Making this living just brings about dying

"... I remember my lover getting leukemia and being given pamphlets at the Princess Margaret hospital. None of them covered what causes cancer, but there was one for Run for the Cure. Though I’m very grateful for the treatments that exist, I think that the causes of cancer are fairly evident, and it feels hypocritical to be at once running for the cure and then living in a way that is utterly destructive to the environment, from the way that I dress to the way that I get around the city to the amount of electricity that I use.

So there’s too much focus on the cure, rather than on prevention?
Yes. And then in combination with a new awareness that I think people are getting through the Idle No More movement of the relationship between environmental rights, land rights, and indigenous title to the land, to the ways in which the Canadian state only guards corporate interest and not the interests of our first peoples, it means that there has to be a link drawn between indigenous sovereignty, indigenous title to the land and our own settler environmental movements. And then of course a link between our own environmental movements and our health. I think about that all the time. I think about the violence that’s enacted on the land and how that cycles back towards us. I think it’s obvious. It’s all I can think about.

Are there any songs in particular that really engage with that theme?
“Rage of Plastics” is the story of a woman who gets asked to run for cancer during her lunch break at work. I envision the song as her response. She works at an oil refinery and she’s nursing her husband through cancer. She herself has become infertile. And she refuses to run for cancer. She’s talking about why she won’t participate in the hypocrisy when she’s still going to keep her job working at the oil refinery. The tagline of that song is “making this living just brings about dying.” I don’t blame her. I don’t see her as unique. She’s representative of many peoples’ condition, even my own. I don’t think your job needs to be totally tied to the oil industry in order to have negative impacts on the land".

(Fiver - Simone Schmidt intervju)

Rage Of Plastics

It was the rage of plastics, I was 24
I was doing my time on the dance floor.
It was all polyester and leopard print
And fabergė coming off the ladies.

It's a blight to the brightest how our designs unseam,
Like the backside of some skirt in some old man's dream.
I got caught putting off all my traveling plans for this refinery job and his maybes.

Hair in ribbons, stockings in runs,
Fashion bricks out of the breaks as they come.
Land goes for less downwind of the plant,
There's no telling how long you'll be paying.

There are scores of us born in the silent spring,
Whose wombs don't take, won't bear anything.
He had want for a daughter, I had want for a son,
Now I rock my moon faced man like one.

Was it the river on fire that made us what we became?
Was it the cup that we drank from, or what it contained?
Does it move to the beat of the oil drums,
or flow out of our eyes as we're wailing?

I see it rise in ribbons to the clouds over hung,
Just to spit back down on everyone.
Land goes for less downwind of the plant,
There's no telling how long you'll be paying.

I have tried to be patient as I've been made nurse,
Get some help from the percs of my devotion's curse,
And I know, yes I know, the man's pain is much worse,
For the moon and his grace are now waning.

You say the first one now will later be last,
My faith in scripture's come to pass.
Na I won't play dumb, I'm done trying to sweeten this load.

You give me a ribbon, you tell me to run,
To lend my legs to that narcissus fund.
Land goes for less downwind of the plant
Making this living just brings about dying.

I got a rage of plastics, the refinery floor.
I got a rage of plastics and nothing more.
I won't play dumb and I'm done lying,
Making this living just brings about dying.
Land goes for less downwind of the plant,
Making this living just brings about dying.