of the arch, and I hear this noise behind me.

I turn around and look and it’s a cop car driving across this bridge. Where you aren’t allowed to walk. Unfortunately, if I had heard them earlier, I would have hidden, you know, climbed down one of the towers. But I didn’t. So they pulled up to me. They said “Get in.” So I got in the car. They said “We’re taking you back” and I said “Listen, I’ve got no way of getting over to Halifax, and I’m almost there anyway. There’s no danger there,” and they said “Okay. You’ve got two choices. We’re going back. We can let you out when we get back to the other side, or we can take you and put you in jail for the night. What do you want to do?” So I thought, “I’m going to go to jail, I’m on the transportation committee, and I can make hay with this!” But then, I started thinking, my father had been in jail at one point and he got talking about being in jail one night with all these drunks throwing up and I thought “Oh god, I don’t really want that”. So they let me out...

Brian: ...back in Dartmouth.

Cliff: Yeah, back in Dartmouth- completely stupid right? And, to this day, I don’t know why I didn’t just go back and jump over the barricade. But what I did was I walked to the new bridge, the Mackay bridge. And I was gonna walk there. And I thought you know, get arrested again, because there was no pedestrian stuff there. I was just walking down to where the entrances were, and a taxi came by, driven by a guy I knew...

Brian: Bob McClintock?

Cliff: Ya, Bob McClintock. So he drove me to Halifax and let me off.

The next morning I called CBC’s morning program and I said “Listen, I’m the chair of the Ecology Action Centre, here’s what happened last night. There was no provision for people to get back to Halifax after midnight.” So they got me in, they did an interview and all of this, and there was a momentary kerfuffle about that but nothing changed. Nothing changed. But the thing about this that’s important, was that city council -- it didn’t even occur to them that this might be an issue for people and that they should have made a provision or something like that, a small bus or a van that could take people across at night who were stuck over there, maybe running the ferries. But nothing. Didn’t occur to them.

Brian: We get a certain amount of credit because we were there at the beginning, but in some ways just happenstance. It’s a story where the organization, and all of the other organizations in Nova Scotia, are a story where hundreds and hundreds of people had been involved and helped keep that, the Ecology Action Centre going, but also all these other groups all around the province. It’s marvelous, it’s really marvelous to see. And I’ve been very, very impressed with the quality of the people who are both volunteers and staff there, and with the quality of the work they’ve been doing in the last ten years since I’ve been back!

Cliff: Yeah, I don’t think any of us thought at the beginning, the first summer, that this is going to be going on 50 years by now. And certainly, it’s had its low points. We came close at one point to fading away, but it managed to renew itself. And as Brian points out, other people who were over the years just as important, and in some ways more important. It’s an incredibly important organization to give Nova Scotia a voice that otherwise it wouldn’t have. And I think it can stand up against things that are happening in other places across the country. You know, we’re not second best, we’re as good as anything across the country.