by Eva van Loon

Clap your hands, children—our provincial government is the first in Canada to install a carbon tax! We’re the greenest place in the country!

And who’s going to pay the carbon tax? Why, we responsible citizens, of course! Don’t we always?

As a recent caller to CBC put it in his response to the BC budget, “I’m overwhelmed with choices now—the choice not to drive to my job, not to heat my house, not to attend my child’s hockey game, not to go on vacation….”

Can someone tell me why we keep on electing people whose chief expertise seems to be kneejerk reaction?

Okay: we’re faced with the gravest crisis in human history, a.k.a. climate change. Which started with the society we are part of. So what do entire jurisdictions of this society do about it first? Outlaw the incandescent lightbulb in favor of ugly fluorescent twisty-things whose light gives a lot of us headaches and sore eyes and whose innards contain dangerous mercury. Lovely—for the twisty-thing manufacturers. A free ride for them.

Is that really a green initiative? Or just corporate slime? How can we know? Then there’s biodiesel (which I admit to falling for). Plant oil can replace dinosaur-era plant oil—what a discovery! There’s a use for all that used French-fry–oops, pardon me, freedom-fries—oil. Your car, too, can smell like a fast-food junkie while using diddly-squat gasoline. Driving as usual. Business as usual—except that somebody’s food supply is now being usurped to keep you and a zillion other drivers on the road, because all the used veggie oil on the planet won’t support the North American addiction to cars; so we’ll just have to take over somebody’s corn field to grow fresh oil to feed our habit.

Is that a truly green initiative? Or just corporate slime?

Back to carbon tax, the latest playground of the stock-market junkies. Who pays? We do. The little people. Follow the money and what do you find? It hangs out in corporate pockets and flows into the pockets of people who bet on carbon-tax futures. How do I know? I get those slimy offers in my email, several times a week.

Every time you follow the money, you wind up on the positive side of a corporate balance sheet. Some say that’s the rule of divining politics: follow the money, and you will know all there is to know about an issue. It’s an endless, useless scandal.

Spring is a time of re-birth, traditionally, something we never needed more, and at all levels. We need to re-invent everything, from our personal lives to our communities to the way we run our country’s politics, if we want to survive—never mind flourish. Is there anyone out there who thinks next spring would be a better time than this spring?

Why doesn’t our tender greenleaf spring budget sprout an original idea or two? Like tax credit for the mill worker who walks to work? Like first-forty-thousand-free for stay-at-home working parents? Like grants to help people buy homes that double as workplaces? Like free public transit? Like ferry rates for us that are no more than gas would cost us across the straits? Like a government-paid slaughterer to service our local farmers? Like a grant to explore ways we could turn our mill and our forest industry around? Like anything that will help us be more ourselves and have a quality life?

Harper was heard to say a few weeks ago that for the “troubled” forest industry he would seek out “new markets”. Now, we know this man has actually been out of the country quite a bit and even had his picture taken in a Chinese get-up—but was he awake at any time during these trips? Does he not understand what is happening on the planet? Does he not get it, that the old ways are headed for oblivion? The forest industry is mot merely “troubled”, Stupid—it’s moribund. Business-as-usual kneejerk reactions are not going to work any more. If we love the forest industry—and we do!—we need financial help to figure out a new way to run it without wiping ourselves off the face of the earth.

Let’s send Harper this quote from Stan Goff, thinker, author, veteran, anti-war activist, and feminist:

“The physical reality is that sustainable growth is an oxymoron. A soft energy landing from the last two hundred years of development will require massive conservation, especially by the overdeveloped countries, and that can only happen in a nongrowth (and therefore noncapitalist) society. The choice is now becoming either capitalism or humanity.”

Isn’t that what our “Phoenix Conversation” regarding the Sustainability Charter was all about? Engendering something beyond the old polarities that can’t work for us any more?

Rebirth does not happen out of a frenzy of reactivity. The only positive result of reactivity is postponement of the inevitable. Is that what our community wants? Or are we truly interested in a sustainable existence on this coast?

If we are up for this challenge, courage is required. Rebirth happens only for the pro-active, for the people willing to sit patiently, and think for themselves, and imagine…a new and better community, a new and better world.