conservative conservation?

As signs of the biblical end of days scenario appear to increase in the form of earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, droughts and melting ice-caps there are also signs of a public awakening to planetary change. The old man has also recently heard a few decibels more from the voices of those who could be converted to Small is Beautiful economics.  Media attention to the global warming problem and the extent of human responsibility has been particularly acute since the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey in the States.

Within that period I have noticed a number of national television broadcasts, mostly on PBS, dealing with the phenomena. Further:

·       A Republican mayor of New York City publicly supported Democrat Barack Obama for the presidency because he recognized the dangers of global warming;

·       Opinion polls indicated a much larger percentage of the general public now believed that global warming was real, though most still denied human causation and carbon emissions for its recent rapid increase;

·       More frequent news reports on environmental protests such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and anti-capitalist and oil company greed and corruption antagonism included numerous book reviews and films on near midnight end of world events, such as a technology filled remake of the 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still and long discussions about the human causes of prairie erosion and the showing of the eight hour long Ken Burns film about the prairie dust bowl of the thirties.

Among such reviews I was particularly impressed with an hour long Bill Moyers and Company program broadcast on the Seattle PBS channel November 18 last, titled Hurricanes, Capitalism and Democracy. In that program he talked at length with attractive young Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein. She sounded most rational and amazingly articulate but she was obviously married to one anti-big capital and global conspiracies line of attack to stem global warming and the striking economic imbalance between the rich and the poor. She did respond to some of her critics by saying she was not against capitalism but favoured a type of decentralized capitalism. I found that suggestion congenial with my own early thoughts against “bigness”, against the constant need for more, against the need for instant gratification and communications and my later interest in Small is Beautiful economics. You may view the entire PBS program by clicking on the Hurricanes, Capitalism and Democracy program of November 18, 2012 on billmoyers.com .

Though I spent most of my life on the fringes of big business and have personally benefited from the growth syndrome through periodic inflation if nothing else, I have been opposed to the notion that “bigger is better” and have attempted to give effect to that idea in my own undertakings. That may stem from my roots and traditions in a rather closed religious community. I did not find its separateness or its religious strictures congenial, but although its members generally assisted individuals in extreme exigencies of need, individuals competed with each other and were responsible for their own welfare and the sustainability of their holdings and their debts. The world was not that much with us in the twenties and thirties when I was a child. The enticements of affluence that constantly assail everyone now in an orgy of consumerism through radio, television and the Internet to distract us and make us dissatisfied with our lot, did not affect us then.

You may have noticed that my title for this issue of the Post is a small “c” conservative conservation? The term stems from a job I accepted in my last year in law school to avoid further delays in earning a living and starting a family. One of my older classmates said, “If you go to work for Imperial Oil you’ll have to eat, drink, live and breathe the company.” He was right and the company expected total and exclusive loyalty and constantly advertised to the public and expected its employees to believe and preach its creed that it was a gracious corporate citizen. In turn it nurtured its employees like a mother nurtures its young and from May 1952 I experienced the joys of “bigness” and suckled at the breast of Mother Esso for seven years before I was weaned.

Through the rest of the fifties I drank of the milk of plenty to develop the muscle of ambition and competition, prod my lethargy, develop right thinking (I plumped for Diefenbaker in the “follow John” federal election of the fifties) and learned the power of the cheque book, the sanctity of contract and the prospect of unlimited resources.

Resources, I learned, rewarded as a matter of right and justice individuals and companies willing to risk all to exploit them. Conservation in those years had very little to do with leaving resources to the environment. Conservation, to exploiters and government regulators (including those of socialist Saskatchewan) alike meant the task of complete recovery and utilization of resources. The environmental movement had not yet made a splash and the word ecology was unknown to me. I resigned on March 23, 1959, stating my reason in part as “I have come to the conclusion that in a small law practice I can contribute more to the community, my family and to myself, than I can as Division Landman or an even better position for Imperial.” I had to clean out my desk and leave the premises within the hour.

