| The central Bras d'Or Lakes watershed on the island of Cape Breton/Unama'kik, Canada is experiencing severe ecological degradation, including siltation, septic contamination, and declining biodiversity. These problems are the result of a number of things. At the most general level, Cape Breton/Unama'kik has historically been treated as a resource extraction zone for "Industria", the global system of political and economic power, knowledge and technology which is feeding parasitically on "Gaia", the wild, living Earth. In addition, hegemonic Industrian ontology and epistemology have ensured that managers have failed to recognise the Bras d'Or watershed as an ecological "whole" which is itself part of larger "wholes" up to the planetary level. Government managers operate isolated from one another, attempting to deal separately with different aspects of human interactions with the rest of the natural community in the region. The result has been jurisdictional overlap, inefficiency, and continuing ecological decline.;Local communities, including the Mi'kmaq nation and non-Mi'kmaq "Cape Bretoners" have responded to these problems with a number of proposals and initiatives. The Cape Bretoner proposals have focussed on lobbying the government to implement some form of integrated management. For their part, the Mi'kmaq have begun to unilaterally implement such an integrated management approach, utilising the jurisprudence of their underlying title to the land as a political lever.;This dissertation adopts a "Gaiagraphic" approach, wedding Gaia, Fourth World and bioregional theories through a philosophical appeal to the work of post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze, to evaluate these local initiatives for socio-ecological sustainability. It concludes that a revamped bioregional approach, which takes into account the ecological expertise and territorial rights of the Mi'kmaq nation and focuses on the creation of cross-cultural alliances, holds the greatest promise for the project of developing sustainability in the region. It argues that a new approach to development and sustainability is needed which rejects some of the universalist presumptions of modernist thought which pervade Industria, in order to build a post-Industrian, "Terran" civilisation. |
