Wake up: the polycrisis is an emergency

The oilsands in Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2008. The biggest failure of government in our times has unquestionably been climate change mitigation, writes Bill Henderson. The Hill Times photograph by Jake Wright

GIBSONS, B.C.—I woke up on a beautiful, sunny spring day to the nightmare we now all face every morning: what has United States President Donald Trump done to further imperil our world? So, I went out in the sun to our neighbour’s little park to rebuild the inukshuks, a balm to my physic wounds.

My neighbour, who is a senior and has been sick, walked by, and I asked how she was doing. She said she was sent to the ER by her doctor to get tests, including a CAT-scan, and had driven the 40 to 50 minutes there herself at night. She waited for hours in a crammed ER and finally, in despair, left without getting the tests done, and drove home alone.

I woke up the next morning to more news about the attacks on Iran and economic turbulence, and I was thinking again about how to help get us to reducing emissions by half by 2030, and about the impossible to-do list had added one more crisis. My neighbour’s plight was a manifestation of governmental failure to plan effectively for the “silver tsunami.” We should have invested in and built a much better geriatric heath system, but we are now faced with what American entrepreneur Jeff Giesea calls “gerontocratic capture,” and another crisis out of control.

Our very fortunate little community of Lower Gibsons, B.C., has to grow and survive increasingly difficult economics; the forest industry, upon which the pulp mill and remaining scraps Gibsons is more than somewhat dependent, is on its deathbed after decades of totally hopeless, myopic, and self-interested timber management, and now burdened with punitive tariffs.

Our health-care system wasn’t prepared for the silver tsunami; our forest industry ate itself; our local economy—and, hey, it really is the economy, stupid—is threatened in innumerable ways all at once, and the levels of government are not only drowning, but are also, in panic, gutting every reasonable response by trying to sustain an unsustainable economy. They are abandoning needed regulation to allow clear-cutting of even more forest, forest that is desperately needed as a climate sink and biodiversity refuge; they are planning to build more pipelines and LNG facilities (prefabricated in Korea); and investing much more of our shrinking wealth in extractive, legacy industries that are so sunset that it’s already getting dark.

Our governments are failing. Says Toronto Metropolitan University professor and author Lloyd Alter: “We have a crisis of governance, with baby boomers voting to elect conservative and populist governments who promise to keep things the way they are, who won’t do anything about climate change, who won’t raise the taxes needed to fix what we have, let alone plan for the future.”

The biggest failure of government in our times has unquestionably been climate change mitigation. The capture of government by business and government for narrow economic self-interest has not been government in society’s best interests; with the wealth created over the past several decades, we could have built a much more secure, nurturing, resilient socio-economy. And here in British Columbia, over the past three decades, the province’s foremost industry has spiralled down to insignificance even as more precious forest was degraded. We are more vulnerable to Trump and his economic warfare, but even now our so-called solutions play into U.S. corporate dominance.

Business has—no question—helped to build a remarkably favourable world here in Canada, here in Lower Gibsons, but trying to protect this country by doubling down on the legacy economy and this approach to government and community building threatens to destroy all we love and care about—this is not the sustainable, innovative, knowledge and nurture-based economy needed to build a stronger Canada today.

Senator Rosa Galvez, Trevor Hancock, and Courtney Howard, writing about planetary boundaries in The Hill Times back in January, nailed it: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work any other way round.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney and B.C. Premier David Eby should know better.

Get the business guys—especially the voices from the old Fordist fossil fuel economy—out of government and sequester them safely inside an economy that is well-regulated and serves the community. Their continuing advice is keeping us going in the wrong, suicidal direction. We need a nurturing, innovative, forward-looking economy, not more holes in the hinterland, not more money for billionaires. We need healthy communities in healthy ecosystems, not more stuff.

Stop ignoring the science and ethics trying to save a business as usual that is so obviously failing, just for exceedingly short-term economic and political self-interest. This is just making things worse.

The polycrisis is an emergency. Declare an emergency, get business out of government, and let progressives organize our future so that we can have a future. The year 2030 is just four years away, and we have a lot of emissions to lose and a lot of changes that need to be made.

Bill Henderson is a long-time climate activist, and he can be reached at [email protected].