Ahhh…blogging. So rewarding. So time consuming. After much deliberation, I’ve decided that it’s time for Boreal Citizen to come to an end.
It’s already past due, drawn out by the encouragement of kind people, new subscribers, and friends who clicked “share” ten minutes after publication, making my efforts feel worthwhile. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the support.
However, there are only so many hours in the day. As a parent of young children, I must carefully choose where to direct what little energy I have to spare. Am I making a difference? Is my time well-spent?
Politically, economically, we are entering difficult times. If we believe what the experts say about energy depletion, environmental degradation and the limits to growth, then we need to start focusing, in particular, on community resilience and local food production. It’s hard to justify neglecting my own practical projects in order to spend time in the abstract, researching and writing about these things instead.
That said, I’d like to write more for other publications. And I have a long list of to-do’s: build a chicken tractor, plant some vegetables, write a municipal urban hen proposal, exercise more, look into homeschooling, complete some sewing projects, work on my photography skills… Most importantly, I’d like to figure out how to get out of debt and find a rural property that is more conducive to a simpler, more self-sufficient life.
I’d also like to focus on Transition Town activities since these probably represent our best chance at a live-able future. If anyone would like to assist with a NWO or Kenora Transition Town website (and/or FB page), please contact me so we can work together. I hope to have the site up and running before this one goes dark, and will provide the link.
In the meantime, to my readers I must say: thank you, thank you, thank you. This blog has been a wonderful intellectual outlet for me and I will miss it dearly. It has been an exercise in both bravery and self-restraint. Recklessness and careful consideration. And while it represents but a speck of dust in the infinite universe of the Internet, I hope that I’ve made some small impact in the world.
What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, ‘What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?’ – Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
When it comes to teaching my kids about the world, I never assumed science would be a top priority. Yet these days I find myself spending little time focusing on language, instead opting for discussions about things like gravity, the solar system and human evolution.
This is partly due to my children’s natural curiosity about such topics. But one might also argue that our future as a species depends on our ability to think critically, and base our decisions on evidence and reason. (Climate change denial, and its potentially dire consequences, might be the ultimate example of our collective failure in this regard.) It follows that we should probably give kids tools to counter dogmatism, superstition, and anti-intellectualism from an early age.
Indeed, as Shawn Lawrence Otto asserts in his Scientific American article, Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy, there is much at stake. He also points out, quite rightly, that anti-science discourse stems from both ends of the political spectrum:
Science denialism among Democrats tends to be motivated by unsupported suspicions of hidden dangers to health and the environment. Common examples include the belief that cell phones cause brain cancer (high school physics shows why this is impossible) or that vaccines cause autism (science has shown no link whatsoever). Republican science denialism tends to be motivated by anti-regulatory fervor and fundamentalist concerns over control of the reproductive cycle. Examples include the conviction that global warming is a hoax (billions of measurements show it is a fact) or that we should “teach the controversy” to schoolchildren over weather life on the planet was shaped by evolution over millions of years or an intelligent designer over thousands of years (scientists agree evolution is real). Of these two forms of science denialism, the Republican version is more dangerous because the party has taken to attacking the validity of science itself as the basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology.
I would have to agree. For example, an unfounded belief in astrology or homeopathic medicine – common among progressives — is rather innocuous compared to the anti-science rhetoric coming from corporations whose profits are threatened by environmental regulation. Nevertheless, they share the same seed: a desire to believe what we want to believe, rather than engage in scientific inquiry and rational discourse.
From a young age, we also set a precedent for this type of thinking through religious indoctrination. Even many agnostic parents answer their children’s questions about what happens after death, for example, with references to an afterlife (i.e., heaven) simply because they are more palatable than the truth (which, for the record is: nobody really knows).
