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Pique n' your interest

Sustainable peace

As world leaders in politics and industry begin to consider sustainable concepts for the future, just the word "sustainability" is often enough to unleash a conservative backlash against all things liberal, environmentally sensible, and inherently peaceful.

There are people out there who are doing everything they can to discredit the sustainability movement – they don’t believe in global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, the three Rs, soil erosion, or species at risk, and blithely assume that there can actually be safe levels for chemicals and toxins in the environment.

If you are for a peaceful solution to the Iraq issue, you are branded as a coward, a freedom freeloader, a supporter of terrorism, "old Europe," or a peace-loving hippy.

If you are for better gas mileage, smaller cars, and pushing the shift towards environmentally-friendly and renewable energy sources, you’re branded as anti-business, anti-consumer and anti-Alberta – see "Think Fast Hippy!" bumper stickers.

If you are for socialized health care and education, then you’re against free enterprise, and for big government and high taxes. You’re also a bleeding heart liberal, and socialist. Go back to your commune, hippy!

If you’re for making sane environmental decisions involving our land, air and water, then you’re a lazy, tree-hugging, granola-munching hippy who has no concept of how the economy works.

Well, if being pro-peace, pro-environment and pro-society makes you some kind of a hippy, then everyone I know is a hippy.

Well, practically everyone. There are still a few people I know who will argue for a war in Iraq, big oil, or privatized health care long into the night, but the majority of my peers seem to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world today.

Still, the right-wing has its way. The conservatives are becoming more belligerent every day, shouting down the growing number of moderate voices from their positions of power.

They say they have to shout loudly to be heard over the so-called liberal media, but take a look around the country – what liberal media are they talking about? In 2000, CanWest bought out Hollinger and Southam newspaper holdings. In 2001, CanWest acquired the controlling share of The National Post.

Now the media giant owns 14 large city dailies (including both The Province and The Vancouver Sun), 120 dailies and weeklies, and the Global TV network. Media concentration is at an all-time high in this country, and it’s concentrated in the wrong hands.

In addition to owning all of these media properties, CanWest has shown again and again that they expect their editors and columnists to toe their conservative line, and rewarded the few true journalists in their organization that dared to air a dissenting voice by giving them pink slips.

Furthermore, they employ a national group of conservative columnists that are included in every publication, regardless of the market. These columnists lean to the right almost without exception, and deftly champion the corporate causes of owners and advertisers without the slightest shame.

As a whole these columnists are for a war in Iraq. They blame the softwood lumber tariffs imposed on Canadian timber producers on our own socialized governments, not American protectionism. They liked the Liberal Party when they resembled the conservatives early in their reign, but hate recent attempts to reconnect with its liberal roots. Meanwhile, every attempt our country makes to control our own destiny is viewed as a grievous insult to our benevolent neighbour and protector to the South.

At the risk of being shouted down, I submit that the reason that conservative voices are growing louder and more intolerant is because there are a lot fewer of them. They have been backed into a corner, and it’s nobody’s fault but their own. The rich are getting richer while the middle class is shrinking and the lower classes swell with new recruits.

This is the most indebted generation in history. It’s also the first generation that will make less money than the previous generation.

We got into debt trying to maintain the same lifestyles our parents enjoyed. We earn less money because there are fewer opportunities when Third-World labour is cheap, mass production rules every industry, and the economy is in fewer and fewer hands.

As a result, people are embracing quality of life and life experiences over the pursuit of personal wealth. Having watched the previous generation of brass ring grabbers and go-getters get downsized, wiped out by stock market fluctuations, and forced into early retirement, we don’t have any faith in the system.

The world is changing, and conservatives fear a shift in the world order that would place their interests at the bottom, while addressing the real needs of the majority. Fair and equal opportunity for common people is a fundamental tenet of democracy, before the concept was perverted to equate with the exclusive freedom of the "free market economy."

Sustainability – despite conservatives’ attempts to pass it off as hippy hypocracy or co-opt it by coining phrases like "sustainable development" or "sustainable growth" – will be the mantra of the next generation whether the right likes it or not. It has to be.

Last month the Worldwatch Institute ( www.worldwatch.org ) published their State of the World 2003 and reached the conclusion that Homo sapiens have maybe one generation – two generations, tops – to turn things around. Failure to do so could result in environmental disasters so destructive that billions of people will die.

Whistler bit off more than it could chew when it adopted The Natural Step sustainability principles, but someone had to do it.

You can talk about El Nino all you like, but when it’s so warm in Alaska that they’re moving the Iditarod further north and Whistler temperatures are hovering in the positives in January and February, you have to wonder if global warming might be making things worse.

For that reason Whistler should get its sustainability program back on track, and push ahead with changes.

Conservatives in the provincial government and developers in the region may not like it very much. But as they raise their voices in opposition remember that they are not the majority and can be silenced in the next election.

Think fast, hippies.