By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 6, 2013
This can’t last. The signs are all around us, and it’s pretty hard to mistake. We’re not treating the environment right. We’ve fallen out of balance. Worst of all, the Canadian government seems hell-bent on maximizing the destruction for cold, hard cash. But, I’m just a university student, I don’t claim to have all the answers. What are we supposed to do?
That’s what I wanted to know when I sought out Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Rex Weyler, UFV’s new writer-in-residence. He’s a journalist, a writer and an ecologist. He also co-founded an organization that started in 1971 as a group of activists who sailed a boat up into the heart of danger, attempting to disrupt the devastating U.S. nuclear testing at Amchitka, near Alaska. They became the infamous environmentalists who dared to race alongside the gargantuan whaling ships in their miniature-sized inflatable boats, just for a chance to film the dark deeds taking place. That group Weyler founded, the group he wrote the newsletter for, the group he helped to become one of the world’s most important environmental organizations? Greenpeace.
Born in 1947 in Denver, Colorado, Weyler published his first book in 1969; I Took a Walk Today, a book about pacifism, was just the start of his environmental activism. He moved to Vancouver in 1972 and began writing for the North Shore News. He has since gone on to publish a number of books, including his most recent effort in 2004, Greenpeace: How a Group of Journalists, Ecologists and Visionaries Changed the World.
He’s still directly involved in a number of activist endeavours, most notably efforts to stop the Enbridge pipeline to Kitimat and the Kinder Morgan pipeline to Vancouver.
“There is an enormous risk to the entire coast, to the marine environment, to the coastal economy, to the whole region which we identify as “Beautiful BC” and Vancouver which is supposedly the “greenest city,” Weyler told me when we spoke. “It would all be destroyed by an oil spill.”
Many people agree that these pipelines aren’t for the best of our environment, but they’re not getting involved. Maybe they’re expecting the government to deal with it through summits and meetings. You’ve said before that these don’t have any real effect.
Well yeah. For example, there are the pipeline hearings that the federal government is undertaking now. Traditionally, we know what happens with these hearings. They’re a rubber stamp. They don’t ever turn anything down. They make it look like they’ve done their due diligence, and then they approve it.
So, it usually comes down to whether the citizens will allow it. We don’t always realize how much power we have, as citizens. But, we only have power if we stand up and exercise it.
If you look at this area, they’re planning a major coal export increase in Vancouver harbour. Vancouver has been slated by the international industrial corporate resource community to basically be a shipping core for these major resources. Those involved have a lot of money and can influence government and buy people off.
You saw the way our current Liberal provincial government did the same thing, selling off BC public assets that used to be ours. These used to be our assets, and now they’re being sold off to private hands. It’s also happening federally with the tar sands being sold off. And, with no secondary industry here, it’s the same mistake Canada made with its logging. We had these huge, massive forests – some of the best in the world. We really strip-mined them and shipped all the raw logs off. We destroyed our logging and it’s the same thing we did on the East Coast with the cod. We strip-mined the bottom of the sea. We repeat the same mistake over and over again.
We take too much, and we kill the goose that lays the golden egg over and over again. If you fish at a sustainable yield level, you can catch cod forever. If you harvest the forest in a sustainable yield level, you can harvest forever.
So, what Canada should have done, for example with logging, is that they should have harvested way slower in an ecological, sustainable manner – preserving all of the riparian zones, streams and rivers. They should have harvested at a rate that the forest could easily reproduce and used that timber to build secondary industries here to build furniture. We should have built an industry like IKEA here in Canada, rather than shipping off all our logs and then buying furniture from Sweden. What were we thinking? We screwed up. We shipped out the raw logs and Canada got a little bit of royalties and stumpage fees, and now it’s over – instead of building a lasting industry.
Now we’re making the same mistake with the tar sands. Canada still imports most of its refined petroleum products, so why are we exporting our raw petroleum products? It just doesn’t make economic sense. It only makes sense to the large corporations that are driving it, because they get all the profits.
