Last night in the village near where I live I noticed a poster for a psychedelic gathering on the outskirts of Victoria.
Quite surprised and interested, I then read that it was being held at Bear Mountain Resort. I then felt my stomach sinking.
“Venue: Westin Bear Mountain Resort and Spa, Victoria, BC
Meet and network with forum presenters. Live band
entertainment; DJ music incorporating psychedelic African funk,
afro-beat, and Nigerian disco. Join our interactive art factory. Share
your psychedelic-inspired music or spoken words. Money will be
raised for the “Moving Forward” project.”
http://www.psychedelicpsychotherapy.ca/register
Really moving forward? Time for a bit of history about bear
mountain. Bear mountain was a beautiful mountain that was completely
forest covered and was a place of habitation for wildlife including not
surprisingly the bears the mountain is named after.
A decade or so ago the forest was demolished and replaced by a giant
oversize resort, spa and water intensive golf course for the super rich
made so it is said by some hot shot hockey player for him and his overpaid
multi-millionaire cronies.
To deal with what was expected to be an increase in traffic volume
(already the highway out near that direction has been known for decades
for its endless crawl due to heavy traffic’ (‘the Colwood crawl’) a new
highway interchange in that direction was built just to service the
resort,
with access going directly to it. Putting in this highway interchange
required
bulldozing forest along the whole route.
Numerous environmentalists fended off police officers and would be
loggers for months, risking their time, lives, energy and resources to
fight this from happening.
But I guess it was worth it right? Now we can have an expensive non
green psychedelic conference at a giant capitalist monstrosity of a
resort built over over a recent demolished pristine forest. And that is
‘healing,’ ‘therapy’ ‘moving forward.’ And you can bet a significant
amount of the money involved in the conference is going straight to the
owners of bear mountain, who will in turn invest it in more
environmental destruction/speculation.
This is what I see as happening with the psychedelics movement in
general. It is no longer about ecology, but waste, throwing a big party
without any care for the environmental consequences, spending as much
money as possible and acting like rock stars. The nexus of this could
be said to be burning man, now a parody of itself, which should adopt as its official motto: “the greatest
show on earth.” There is nothing Green about burning man and just like
anything at bear mountain, the thousands and thousands of dollars
involved aka big business are often heading straight to the man.
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