Some have noted that religion, unlike every other human domain (like medicine, or philosophy), is considered beyond reproach. As Sam Harris implies in his book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, to equate the belief systems that are currently in vogue (such as Christianity and Islam) to any other superstition is considered “intolerant”. Yet to a non-believer, it would be intellectually dishonest to afford these popular doctrines any more validity than, say, the pagan religion of Ancient Greece. (Replace “God” with “Zeus” during the commencement prayer at a city council meeting and you can see just how goofy and inappropriate these things appear to a secularist.)
I suspect the correlation between religiosity and a susceptibility to anti-science rhetoric is also quite high, as is evidenced by the current situation with North American conservatives. It’s now common knowledge that 68 per cent of registered Republicans believe in demonic possession while only 48 per cent say that climate change is real. Perhaps the willingness to believe that religious texts are the “true word of God” simply “because the books themselves say so” (and because religious leaders declare it so) also predisposes one to believe other unsubstantiated claims from authority figures. And, as Harris writes, “epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world”.
He remarks that it is taboo to notice certain things about religion, like the differences between them that cannot be reconciled (i.e., if one religion is true than all others must be false). It’s also taboo to recognize that many of the societies that have eschewed dogma for reason (Sweden for example, where only 23% of the population believes in God), tend to be quite peaceful, have an enviably high quality of life, and have very progressive environmental policies.
There is growing evidence to support the benefits of secularism. As Paul Gregory notes in a CBC interview (about his 2009 study in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology), “religion is most able to thrive in severely dysfunctional societies.” The article claims that Paul “compiled data on everything from homicide rates and income equality to infant mortality and teenage pregnancies and found that the societies that scored the best on socioeconomic indicators were also the most secular.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a causal relationship, but it’s certainly something worth considering when asking ourselves what type of society we want to live in. And, of course, in establishing our own parenting philosophies. For me, an emphasis on honesty and rational discourse is crucial in raising children who are well-equipped to deal with a challenging future. That doesn’t mean I won’t lie to them about things like the Easter Bunny for a couple more years. But when it comes to questions about life, death, the planet and the universe, I’ll draw on science to answer what I can. And I won’t pretend to know the things I can’t.
Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. – Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
In Manitoba, beach-goers fed up with cigarette butt litter and drifting plumes of smoke have reason to celebrate. The province is the first in Canada to make beaches and playgrounds in provincial parks smoke-free.
Now, imagine traveling back in time, and showing that headline to somebody in the 1960s when smoking was commonplace in offices, airplanes, vehicles…even growing up in the eighties I had a teacher who kept a full ashtray in his desk. It would probably seem absurd. It certainly demonstrates how far we’ve come in so little time. Through a combination of taxation, public education and regulation we’ve gone from a smoking rate of 49% in 1965 to a situation in which only 14% of Canadians smoke on a daily basis.
While scientific research into the health effects of smoking certainly played an important role, how much of this shift can we attribute to an expectation of the right to clean air? It has become a fundamental part of our culture — if someone suddenly lit up a cigarette in a restaurant, the other patrons would be horrified.
And yet this right really only applies to tobacco. When I haul my kids across the lake to the playground, I can safely assume nobody will be smoking nearby. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be inhaling the toxic fumes of snowmobiles as they roar past (seriously, who designed a snowmobile trail to cut right through a kids’ playground?). Or the noxious exhaust of the Ford F350s idling endlessly in the school parking lot.
Of course, I’m considered the weirdo for thinking my right to breathe clean air (i.e., not laden with carcinogens) should take precedence over another citizen’s fossil-fueled high-speed recreational activity. (But, you know, snowmobiling draws 10-zillion tourist dollars to Northern Ontario every year, so I daren’t be critical of it.)
What’s worse, here in bizzarro-world we’ve decided the right to make money (and not have to make alternate living arrangements) should take precedence over our children’s and grandchildren’s right to a stable climate.
The current fight for climate justice bears a remarkable similarity to the fight against Big Tobacco. In fact, as DeSmogBlog points out, the official State Department report published March 1st (and quoted by many climate deniers as evidence that the Keystone XL is “no big deal”), was conducted by an “oil-industry firm with Big Tobacco ties.” The big difference is that this time the stakes are much higher, and time is running out.
