Wendy Deavitt remembers the day in 2001 when she spotted her dream home in the country. At the end of a tree-dotted gravel driveway stood the farmhouse and adjacent horse barn that turned her fantasy about rural living into a reality. "This is heaven," she recalls thinking.
But at the end of September, Ms. Deavitt fled the property, her five horses and one donkey in tow. The erstwhile small corner of heaven in Eastern Ontario, an eight-acre hobby farm, turned into a kind of hell when the farmer who owned the land around it started spreading municipal sewage sludge on his alfalfa field.
Ms. Deavitt says that being exposed to large amounts of sewage, within 45 metres of her home, was an experience she never wants to relive. "As soon as you went outside, the smell was so noxious that you wanted to vomit," she says. "Then the diarrhea started, [and] headaches." Her horses also started falling ill.
After eight years of living in the country, Ms. Deavitt has become something we're not used to hearing about in Canada: a rural environmental refugee. She abandoned her home because she was fed up with being sick and living around land she felt had been poisoned. "I can't live here any more. I can't live here with the fear," she says.
Rural life often has a bucolic image of neat farm fields and undulating hills, especially when contrasted with the crowded housing and traffic jams of urban living. People flee the degradation of cities for the countryside, but when they get there, they find anything but clean, green open spaces. From sewage-spreading to wind farms and gravel pits to garbage dumps, many people in rural areas are finding themselves involved in environmental issues that almost never afflict urban dwellers.
Although no one keeps figures on where, geographically speaking, environmental fights are breaking out in Canada, lawyer Richard Lindgren has an indication, via his caseload.
Mr. Lindgren works for the Canadian Environmental Law Association, a legal clinic that represents individuals and community groups in anti-pollution fights. Nearly all of his clients these days hail from the countryside. "I would say, easily, 90 per cent of them involve situations in the rural landscape, as opposed to urbanized areas," he says. When he first started out as an environmental lawyer in the mid-1980s, it was more of a 50-50 split.
Sewage Sludge Creates Rural Environmental Refugees
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Paradise lost for many rural dwellers
By Martin Mittelstaedt
Globe and Mail, December 18, 2009
Straight to the Source
