Some Greens are anxious to assure the public that we are not a one-issue
party, but without a livable environment no other issues will matter. To
address our environmental crisis requires achieving an open, democratic,
informed, and confident society. Societies dominated by powerful special
interest groups-as in the old Soviet Union or in the present United
States-cannot, on their records, make the changes our survival requires.
Some people say "don't be alarmists, we haven't had a ecological disaster
yet." But we have had, and often. The world is littered with the ruins of
societies that exhausted their ecological bases and went extinct as
societies. We now have the power to globalize that destructive process and
we're on the road to global extinction. At present, both the political
right and left (the Liberal and Conservative twins, the NDP) agree that the
answer to our current crisis is growth. The left would share that growth
more fairly, the far right less fairly, the middling right as now, but
growth is their common answer.
The president of Harvard, Larry Summers,
former president of the World Bank, came to Toronto this fall to tell the
Harvard Club and guests that only growth can realize our hopes. Growth and
globalization are our problems, not solutions. Naomi Klein came to
Kingston and diagnosed some of our current disorders, but to cure our ills
she wants third-world factories to pay better wages. Share the growth more
fairly. Larry Summers defends paying them $1.27 a day-don't share. But,
if the rest of the world consumes resources and produces wastes at the
current North American rate, we'll need four or five more planets for raw
materials and landfill. The problems of ecological degradation,
pollution, and poverty will be solved by a fairer sharing of a reduced
production, or will not be solved.
To sustain growth, we must continually consume more to keep the economy
moving forward. In the past, the clergy argued that social stability and
order depend on religious faith, but now the priestly caste of economists
insist that growing consumption underpins our social order. The consumer
keeps the economy stabile with a mortgage and credit card debt. To
sustain growing consumption we aim mindlessly at economic efficiency
without regard to the consequences for the earth-that is for ecological
efficiency. For example, a hog produces ten times the excrement that a
human being produces. A factory farm with 10,000 hogs in a minimal,
economically efficient space, needs, but doesn't have, and can't
efficiently have, a sewage system at least as good as Kingston's. Such
farms don't have a sewage treatment system-they store concentrated waste
with antibiotics and e-coli bacteria and all the rest in leaky underground
tanks, some seeps into the groundwater and what doesn't winds up on fields
that can't absorb it all and runs into our streams, lakes, and rivers.
Economic efficiency requires concentrating those hogs, ecological
efficiency requires dispersing them. So too with salmon, cattle, and
chickens- all disaster areas ecologically and sources for epidemic disease
among animals including us.
The priests and theologians of growth, mainstream economists, accept as
the true creed an institutionalized schizophrenia, or separation from
reality. They dismiss the real world consequences of the actions of their
idealized "market" as "externalities," matters the orthodox must shun. In
cyberspace or on paper, endless growth is modeled as if possible, and the
vision-like a schizophrenic's delusions-leads to irrational and socially,
ecologically, destructive action in the real world. Our conventional
politicians and business leaders accept this collective insanity as the
true faith.
We live on a single planet with limited resources; we have now all the
water we'll ever have and all the carbon we'll ever have. Carbon, oxygen,
hydrogen, and molecules of water are the basic materials of life. Over any
reasonably short period of geological time, the biomass of the earth is
roughly constant-that is the combined weight of all living creatures from
viruses to great blue whales-is constant. If one species gains, some other
or others must lose. Human beings depend directly on a very small number
of plants and animals. As our crops and herds and flocks gain, other
plants and animals must lose, are losing, have lost, have become extinct.
Nature is a zero-sum game-what one player gains another loses-utterly
unlike the economists' computer models. But life itself depends on a
diversity of living species bound together in relationships we understand
only partially. No species is independent of the whole. If we
oversimplify the range of living organisms on the earth to a tipping
point-and we're driving other creatures into extinction at one of the
fastest rates in geological history-we may set off a general biological
collapse that will include us. It's happened locally before, now it can
happen globally.
Global warming: over the past 400,000 years, the concentration of CO2 in
the atmosphere has rhythmically fluctuated between quite consistent highs
and lows about every 100,000 years. But since the industrial revolution
(beginning about 200 years ago) we've gone in a moment of geological time
to a dramatic new high. CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" which has contributed to
an overall warming of the earth's atmosphere that has evaporated more water
from our warmed lakes, rivers, glaciers and seas-and water vapour is a more
effective greenhouse gas than CO2. As the temperature of the earth
increases, our permafrost in the north melts; if it keeps melting, that
permafrost will release large quantities of methane gas-a super efficient
greenhouse gas.
To address our ecological crises-their name is legion-we have to make
changes in our economy, our means of production, our patterns of
consumption, our treatment of wastes. We need more local production and
consumption. We need more train and transit travel fewer miles driving to
work on the Don Valley Parking lot, far fewer transports on the 401. We
need much less globalization which burns huge amounts of hydrocarbons to
extract raw materials wherever they can be bought cheapest, then burns more
fuel to move those materials half-way round the earth to find the cheapest
labor and laxest environmental laws, then burns more fuel to send those
products to markets all over the world. The winners in this process are
world's richest two hundred people and biggest corporations; the losers the
world's workforce along with our earth, air, and water.
To halt this race to the bottom requires significant changes. To make them, we have to
create a confident society in which people do not fear change. In the rich
world, our politicians have nearly abolished the "new deal" and the postwar
welfare state to create an "ill fare state" like that we knew before WWI.
This reactionary transformation makes the workforce insecure, unconfident,
and fearful of change. When the necessity of reducing greenhouse gases was
first raised, corporate spokesmen shouted-and threatened-"that will cost
jobs and money." CEOs plan endlessly to downsize workforces, reduce wages,
and to move production to the third world much of which is becoming a
nineteenth century style industrial ill fare state. But at home the CEOs
warn the workforce that change will ruin them. We have to restore the
social welfare state thoroughly enough that saving the environment doesn't
ruin people who work for a living. After all, if you give people the
choice of ruin later on and ruin right now, they'll always opt for ruin
later.
We have to change the object of our national financial policy from
one of planned and targeted rates of unemployment (keeps wage bills down,
lets profits rise) to an objective of full employment without runaway
inflation. It can be done: in the last war, the military aside, we
produced and consumed less, shared what we produced and consumed more
equitably than ever before, and came through a great crisis. We can do it
again without the vast military production that won WWII, but we can't
handle our current crises without actually making changes including
changing the colour of our parliament in Ottawa from Red and Blue to Green.