Friday, August 30, 2019

Are We Willing to Lose This Without Even Putting Up a Fight?



How do you not show up to fight against an existential threat?  It's existential. It imperils your very existence.

Jason Kenney's Canada, Scott Moe's Canada, Doug Ford's Canada as well as Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau's Canada is a nation that has little stomach for fighting a clear threat to our continued existence. They're what you could call the Business As Usual club, or BAU.

Most of them talk a good game but they're just blowing smoke up your arse. The glaciers are disappearing, ice caps are melting, sea ice is vanishing, sea levels are rising, we have heatwaves inside the Arctic Circle in the dark of the polar winter, the tundra is thawed and dried and burning, the permafrost is exposed to release its once safely sequestered bounty of methane and CO2, man and nature now compete to see which can set fire to the most woodland, crops fail from heavy flooding in one region and flash droughts in other areas. To feed our nearly 8 billion strong brood we're farming our stocks of arable land to exhaustion and contaminating our lakes and rivers with blue-green algae caused by the runoff of agricultural chemicals. Our dwindling stocks of wilderness are being consumed and we are denying other creatures the habitat without which their numbers plummet by more than half. Species are going extinct at rates unknown in the history of our civilization.  Where they can find a clear path, plants and animals are migrating poleward. We rarely talk about it but our leaders, civilian and military, are bracing for mass human migration from homelands that are becoming uninhabitable by people seeking nothing more than survival.

Yet we're in a pissing contest over a $30/tonne carbon tax. While we're at it our purported leaders are vying to persuade us that they alone can ramp up Canadian production of the highest-carbon, lowest value, climate wrecking ersatz petroleum there is. Let that sink in for a minute.

Some are questioning whether we've already left it too late, already ordained the collapse of our ecosystem, our biosphere.

Cristiana Paşca Palmer, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforest was a grim reminder that a fresh approach was needed to stabilise the climate and prevent ecosystems from declining to a point of no return, with dire consequences for humanity. 
“The Amazon fires make the point that we face a very serious crisis,” she told the Guardian. “But it is not just the Amazon. We’re also concerned with what’s happening in other forests and ecosystems, and with the broader and rapid degradation of nature. The risk is we are moving towards the tipping points that scientists talk about that could produce cascading collapses of natural systems.” 
The world’s environmental crises are an increasing concern in international politics. Deforestation of the Amazon was high on the agenda of this week’s G7 meeting in Biarritz, France. In September, world leaders will gather in New York for a climate action summit. Next year, they are scheduled to get together again for a nature summit before a UN biodiversity conference in Kunming, China, in October.
Conferences, they're good. There was a summit in 2015 at which the community of nations pledged to do whatever it took to limit climate change not to 2 degrees Celsius but to just 1.5 C. A freshly minted prime minister proclaimed that "Canada's back" but, since then has been mainly backsliding. Mr. Trudeau has been falling further and further behind even meeting Stephen Harper's emissions goals. But what about that 2015 stuff and the 'Canada's back' business? Oh, I see, that was just more horse shit.

Some are already throwing in the towel. The Guardian has a video of Alan Cookson who has spent four years leading volunteer beach cleaning efforts on the Welsh coast. He's quitting, finding the plastics onslaught insurmountable. He says it's like "mopping up a flood."

Yesterday I wound up watching a couple of travel videos from Deutsche Welle. They focused on Southeast Asian destinations, including once pristine Thai resorts. It was disheartening to watch huge hordes of European tourists quite happily swimming amidst a sea of plastics, beaches covered in the stuff. People still pay big dollars for the privilege. I had to ask myself what have we become? Is this 'terminal-stage humanity'?

Homo Sapiens have a terrible, potentially lethal flaw. It has various labels. Some have called it 'landscape amnesia' but I prefer 'creeping normalcy.'  We get used to 'what is today.' It becomes our new normal. The past is forgotten, extinguished, no longer relevant. Why not swim in a mess of plastic when that's normal?  Why not, through weight of numbers alone, thoroughly, perhaps permanently, trash once pristine ecosystems when that's normal?

Do you think that pigs stuffed into those industrial barns find that little metal cage anything but normal?  That is the pig's normal until something else comes along, usually something worse and often involving knives.  We may be more intelligent, more sentient than the pig but, damn, if we don't behave a lot like them.  And we may be heading for a similarly abbreviated fate because that's what Business As Usual has in store for us.

5 comments:

  1. .. sigh ..

