| Too Little, Too Late? |
| by Max Fawcett | |
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Why our newfound commitment to environmentalism isn't going to be enough to make a real difference. *** It wasn't too long ago that the only people concerned with footprints were police officers, Bigfoot believers, or those with a particularly stubborn foot fetish. But because we've been bombarded by so many inconvenient truths about the environment and our impact on it over the past few years, interest in the footprint has expanded beyond that core constituency. Almost overnight, an individual's carbon footprint - the mark that they leave on the environment both through what they consume and how they consume them - has become an important social and cultural marker. To be uninterested in reducing the size of your carbon footprint these days is sort of like driving around with a bumper sticker that professes your affinity for eating babies with ivory utensils. This is mostly to the good, of course. It's certainly better than the way things were just a few years ago, when global warming was considered a disputable theory and you could fit every serious environmentalist in the country into one of the tank-like SUVs that sat in seemingly everyone's driveway. Environmentalism's on such a roll it even managed to make Al Gore popular, transforming him from a political footnote with a beard to a Nobel Prize winner and cultural hero in six years. More amazing still is the fact that much of the environmental movement's recent success is rooted in a movie that features long stretches of Al Gore using Powerpoint, a combination that should have put any human being who watched it to sleep. The thousands of people who watched "An Inconvenient Truth" and the millions who merely said they did now dutifully sort their garbage into the various categories mandated by their local recycling authorities. Some have traded in their SUVs, sports cars, or other environmentally-offensive vehicles for hybrid equivalents. The most zealous of converts to this new faith have replaced their inefficient appliances, traded their dryer for a clothesline, and covered their roofs with solar panels. Unfortunately, these modest changes are not going to be nearly enough to stop, or even significantly slow, the advance of global warming and all the nasty consequences it portends. They are good and necessary first steps, to be sure, but they're like someone crawling out of a burning building when they really should be running for their lives. And while crawling might get that person closer to the door, it's still a losing strategy. Thankfully, the earth is not taking our abuse silently. Even the dimmest of idiots have, by now, noticed the changes in our climate that have raised temperatures globally, flooding certain parts of the world and drying others out completely, but that deadly mixture of hubris and ignorance that is unique to our species has tempted some - Republicans, mostly - into believing that we can overcome these inconveniences. But a closer and more honest inspection of our natural environment reveals a distressingly diverse range of indicators that express the urgency of the impending environmental disaster that we've created for ourselves. One such indicator is the retreat of the Athabasca Glacier, one of the many glaciers around the world that provides fresh water to the rivers, lakes, and streams that are used to satisfy the demands of industry, agriculture, and personal consumption. The Athabasca Glacier quenches the thirst of millions of people in Alberta, the Prairie Provinces, and states in the Western United States, but it may not be able to do that for much longer. It has retreated 1.5 kilometres since 1843, and the pace of that retreat quickens annually. "The Athabasca Glacier," says Bob Sandford, author of The Columbia Icefield and the chair of the United Nations International Year of Fresh Water and Wonder of Water initiative in Canada, "is the single best accessible example in what we are seeing happening in the world because of climate change today." The discovery of car exhaust, DDT, and other pollutants in its layers of compressed snow dating to 1932 leaves very little doubt that we are responsible for its disappearing act. There are other such indicators throughout the world, from the disappearance of healthy coral in the Southern Hemisphere to the collapse of massive and ancient ice shelves in the Antarctic to the disappearance of fisheries throughout the world. They are all living - for now, anyways - testimonies to our impact on the world, and consequences of any further inaction, or under-action, on our part. Our newfound commitment to recycling as a society is representative of this under-action. There is no doubt that recycling is an environmentally helpful activity, albeit one that consumes a great deal of energy. But while recycling makes people feel as though they're making a positive contribution to the environment, there's evidence that it isn't helping nearly as much as they'd like to think. Worse still, recycling those cans and bottles encourages us to be wasteful in other aspects of our lives because we've already made our "contribution". The same is true of low-flow toilets, fluorescent light bulbs, and carbon credits on air travel, which do far more to boost our environmental self-esteem than the environment itself. A cottage industry has popped up around this kind of feel-good environmentalism, and authors like NOW Magazine's Adria Vasil have been quick to capitalize on it with books instructing readers on how to bring their daily lives into harmony with the environment. An optimist might argue that these expressions of environmental responsibility are, if not the full and proper steps we need to take, still "better than nothing." But are they? Finishing second in the race against global warming isn't going to do us any good, after all, and the Athabasca Glacier and other phenomena like it aren't going to wait for us to get our act together. What we need is second-wave environmentalism. Second-wave environmentalism would take our heightening awareness of environmental concerns and marry them with real solutions, ones that might actually make a difference in fifty years time. It would disabuse us of the notion that we have some sort of divine right to our current standard of living, and encourage us to make real and meaningful sacrifices. As Yadowsun Boodhoo, President of the World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology said in 2003, "we must, imperatively, change our attitudes and agree to live modestly and realistically - all for the sake of the future - which is not ours but which we have borrowed from future generations." Living modestly and realistically might mean that we'd have to pay the full, unsubsidized price for gasoline, which would make owning a gas-guzzling SUV or sports car a truly punitive purchase. It might mean that we'd have to pay the true cost for our domestic energy consumption, which would get even the laziest person to turn off a few lights and drop the thermostat a few degrees. And surely, it would mean forcing our politicians to embrace political agreements like the Kyoto Protocol that aim to make a real impact on our collective carbon footprints. This second-wave environmentalism would have its enemies, and they'd be the same ones who fought so hard against the first wave. After all, environmentalism's opponents, who waged well-funded campaigns of disinformation against first-wave environmentalists, haven't conceded the battle. They've merely retreated to higher ground where they're better able to defend their territory. Industry lobbyists, corporate spokespeople, and the majority of politicians may have abandoned the idea that the science behind environmentalism is "debatable", but they didn't do it out of a sense of altruism or remorse. Instead, they've discovered an even better argument with which to rebuff calls for higher emission standards, alternative sources of energy, and a reduction in our domestic energy consumption. Worse still, it may be more effective than their previous tactic, which was vulnerable to the persistent intrusion of, you know, the facts. Today, that grand coalition of interests opposed to seriously dealing with environmental concerns is deploying a strategy straight out of their dog-eared copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", the appeal to self-interest. Tackling environmental concerns, they argue, will cost us thousands of jobs, billions of dollars, and that standard of life to which we've become accustomed. It's a choice, in other words, between protecting what's left of our environment and that new Range Rover in the driveway. It's a cunning strategy because many people, in the face of an ever-growing body of evidence that their cars and the lifestyle they represent are destroying the earth, will still opt for what's sitting in their driveway. It's not yet clear how that argument will be defeated, if it will at all. It may take a major environmental disaster - the shifting of the Atlantic jet-stream, perhaps - or an unlikely epiphany on the part of our political leaders. But at some point soon, we need to come to terms with the fact that fixing what we've broken isn't going to come cheap, and it certainly isn't going to be free. The cost of doing nothing, after all, will be a hell of lot higher. Toronto, November 22 - 1,498 w.
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