Ed Deak left us last week.
He will be missed by the local art community.
Known internationally, his work included paintings and woodwork. He was a strong supporter of both the Station House Gallery and the Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin.
He will be remembered in the Big Lake area as a neighbour and supporter of community events. A huge number of people will miss his pithy comments on a number of internet venues. He had strong ideas about the economy, government, agriculture — you name it.
I don’t remember how I met Ed and Marta Deak, but Ed wrote a column for the Tribune while I was editor.
For those who want to know the Deaks’ story, Marta is featured in the book Women of Brave Mettle. My memorial to Ed is to tell you his economic ideas.
They weren’t what everyone wants to hear. No doubt his ideas were shaped by his early days in Europe in the Second World War.
Ed believed wealth is the temporary control of energy. He said wealth cannot be created, it can only be taken from others, from the environment, or from future generations.
He said no one had ever proved his theory wrong. He felt the only solution to modern woes was the rebuilding of self sufficiency at all levels, and helping other areas of the world with appropriate technologies to permit them to survive with the least ecological damage to local and global systems.
He saw globalization as a fraud by a conspiracy of multinationals to take over and control the world’s resources. He said the B.C. economy isn’t leaking jobs, just exporting them under “free trade rackets to our wealth creating foreign investors’ slave labour factories, so they can make more profits to buy B.C. up from under our feet.”
There was more, but whether you agreed with Ed or not, he made you think. That isn’t a bad thing to do.
Diana French is a freelance columnist for the Tribune. She is a former Tribune editor, retired teacher, historian, and book author.