What’s the formula again? Oh yes — taxation (in this case, carbon fee and dividend), public education and regulation…the only major complication in this case is the need to invest heavily in replacement energy sources that won’t wreck the climate. But the corporate libertarians (who are now running the show, even in Canada) are working hard to convince us that these solutions will destroy the world as we know it. Now that the science has become widely accepted, even among many deniers, they have progressed to even nuttier arguments — like proclaiming that the tar sands will be burned anyway, so we must continue to build pipelines and burn them. Sounds kinda familiar, doesn’t it?
What if you are right — and smoking declines? As time passes…the population will be larger, and its average age will increase, because smoking-related diseases will disappear. The health system will be faced with treating a larger number of people, especially elderly people, which would tend to offset the savings of not having to treat people for smoking related diseases.
– Tobacco Institute of Australia, c 1989
Is there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and swindles who thinks that he or she will escape the wrath of the Millennials rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an academic economist could fail to notice. – James Howard Kunstler, Democratic Underground
This was not my intended topic today. But when Dr. John Izzo’s TED talk — a Baby Boomer rallying cry — was released recently on-line, and highlighted via 350 or Bust, it quickly became a priority. (Scroll down to watch below.)
The Boomer generation both fascinates and irritates me (OK, it’s more than irritation, but I’m trying to be more zen about these things). Izzo hits the nail on the head when he says he belongs to the luckiest generation ever — their propitious lives sandwiched perfectly between the war and poverty of their parents, and the environmental and economic chaos that will plague their children. Boomers built their wealth during the greatest economic growth period of all time, thanks to a one-time endowment of cheap fossil fuels, which are now rapidly depleting. This is a generation that, as Izzo points out, now holds 80% of the wealth in the world (and, I might add, has the nerve to continually neuroticize about whether it can “afford to retire”).
I can’t blame someone for being born at a better time than me. However, I can blame a group of people with an unprecedented level of wealth and political power for not giving a rat’s ass about future generations.
There are, of course, a lot of wonderful, engaged Boomers out there trying to make the world a better place. But for every one of those I meet, there are at least ten more who are preoccupied with optimizing their stock portfolio, perfecting their golf swing, or finding cheap flights to the south of France. That’s before we even talk about the ones who are running most corporations, and who are running the country as both politicians and voters. Take a snapshot of a typical Harper supporter and you’ll see a 65-year old male who earns over $80,000 per year.
Izzo implores this group — who has so much, who has taken so much from the world already — to take some responsibility for solving our emerging problems. His impassioned (albeit somewhat narcissistic) “grey-corps” call to action is long overdue. He proclaims,
How can the generation that is going to be the healthiest, longest-lived, most educated and wealthiest older generation in human history actually believe that “we’re not the ones”?
Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate it. I hope it works. I hope it inspires at least a few Boomers to get involved in the fight for climate justice, to write a letter to the editor, or to do something political beyond just voting.
I hope, but I am not optimistic. There are systemic factors hindering this generation’s will to change — Izzo’s senior citizen army can only move forward if there are enough older people in the right frame of mind. For starters, an almost-religious belief in free-market capitalism is underpinned by a need for this economic arrangement to succeed: nobody wants to cash out his investments during a period of decline. Furthermore, many company-loyal Boomers spent so long shackled to jobs they despised that their retirement expectations have become distorted; I suspect an over-inflated sense of entitlement is the driving force behind all that self-indulgent leisure activity and consumer spending. They might make good climate-capitalists if that’s your thing, but a major worldview shift seems unlikely.
