One
thing about growing to an advanced age is that one becomes clued in on how
repetitive is human experience.
I have been reminded of this ---
again! --- by an announcement this week of a finding by the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that has been doggedly
pursuing a work of documenting the threats to human survival in a planned
series of reports, of which this is the second, I believe.
This one deals with the degradation
of land, and what can be done about it. It certainly took me back about four or
five decades to a time when I was an eager-eyed young reporter — not that young
any more, already into my mid-forties ---
uncovering uncomfortable facts about the way we were managing our land,
our resources and our economy, among other things.
It was a more or less accepted fact that
our intensive, chemically-aided method of agriculture was having the effect of
drastically reducing the productive possibilities of our land. But when I
looked into what was being done to stop that by our elected government, I discovered
that not only was nothing being done to stop it, but we had a huge government
department --- the agriculture department --- dedicated entirely, and without
question, to a system of land management that everyone conceded was worsening
the situation.
Huge areas of Canadian agricultural
land were covered in mono-cultured crops --- wheat, oats, barley across the
prairies, maize (corn), soy beans, and various other crops in more moderate climate areas such as
Ontario.
When I asked the department what care was
being taken to stop soil erosion, which seemed to be an inevitable consequence
of our present system, I discovered the federal government employed just one man
tasked with that job. Just one.
That a prestigious international
panel of scientific experts should now, decades later, have announced their
findings that sustainable land use has to be one bow in the armoury of the
fighters to reduce global warming (caused by human actions), might be described
as a welcome acknowledgement of what has been known for decades but could also
be described as shutting the stable door after the horses have escaped. In face
of research such as this describing already well-known facts, my wife used to
say, “My grandmother could have told them that.”
Anyway, I don’t want to pretend that
I know, or ever knew, the answers to these major questions facing human kind if
we are to survive. Only that I remember meeting many visionaries who did have
answers to them, who were resolutely ignored.
For example, on the question of
saving productive agricultural land , of which Canada has a strictly limited
supply, most of it in the southern reaches surrounding our major cities, I
remember one professor by name of Norman Pearson, at one of the southern Ontario
universities, who made this his virtual hobby horse. As anyone can see who looks at the land around
our cities, productive agricultural land
is sill being gobbled up for urban development as we speak.
I worked on an NFB film, whose title,
Niagara for Sale? Posed the dilemma
in stark terms. I recall a Minister of Agriculture at the time, Eugene Whelan
was his name, telling our camera that if he had money to invest he would be
better to put it into Canada savings bonds than into trying to grow food for
Canada’s city-dwellers. One man who produced locally-grown tomatoes complained
to us that he could not match the prices for which competing tomatoes imported
from the United States were being offered. The shrug of indifference with which
the Minister addressed that dilemma told us all we needed to know about our
government’s attitude towards land management as related to food production.
Leave it to California seemed to be the idea.
Similarly around the same time I came
across a well-heeled maverick businessman stationed in one of the small towns
north-east of Toronto, who had produced a scheme for handling the problem of
urban growth by setting out to direct growing urban populations into smaller
towns across Ontario’s middle north region, the towns to be linked as in a
chain, and with easy access to markets in Toronto, already a burgeoning monster
bulging at the seams. This man’s
sensible idea --- the sort of thing that had been successfully tried out by the
British Labour government after the war with its satellite New Towns around
London ---- was never even given the time of day by any authorities in Canada. The
only time I heard anything more about this visionary was during the Oka crisis
when a news report said he had used his own helicopter to fly food supplies in
behind the lines to the indigenous protesters who were at gun-point with the
troops of the Canadian state for many weeks.
It is possible, of course, that the vary facts of Canada’s existence, cheek
by jowl as we are against the world’s most successful capitalist state, simply
have not left us the room in which to experiment in any meaningful way with
social engineering. If true, that is a devastating indictment of our political
class, for Canada is a nation built on a vast territory, with a growing and constantly
better-educated work force, with the infrastructure to put in place whatever
solutions we might decide upon in face of our major problems.
Though our agriculture department,
devoted with almost fanatical zeal to our system of chemical food production,
may be beyond being shaken free of its shibboleths, surely the same could not
be said of our urban populations, for whom all global knowledge sits right at
our doorsteps. Yet here again, the results have not be particularly
spectacular. I remember the enthusiasm with which the first Trudeau government
of the late 1960s and early 1970s approached these intractable problems. An
urban affairs department was established, major investigations into the state
of Canada’s cities were undertaken, but unfortunately this new department,
standing somewhere between the already-established federal departments, and the
different responsibilities of provinces, turned out not to have the muscle
needed if it were to elbow itself into a position of strength. So, all the
studies done were simply shelved, and the department cancelled as a brave, but
ultimately failed experiment.
In addition to that, however, a series
of innovative initiatives were put in place to improve the means by which
citizens might play their part in social and economic change. The Company of
Young Canadians, for example, enabled federally-supported activists to be
established among vulnerable populations throughout the country, with the aim
of helping them evolve meaningful responses to problems that otherwise might have
seemed beyond their powers. The Local Initiative Programme invited people who
thought they had a good idea for some improving local initiative to put their ideas
into practice. And there were several other similar initiatives whose names escape me for the moment,
which, considered together, argued that
our government was aware of what might be needed if we were to improve our response
to major difficulties that lay ahead of us.
I remember several years later asking
the man who had been minister
responsible for most of these initiatives, Gerard Pelletier, by the time I met
him Ambassador in Paris, what had happened to all these good ideas. He said the explanation was simple: it was
perfectly okay for the Company of Young Canadians to organize to help
impoverished tribesmen in Indian reserves in remote locations, in other words,
people without any political influence, but when the same effort was directed
to the poor crowding in the east end of most of our major cities, the civic
authorities immediately heard of it, and went immediately to Ottawa with the
following request: ‘What the hell do you think you are doing financing
opposition to us among the poor?” It
took only one such response for the initiative to be cancelled.
Ah, well, just some meaningless musing
about opportunities tried out and abandoned. To which I am afraid I have to
reintroduce my mantra,
“Wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours
gai, toujours gai?”
The report’s full name is Climate Change and Land, an
IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management,
food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.
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