… I regret to say.
From the New York Times Magazine: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It . . . and He Feels Fine”
“Everything had gotten worse,” Kingsnorth said. “You look at every trend that environmentalists like me have been trying to stop for 50 years, and every single thing had gotten worse. And I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here saying: ‘Yes, comrades, we must act! We only need one more push, and we’ll save the world!’ I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! So what do I do?”
The first thing that Kingsnorth did was draft a manifesto. Also called “Uncivilization,” it was an intense, brooding document that vilified progress. “There is a fall coming,” it announced. “After a quarter-century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall . . . Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.” …
Instead of trying to “save the earth,” Kingsnorth says, people should start talking about what is actually possible. Kingsnorth has admitted to an ex-activist’s cynicism about politics as well as to a worrying ambivalence about whether he even wants civilization, as it now operates, to prevail. But he insists that he isn’t opposed to political action, mass or otherwise, and that his indignations about environmental decline and industrial capitalism are, if anything, stronger than ever. …
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I’ve been wondering what will happen in this province under this more-than-possible scenario:
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The transit referendum fails
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TransLink starts cutting back service to 2003 levels
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The Massey Bridge and other road projects proceed – as expensive as the transit projects jettisoned and postponed
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Fast-growing municipalities plan for Motordom by Default
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The ALR is eroded, or opened up by a combination of Port Metro and First Nations
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Signs of sea-level rise continue, even as we start to develop more lands below sea level
How will we – particularly our youth – respond? What, in this case, makes sense?
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Kingsnorth would agree with the need for grief but not with the idea that it must lead to change — at least not the kind of change that mainstream environmental groups pursue. “What do you do,” he asked, “when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad?
And that’s not a series of questions that have any answers other than people’s personal answers to them. Selfishly it’s just a process I’m going through.” He laughed. “It’s extremely narcissistic of me. Rather than just having a personal crisis, I’ve said: ‘Hey! Come share my crisis with me!’ ”
Gee .. Perhaps life will just continue .. As prices regulate many things ..
More people need more resources .. So if Canada or Lower Mainland grows 50% it will need more resources, more land, more transit, more cars .. And as car use gets worse and worse people will use it less.
The issue, as your blog is called, is pricetags.
Everything has a price, and prices are often far too low, for example road use or gasoline or parking in urban areas. Just tax the bridge use, the tunnel use, using the road to the airport or Granville Street and behavior will shift ..
Far too much land in the Lower Mainland is protected for agriculture, and far too little new land is being created by cities like Richmond, Vancouver , N-Van or Delta. More land would mean lower land prices and more affordable housing, more room for agriculture, recreational, residential and commercial use.
Environmentalists need to realize that we have now 8B soon 10B people, and more people need more land, more food, more cars, more clothing and more energy from all sorts of sources. Many environmentalists are essentially anti-human. I am for more environmental protection but also for cheap energy and for human abundance. Humans are very inventive. Very !
With proper pricing solutions will emerge. For example, if oil becomes scarce and it is $200 or $400/barrell in today’s prices we will use less of it, cars will get smaller and more efficient and other now more expensive energy sources, like solar and waves and nuclear and run of the river will be used far more.
We need more market forces, not more government.
More pro-human not anti-human “environmental” activities.
Pricetags, man, pricetags indeed !
So we respond to the need for more food by paving our agricultural land and become totally dependent on imported food that must be moved using that $400/barrel oil?
We ought to have a debate here rather than a “no ALR conversion whatsoever” policy. Yes, we need land for agriculture, but we also need it for industry, recreation or residential use, and in a high density area with very high land values I question the need to grow blueberries or other vegetables on land that is $10M+ an acre ! Perhaps Okanagan is better, say on vineyard lands as we have far too many there or in newly created land in the Fraser River delta off Delta or Richmond, or near Osoyoos, or Kamloops or SW BC, or nearby WA state.
We cannnot use policies devised in the 1960’s and 1970’s, almost 50 years ago, for populations that are far far higher than envisioned then !
I’m sorry, but I can’t buy into this self-indulgent pessimism. Everything has gotten worse? There were dolphins in Howe Sound this year. The Montreal Protocol works. The Great Lakes are far cleaner than they were in my childhood. Huge swaths of BC wilderness that were unprotected 20 years ago are protected now. Ontario just stopped burning coal for electricity.
Darren all great things you mention but very much a case of cherry picking info to suit your own needs. Imj better to look at general themes and patterns. Climate, farming, oceans, extinction, inequality, peak everything, debt, etc, etc. On the whole not lookin so good. After 20 odd years of pounding the green drum, paul is just being willing to see things as they are, hard as it may be.