Tar Sands March Week Poster I have often wondered why Canada seems to ship its trees, oil, and minerals elsewhere to be made into usable products. It has never made sense to me. Nevertheless, Canadians would like to pipe Alberta oil to refineries in Texas. The potential impact of the pipeline on the environment is, as you know,hotly debated for moral, practical, and economic reasons. Oddly enough, similar moral, practical, and economic debates were going on in the US in the nineteenth century over the production of cotton in the south and its manufacture into cloth in the north.

I used to think that the American civil war was about slavery, but it turns out that was only part of the story. Imagine my (white self-righteous) surprise when I realized that the war began because Lincoln did not recognize the right of the states in the south to leave the…