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Lifejackets and concrete shoes

Help! I’m drowning in a sea of sustainability. I don’t know how much longer I can sustainably tread water. My head is still spinning from last week’s sustainable barrage of news, gossip, entertainment and opportunities, both grasped and missed.
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Help! I’m drowning in a sea of sustainability. I don’t know how much longer I can sustainably tread water.

My head is still spinning from last week’s sustainable barrage of news, gossip, entertainment and opportunities, both grasped and missed.

There was, first and foremost, the unexpected spectacle of seeing a jury of most decidedly not his peers find former Canadian Connie Black guilty of several counts of mail fraud and at least one count of being a walking, talking sphincter. While I’ve never met the man and have no grinding animus against him, it was satisfying at least in the sense it lends some credence to the old chestnut about karmic revenge — what goes around comes around or vice-versa, however that twisty phrase is supposed to go. It’s kind of like walking the talk or talking the walk or one of those other confusing but poetic sayings. You know what I mean.

I feel generally good about the thought of Connie packing his Louis Vuitton’s for an extended stay at a country club prison for several reasons. He’s a pompous windbag who regularly mourned the passing of flogging as a legitimate management tool; he’s a man who made us realize we need a new word in the English language to adequately express the über hubris of which he was the embodiment; he thought being an absentee British Lord trumped being a hoser Canadian; and he thought all things American were vastly superior to all things Canadian. Especially, one hopes, American justice.

But I’m especially happy Connie’s going to have to think twice before bending over in the shower to pick up his slippery bar of soap. That’s because he laid waste to one of my personal prejudices. I would generally rather sidle up to a smart person in a bar than a not-so-smart person. An educated — self or institutional — person rather than an incurious, uneducated dummy who gave up on learnin’ when the class got to long division.

It’s not that uneducated people of my acquaintance aren’t generally nice or lack affection for small animals or anything like that. It’s just that they’re generally not very interesting. You can have extended and sometimes fascinating conversations with smart people, often about subjects other than themselves. You can have belching contests with not-so-smart people. Not that I don’t enjoy belching contests. I just run out of gas sooner than I run out of things that are interesting to talk about.

I’m not sure I’d want to bump into Connie in Dusty’s though, not that he’d talk to me if that almost unimaginable coincidence were to ever occur. What would you say to a guy with more brainpower than one person ought to have, more advantages of birth, more business success, more potential than 99.8 per cent of the people in the country, who throws it all away because of pure unbridled greed and hubris? What a waste. It draws perilously close to the kind of personal crisis I suffered when Margaret Thatcher laid waste to my deeply-ingrained prejudice that women would make better political leaders than men.

While still savouring the news of Lord Black’s collision with mortality, thinking “Hey, maybe there’s hope after all,” I stumbled into Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS. It was a bit like someone had finally, successfully, slipped LSD into my drinking water. Here were two guys on U.S. public television — which barely survived a funding and philosophical attack by the combined forces of a Republican congress and neoconservative movement, an onslaught that did manage to successfully yank Moyers himself off the air for the better part of two years — Bruce Fine, a conservative constitutional lawyer and columnist for the Washington Times and John Nichols, a writer for The Nation, passionately and forcefully arguing in favour of bringing impeachment proceedings against George Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush and Cheney! Be still my heart.

Not since PBS televised the Watergate hearings over three decades ago has television been so interesting. Of course, there were probably only six people watching, the other 100 million lemmings breathlessly mesmerized by American/Canadian Idol or Can You Dance Better Than a Fifth Grader or something equally enlightening. Nonetheless, it was something I thought I might not live long enough to ever see… and it sure gave me sweet dreams.

But then, last week’s Pique arrived at Smilin’ Dog Manor and I was once again sustainably scratching my head. Can anyone out there please explain the B.C. Council of Tourism Associations’ sustainability plan to me? Please. I read it, reread it, re-reread it and I still have visions of that experiment where 100 smoking monkeys are shackled to typewriters, fed amphetamines and left to frantically pound at the keys in hopes of producing the great simian novel.

What the hell do those words mean? And more importantly, what do they have to do with even the most tortured meaning of the unconscionably tortured word, sustainability? Has sustainability successfully become the world’s first perpetual motion machine, sustaining itself and its imperceptible forward movement on little more than its own meaninglessness?

How does one, without a dangerously toxic dose of dogma, square the concept of sustainability with the stated goal of doubling tourism revenues over the course of a decade? Especially when the on-the-ground tactics have thus far embraced building lodges in remote British Columbia parks, increasing the number and range of backcountry tenures being awarded to companies who will employ gas guzzling machines to take people into the backcountry and throwing money at new ski resorts that will just carve the same shrinking pie into smaller and smaller pieces. Sustainable lunacy, perhaps.

Turn the page and there’s a story about Ross Rebagliati leaving the TV show Whistler to move to Kelowna to head up the ski and snowboard school at a new, four-season resort rising Phoenix-like from the smouldering remains of Kelowna Mountain. It’s pretty clear from the reading that the only sustainable element of this expansion of tourism is the real estate development that goes along with it. I don’t know what the official betting line is but my money is on a bankrupt ski hill and a vanished developer before 2015 — Slash Gordon’s target for that doubling of tourism revenues — rolls around.

And finally we have news from Allen Best that homeowners around Aspen want to ban solar collectors from the roofs of homes because they’re unsightly. No word on what those same vacuous homeowners would have to say about a coal-fired electric generating station in their neighbourhoods… not that they’d ever have to actually face such a reality.

And here I am, hoping against hope that Whistler’s council might, someday before we reach buildout, actually have the foresight and courage to require all new homes in Whistler to have solar panels on their roofs and greywater recovery systems.

Now that would be walking the talk.