Another psychological hurdle is the pervasive need to feel like an oh-so reasonable “moderate”. As a result, Boomer information sources are heavily weighted toward VSPs (like Peter Foster, Rex Murphy, Margaret Wente — you know who I mean). VSPs (Very Serious People) typically mollify; they can’t wrap their minds around the implications of worst-case climate scenarios, or the radical solutions we might need to prevent them. And why should they be alarmed? North American Boomers lived during the most peaceful, prosperous time in all of history (their longest-running, most grave concern — nuclear war — never did materialize). They were the first generation raised with television, with consumerism, with suburbia — that’ll mess you up. They labelled rich countries “developed” as if they’d reached some sort of logical end-point: the natural arrangement of things from now on. That’s a tough ideology to crack.
Even if they did suddenly become enlightened en masse, there is still the question of motivation. Izzo is relying on altruism and the desire to build a great generational legacy, but I’m not sure that will be enough.
Maybe a much better motivator would be, as Kunstler puts it, “the wrath of the Millennials rising.” Climate change is moving more quickly than originally anticipated — if we continue at this rate, the world will start looking rather dystopic before we even hit the mid-century mark.
Let’s think about what that might look like. If Millennials are struggling, on a parched planet, just to feed their own children, how much time and compassion will they have left for the ninety-year-olds who once fought the policy changes that could have prevented such misery? When Milllennials finally seize control of what scant resources remain, with whom will they be willing to share?
Do what you want, Boomers (you always have)…but if I were you, I’d seriously consider hedging my bets.
When we talk about complexity, resources and economic decline, it seems we’ve learned nothing from history.
In his talk in Barcelona, [Joseph] Tainter gave the example of the Roman Empire during the 3rd century A.D. At that time the empire faced a serious military crisis: invasions of foreign peoples and internal civil wars. The crisis was solved by Diocletian by doubling the size of the army, increasing taxes and enlarging bureaucracy; overall it was a considerable increase in complexity. Transforming the Roman Empire into sort of an early version of the Soviet Union was a solution – of a kind – that retarded collapse by a couple of centuries, but that, in a certain way, made it unavoidable. –Excerpt from Cassandra’s Legacy blog entry, March 10, 2011
Sounds awfully familiar. Shoal Point Energy just announced an exciting new plan for exploratory drilling along the western coast of Newfoundland: it could be the next big shale oil discovery.
Like any addict on a losing-streak, we feign confidence and tap the table, doubling-down on the very energy source that is causing our climate crisis, but this time with far more complexity (hydraulic fracturing), much greater expense, much higher risks (contamination of ground water, for example), and a significantly lower rate of return (EROEI).
I suspect we will continue like this for some time, trying to stave off the inevitable, just as Diocletian did. And why not? After all, a politician who enables these types of investments — creating enough jobs and keeping the economy just simmering enough to get by in an uneasy world — has a pretty good chance of re-election. As Deborah Coyne, Liberal leadership candidate emphasizes, her top three priorities are economy, economy, economy. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne echoed these sentiments yesterday in her speech from the throne, which included at least a dozen references to economic growth or variations thereof. Fossil-fueled growth is our Roman legionnaire: both the problem and the solution. And we can’t wrap our minds around anything else.
Besides which, moving from larger, more complex systems to smaller, simpler ones seems counter-intuitive. Little, inexpensive houses, for example, are called starter-homes for a reason. We don’t call them you-could-be-happy-here-forever-homes because we’re expected to move up as we get richer, and seek out something better. Anything less seems quiescent…depressing even.
The biggest challenge of the voluntary simplicity movement, and for those advocating for simpler (and thus more resilient) food and energy systems, is to convince the growth-obsessed masses that these choices are not a step backward. On a personal level, I struggle with these ideas every day.
On the home-front, simplicity can mean more labour-intensive activities, and we’re generally afraid of physical labour. Most people cringe at the thought of hanging a heavy load of laundry on the line, or turning the humanure in a composting toilet, but consider the same calories expended at the gym “me time.” I’ll admit that, in some regards, I’d rather go down with the ship than face the simpler, eco-friendly alternative — I love my dishwasher, for example, and often run it twice a day. Nevertheless I have to wonder, although I am by no means a Luddite, am I romanticizing simplicity?
