Trading or Taxing? Huh?

Tomorrow, the Canadians are off to the polls to elect a new national government. The Globe and Mail referred to the campaign as ‘ugly and occasionally brutish’ and, I might add, blissfully short.

All the Canadians I’ve recently talked to have described their national election as boring, in contrast to the U.S. campaign. We’ve not discussed the ugly and brutish part which the U.S. has surely shared, but Canadians seem to think the Canadian campaign wasn’t about much of anything. The people I meet have not seemed to be enthusiastic about Stephen Harper (the Conservative candidate and current Prime Minister with a minority government and likely to get another one when the counting is done tomorrow). On the other hand, they don’t demonstrate much enthusiasm for any of the other four parties, either, or at least not in any noticeable way.

The Liberals are the likely alternative, but there’s also the NDP (socialist, sort of—well, if ‘we’re all socialists now,' perhaps the NDP will do better than expected, thanks to the financial melt) and the Greens and the Separatists who have no constituency in B.C.

One of the most interesting things to me about the Canadian campaign is that the Liberals favor a carbon tax while the Conservatives are cap-and-trade supporters. This is all about global warming and refers to the Kyoto treaty, which Canada signed but the U.S. backed out of. And, as an issue, it's one that the Americans also ought to be concerned about: global warming means all of us, just like global financial meltdown meant all of us. However, I doubt if one in fifty Americans could tell you anything about either choice. And if the Canadians find this all that boring, maybe they’re no better informed than we are. Sobering thought.

Well, once we all finish mastering the intricacies of the financial system, we can move on to learning climatology, oceanography, planetary science generally, and ecology, of course. I can hardly wait.

What's Our Problem?

I remember World War II quite distinctly and especially the sense of urgency about doing things that were in the service of the war. The ration books that told you how much stuff you could obtain, the saving of things that the war somehow needed: tin cans, toothpaste tubes (which I think you had to take back to the drug store when empty in order to get a new one), jars of meat fat from cooking (like bacon fat), tin foil, tin anything (I guess). The saving of small amounts of money so that you could buy War Bonds. (If you could get together $18.75, the government would pay you back $25 in, as I recall, ten years). Even little kids saved their money for War Bonds. The practice air raids in which the black curtains had to be put on the windows and the local air raid warden walked around to make sure no lights were visible. There was such an every-day presence of the idea that we all were in a big problem and only if we all worked on the big problem would the big problem find its ultimate solution.

It is such memories, I think, that made the 9/11 advice from George W. to go out shopping so profoundly irritating. One the one hand, I was being told that life as I had known it was now gone (as in, after 9/11, everything changed); on the other, I was being told that nothing was any different, just get a nice, expensive meal at a nice expensive restaurant and you’ll feel fine. Cognitive dissonance, I believe that’s called, and an invitation to a schizophrenic response. So maybe we are just in the schizophrenic response phase.

It certainly appears that we are in a really big problem, at least as big as World War II. Perhaps we are just waiting for the equivalent of Pearl Harbor to join up. What would that be? Record floods? Record large hurricanes? Record heat waves? Melting glaciers and ice shelves? Apparently not. Whatever it’s going to be, I guess it will have to be more astounding than 9/11 for everything to change.

I saw Al Gore’s film; I thought it wonderfully impressive and, given all the positive response, I thought that the film itself might be somehow the equivalent of Pearl Harbor (at least in the sense of convincing people that something astoundingly dangerous had happened). Al Gore now has a website where you can sign up to be part of the solution: it’s called ‘We Can Solve It.’ I signed up, you can too, but so far I doubt if any of us signing up will be as helpful as my saving tinfoil was in WWII, and believe me I don't think that had much effect. But it’s something. Maybe it’s a start. The site itself urges you to tell other people to sign up and to nag your elected officials. I have to say that the site disappointed me because I want to be saving tinfoil or being told what my ration card allows (even if I don’t particularly long for a ration card itself). [ JUST IN: Having sent out a puzzled cry for help to my offspring, I am told that Al Gore’s site does have advice for individual action. It’s well hidden here. And it’s good advice.] /

