Buzz saves the world
Environmentalists and conservatives share morals
Dear Jean Chretien:
While you were in Genoa ducking the protestors and getting your boots licked by Bono, your environmental hit men were in Bonn carrying the Bush gang’s violin cases. The Godfather himself could not have made a more clinical execution. If the environmental accord were a bull, you would be feasting on barbecued prairie oysters.
I’m not sure the original Kyoto Accord could be considered two steps forward on these environmental issues, but I’ve been around long enough to know a step backwards when I see one. Although, I see you didn’t go so far as my idea of including pond algae as a carbon-sink eligible plant – with the way it’s blooming in what’s left of my slough, it could have reduced the economic impact of the accord on Canada to nothing.
As it is, your people saved Canadian business enough money to keep the Liberal Party’s coffers overflowing with gratitude for the next two elections. If nothing else, the whole exercise has made the juggling act of environmental reform quite transparent. Throw the environmental groups the smallest bone possible, keep industry happy and don’t mess with the conspicuous consumption that is the foundation of our economic growth for the past 10 years.
You already know I’m not a raving environmentalist. The agro-business where I earn my living is one of the enviroheads’ prime targets. However, the values that my parents and grandparents instilled in me look suspiciously like the virtues environmentalists proclaim will save the world from destruction at human hands.
Thrift, hard work, moderation and a healthy suspicion of greed and wealth were the place my moral education ran head-on into what used to be economics and, although I didn’t know it at the time, environmentalism.
Ever since Mitzy threatened to take away my rye whisky if I didn’t stop talking and thinking about Stockwell Day — 30 years of marriage and they know what you’re thinking – I’ve been looking for things to keep me out of trouble. The other day, I found a test that promised to tell me how much land is required to support my lifestyle and how many earths we would need if everyone lived the way I do. Thanks in large part to Mitzy’s gardening and my obsessive distrust of electricity companies, we did all right.
It would still require four earths for all humans to live the way I do, but, after all the hard work I’ve put into my business, I don’t expect the whole planet to enjoy the same standard of living. That’s why we fought the Cold War.
My point is that the whole exercise got me thinking about my Grandma’s favourite saying, "waste not, want not." Sure, it was born in the trials of the First World War and the Great Depression, but it could turn this whole environmental debate upside down. Of course, it would also put the economy in the tank faster than a magpie can spot a piece of road kill.
These days, sound economics is about consumption. When people stop buying gadgets and good-life knick-knacks, and instead choose to save money or, more likely, pay off their staggering debts, the whole economy shudders like a combine chewing on too much Russian thistle.
Now, we can beat around the bush all day, but shrinking the Western world’s insatiable desire for bigger stockholder dividends and more stuff of every conceivable nature is what we are talking about here. This endless spiral of profits and consumption may or may not be destroying the environment, but it is certainly creating some serious moral decay.
And that’s why I don’t understand why so many true conservatives dislike environmentalists. They have so many of the same morals: self-control, a careful nurturing of resources and the indignant moral superiority that allows you to preach with such certainty to the unwashed masses.
It always takes a crisis to put higher virtues front and centre. We can’t afford another world war and I’d rather avoid another Great Depression. If it means a return to a more reasonable and cautious approach to life and development, an imminent environmental catastrophe seems as good a crisis as the next.
A little environmental temperance and discipline would put the starch back in the shorts of today’s youth and force them to spend some time walking, gardening and self-reflecting instead of wasting time and electricity in front of the computer or television.
Yours in old-fashioned moral values,
Buzz Angus
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