Here’s the view from Dogtown, a métis town being gentrified in the midst of the White Okanagan. The capitalization of investment, such a dominant myth in the colonial power here, Canada, leads to the treatment of machines as slaves… and the labour of the men who built these machines. Each of these machines (and there are thousands) has a debt to the land, which has not been erased. The accumulated weight is getting strong.

This is a Ford tractor from what looks like the 1980s. There’s no reason it is not still running, other than abuse, capitalization and neglect. So does the social fabric decay, following an economic model that favours industrial replacement over the deepening of social bonds. This tractor is on an agricultural research facility. Notice the unbridled sense of neglect, which illustrates the lack of a functional boundary between industrial production and the production of the Earth. Perhaps in cities, this is called “natural depreciation of machinery” or “the natural decay of outmoded modes of production,” or something else like that, but make no mistake: this is less a tractor sitting here in death and abuse than an Earth and men. Period. Let’s start from that.