"I would have said no", "I'll figure something out", "I can deal with that."

Read Wm. Marsden's essay, "The Perfect Moment". It's in Carbon shift : how the twin crises of oil depletion and climate change will define the future ('09).  Ralph Benmergui's interview with the book's editor, T. Homer-Dixon, is found at http://greenparty.ca/spotlight/2009-05-13/carbon-shift-interview . Marsden is writing with such plainly forceful eloquence, I feel moved to post here a closing extract:

   "If you believe in [...] a "cowboy" economy, then you don't generally care what kind of mark you leave.  You take what you can and you ride on.  There are endless new horizons.  What's left behind is what's left behind."

   "Some might say that to blame the Rick Georges of our world for this destruction would be wrong.  He is simply a smart man [as head of Suncor in the tar sands] who has become a champion in an economic system in which we all partake and benefit.  But I'm not sure if that's much of an argument.  We may all be part of the system, we may all be responsible, to paraphrase Rabbi Abraham Heschel, but not all of us are guilty.  I never asked the Rick Georges of this world to go up to Alberta and destroy a hefty portion of my own backyard.  Nor was I ever asked. Even though global warming is affecting my life and will drastically affect the lives of my children and grandchildren, I never had a choice.  Nobody came to me or anybody else that I know of and honestly laid out the pros and cons of tar sands development.  Nobody said that if we build this mine we will destroy this amount of forest, pollute these waterways, accelerate global warming and harm Earth's ecosystem in this and that way and we have no idea whether we can repair any of the damage.  That would have been the beginning of true environmental stewardship.  Waving a green flag after four decades of letting the free market call the shots does not qualify.  If Suncor had asked my opinion, I would have said no.  The price is too high.  If it means less oil, fine, I'll figure something out.  I'll campaign to improve public transit and to create compact communities where daily commutes aren't necessary and where all you have to do is walk down to the corner to get milk.  We don't have the technology to extract oil safely from the sands, but we certainly have the telecommunications that will permit us to live without relying entirely on the automobile.  We'll change our lifestyle and probably be happier for it.  We'll find other sources of revenue and jobs.  It may not be the perfect moment, but that's okay.  I can deal with that.
    That's what many of us -- perhaps most of us -- would have told the Rick Georges of this world, if they had bothered to ask.  But they didn't.  And that's why we're deep in the pit."
   
Puis-je recommander l'écoute à "Plus rien ne m'étonne" de Tiken Jah Fakoly: "...ils ont partagé le monde, sans me consulter..."; l'Afrique, par exemple, est-elle enfin tellement différente de notre Canada?  

I said "moved to post" above advisedly, from the entire piece's effect combined with the unexpected religious reference and simple eloquence of Canadian idiom, I actually had tears in my eyes. It's similar for me to feelings I've felt when, say, walking contemplatively in a certain lakeside memorial grove in Toronto (please see http://www.greenparty.ca/node/2581#comment-1795 ).  While what I have in common with Canadians memorialized there might be limited, it is easy to be moved by the sad result of action, or at least acquiescence, of well-intentioned but ultimately ill-informed people in concert with arrogating violent purpose.  Yet when I see today's vehicle stickers and highway dedications exhorting or trying to instil support for troops, I am no longer moved.  Apart from ill-informed succumbing to arrogating purpose, get the tar sands connexion here: to evince positive feeling for our war effort in Afghanistan, yellow ribbon-decals on automobiles, on a highway now named for "heroes", cars & pavement at the symbolic core. It was tough for dissenters in WWI, maybe I would have felt as they did.  I haven't been to Coronation Park in a while; maybe one day I'll feel more for today's soldiers. "If English-speaking people can still only be largely motivated to great causes by warlike rhetoric, I truly think there is no hope for them in the end." (See http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/3265 ). So now we have our war on the boreal for the tar sands. Barry Cooper must be proud.

