Buy, Bye

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty took a page out of George W. Bush's book yesterday. Did he endorse a troop surge in Iraq? How about tax cuts for the top ten percent? What about secretly spying on Ontarians? Endless detention for Muslims?

No. It was shopping.

In response to the economic downturn gripping the world McGuinty was heard to exclaim: "If you want to be helpful to the economy, then go ahead buy that fridge, buy that new house, buy that car. That's good for our economy and good for our jobs."

But maybe not so good for the planet. Hate to break it to you Dalton but you can't shop your way out of the dreadful destination we're all heading. There's only one way out of this and that's to dramatically power down things and get our population under control.

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The US has similar plans. Let's send out some money to keep the death machine afloat. Put off the collapse a little longer, I want to get rich . . . and have kids.

Rows or Columns

I appreciate that this gentleman didn't do what most people do and claim that technology will save us from the menace of human-induced climate change. Remember, it won't and it's likely to get us into more trouble. But still this is a worthwhile video.

Got it Wrong

Today the two senior UN climate change officials warned the World Economic Forum that the pending recession may harm humanity's efforts to slow climate change. They claimed that politicians will focus on the immediate (job creation, tax cuts etc) and ignore the more long term (climate change). Obviously compared to the threat of climate change, jobs seem pretty measly considerations.

Unfortunately these two esteemed gentlemen got it wrong. A recession, and a protracted one at that, is exactly what we need.

Every time the economy grows, our carbon emissions go up. What else is the economy but the consumption of energy and other resources? It's an (un)natural law. Right now most of civilized human beings' energy consumption is from fossil fuels like gas, oil and coal. Economic growth is tied to emissions.

The idea that economic growth can somehow fight climate change is a joke. I presume that these UN officials are also bowing to that hallowed god of technology. They'll have you believe that when humans are consuming a lot and buying a lot and have lots of imaginary money flying around that they are in a position to come up with innovative solutions to problems like climate change.

Is anyone else tired of hearing how technology is going to save us?

Recession is a dirty word. We are told to fear it from the day we turn on our first bright television to the day we die. Never once do we question this view. But in truth, growth is our problem. Engineered or natural recessions are the proper reaction given the situation we now face (climate change, peak oil, resource depletion, displacement and extinction of other species, overpopulation). Once we get to an ideal point (population, lifestyle etc) we should then aim for neither growth nor recession but balance.

Endless growth, our god, is the definition of cancer.

I can live without an Ipod, without a computer, without a car, without DVDs. I can't live without my landbase, my family and friends, shelter and healthy, nutritious food. Let's figure out what we really need and ditch the false dreams of the death economy.

The Energy of the Future?

On his recent trip to the Middle East, French President Sarkozy exclaimed: "In 40 years from now there will be no oil left and in 100 years no more gas, nuclear power will replace those energy sources . . . It is the energy of the future."

Nuclear is certainly the fuel of the future. For one thing, the waste produced in reactors is going to be around for tens of thousands of years. That's a hell of a lot of future. Do you think that humans are really going to keep an eye on this most hideous of wastes during those long years? Or, as we usually do, are we going to forget about it and then have it come back to bite us in the ass? Only an idiot wouldn't bet on the latter.

While it's nice to hear a president speaking so candidly about the end of oil, the dream of nuclear is a nightmare for more than the waste reason outlined above. First of all, we must be pretty thick to pin all our hopes on a fuel that, much like oil, will peak and decline as well. There is only so much uranium on the earth. Once it's gone it's gone.

So essentially we are just buying a few years before we are forced to live like every other being on this earth: simply. The only true infinite (and even then . . .) source of energy is the sun which grows crops (and therefore animals like us) which provide everything humans need (food, fuel, paper, meat, clothing--sorry no computers or plastic).

If only we could learn this and change course now instead of going through the pain of climate change and then the threat of nuclear waste to end up where we should have been going in the first place. But humans are pretty stupid and shortsighted so what do you expect?

Stubborn Stains

There's a hidden message in the media's hailing of Barack Obama as the "First Black President of the United States" (FBPOTUS). Most people wouldn't catch it so I don't blame you if you haven't spotted it yet. If he is elected, he will most certainly not be the "First Black President of the United States".

If he's elected, he should be known as the first mixed race (though isn't that a terrible and problematic set of words) President of the United States (FMRPOTUS). Obama's mother is a white American and his father is from Kenya. He's not black, in fact he looks quite brown to me. Blackness means that as far back as you can tell, you're family was descended from Africans (slaves, mind you, not Kenyans--there was no such thing as Kenya until relatively recently). The same thing for whiteness (though what does that mean? There are white people from western Europe to the Caucasus and now beyond).

Though I admit few personal details on these pages, I'm the child of a mixed race (ugh again!) couple. My dad is Indian (no, not First Nations) and my mother is white. But much like Obama's blackness, I'll never be more than an Indian. Very few people would ever consider the complexity of my background in defining me. The only thing they see is the stain of my birth: colour.

Here's an example of the usual, everyday conversations I have to endure:

(Suspicious) "You're not Canadian. Where are you really from?"
(Suppressing rage) "Well my mum is from England and my father is from India and--"
(Interrupts smiling) "Oh you're Indian. I love curries."