    I've made a few comments.. here n there.. Sometimes I include the word or term 'exemplar' .. Now what i would be stoked to say or claim is Canada (my home n native land) is an exemplar.. but I can't. If I'm honest, I have to say or admit, we are losers.. not all of us.. but as a country we are a failure... bottom line. As a country we lie to ourselves.. because we suck, big time. We suck at Environment, Habitat, Species. Regardless of Jason Kenney, Trudeau, Harper, Dame McKenna propaganda.. we just plain suck or are even worse.

    Yes we have some exemplars.. you're one. David Schindler is one, Andrew Derocher is one, , Bruce Cockburn another, so is Paul Watson, Jane Philpott.. I know one when I see, hear or read one.. their actions stand out. they are the 'doers'.. How do we get (or drag or force) Canada to the 'exemplar' region ?? Instead of the 'loser' region ?? I'm beginning to see this what its all about. Simply put.. Canada is aimed currently at being a total loser. How do we raise our sights higher ?? How do we get Canadians to only accept being champions for the Environment.. and all that entails. BIG ORDER.. this I know.. but I see it more clearly as the challenge of the rest of my lifetime.. I'm a slow starter, late to the game, tardy & lazy. I've been a winner by default in most ways.. 1st by being born male, 2nd being born Canadian, 3rd being white.. and.. uh.. OK.. how to really get off the dime.. ?

    Like many I guess I was hoping Justin Trudeau was going to do it for me.. that never happened. I wonder what runs through the thoughts of a David Schindler.. or a Derocher or a Paul Watson.. Can I tap into that.. or will it scare the living daylights out of me ? Do I have the parts to swim in those deep fast waters ? Or where do I learn ? Or at least survive in the shallows ? I get that people are dispirited.. including you.. and my best asset may be my batteries are strong .. and I'm naive.. even altruistic.. and I have imagination & a powerful belief in lateral solutions & problem solving..

    I'm thinking right now.. still writing, wondering.. how to rock the casbah.. or at least lend a hand.. I may go help Jane Philpott in her riding as an Indy candidate.. I don't subscribe to her Christian beliefs.. yet I have swung in the wind to come truly admire her regardless.. she been there done it, got the t-shirt and the tattoo.. and got the shaft from Justin Trudeau and his rabid social media partisans insult her daily .. truly uncalled for ignorance. I give credit to Warren Kinsella and his wife Lisa for being ahead of the curve in her defense.. and in defense of Ms Wilson-Reybould as well. Crazy times Mound, these are crazy times.. Canada is in a dead heat with the US of A for being Environmental and Ethical Stupidos.. and it does not sit well at all.. I don't abide.. not at all..

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  2. Crazy times indeed, Sal. Many people use 'crazy' as an adjective for our times. Then again, it's difficult to even grasp the magnitude of these changes.

    Canada is not even acknowledging the IPCC's call for a 50 per cent cut in emissions by 2030. The latest numbers suggest that Trudeau has us on course for a 16 per cent reduction by 2030.

    Canadians don't understand that, as a major GHG emitter, both in absolute numbers and per capita, Canada has a clear moral responsibility to be leading on emissions cuts. Only that's a responsibility we are not prepared to shoulder.

    2030, that's barely a decade off and yet our government, that proclaimed a climate emergency, behaves as though we're still in the 1980s. They claim to be doing wonderful things but they're not, not really. And Scheer would be much worse.

    We sure haven't set the bar very high.

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  3. Been reading Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class for a class starting this September. Having thoughts about how government's behaviour ties into this theory. I'm a bit shakey on it yet -- need to re-read the book even though I'm not yet finished reading it the first time -- but there seems to be correlation between Conspicious Consumption on the level of nations. Wasteful behaviour is necessarily seen as important.

    That spending/investment on the conveniences that Fossile Fuels provide is wasteful, therefore it is all important. Especially to those who invest in it. Wastefulness is sold as essential to the classes below the Fossil Fuel barons. It is sold to government as essential. Ease of life is sold as being as the Leisure class.

    In a sense, to end this cycle, it is nescessary to "rob" who controls convenience from the current leisure class, and set-up a new one that isn't reliant on fossil fuels. But that's probably called a revolution.

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  4. That's a meaty tome, Troy. I wish you well with it and, at the same time, relieved it's not my assigned reading.

    It is becoming less difficult to accept that the end result might be, as you suggest, revolution.

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  5. Yes indeed....we have left it too late. anyong

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