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JANICE HARVEY
CIVIL SOCIETY

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Speak Up

Last Friday I participated in the Ideas Festival sponsored by the young leaders' group 21 Inc. and the New Brunswick Business Council. The concept was an interesting one: an event engaging lots of thought leaders to encourage people to think outside the box about issues, problems, opportunities and our individual and collective position in the world.

That said, finding new ways of thinking about things is easier said than done.

My panel topic, the future of environmental action in Canada, is a case in point. The very idea of individual environmental action stems from a misunderstanding of the gravity of the situation we face and the dramatic structural changes that need to be made in industrialized societies to turn things around. The task of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent in a little more than one generation (the target scientists tell us we have to meet) requires a profound rewrite of the western industrial society narrative. It is fundamentally dishonest to suggest that an incremental approach of saving a tonne of CO2 here and there through personal lifestyle changes is the way forward.

The myriad things we can do personally to reduce our ecological footprints - the subject of thousands of books and guides and websites and citizens' groups - are but a footnote to the real challenge before us.

It is equally dishonest to pretend that encouraging carbon reduction through tax incentives and penalties is the silver bullet. Both the individual and the market-mechanism approaches reflect the economic and political culture created in the past four decades. Environmental protection in our affluent market society has been privatized, individualized and consumerized.

This encourages a chronic and willful avoidance of political leadership at a time when a collective response is an absolute necessity. Some have equated what is required to a full-blown war effort to curb the worst effects of global warming. Our climate is already changing - it's now a question of how bad it will become. Without the requisite leadership, we can stop idling our cars on cold mornings or running the water while we brush our teeth all we want: greenhouse gas levels will continue to rise, species extinction reports will continue to roll in, and the glaciers will continue to melt.

For action at the household or personal level to be meaningful, it has to be part of a major restructuring of the way society does business. Using the wartime analogy, individual environmental action would be on the scale of victory gardens, rationing and black-outs. These actions were critical to the functioning of society, but the major battles were fought and the war won by armies, navies and air forces under the command of generals in the service of a societal goal led by elected governments.

The structural redesign of society that requires visionary political leadership looks like this. Our building stock must be transformed; new buildings must be energy producers. Communities must be redesigned for pedestrians; transportation systems must be redesigned for public transport of goods and people. The industrial food system, which produces a third of our greenhouse gases, must be redesigned and decentralized. Energy systems must be decentralized and dependent on renewable sources. Production systems must be self-sufficient in energy and produce zero waste. Ecosystems such as wetlands, which provide critical ecological services, must be restored.

Most profoundly, we have to abandon an economic system based on perpetual growth in consumption represented by consumer spending. Globally, ecosystems are laid to waste, arable land and potable water supplies destroyed, cultures disrupted, communities displaced, people and land poisoned, and fossil fuels burned to drive the whole process in the service of ever-growing gross national product.

We in the developed world are literally consuming ourselves out of house and home. We have already done this for billions of environmental refugees and the global poor.

So the big idea is this. We need to generate the political leadership to make the transition from a "consumer" society to a "conserver" society which provides for everyone, including the four fifths of the global population now living in poverty, and restores the earth's ecosystems so life of all kinds, including our grandchildren, can thrive.

That challenge will take some serious thinking outside the box.

Janice Harvey is a freelance columnist. She can be reached by e-mail at waweig@nbnet.nb.ca.