Whiteness is sacred. It doesn't matter if your parents came from Russia and the Orkney Islands or Finland and Croatia. You're not a complex person, you're white, you're special, you're at the top of the pile.

But the second a white person has a child with a person of colour, the child is forever stained, quite literally, with that terrible act. Even if you never spend a second with your coloured parent and have only white kids as friends and listen to country music, you're coloured. You're not a kid with brown skin who plays hockey with his white friends, eats burgers and fries and listens to country music.

So I encourage you, dear reader, to avoid falling into the trap of referring to people of mixed backgrounds by their stain alone. In fact perhaps you should disengage from believing in the rarely discussed concept of stain altogether; though that's hard since we all believe it utterly and completely like the fact that the sun will rise in the morning.

Despite all this people of mixed backgrounds are just as complex as any other human being or any other living being on this planet.

The Politics of Failure

I love all this US election crap/coverage that's just everywhere. Just 11 more months of hell everyone! Then we get a kinder, gentler Bush who will abandon Iraq and bomb Iran, waffle on Palestine and just maybe sign up to the Bali Declaration despite the lack of any meaningful targets. Phew, then we can all relax and get back to the mall.

The "development" of the tar sands and all those greenhouse gases already mean that Canada is automatically out of any future agreement.

Anyway in the spirit of the election season I encourage you to rent The Simpsons Little Treehouse of Horror VII and watch Citizen Kang. Watch out for great lines like:

"My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

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"Abortions for all." [crowd boos]
"Very well, no abortions for anyone." [crowd boos]
"Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others." [crowd cheers and waves miniature flags]

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"The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again. Tomorrow, when you are sealed in the voting cubicle, vote for me, Senator Ka... Bob Dole."

Or insert Senators Obama, Clinton or McCain; Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee or (shudder due to his dweebishness) Rudy Guiliani.

Perhaps we'd be better off with aliens or apes as our masters. Either way, I'm learning that putting your power in other people's hands is a bad idea. Electing one person isn't going to save the world (despite all our hopes) given the nature of the system that exists based on endless growth on a finite planet. We need to take steps on our own.

Visionary Species?

My desk is littered with thoughts on tiny scraps of paper. Some of them make it to this space and some end up on the floor or in the recycling and are forgotten. It's quite sad really because in the moment that one records them thoughts seem to be genius, major breakthroughs. But when you get around to doing something about them it's almost too late.

And maybe that's okay.

A recent thought dealt with the constant theme of this blog of late: the place of humans in the natural world. Undoubtedly humans are currently on an unsustainable and destructive collision course with the natural world. We have forgotten ourselves in the flashes of neon and plastic that assail us like IEDs. It's like over stimulation has caused a sort of madness to take hold, one making us blind to the facts.

• We are too many therefore we are squeezing out other species,
• We wholly believe in the doctrine of instant gratification, living in the moment,
  
• We consume too much, far too much of the earth's resources pretending these are needs,
• We are violent to other beings, not out of necessity but out of greed,
• We are dooming other species and our descendants to miserable lives, if any at all, on a planet that would sustain all life indefinitely.
  

My thought was about the place we currently occupy. We are caught in the dark void between animal and something else which I'll refer to as visionary species. Animals live in balance with other species as parts of vibrant and ever changing ecosystems. Sometimes they vanish being unsuited but the system continues through cycles. One member of this system doesn't need to give it much thought, just provide for the basics and ensure you pass on your genes to the next generation.

A visionary species on the other hand would be able to think long term and be willing to make tough choices to ensure the survival and thriving of the species. A visionary species, I surmise, would never risk extinction, being possessed of foresight. The visionary species would recognize that it is part of the world's many ecosystems but that its special place requires treading softly and mindfully at all times. In order to achieve maximum happiness and material security, populations of these species would be small but vibrant enough to ensure a stable and healthy gene pool. A visionary species would make lasting goods as much as possible and never, ever take too much ensuring that future generations could live as comfortably and happily as the one that came before.

While I recognize that dichotomies are usually false, I beg, for the purposes of this argument, that you bear with me. By failing to either embrace our animal natures (which might be impossible given our devious/genius brains) or our potential to be a visionary species we are threatening all life on earth. We are an out of control animal that overcomes natural controls to our ultimate detriment. The longer you put off the fire, the hotter it will burn. In our madness we think the party will go on for ever.

To start down the path of being a visionary species (and we need to move fast) humans need to challenge everything they believe. I mean everything from retirement to travel to food to ownership. Currently all our collective cures to our own excesses remain within the frame of our destructiveness; so we consume more to cure our consumption for instance. The strongest barrier to challenging these "truths" is our lives which have become so burdened and mindless that we can't sit quietly and truly find the path to visionary species and we certainly can't do so together.

So we are always alone writing little notes to ourselves.

There you have it. Do humans have the potential to become a truly visionary species? Is this just more human arrogance and denial of our true nature? Or, as I often believe, are we simply not worth it? If only we could go without taking the system down with us, that would be truly visionary.