In some cases, now, China, with its mining and resource extraction in Canada, is even bringing its own work crews. That’s what they’re doing at Tumbler Ridge. Hello? Does our government care about us at all? Try and do the same thing in China. Try and say, “We’re coming over, we’re going to harvest your resources, and we’re going to bring our own work crews.” See how that goes. It would not happen. It wouldn’t happen almost anywhere in the world, because governments have enough sense to protect their own workforce and their own public.
It’s enough of an issue to bring down our current government, and it should. Our government is not working for you or me. They’re not working for the Canadian people or our children. They’re working for the resource extraction corporations.
More broadly, though, what is the ideology that is driving the way our culture is going?
It’s industrialism and it’s the growth mentality, really. Capitalism is predicated on this idea that we can grow forever. If you have an economic system based on debt, which we do, that debt is a claim on future cash flow, on future resources, on future energy. So, as we pile up this debt, we’re saying that we’re going to pay it off with future development, enterprise and wealth, but, historically, we never get there, do we?
It’s as if we’re renting the planet from the banks. How did the banks own the planet? How did that work?
When the bankers loan billions of dollars to these industrial companies, that’s not money that you deposited in the bank, that’s not deposits they’re loaning – they get to create that money out of thin air. They create the money, loan it, and collect it back with interest. It’s criminal. It’s robbery. And that is what drives all of this.
The idea is that this can grow forever, but we live on a finite planet with finite resources. We should have learned from the forests and the cod. We’re over half way through the Earth’s forests; there used to be over six billion hectares, now there’s under three. Sure the trees grow, but only at a natural rate; and you can’t cheat nature.
So, the drive to have a growing economy in which everybody is making more and more money, that ideology is driving our culture, and it’s bumping up against the reality of nature.
In a way, people know that, but it’s not enough …
It’s not enough to know it. That’s where action and activism comes in. No, it’s not enough to know it. The public actually has to stand up and take back their rights and their resources. They have to say, “Wait a minute. Doesn’t Canada belong to Canadians?”
Ninety per cent of the land area in British Columbia is run for profits of corporations. Our crown forests don’t belong to the people of Canada. They belong to the corporations that hold the licenses on them. They can be bought and sold. I’ve had experiences where we’re trying save a tract of land, and they don’t care a hoot about Canadians or the environment.
So, we find that our public assets are controlled by somebody else. Our government is passing laws that say we don’t even have the right to intervene. Our government is passing laws saying that China has the right to these resources and they have the right to sue us if our citizens rise up and try to stop them. Our government is actively working against our interests and our right to even stand up for our interests.
This is a really scary time. Canadians are losing their rights right and left, and I think for most people, they don’t even notice. They sort of hear something about C-45, or C-38, or locally in BC, Bill 30, but it doesn’t seem to register.
They’re being stripped of their assets, of their rights to assets, and so this is where citizen action comes in. This is where people have to stand up.
So, you’d push for people to do peaceful protests, or would you say people should just live differently?
I’d say do both. Live differently and get active. We have to live in ways that consume fewer resources. Simplifying our lives. We have to make simplicity more of a cultura value.
Historically, what advertising has done is to make consumerism appear cool. But, over consuming resources is not cool. So we need a counter-advertising campaign. In my generation it was the hippies. That fundamental trend of going back to the land, back to basics, and not needing fancy cars and big houses, that’s a good trend. So that’s half of it.
The other half is that you have to get politically active, because you’ve got the counterforce on the other side, these corporations, which would love to strip you of all your rights, all your resources. They want to take all the trees, the oil, the fish, and then what are you left with? Nothing.
So, you have to fight for that too. How much are we willing as citizens to watch our own government help the corporations steal from us? How much are we willing to take before we strike back? Hopefully not much.
Sometimes you think, “If people could just understand … If people could just see what’s happening, they might change or get more active.” But that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think the pipeline story and the tankers – I think most people get it, and most people in BC are against it. But does it make people active? Not necessarily. It does in some cases. But …
The routines and schedules they’re on keep them busy. Distracted.
