The Environment of Your Dreams
by Roland Barphe, editor of ExcrEssences and
head of media studies at the Polyvalente de Saint-Tite
The environment is literally that which is about us, our surroundings. One would think it would be difficult to misapprehend what is about us, but as the debate about the environment shows, the human race can surmount any difficulty.
In Canada we have been having a stimulating debate about the environment for many years. All sides of the debate pretend to an interest in protecting the environment. Yet, Canada is remarkable among developed nations for its failure to do anything to protect the environment. Having pledged to meet the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases, Canada has blithely kept increasing emissions, and now announces that it is unable to live up to its pledge, and that the other signatories to the Kyoto Protocol will just have to wait for us to catch up! Canadians are treated by the foreign press as a laughing-stock because, while professing environmentalism, they continue to drive SUVs and to demand that the price of gasoline be kept low.
Canadians, however, seem unperturbed. They see no contradiction in simultaneously believing in the desirability of reducing greenhouse gases, the desirability of keeping gasoline prices low, the necessity of having an air conditioner in the SUV that you use that cheap gasoline to propel, and so on.
Canadians are not notably illogical. Their inability to see contradictions is not due to their being unable to reason but to their belief that there are no contradictions. This belief is logically derived from the conceptions they have of the environment. They do not all see the environment in the same way, but whatever their view of it is, it usually bears little relationship to the actual environment which surrounds them.
These views share a characteristic which is common to the explanatory principles espoused by bourgeois societies – they believe that events happen in isolation. For example, one popular view is that the environment is robust. According to this view, the environment is a huge system which the puny efforts of humanity can do little to affect. This view is naturally very congenial to the heads of the large greenhouse-gas-producing corporations which dominate post-modern industrial society and has been enthusiastically promoted by them. The people who own stock in these large corporations have naturally responded well to this promotion.
The mythical character of this conception of the environment can be seen in the desperate defence mechanisms which its believers deploy to preserve their faith in it. First they demanded that believers in global warming show that their position represented a consensus of scientific opinion. The idea that the consensus of scientific opinion is identical to the truth is, simply put, silly. Semmelweiss was driven insane by the scientific opposition to his view that death rates in maternity wards might be reduced if the obstetricians washed their hands when examining pregnant women directly after examining cadavers. In more recent years the idea that many ulcers of the gastro-intestinal system were caused by bacteria was resisted by many scientists.
Anyway, having demanded a meaningless consensus, they eventually found themselves confronted with one. Scientists started producing consensus reports in which they asserted that their was high probability that global warming was due in large part to human production of greenhouse gases. And what did the proponents of the robust environment do?
They started complaining that the new consensus had become a new orthodoxy, a new form of political correctness. They claimed that dissenting views were not being accorded their place in discussion of the issue.
Well, that’s what consensuses are for. They’re about finding a generally accepted definition of problems. Once you agree on that definition, you act on it. Having asked for a consensus, when the proponents of the robust environment got one they complained that people were acting as if there were one (there is also considerable doubt whether people really are acting like that, but to those who demanded a consensus that should be immaterial).
So the robust environment sect seems to be developing into a conspiracy theory. The irony is exquisite, since it is they who have acted most like a conspiracy.
But what of the other views of the environment? At the other extreme from the idea of the robust environment we have the idea of the fragile environment. Proponents of this view accept the proposition that human activity is causing global warming, often without considering evidence. They espouse a rigorous program of environmental controls, conservation, and recycling to reduce global warming. One of them is our own dear publisher emeritus, John FitzGerald, who requires little prompting to tell you how he never uses a car, how he doesn’t have an air conditioner, how he thinks gasoline should cost twice as much, and so on. We all expect that soon he will reveal he farts into a thermos and then extracts the methane to power his environment-friendly refrigerator.
At the moment, the facts seem to be more on the side of this group than of the robust environment crowd. The connection that many of them fail to acknowledge, though, is the one between their program and the economy.
In his response to the recent proposals by the Canadian government for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, David Suzuki observed that seventy per cent of the Canadian people believed that the Kyoto targets could be reached without harming the economy. Well, seventy per cent apparently believe that either Stephen Harper or Stéphane Dion would be a good prime minister. The first question to ask is, How do they know the economy will not be harmed?
The second question, of course, is how does anyone know what will happen to the economy? Certainly something will happen, for a reason overlooked by the majority of Canadians – the economy is in fact part of the environment! If manufacturers have to make capital investments to reduce their emissions, one must admit that there is at least a chance that prices will rise and consequently that exports will drop, which in an exporting nation is not a desirable state of affairs.
But the economy is complicated. Maybe something else will happen. Something will happen, though. To return to our esteemed publisher emeritus, if everyone “lived” like him, the Ontario economy, based in large part on the automobile industry, would collapse. One aspect which is missing from the thinking of most believers in the fragile environment is a plan for dealing effectively with unexpected consequences of environmental planning.
To be fair, most of the people who believe that the economy will not be harmed are probably believers in the third view of the environment. In this view, global warming is caused by human activity, but not by one’s own human activity. This is the view held by most citizens of the democracies about most issues. When teachers go on strike, for example, letters columns in newspapers and call-in shows on the radio are full of complaints about how children are suffering even though their parents have not created the problem. Conveniently neglected is that teachers negotiate with the agents of democratically elected representatives.
This is the crowd that wants action both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to keep the cost of gasoline low. Unable to conceive of how encouraging the use of gasoline might contribute to global warming, they instead demonize industry or politicians or anyone else who comes in handy. If only the politicians would stop global warming we could get on with our lives. This is the crowd that demonizes politicians generally, forgetting that politicians are their creatures.
I noted to begin with that the environment is actually around us, and that we can actually look at it. The view of the robust environment seems to have been arrived at by looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses, the view of the fragile environment by looking at the world through the prism of one’s own aspirations to Do Good, and the view of the environment as something which only others affect by not looking at all. As you have probably noticed, I sympathize most with the fragile-environment crowd. However, in the end each group's view ignores an important aspect of the environment which they are looking at directly.
If you own a car and assume it will keep on working even if you never top up the oil, you soon will have an immobile car. If you own a car and assume that if you take good care of it you don’t have to make the payments, you soon may be walking everywhere. If you own a car and expect someone else to take care of it – congratulations, you’re a Canadian!
The Environment of Your Dreams © John FitzGerald, 2007
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