Switzerland has something called the ‘2,000 Watts Society,’ which urges people to try to think about the energy they use. If everybody used 2,000 watts/year, that would be sustainable. In Europe, the average per-capita use is 6,000 watts; in developing countries like India, closer to 1,000. And, in stunning first place, we find Canada and the U.S., with 12,000 watts per person. So my next job is to try to figure out how many watts I am using per year and at least to think about how I can reduce it. I already have the swirly low-watt lights in all the places they can be; I keep the thermostat in the house at 65 degrees during the time we need heat, and we don’t have or need air conditioning, luckily; full washer loads, only, with cool water; clothes drying outdoors during the non-raining months; no driving without multiple reasons to go out. Stuff like that.

A small community like Point Roberts is, conceptually, a wonderful place to try to create community programs to showcase what people themselves can do, either singly or as a group. But somehow, I have the feeling that the libertarian nature of Point Roberts doesn’t exactly lend itself to this. But in time, real necessity will overcome even that, I suppose. I have been saving flattened tin cans for several years: it was for an art project, but maybe it will come in handy to defeat global warming. I mean, didn’t it work to overcome the Axis Powers?

Deer Not Interrupted

This morning I ran into a young doe in my neighbor’s yard; ran into it in an almost literal sense: I turned a corner round an apple tree and there she was, eating on the other side of the tree. Forbidden fruit, indeed. I was surprised, but she wasn’t. She gave me an indifferent stare and then looked away as if I weren’t worth bothering about. (And indeed I’m not.) A few minutes later, after I had gone up to the neighbor’s porch, she moved on to eat from their raspberry bushes, fruit that is just beginning to be adequately ripe. Later I found her in my yard, but there she was not finding much to eat as I don’t grow much that deer like. But nowhere was she the least bit fearful.

The thing was that the deer was not in the least opposed to sharing that space with me. Nor with my friend’s husband who went out yelling, waving a stick, and wielding a turned-on hose. Couldn’t care less, was the look on her face. Couldn’t care less about any of us. Previously, deer in this yard have been seldom seen and very, very skittish when passing through. But this summer, they are around frequently and behaving like very large pets. That doesn’t really seem right. I’m tolerant of wild animals, but I like them to be wild, or at least wild enough to have second thoughts about the wisdom of hanging out with people.

Something’s changing, I suppose. That’s why they are here more frequently; that’s why they are less shy. Fewer acres they can call their own, more experience with our presence, maybe less water outside peoples’ yards where ‘water features,’ as the gardening magazines call these small and not-so-small ponds are common. Doubtless, global warming has some role in their newly familiar presence. It seems to be a part of everything we notice.

Al Gore wants something of me in this respect, but I don’t exactly know what it is. I was reading an article in a recent New Yorker about an island in Denmark that is energy independent. It took them ten years to get to that point, but they did it. Experts involved said that the technology was entirely available for doing this. And I got to thinking about whether, if I knew how to access and incorporate that technology in my own life, would I do it? Probably not. It’s just me and what difference would that make?

But of course, that’s the whole point and the whole problem. We are spending countless hours and dollars and psychic energy carrying on about the most trivial things, the most pointless things: things that don’t matter in the least, ranging from choosing a fancy handbag that we have no need of to fighting a war in Iraq in which we do not even understand who it is that we are trying to defeat. (Granted, that war matters a lot to the people involved, but not to most Americans: we just want out in the quickest, least embarrassing way. That war is over for us, just as the war in Vietnam was over long before we stopped and formally called it quits.) But no energy for global warming, for what looks like an ecologic catastrophe. We are, I guess, waiting for someone to lead us, to tell us specifically what to do, because if we don’t all do it, it won’t matter. And whoever passes for a leader nowadays (the kind that has some actual power to do something) is waiting for us to demand that they lead, I guess.

But whether they lead or not, whether we demand it or not, change of a sort that is not going to be easy is coming. Ten years, it took the Samso Islanders. Ten years from when they decided that they might do something of this sort. How many deer will be in my yard in ten years? Maybe, like the deer who seem to be moving from their own land to ours, we will just have to take over some other peoples’ yards--yards that provide us with more of what we want. Or does that already explain how we got to Iraq?