In Depletion and Abundance, Sharon Astyk similarly questions her push for subsistence farming and simple living in the section entitled, Am I romanticizing poverty? Her response could be equally applied to the simplicity argument:
Our perceptions drive our sense of what is work more than the actual work does. How many people can remember doing some now-unthinkable job when they were young and poor, and now say, “But I was happy.” I’ve met people who walked in the snow to their outhouses, who boiled laundry on coal stoves, who hung their dripping, freezing laundry off a fourth-story balcony. And I’ve hauled a month’s worth of laundry half a mile on my back in a sack, carried my groceries for a mile, stood outside in the cold waiting for a bus every morning, walked four miles to work. And when I look back at every one of those activities, it really wasn’t that big a deal.
She also points out that some experiments, such as the PBS documentary series Frontier House, suggest that romanticism of the past “isn’t entirely misplaced.” Most of the participants in these projects preferred their much more labour-intensive frontier lives to the modern ones they returned to. After a short adjustment period, the “emotional, spiritual, and personal benefits of the life overtook the transitory concerns of physical work, and again, life was good.”
But even with a return to simplicity, its unlikely the future will look anything like the past (and that’s a good thing — I hope high-tech medical care, the Internet, books, electricity and all sorts of other modern-day things will always be around, no matter how rough life gets). Moreover — because we are such clever creatures — the drudgery-simplicity relationship is not always linear. The cheaper, simpler and more resilient choice is not always more burdensome, especially if it is the product of careful forethought. A solar-heated thermal mass, for example, is far simpler than a natural gas forced-air furnace; it also costs less and requires less maintenance. In his recent Grist article, Will Oremus touts triple-paned windows as the “surprisingly low-tech solution to big cities’ climate woes”. And what about cycling? When the snow is not knee-high, a bicycle is arguably the most ingenious simple contraption around.
And then there is the bird feeder. When I look out my back window, I see the plastic feeder we bought from Canadian Tire. As soon as it snowed, the fancy retraction mechanism jammed and we could no longer refill it. Outside the front window hangs a free bagel on a string that we occasionally coat with peanut butter and grain. The birds love it — they couldn’t care less what it cost, how complicated it is, or if its purchase contributed to the GDP. They just want to be fed.
World population has increased from under 1-billion in 1800 to over 7-billion today–that’s just over 200 years. So that’s an extraordinary rate of population increase. If we saw that in any other species, we’d say, “Wow, that species is headed for a crash.” We don’t think that way when we see the human population numbers. We look at them and say, “Oh, wow–how successful we are.” –Richard Heinberg, in a speech at the 2012 Bioneers Conference
This week we decided to tackle the baby items: sorting them, cleaning them and selling them. During this process, I could not help but marvel at how fortunate I am to live in a time and place where, as a woman, I have so much control over my own family size. While we might expect that authority over one’s own reproductive system should be treated as a fundamental human right, the resignation of Pope Benedict this week was an important reminder that in much of the world, it is not.
The rather out-of-touch Catholic leader received a great deal of criticism over the last few days as his papal career was reviewed. At the top of my list of his crimes would be his declaration to Africa — a continent devastated by HIV/AIDS, and facing a serious population crisis — that condoms might “even increase the problem.” A tremendously influential figure, I often wonder how many new HIV infections could be linked back to this statement. Not to mention unplanned pregnancies.
If we are to have any sort of future at all on this planet, we need to get a handle on growth. Activists and organizations like CASSE have started the discussion on our need to curb economic growth and consumption (i.e., move to a steady-state economy), but population growth is a touchier subject. Nobody wants to risk offending those who have already chosen to have large families. Luckily, there is no need to point fingers at our fertile friends, since TFR (total fertility rate) is something that falls naturally as we improve the lives of women, and our overall quality of life.
