There is much in this cartoon from Graeme Mackay about how politics is practised in most jurisdictions with much room for commentary on how we should govern ourselves, what with politics having pretty much divorced itself from governance. The context for the cartoon could very well be explained in the blog post I read this morning from the Disaffected Liberal:
I know people in our local community who’ve been working on the whole climate change file for a couple of decades already, and have made little in the way of inroads into the general consciousness. The sad fact is that even some of the staunchest proponents of reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gasses are still living a life that produces a healthy dose of said gasses, and no end in sight. In part, this could be attributed to the possibility of a complete loss of credibility in the eyes of Everyman in appearing to be too far out on the fringe, but I also suspect that some of it is just personal and societal inertia.
The Disaffected Lib’s words are important in that they are a warning and a reinforcement of the warnings of Bill McKibben, James Lovelace, James Hansen and the like that a crash is on the way, that we’re making the consequences worse as we fritter away time in political squabbles within an obsolete framework and shirk responsibility or just delay as we wait for the other guy to go first, or for some leader to step up and move the process forward with the expeditiousness appropriate to the situation.
This thought follows on the heels of a conversation I had with a certain local councillor that was more an exploration than a dialectic about the rôle that elected officials ought to play in society, a rôle that has a couple of channels. The first is to to get educated, and then to educate. Our adversarial system often leads officials to work from a pre-set party platform, often the result of being beholden to a certain group of people in society, sometimes motivated by attempting to right the wrongs of previous groups of the elected, and, facts be damned, to work inside that administrative bubble that allows us to carry on with a dynamic balance that brooks no accounting for crises on the horizon, however close in that horizon might be.
Living as if there were no tomorrow, we are converting a carefree metaphor into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
—John Whiting
Our own Christy Clark is a perfect example of an elected official who runs her show according to predetermined guidelines as set by her Liberal Party donor list and who wilfully ignores the evidence that cries out that her whole program is not only creating hardship for the majority of her constituents but is also hastening the onset of catastrophe, this in aid of keeping her in the limelight for another term. My sense is that she is at least somewhat aware of the hazardous path on which she has set her administration but that she is unwilling to acknowledge or act upon what she knows, indicating that her need to educate herself is more in the affective domain, in her need to develop empathy and a sense of general justice, than it is in factual scientific learning. Rachel Notley is another who seems more focused on staying in the driver’s seat than on doing what it will take for us to make the needed contribution from our little corner of the world. A clearer vision would see her educating her electorate in the benefits of a shift both immediate and radical to renewable energy and pipelines be damned. Not happening: it’s a daunting task in any jurisdiction, an eminently steeper climb in bitumen-soaked Alberta, especially given the nature of the fossil fuel business and its propensity to concentrate both profit and power outside Alberta. I don’t know if Brad Wall needs to learn the sad facts of physics or whether he is another who wilfully shuns knowdge in pursuit of long-term political power, and Manitoba’s Brian Pallister has, to the best of my knowledge, kept his head down somewhat, but with his party affiliation, it would be easy to plunk him squarely in the Brad Wall camp. Wynne and Couillard have opted for cap and trade schemes, a good idea, perhaps, but easily gamed. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland have a lot of skin in the petroleum game and are likely to be somewhat recalcitrant in coming to the table when it comes to climate disruption.
Sadly, even when there is the best of intentions on the part of those who govern to educate their constituents about the do-or-die circumstances in which we find ourselves, the electorate itself has proven to be resistant to stepping up to accept the new reality. We’ve allowed ourselves to take the path of least resistance, to be lulled into indifference by the press whose stories have, by and large, downplayed any sense of urgency with respect to climate action, and, apart some exceptions, we are either too busy trying to scratch out a living from our current economic mess or just too comfortable to make the effort to readjust our expectations and our willingness to be active participants in what looks to be a monumental and painful march to sanity.
We can all draw our own conclusions. However, possible future generations will not look kindly on the sort of mess we seem on course to leave to those who survive whatever period of readjustment befalls us.