So I find even myself now dealing in war references.  Why?  Well, to draw in reference to Cooper's new book (also '09), It's the Regime, Stupid!: A Report from the Cowboy West on Why Stephen Harper Matters, with apologies to Marsden for juxtaposing his writing so, whose own book is named, Stupid to the Last Drop, and to note Homer-Dixon's referring to that run-up again to WWII in the interview.

To Cooper, I'm a "Laurentian", that's for sure, just read some of what I said at http://www.greenparty.ca/node/4264#comment-4183 , about that older bumper sticker, "My Canada includes Quebec". But the supposedly defining "garrison mentality" hardly defines this "green" Laurentian. Whether garrison, Laurentian, green, conservative, cowboy, Westerner, it was not pleasant but felt necessary nonetheless to have a fair look at Cooper's book, because more than once have I noted that those on the political right can be right, not for right reasons, but based on right perception, about things Greens should understand.  So who better than he to ridicule & prescribe where a self-sustaining & counterproductively self-entrenching centralist bureaucracy should be cut down to size.  But because reasons are off, prescriptions can be downright dangerous.  Here's a couple of examples of that danger:

"The most objectionable aspect of the embedded state is the practice of bureaucrats and, let's be frank, judges in undertaking to create constituencies for their own administrative advancement."

Let's do be frank, off the deep end.

"Moreover, should the Liberals return, they will come armed to the teeth this time not with the silliness of national unity -- the crisis of which their governance assured -- but some even more fraudulent issue such as "global warming" and what Canadians must do about it."

'Nuff said, "stupid".  It's one thing to question political uses of an issue, but we should thank this author for clarifying his anti-thought political alignment so clearly.  

I don't know that he'd want to parse the following amusing text of his, but I expect what he'd find praiseworthy more of us would find objectionable:

"I uttered my first political statement about a year later.  My mother was driving my sisters and me [...]  The highway from Calgary for most of the drive was parallel to the railway tracks.  We gradually overtook a freight train and I announced proudly, "Look, Mum, it's the ---damn CPR."  She reached over and whacked me on the side of the head and told me never to use that word again.  After my tears evaporated, I was puzzled, not knowing I had uttered a blasphemy. I was just using what I thought was the full name of the railway, because that was what my grandfather and uncles always called it."

Now let the contrast sink in between the "blasphemy" and Marsden's rabbinic invocation. "Not knowing", not caring, seems to be at the root of so much of Cooper's kind of politics.    

I've referred to Macpherson's important writing on Alberta political history, it has much instructive for Greens (see reference at http://www.partivert.ca/blogs/7/2009-01-10/happy-birthday-sir-john#comme... ).  But Cooper seems more obsessed with some Marxist bent than with that writer's incisive view about delusions of independence translated into politics: even today, how can one not see Albertans falling into an uglier embrace while trying to shirk one from Ottawa?  For example, smaller grain farmers feeling a relative independence of livelihood practice, extending that sense to national politics & beyond, oblivious to their succumbing to commoditization of what they were growing.  Regarding freedom to exploit tar sands for more local benefit, Marsden's essay shames Cooper's politics.

But it is time to swallow hard and take some of the perceptions of Cooper & co. seriously.  There is good reason to dwell as he did on "Adscam" to impugn ultimately unaccountable operators, to highlight dysfunction of centralism.  The illegality was supposedly in the service of a higher cause that could not be prosecuted differently, to the inaccessible profit of insiders. Modernist overreaching applications have reached their end, even in governance & administration.  That might recommend localist or regionalist focus, but not at dreadful collective cost, "stupid to the last drop". Greens should have a saner way to address local focus, while retaining appropriate reference to federalism.

It's very good to see Ralph Benmergui working with GPC, and the interview with Homer-Dixon is welcome.  I promptly obtained a library copy of the book. But the interviewee gets into a tangle using that unfortunate analogy about affairs of 70 years ago, so much so that anticipating some trouble he had to state,"that would be ridiculous", when realizing that he could be seen to be encouraging some unintended comparisons.

