By Nadine Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 22, 2014
B.C. has a long history of environmentalism. It’s become a way of defining ourselves, a culture of its own.
However, to the detriment of our cause, it has now become a cliché.
When two peaceful environmentalist protesters comically outwitted security and snuck up behind Prime Minister Harper during a conference with the Vancouver Board of Trade, Harper joked that “it wouldn’t be Vancouver without it.” Without the dramatics, without the hysterics, you can almost hear him thinking.
It has become especially easy to write off eco-protesters.
The main criticism comes in the form of an ad hominem attack. For those of us who have avoided taking Philosophy 100 thus far, instead of attacking the argument the protesters are making, critics needle at their characters.
Illogical, they call them. Irrational. Unreasonable, and most likely unhygienic.
The list continues, as seen in almost every eco-critical “letter to the editor” in The Province and the Vancouver Sun. The most common accusation environmental protesters receive — more often than not from smug boomer-centrists or Calgary natives — is that environmentalists are hypocrites.
They probably drove to the protest, is the argument. This proves they rely on fossil fuels and they should really be inviting a pipeline through their needlessly pristine coastline. Gas’ll be cheaper, don’t they know?
Consider David Suzuki’s fuel usage as he jets around the world giving talks on climate change, they say. Or Al Gore’s supposedly huge energy consumption.
It’s a biting attack. There’s no consideration given to the environmentalist agenda; it’s a way of side-stepping what environmentalists are really trying to say, an avoidance of action by those who want to comfortably drive their SUVs guilt-free.
The fallacious argument is inevitably made by those who fail to understand. Environmentalists speak to a change in our economy, in the infrastructure in which we are all bound. Sami Grover writes in Treehugger that we live in a world “structurally designed to promote waste, consumption, and fossil fuel dependence.” For example, light rail from the lower mainland to Vancouver is put on hold while the highway is expanded and bridges are built to accommodate the ever-increasing levels of traffic. It is the hope of the environmentalists to force the change in infrastructure by not feeding into a fossil-fuel-dependent system; leave the oil in the ground, let the gas prices go up, and begin a transition to green energy.
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian that hypocrisy is by definition the discrepancy between our “aspirations and [our] actions.” Those of us who consider ourselves environmentalists have high aspirations: we want to live ethically, without detriment to our home. But we will, time and time again, fail to live up to these aspirations. Monbiot writes that “the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism.” Someone’s environmental foibles should by no means stop them from voicing their environmental concerns.
After all, wouldn’t most of us rather be a hypocritical environmentalist than a cynic without a soul?