And that’s part of how the banking and corporate agenda succeeds, is by keeping the population obligated to work for a living, at the discretion of the companies. So people are too busy and not directly engaged in their own communities and their own lives.
We need to return to a simpler way of life. We need to return to people living off, as much as possible, the resources in their area. And we can still trade with other regions. But we can’t base our entire economy on having one resource. Like Nigeria has one resource, Canada has one or two resources, and every nation is just shipping off its resources into one big industrialized machine that’s turning them all into cheap crap that you buy at Wal-Mart for those who can actually afford it.
It’s only about 15 per cent of humanity that can afford all of the stuff that the industrial world makes. Most of the world is becoming impoverished because they’re losing their resources. What we see happening in Canada with our resources getting sold off – imagine what the people in Nigeria are dealing with. The oil companies don’t even have to pretend to be graceful there. The public leaders get killed. Communities get destroyed, community leaders get co-opted. It’s just nasty business out there. This is what most of the world deals with.
Vandana Shiva, a physicist from India who’s led ecological and human rights movements, says the poor people of the world aren’t poor because they’re stupid. They’re poor because they’ve been robbed. They’ve been robbed of their resources. People in Africa, India, Asia, and these regions have had their resources plundered for 200 years – primarily by European nations. That’s why they’re poor.
Most of the world is being kept poor in order to supply the wealthy of the world with gadgets and luxuries. That’s not fair. Most of us can accept that’s not fair.
Earlier you said living simply was a great idea. I think many would agree, but they don’t really know how to do that within our culture, which has all these regulations and taxes that force us to work. How do you step out of that? Maybe First Nations leaders from each area could play a role in helping people understand how to live simply within specific regions?
It’s possible. I think people know how to live simply. I think that we get caught up in consumerism through advertising and cultural pressure. But, we often don’t really think it through. If you have all that stuff, if you want to replace your computer or phone every couple years to have the latest gadgets, fine, but add up the cost. You have to work for that stuff, and so your whole life is spent making money for you to buy it. And what’s life about? Going in to some job 9-5 job every day and sitting there and doing something you may not have much interest in, in order to buy stuff?
I think once people have the experience that there’s way more to life than that, then they can start making that change. Otherwise, it’s so easy to get trapped in this culture. Let’s say you graduat from university and now you’ve got student debt, so now you have to pay off the debt, pay your rent and you have to eat, and you want a little fun; suddenly you need to be making $2000 a month. And that’s not to live a luxurious life by our standards, that’s just to pay the bills. So you’re trapped into this debt-driven world.
One thing I suggest to people is to get out of debt and to stay out of debt. And if you’re not in debt, don’t get in it. Cut up the credit cards. The more you live in debt, the more you’re paying the bank for your right to live. We’ve got this system where once you get into debt, you’re just paying the banks. It’s ridiculous.
I mean, I don’t mind paying taxes because I don’t mind paying for schools and roads and services, but I’d be happier if the schools were better and the transportation system wasn’t so stupid. But, take land taxes. Say you want to get a piece of land and live simply off of it. You can’t necessarily do that, because you have to come up with enough cash to pay your land taxes. So, then you need a job, nice clothes and a car to get there. It goes on and on. So, the system that’s driving all of this craziness is the debt system, the economic system. But, there are ways to pull out of it, and to live more community- based lives.
I know a lot of people that live very simple, modest lives. Their cash flow may only be a few thousand a year, but they don’t need to make $100,000. They can live on much less. They live in an environment where they can grow food, fish and hunt, and make and repair their things. It can be done. But you have to make a conscious choice to do it. It takes time.
If you could go back, knowing what you know now about the lack of real progress in the environmental movements, what would you do differently?
