Green-Tinged Hypocrisy

Surely there is no one who still seriously believes we are not facing ecological catastrophe. The only real question now is what are we going to do about it.

My idea of being environmentally aware consists of looking both ways before crossing the street. What is the point of doing much more? There is a litany of excuses for apathy and inertia that can be boiled down to three generic rationales:

The first two reasons are complementary, and rafters of books are being churned out to persuade us we can each do our part with very little effort and expense. And so we get the likes of Adria Vasil’s Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada and David Suzuki and David R. Boyd’s David Suzuki’s Green Guide, two encyclopaedias of tips for improving our household ecology.

Vasil’s clumsily square-shaped compendium squints critically at every product of daily life from an ostensibly ecological perspective. I say ostensibly because what she finds is more about toxic bacteria than about environmental impact. Like many self-absorbed post-boomers, her definition of “environment” seems to extend only to personal space and well-being.

Vasil’s attitude is that everything is bad for you and for the environment. Bet you never dreamt flossing your teeth was evil, but according to Vasil, it is potentially lethal—albeit it would require flossing 365 times a day (yes, a day) for 75 years for you to be exposed to a grand total of 3 milligrams of perfluorooctanoic acid, which is merely a “probable” carcinogen.

Numbers like these often seem plucked out of the air. “Even if only a third of Canadians threw out a razor blade once a week,” she claims, “we’d be tossing over 520 million every year!” As someone whose beard is a natural ecological benefit, then, I am probably not qualified to scoff, but razor blade companies notoriously refuse to provide hard evidence of the number of shaves one can get out of a standard blade. Vasil thus ignores the simplest way to reduce the environmental impact of discarding razor blades: just use the blades until they really, truly, visibly and tactilely no longer give a decent shave. For the average clean-shaven man, that means a good three months, not seven days.

As for Suzuki, his book is a lazy pastiche of thoughtless assertions. “Forty years ago, Americans spent 18% of their income on food and only 5% to 6% of their income on health care,” he informs us in an effort to convince us to quit eating meat for the sake of the environment. “Now Americans spend 9% of their income on food … and 16% to 18% of their income on health care.” That says far more about America’s ongoing refusal to provide national medicare than it does about their eating habits.

“When it comes to wasting water,” he insists, “the main culprits are inefficient toilets, leaking faucets, water-guzzling appliances, and thirsty lawns.” Is it really inefficient toilets and thirsty lawns that have drained lakes and rivers in Alberta’s oil patch and destroyed the fishing industry of the Athabaska-Slave-Hay rivers system all the way to Great Slave Lake?

“Next time you move, look for a comfortable yet modest home in an area where you can use your car less,” he commands. “Look for a neighbourhood with safe streets for walking, cycling, and children, lots of trees, and proximity to attractive green spaces.” As if it is that easy for 95 percent of the world populace, or even for the residents of a greenbelt-designed city like Ottawa, where I live.

Suzuki also fails to address the fact that our economic system continues to identify housing starts as one of the three or four most significant measures of economic growth and stability. When I bought my house ten years ago, it was the second last on the edge of a complex of forest, wetland and farmland; today, more than 35,000 new “housing units” have not only destroyed that environment, but also deprived countless birds and animals of their homes. How can housing starts be considered a purely positive economic influence when it causes such environmental devastation?

Perhaps the ecologically tentative individual can be more encouraged by role models than by the advice of Vasil and Suzuki. I certainly cannot recommend using James Glave for this purpose. Almost Green: How I Built an Eco-Shed, Ditched My SUV, Alienated the In-Laws and Changed My Life Forever is the story of his decision to build a supremely ecological writing studio to which he attached the infelicitous nickname of “eco-shed.” He insists his goal is to inspire the rest of us to embrace a concept of environmentalism as “a series of quiet conclusions reinforced with individual actions,” but his tale unintentionally becomes a cautionary horror story of personal environmentalism gone berserk.

Every element of his eco-shed is calibrated to zero degree of ecological impact. He spends dozens of pages investigating the options for the basic material of the walls: rammed earth, straw, reclaimed wood. Tracking down optimal reclaimed roof shingles takes another four pages. Setting up a cistern takes ten more pages, not all of them nearly as amusing as Glave obviously hopes.