Contraception is an important part of the equation, of course. In my teens and early twenties I was surprised at how easy it was to procure contraceptives, often for free. But birth control is not a panacea; a woman’s willingness and ability to control her own fertility is highly dependent on a number of other factors. In her very informative essay, 7 Billion: Understanding the demographic transition, Sharon Astyk sheds some light on the many keys to stabilizing population. Having enough to eat, being educated and literate, having future plans, living in a peaceful, highly-equal society with a low infant mortality rate, having a social safety net for the elderly…to name a few.
(Interestingly, wealth is not necessarily a prerequisite for a lower TFR, as is evidenced by some poor countries. The Indian state of Kerala is an often-cited example of a region without western-style wealth and consumerism, but a very low TFR — likely the result of its 100% literacy rate and high quality of life.)
I suspect these factors also provide some protective benefit against oppressive religious dogma, such as the discouragement of contraception and sex education, or the treatment of human sexuality as shameful. One case in point could be Italy, where the Catholic Church plays a central role (90% of Italians are Catholic), yet its TFR has fallen to a measly 1.4 children per woman.
But there are many places where life is not so easy (like Africa), and where religious leaders have a much greater influence. Perhaps it’s for this reason that so many progressive folks are anxiously wondering if the new Pope will be more forward-thinking than the last. In the meantime, we need to create a better world for women everywhere — one in which they are educated, literate and empowered enough to make their own decisions about family planning, rather than taking cues from out-of-touch old men.
Last month, while reading and reviewingToo Much Magic, I came across a line in the latter half of the book that really stung: “Not even people who are preoccupied with climate change like to think about it anymore.” It hurts because it’s true. I’m tired, and disheartened by the snail’s pace of climate progress. Meanwhile, the malaise of a feverish planet is rapidly intensifying, each drought or extreme weather event unfurling a new set of problems, foreshadowing our own undoing.
Kunstler goes on to write,
The more you explore the problem, the worse it seems and the more hopeless you feel. A lot of people like myself who do think about it remain plugged in to the fossil fuel economies that are responsible for this set of problems. I suppose we’re free to blame ourselves, for all the good it may do. I can’t speak for others in my position but I feel that I am a hostage to this economy. To say that it is the only economy I’ve known my whole long life may sound like a lame excuse. More to the point, perhaps, there is no post-fossil fuel economy yet to–forgive me for putting it this way–plug your life into, no World Made by Hand that represents the kind of immersive reset of daily life that would allow someone to function in a different context.
And there you have it: we are immersed in a system that, by its very design, is incompatible with our long-term survival, but we have no ready alternative. Furthermore, proposed alternatives to the current growth-based, extractive economy that is causing so many financial and environmental woes (worker-owned cooperatives, or local food and energy production, for example) are so inimical to our collective worldview, that they are almost entirely omitted from the discussion.
I’m not sure we’ll see any real progress until we rethink our core assumptions. The video below–yes, it’s Sesame Street–reminded me a bit of the situation we have now in Canada: a government whose viewpoint is so myopic they’re functioning in a sort of upside-down fantasy world, one in which climate change is not really happening. Economic growth is Harper’s raison d’etre…at the expense of everything else, including social equality or environmental protection. The Conservative party has its head so far up its own arse it won’t even consider taxing carbon, even though the oil producers themselves want a carbon tax. And we continue to build fossil fuel infrastructure–pipelines branching out like veins, delivering black goo across the continent–even though burning it will irreversibly alter our climate and jeopardize our children’s future. If someone in the latter half of this century could send a text message to our current leaders, I suspect it would merely ask, “WTF?”
Muppet Dowager Countess: “Why have the crumpets fallen to the ceiling?”
Muppet Carson: “Again, Mam, it most likely is because we are upside down.”
Muppet Dowager Countess: “This is a bit of a problem.”
Muppet Carson: “Perhaps if we were right side up, the problem would be solved.”
Muppet Dowager Countess: “Hmph. Don’t be ridiculous, we very well can’t be right-side-up in Upside Downton Abbey. It is simply not done.”