Back in the Fraser Valley, I joined a firm started in the early twenties. It had changed but little when I joined but the changing sixties moved in with me. A populist western conservative political group brought the growth syndrome to British Columbia in the fifties. The province became a hive of interference with nature when highway construction, river damming and international power grid development as well as oil and gas pipeline construction became the order of the day. Power of both capital and labour became centralized in the capital so that local community independence and self-sufficiency were hard to maintain.  On boards and councils I kept arguing for community consolidation and to halt the one size fits all trends but eventually the same expansion-growth trend found its way into my small partnership. Having developed debilitating diabetes and strained relationships I left the firm to its expansion and abandoned my partner of 14 years to start a solo firm a few miles away, intent on proving that remaining small was still possible.  Through this period I contributed to my service club by editing the twice monthly newsletter. My editorial comment in a fall 1974 issue illustrates my contrarian thoughts about both today’s all-engulfing technological consumerism as well as the environment:

Our luncheon speaker last week was erudite and enlightening on the wonders of cash-less banking and other technological marvels. I did consider his subject matter and the reaction of Rotarians to the scientific wonders he revealed worthy of comment and perhaps a little disturbing. It seems that Rotarians can hardly wait for the twin goblins of coaxial cable and computer to shower their many benefits upon us. Take heed then of the words of John Ruskin written in the youth of the Industrial Revolution:

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the crags. YOU cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash; you thought you could get it by what the Times calls “Railroad Enterprise”. You enterprised a railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone and the gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you fools everywhere.

All these many years later the definition of my titled conservative conservation adopted by governments of all stripes and the capital developers has not changed since the old man’s Mother Esso days described above. I suggest that whether right, centre or left, and whatever the talk of environmental protection and carbon limits, the results are still the same, especially in Canada and the States.

The record of the Harper government in Canada, appears particularly disappointing and contradictory in its northern policy. It sends armed forces and scientific vessels into the Arctic to claim national jurisdiction over large areas of the continental shelf. One would hope that information would be used for protection of the area and its flora and fauna. Yet the concentration seems to be in exploiting the resources made accessible by the receding ice in competition with the Asian, European, and Alaskan adjacent areas. At the same time in attempts to promote economic advantage from fossil fuel production, our government considers selling large interests to a Chinese government owned corporation to increase foreign control of “our” resources.

The Alberta and Canada policy on tar sands production seems a special insanity to the old man. By using all the latest technology the oil conglomerates are now mining and producing a sort of petroleum sludge that will travel through pipelines. They despoil and deplete already limited fresh water in the process, which uses nearly as much energy to produce as it creates in sludge form. In order to make a deal with China for the energy it would provide to them, a trans-mountain pipeline to the west coast near Kitimat is in the offing. All governments believe it essential and our BC premier simply objects because she wants BC to have a piece of Alberta’s revenue from the sludge that flows through the province. In spite of all the advertised (paid for by the taxpayer) double piping and tanker hulls, I believe it is an inevitable environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions in the making.

In the States, in spite of Obama’s fine rhetoric on developing renewable energy sources, he is still backing all sorts of fossil fuel development as well. He too is a captive of the lobbying of the likes of supporters of the tar sands pipeline to Texas, of drilling on federal lands for heavy oil, of coal mining companies, of expanded off-shore drilling and of the T. Boone Pickens shale gas drilling empire. In his first post-election press conference he admitted that no short term political action to limit carbon emissions in any meaningful way was possible. Drill, baby, drill!. There simply are too many people who still claim that carbon is favourable for the environment. After all, trees need it to live. Personally, I don’t blame global warming entirely on human destructiveness of our planet as we may be entering a new inter-glacial period due to some shifting effects in our solar system, but I also believe that all species have contributed to the changes that occurred over millions of years by destroying habitat wherever species multiplied.

The image of the Arctic ice shown at the top of this issue was copied from Dr. Jeff Masters wunderblog, where it is credited to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. Readers may be interested in reading some of the information in that blog, available at www:wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters .

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