Detour
Where were you when the lights went out?
Back in March, I watched the first intermission of the hockey game, and David Suzuki came on to ask hockey fans to participate in the Earth Hour event by turning off the house lights to raise awareness on climate change.
He did say we hockey fans could keep the TV on, but in a sweep of irony even Alanis Morrissette would envy, turning the lights off was an illuminating idea for me.
The TV glow exposed everything else that was plugged in: the stereo, a couple of cordless phones on their chargers, a cellphone, and the fridge.
Plugged in but using standby power, that new consumption tool, was a second TV, a DVD player, my clock radio/iPod player, charger, and microwave.
I’m just one guy in his apartment. What does a family of four have around the house using energy?
Seeing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was as much a paradigm shift for me as it was for anyone else who’s seen it. However, where once media obscured the problem, we now find disparate views on what to do about it.
The phrase with traction these days is “sustainable growth,” which has more to do with oxymorons than any value it has to climate change. Sustainable growth is a prime example of our ability to grab the wrong end of a stick and beat around the bush with it.
Big Oil and Dirty Coal are easy targets to mobilize against, but what if I suggested the problem lies not with oil and coal, but with the people it serves…us.
When I was a kid, phones didn’t need to be plugged in to an electrical socket. I mean, what was a cell phone? And a computer?
The middle-class lifestyle includes so much reliance on petro-chemical plastics and electricity that I wonder if we realize how profound it is. Conservation on a personal level is often proffered, but the option to own more and more types of entertainment gadgets, and the justification for having them, is growing. Even electric cars will need to be plugged in somewhere.
So forgive me if I have doubts on society’s ability to conserve. I’m all for more efficient appliances and gadgets, and manufacturers are well served to offer those up to the public. But for real change, the solution will have come from elimination, not conservation.
The population on this planet shows no sign of decreasing and, as Gore’s film points out, we have a planet that’s meant to sustain 2 billion people, trying to cope with 6 billion. As this population increases by 60 million a year, with it comes an increasing middle class in places like China and India and they’ll consume just like we have. Thirty to fifty years from now, the cheap labour our lifestyle depends on will move from Asia to Africa.
So, it should come as no surprise that resource companies are turning over every stone they can find in places like northern BC. We may not like coalbed methane and its implications for our traditions and ways of life, but we may not have much choice if we want to be part of a global culture and economy.
If society really wants to preserve places like the Sacred Headwaters, we have to ask what we’re willing to give up. Can we give up the security of Call Display? Do you really need a cellphone to keep track of kids or work? Is $300,000 better spent on a 2,000-square-foot house or a condo in the city? What would it mean to your loved ones if you decided not to have the next Einstein or Newton?
Is an Einstein or Newton what we need? Are the solutions to living well not already all around us? What effect will our sacrifice have if hundreds of millions of people in another continent won’t make those same efforts?
And if we don’t have the personal will to make the really tough decisions on something like a cellphone, why should we expect any politician anywhere to make those choices, especially when the stakes are much higher?
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