“How,” he asks, “do we transform our lives without unraveling them?” As his mission consumes him, his life does indeed unravel. So does his writing. He starts the book with incisive psychosocial analysis: “Part of the problem was that I resented the solution. It meant I needed to either inconvenience myself or descend further into consumer debt.” He deflates celebrity-ecology—“eco-chic”—with surgical delicacy: “If eco-chic had a subtle motto it was this: ‘Shop different, feel better’.” By page 157, however, he is writing in a stupefying Mike Holmes babble:

Unbelievably, there is not one single visual aid to help us see the design Glave has in mind and how its creation progresses.

Is any of this relevant to the average person? Hardly. The eco-shed turns out to be no bigger than a one-car garage, cost more than $100,000 to build, had a construction time frame measured in years (and is not even finished at the conclusion of this account), nearly ruined his life and his marriage and, in the end, doesn’t even work!

Likewise uninspiring is Jay Ingram’s The Daily Planet Book of Cool Ideas: Global Warming and What People Are Doing About It. As the name suggests, this book translates a number of his TV episodes into a collection of screen treatments.

The transition, alas, is not a successful one. Each item is a too-short four-page vignette; we are hustled on to the next one before we can really immerse ourselves in the often difficult science involved. Ingram is no help: as host, he sees his role as one of asking questions that invite his interviewees to expound upon their activities, unchallenged, unjudged and undebated.

The space in which he might have shared more information is given over to the photos that are so numerous and scrumptiously printed as to seem the book’s entire raison d’être. Too bad the photos themselves tend to poor angles and framings that make it difficult for the viewer to get a sense of placement, and are accompanied by captions that are often unhelpful or downright baffling.

The “cool ideas” of the title are quite a mixed bag. Some are ingenious; many are just plain nuts. One guy wants to put 16 trillion glass shades into deep space to achieve a mere 2 percent reduction in harmful sun rays. At least three people want us to live in partially underground bunkers or caves. Another goofy idea is to build 250,000 “artificial trees” that would harvest carbon dioxide, turn it into sodium carbonate, break that apart into sodium hydroxide and carbon dioxide, and get carbon dioxide back again.

It is easy to excuse these pipe dreams on the grounds that the environmental situation is so desperate that we have to consider even the wildest of ideas, but is the cause really well served by giving totally impossible “solutions” the same respect and attention as more practical ones such as solar-created electricity?

Back down here in real life, Robyn Harding reminds us that environmentalism can be fostered incrementally through the pressure and support of family, friends and neighbours. In Mom, Will This Chicken Give Me Man Boobs? My Confused, Guilt-Ridden and Stressful Struggle to Raise a Green Family, she sounds like nothing so much as an Erma Bombeck for the ecological set. An unpretentious newspaper humour columnist, Bombeck went for quick and plentiful laughs in short suburban-life vignettes. Harding is a novelist and tries to put cartoon bandages on the longer bones of a skeletal narrative about her “valiant efforts to become [a suburban] enviro-mom.”

The narrative direction itself unconsciously reflects suburban clichés in that it seems to be a shopping list of “daily life” topics: one chapter each on cars, food, personal hygiene (why is that such a bugbear for Canadian environmentalists?), plastic containers, birthday parties and so on.

The very banality of Harding’s mises en scène will provoke differing reactions from readers. Among her peers, women will love her and men will loathe her for sounding like a soccer mom nattering on (and on and on) about household trivialities to the other soccer moms curled up in Starbucks, toasty with the delusion that self-deprecation hides, or at least excuses, her narcissism. As for readers who are not privileged, white, upper-middle-class suburbanites living in eco-smug British Columbia, I can’t imagine them reading this book any more than they might read Bombeck.

There are a handful of good wisecracks (“I really like you but … I just think this relationship would create too many carbon emissions”) and maybe two nice examples of asperity—I especially liked this one: “No one used to ask if your kid’s T-shirt was made by child labour. Of course it was! In some countries, kids had to have jobs.” And she does bring home the self-contradictions of environmentalism, its absurd welter of conflicting opinions and values and merit systems.

I would be remiss if I did not admit that I found myself connecting with at least a couple of Harding’s everyday tribulations: the emissions created by driving my daughter to ballet practice four times a week (Harding quails at three times a week before settling for twice weekly) and the expense involved in feeding a son who turned vegetarian (Harding’s son goes organic). This, however, was not enough to make me care about her book. When the stimulus to your environmentalism is, at bottom, nothing more than a 1950s obsession with what the neighbours might think of you if you fall out of lockstep with their march toward litter-free homogeneity, lines like “Kitsilano is crawling with people who are so committed to the earth that they make me feel like a property developer in comparison” are not going to compensate for the triteness and self-congratulatory tone of your book.

