Set on a small organic farm in southwestern Ontario, The Buttes unfolds through the sensibilities of the farm’s people, their friendships, their personal traumas, and their conflicts when massive corporate interests take an interest in the area because of its unique growing conditions. At the heart of this novel is its central theme, our tenuous ties to place, and how these ties expand our sense of who we are and how we can live more harmoniously on a planet threatened by human business-as-usual activity.
When an adjacent farm is courted by big agricultural interests, battle lines are drawn between those who care for the land and those who wish only to make a profit from it. Georgia Butte, the central consciousness of the novel, sums up this conflict: “What I know is that we’re in a battle between those who understand that we’re a part of the web of life on this beautiful planet and those who are convinced humans are the only part that matters.”
Desperate for alternate solutions to her partner and his former coworkers’ efforts to save the threatened farm by creating a paintball gaming centre that will turn a profit quickly, Georgia follows the guidance of the natural world and shares this guidance with her community: “Amusements aren’t what we need now. For decades we’ve been amusing ourselves into states of destructive stupidity…. Uly and I, we know this land, all land, is too precious to plough under for any more of the wrong things. We have to be visionaries. We have to create something new, and we can only do it together, with all of you.” In this plea, Georgia demonstrates her affinities with the First Nations Peoples this cluster of farms displaced centuries earlier. It is through her mystical relationships with those who lived in earlier times that she knows how best to protect the land from its contemporary corporate predators.
The Buttes provides a place-specific introduction to the healing that can happen when human beings discover and nurture their bonds to and within the greater-than-human world. Energized by the magic of the unseen world, the novel’s setting and characters express how love of place expands our life experiences by stretching thin the veil separating what we can see with our eyes and what we sense through our unbreakable kinships with all peoples and all places on our Earth Home.
The Buttes is available through independent book stores in Canada and the US. It is also sold through print-on-demand and e-book services on amazon.ca and amazon.com.