Who needs them, confused analogies, like the ones relating to some 70 years ago, as I've variously decried on this site long ago?  Homer-Dixon was making a very relevant political point, that much can hinge on broad public political agitation for a just cause. So many other examples could be used, yet he finds himself kind of sucked into others' war mentality talk --- see the power of rhetoric, especially if repeated in a concerted way?  Anytime you find mainstream media taking up repititive tropes, be suspicious, at least question whether such language suits basic "green" purpose. I recently caught the last part of a fine talk given by Bill McKibben on a CIUT Alternative Radio broadcast, which I think is available via http://alternativeradio.org/programs/MCKB004.shtml , where he made useful reference to Martin Luther King's work.  The part of the talk I heard was moving for me as well in an uplifting way, the American eloquence of his manner serving the 350.org cause well.  (I do hope he wouldn't be caught, in the part of the broadcast I missed, using the uncomfortable wartime reference, as he has done before, mentioned on this blogsite.)

There is indeed very much instructive for us, as I've admitted, from that difficult era.  I recall possibly useful references by, I think, Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting or prolific blogger, Sharon Astyk.  But it goes much deeper than Victory Gardens, so deep that it is not hard to see how such talk can be exploited to prepare an again ill-informed public for future actions resembling that unfortunate era more than just in something like Victory Gardens.  If the Allies "floated to victory on a wave of oil", as the Hitler regime was undone in its pursuit of oil (leading to the failed eastern invasion), as decades before & since geopolitics has just been so much about pursuit of oil...by referring to certain apparent political failures at the time, as did Homer-Dixon, the centrally determining undercurrents of oil & finance get neglected, and we just might find ourselves floating to an atmosphere increasingly totalitarian and worse, as international competition gets fiercer, as international finance is rearranged, very ungreen arrangements making use of such preparatory rhetoric.

What is it, apart from Benmergui's obvious reference to people's "running around" with their daily concerns & pursuits (he should have more pointedly said, "driving around"), that keeps people uninformed, so Homer-Dixon says,"if they were really aware of what was going on"?  What is it about being "ill-informed", unaware, "stupid"?  Again the cultural currents run very deep, and educational failures are at the root.

In Homer-Dixon's writing in his recommendable book, there's no such problematic reference. But I wonder about another Benmergui interviewee, Jeff Rubin, also an essay contributor to that book.  There was a troubling reference in the interview to the world of finance he supposedly retired from to promote his own book. When he says it's not about banks or about finance, he seems to be attempting to draw attention away from where, on the contrary, very much we should look.  His CIBC World Markets has had nothing to do with where we find ourselves now??  Banking rides the back of whatever livelihood bases prevail, and if the oil basis is now hunchbacked, the slide down can be less subject to mayhem induced by those jockeying in the dark for new monetary hegemony, if our new currency is variegated. Please see various prodding on this issue posted here, e.g. at http://www.greenparty.ca/blogs/930/2009-01-20/look-whos-talking-about-it... .

It is very good to focus on radio for propagation of GPC concerns (although it is unclear whether Benmergui's interviews were also broadcast on CJRT).  That type of interview would do well supplemented by something more like what's offered at http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/ , Post Carbon Institute's "Public Service Broadcasting for a Post-Carbon World", where in the past few years hundreds of audio recordings or transcripts are offered, probably every single one consonant with or related to GPC concerns.

Jeffrey Simpson (see http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/4324 & following comments), let it be noted, in his essay in the book describes the GPC leader as a "bullhorn". For some contrast, let me repeat what I drew attention to at http://www.greenparty.ca/blogs/930/2009-02-10/elizabeth-may-who-runs-gre... , said by McKibben about our bullhorn:

"One of my friends, a woman named Elizabeth May who runs the Green Party in Canada—a wonderful woman".

(This blogsite has recently been disparaged by some members, some even fleeing to other sites. I have tried to be informative, positively disputatious, if too provocative for some. But I hope no one thinks my contributions these past couple of years have diminished the value of this site.)