Has Canada Lost it Way?
It is hard not to be confused, overwhelmed, and depressed about the current state of the world. We hover on the brink of economic meltdown, social upheaval and war, and climate calamity. To some these appear to be discrete events in a chaotic world. It would be wiser to view them through the lens of a key principle of sustainability – ‘everything is connected’.
Economically the world is still reeling from the 2008 global meltdown. In Capitalism in the 21st Century economist Thomas Picketty’s meticulous historical analysis suggests that at the heart of the matter is an economic system where gross inequality is not an anomaly of our time, but a “structural feature of capitalism.” Yet, the business-as-usual mantra of less government and more unfettered market freedom still dominates policy and obscene inequality lives on.
Meanwhile, Canadians are in shock and mourning over the attacks on military personnel in Ottawa and Quebec – violence that the political class is convinced has been inspired by radical Islam. Having recently retreated from 10 years of war in Afghanistan, that seems only to have begat more violence, we now embark upon what could prove to be a longer and even more vicious war in the Middle East to confront ISIS.
Then there is the IPCC report released this week, the latest in a long line of increasingly urgent warnings about the spectre of climate change. The worlds leading scientists are now 95% certain that human activity has caused the largest build up of GHGs in the atmosphere in 800,000 years – propelling our planet toward changes that “will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems”. In notes that poor countries “contribute little to the problem” but are “especially vulnerable” to its consequences.
Everything is connected. Our growth-at-all-costs economic system promotes greed and the relentless exploitation of earth’s resources to exhaustion. It promotes a destructive winner-take-all competition locally and globally. Our addiction to oil compels us to violence in the Middle East like a junkie desperate for another fix. The burning of that same fuel threatens to make our planet uninhabitable. The violence we see exploding from Palestine to Pakistan results from generations of this grotesquely unjust economic relationship and all attempts to democratically and non-violently confront it being met with indifference and violence.
At a time when we are in desperate need of principled diplomacy and moral leadership Canada now seems more interested in picking sides, picking fights and fanning the flames of violence – a dangerously ideological, simple-minded strategy likely to make things a whole lot worse.
There was a time when Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Person won a Nobel prize as the father of UN Peacekeeping; when Canadian diplomats lead the charge in organizing the Rio Earth Summit where sustainable development became the mantra for our common future; when the well-being of Canadians was front and centre in economic policy exemplified by Tommy Douglas’ campaign for universal health care. The values that underlay these initiatives became synonymous with Canadian values.
By 2010, in Equality or Barbarism Ed Broadbent, one of the most respected statesmen of our era, warned of a coming barbarity on the heels of the unjust economic system. In Dark Age Ahead, the celebrated urban visionary Jane Jacobs warned of the dangers to civilization of environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor.
In War, military historian Gwynn Dyer writes that since at least the mid-1800s nations have subscribed to Clausewitz’s dictum that ‘war is merely a continuation of politics by other means’ He argues that we can no longer afford that kind of politics. “We have reached a point where our moral imagination must expand again to embrace the whole of mankind, or else we will perish”.
Ecological footprint analysis, created by Canadian ecologist William Rees tells us that on a finite planet of almost 8 billion, Canadians appropriate much more than our fair share of the earth to live as we do. Our insatiable appetite for fully loaded pick-ups, super-sized houses, sun and surf holidays and endless consumer toys and trinkets, is gained at the expense of the majority of our fellow human beings.
We in the west consume more than the earth can bare, and alter basic life support systems through the burning of fossil fuels. We routinely resort to violence to guarantee access to those resources and we have been satisfied to allow the small minority to live in relative luxury while the vast majority live in dehumanizing poverty. None of this can be sustained ecologically, politically or morally.
In The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War Author Christopher Clarke’s warning appropriately describes our predicament: “watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”
by Noel Keough – originally published in FFWD Weekly.
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Noel Keough 