How far back could I go? [Laughs]. Maybe knowing what I know now, I would have been more insistent on the clarity around ecological issues. A lot of what I think of as soft-ecology or fake-environmentalism has been allowed to flourish as if it’s the real thing. If I could do it over, I’d be a little less tolerant with myself and my own friends and family. I also think we’d need to be a bit more rigorous on our demands on the power structure and the corporations. We’ve let a lot of “feel good” stuff happen because at least it was better than being totally ignorant. We just wanted peace, so we let a lot of agreements and things occur that are false solutions. You know, we have more environmental groups and more pollution; more protected areas and fewer species; environmental ministers and sustainability talk and yet every critical metric for measuring our progress is worse. So, what the heck is going on? We’re doing something wrong. If I could go back, I’d say we’d have to be way, way more rigorous for what we’re saying, demanding and achieving.
Here at UFV, most of us grew up with these storylines. “You have to go to university and then you’ll be able to get a job that’ll make your life fulfilling.” And don’t worry about the Earth, we’ll colonize the stars. A lot of us are half-way along and well-invested into it. But at the same time, there is that nagging side, “That’s not going to be what happens.” You know?
Yeah. [laughs]. The story starts to fall apart. You know, I think that happens to an extent with everybody in every age, because we try to protect our children. I tried to avoid misrepresenting the world to my children, but I didn’t tell them everything. I wanted them to have a happy childhood. But, as you get older, you start to realize the world isn’t quite put together the way our parents let us believe. There is no Santa Claus.
On the larger scale, simply going to university and getting a degree isn’t going to guarantee us a happy life. It’s not even going to guarantee us a job at this point. So, the world as it was put together for us starts to fall apart. There are a lot of ways to react to that. One is to be really pissed off and really upset that the adults swindled you a little bit. But, I’m not sure that that’s necessary all the time.
Then we go out into the world and see it’s a little tougher than we thought. Then there is a lot of the cultural story that didn’t necessarily come from our parents. Like the idea that going university means you’ll get a nice job and a nice life – maybe nobody said it exactly like that, but that story percolates through the culture around us. Then we realize it’s not entirely true.
Secondly, even if you did get a nice life, what does that mean in a collapsing culture and a collapsing economy? As Krishnamurti says, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” So, great, here we are well-adjusted and well-educated and we fit right in to a society that is fundamentally dysfunctional. How does that feel? Not so good. Then we start thinking, how can we engage in changing the society to being more functional and more grown-up itself? And now we’re engaged in a society that’s very complex. We’re in a world that is dysfunctional, and that’s not being pessimistic. In the fall, when the wind is getting chilly and the leaves are falling off the trees, it’s not pessimistic to say that winter is coming.
I never set out in this world to be an activist. It was never particularly a goal of mine. I got active because I looked around and saw that the world I lived in was sick. The culture I lived in was contributing to the sickness. There was no way I was going to participate in that without resisting it. I think that’s a natural instinct.
There are people among your peers who will. They’ll try to keep this story alive. They’ll go through, get their degrees, they’ll try to find some place to fit into the world – getting a job and trying to become well adjusted to the world. But, there will be a cost to that. If you live in denial, there is always a cost. So, it’s not particularly healthy to try and keep a delusional story alive. It’s better to accept that the world is not quite as nice as we thought or hoped, and then try to change it.
If you had to just narrow it down to just one message for UFV students to leave with, what would it be?
The world’s too complex for just one message, but there are ways to sum it up. To me, it’s to be awake.
Make sure you’re awake all the time. That means thinking things through. Being skeptical and not believing everything that’s told to you. Believe your own eyes. Go walk through the downtown eastside and see how the outcasts of our society are forced to live. Go to an indigenous community, a native community that’s been dispossessed of their land and culture; see how they’re forced to live.
Open your eyes. Be awake. When you’re awake, things start to fall into place. But if you just go along with the conventional version of society, and try to fit into that convention, you can’t do that and be awake. To do that, you have to put part of yourself to sleep. If part of yourself is asleep, you become dysfunctional. You become like the culture that is asleep. So, that is my message. Stay awake.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