Fred Pearce does the research of a real scientist in his fascinating Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff. He does not just tell us to buy fair trade coffee and recycle our electronic goods; instead, he travels to the spots around the world where the coffee is actually grown and traded and where the electronics are actually recycled—a total of more than 177,000 kilometres and more than 20 countries. What he uncovers is a real eye-opener, genuinely informative and pretty darned depressing.

That fair trade coffee, for instance, is grown by subsistence farmers who are in fact not getting a fair price for their beans: they get $1.46 for a product that sells at Starbucks (in bulk prices) for $300. As for the recycled electronics, they are being stripped down beyond their bare bones by a succession of no-hope Asian indigents casually exposed to large, unrelieved doses of lethal metals.

And in every case, those poorest-of-the-poor are not making any financial progress because there is “a chain of brokers” between us and them, each of whom takes a cut of the value of the products. To create the margin that makes their commission possible, they ship the goods back and forth around the world in search of ever-cheaper labour. Pearce’s pair of fair trade socks travelled an incredible 12,000 kilometres as its producers and brokers sought to “find the cheapest place for each stage of manufacture.” Why? Because consumers want to pay the cheapest retail price for their goods. “The price is still dictated by market conditions in Britain and America, rather than living conditions in Tanzania,” notes Pearce. “We want our ethics on the cheap.” 

This is a frightening picture because all these sources of cheap labour are countries that can be unapologetically described as corrupt, regulation-free, greedy and ecologically contemptuous tyrannies: China, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the former Soviet republics (especially Uzbekistan). Even India is often incapable of competing with these ruthless, filthy countries because it has at least minimal standards of employment and environmental protection.

In the face of Pearce’s litany of venality around the world, it is hard not to feel a certain relief that the only part of North America that comes under his scrutiny is Alaska, and it gets only six pages about its oil industry. But even this apparent lack of comparable ecological disasters and corruption is cause for concern because it exposes the fact that North America has no role or place in the production lines of the global economy other than as consumers. How sustainable are our economies when consumption is their only function? We are finding out the answer right now.

The current financial crisis is the golden opportunity to remake a world in which “sustained economic growth” is not the be-all and end-all, a world where human use of natural resources is predicated upon neither the wrongly assumed infinitude of those resources nor, conversely, the mendacious desire to exploit them financially before their finitude has been exhausted. As Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver wrote recently in the Toronto Star, “growth in consumption is a nonsensical response to the sharp decline in Earth’s biophysical systems that is caused by overconsumption. Our new ecological and climate reality demands new ways to live within the means of the Earth.”

And yet it is precisely growth in consumption that our leaders see as the cure for the world-wide fiscal crisis. Jim Prentice, minister of the environment, went on record defining the Harper government as being “stewards of the environment, and … creators of wealth and builders of industry and economic opportunity.” The comparative number of words used for each of those two responsibilities shows which one has priority for these politicians. The result of such priorities is that Germanwatch’s Climate Change Performance Index 2009 identified Canada as having among the worst climate policies in the world.

Yet the cost of reducing pollution, according to Nic Rivers in the Ottawa Citizen last year, would be extremely modest: “around one to three per cent of global economic output over the course of the century, equivalent to reducing the annual rate of economic growth by around one one-hundredth of a percentage point.” Making my razor blades last an extra week is not going to balance my government’s idiocy in refusing to commit to that tiny sacrifice in growth.

Suzuki, in particular, emphasizes that people must pressure politicians: it is the only way to convince them that real and major change must happen. But twice consecutively the Canadian people have explicitly rejected pro-environment programs and parties in favour of a flagrantly anti-environment party, even as those same voters told pollsters they supported Paul Martin’s Kyoto accord and Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift and liked Elizabeth May’s Green Party. When it comes to making ecology affordable and doable, even the people have no credibility.

“The good Earth,” fulminated Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country. “We could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.” Maybe so, but we are the products of a global economic culture that runs on greed, short-term exploitation and inequality. Until the rubble of that culture is swept away, we will continue being cheap and lazy because our leaders know that is what we will vote for. It does not bode well for planet Earth.