HOW GREEN IS "SMART" GROWTH REALLY?

Dear Ben West, Chairperson of The Green Party of Vancouver,

A friend has alerted me to a quote you have made in a letter you wrote to the Mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan:

"Densification is of course environmentally positive in so far as it prevents the devastation of agricultural lands or wilderness areas but this initiative if not part of an overarching smart growth land use plan would not accomplish this goal."

I have some questions for you.

How is it "environmentally positive" to concentrate people into highrise apartment complexes where it takes massive energy inputs to treat their drinking water and sewage, run their elevators, maintain their multi-story parking garages, power their artificial indoor fitness club environments, and bring them food and resources from distances that grow in proportion to their population size, giving them no hope of growing their own food to survive the new end-of-cheap-energy era?

Isn't it more environmentally friendly for people to live in the country where their water needs no chlorine or UV treatment and their sewage requires no chemical treatments and their septic tank uses less energy per person in its lifecycle than urban waste treatment facilities? Just because people own no land doesn't mean they don't require resources from land in order to survive. Wouldn't it make more sense for people to live on the same land where their food comes from, work this land with their own muscle instead of with machines, and find wood for heating and building materials from their own land instead of importing it from far-away industrial clearcuts? Of course, for this ultra low footprint lifestyle (rural, not urban) to work really well, there would have to be few enough people that each person could have enough quality and quantity of land that they could be self-sufficient without breaking their back.

In the upcoming era of depleted fossil fuels whereby the only oil, coal, wood, and natural gas remaining will take more energy to extract than what you get out of it, we simply will not have a use for so many urban bureaucrats living densely in highrise apartments. The earth's carrying capacity will be drastically reduced due to lack of energy resources. Finding a new unprecedentedly abundant source of energy with zero impact on the environment is not only impossible, but it is also undesirable as it would enable humans to further grow their population, which would displace even more other species, destroy biodiversity services, and therefore lower quality of life on earth for humans.

Would you agree that it is not just the average consumer's consumption level that is relevant, but also the number of consumers?

Whether population growth occurs in the city, in the suburbs, or in the country, is there such a thing as "Smart Growth" when it still involves population growth, which guarantees that environmental damage will increase no matter what conservation measures are imposed? (HINT: Each person must consume finite resources and produce waste just in order to survive. If the number of people keeps growing, it is only a matter of time before the total environmental damage increases even if the theoretical minimum for average per capita consumption is achieved.)

Are you one of those people who uses cliches like "You can't stop progress" or "Growth is inevitable" as a cop-out excuse for letting our environment get worse, while lying at the same time by telling people that our environment can get better alongside continued population growth so long as this growth is "managed/contained/smart/densification/steered/deflected"?

How long will Canada's protected areas be protected if our 1% annual population growth trend continues (doubling our numbers every 70 years); how many National and Provincial Parks will relax legislation to allow agriculture, roads, power corridor easements, mining, native hunting, increased camp sites and recreational development, etc to meet this growing demand? How many Parks will incidentally fall victim to air and groundwater pollution as well as poaching and alien specvies infestations caused by Canada's population growth?

Would it not be prudent for the Green Party of Canada to advocate lower immigration to Canada so that Canada can set a good example in an overpopulated world by reducing its population to a sustainable level to avoid mass species extinctions and human deaths due to the downside of Peak Food caused by fossil fuel depletion?

Thanks and I look forward to your reply,

Brishen Hoff
President of Biodiversity First http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com

FRIENDLY ULTIMATUM TO THE SIERRA CLUB OF CANADA

We still value your opinion.

We’re working to create our vision for Sierra Club Canada five years from now.
If you haven't had a chance to complete this opinion survey, we'd like to remind you that you still can!
It will take a little of your time, but will make a great difference to our planning!
We would appreciate your reply by Friday, July 4. Please use this link to fill out your survey.---Sierra Club of Canada

Dear Sierra Club,

This is just a friendly reminder that you have until Friday, July 4th to reply to MY “survey”. This was the set of questions I sent to you to pre-empt the pre-fabricated set of twenty-one questions that you sent to me, not a single one of which mentioned over-population or over-immigration as an issue or factor to be considered in the environmental degradation of Canada. Kind of like my fitness instructor stressing cardio, strength training and flexibility without mentioning my chain smoking habit.

Please reply to my questions by my arbitrary deadline or I will continue to follow your lead and make policy decisions without your input.

Remember our slogan. “Tell us what we want to hear or take us off your list!” (but we ‘ll never take you off of ours. And Oh, of course, send us your money to save our poster endangered animal of the month….”

In case you have forgotten, these were the questions in MY survey:

And if you think we should just keep tightening our belts to accommodate more and immigrants, cut back our per capita consumption more and more just to increase total consumption through immigration more and more, tell us, how many immigrants is too many for you? Another 10? 20? 30? 40? 50 million? How many Canadians would there be in an ecologically sound Canada as defined by Sierra Club Canada? Do you have any evidence that wildlife “sanctuaries” and reserves enjoy permanent safety from human population growth? As for Sustainable Energy options, is there a technological fix for the species lost from human population growth? Is there a technological fix for marine life eradicated from over harvesting and pollution? Is there a technological fix for soils exhausted by 10,000 years of intensive farming? Why does the Sierra Club think that climate change warrants more concern than the loss of biodiversity services? Why does the Sierra Club not seem to understand that population that is the underlying agency of both? No climate change without climate changers. Growing cities shrinking wilderness.

One should also ask: Why haven't you taken action on your leader Stephen Hazell's comments on TVO's May 5, 2008 "The Agenda" when he said we should decide what an optimum population for Canada is? What do you believe an optimum population for Canada is? Are you afraid of covering this uncharted territory because you don't know of a politically correct way to answer that question? Is Mr. Hazell afraid to follow through on his own advice?
SOURCE:
http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/theagenda/audio/TAWSP_Dbt_20080505_0_0_40k.mp3
http://ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com/2008/05/review-of-tvos-agenda-may-5-2008.html

This is MY survey. I will not be confined by your prefabricated questions. The questions I need answering involve your complicity in the overpopulation of Canada, and your focus on inconsequential feel-good concepts of consumption, conservation and recycling. Remember it is our total consumption which is relevant, not our per capita consumption.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Home of the sanctimonious
Sierra Quadra Club
Motto “Take HIM off the island”

DR. HYPOCRITE AND HIS HYBRID CAR

In the world of feel-good environmentalism, where the incantation to “reduce, recycle and conserve” achieves virtually nothing except provide you with a sense of moral superiority over your redneck neighbour, driving a hybrid car is the equivalent of pulling out a bottle of vintage Beaujolais before your boss and his wife at a dinner party. Snob appeal.

So it could only be for His Holiness, CBC darling Dr. David Hypocrite, one of Mother Corp’s anointed all-time top ten Greatest Canadians, to be driving a Toyota Prius. But guess what? It turns out its all for show. It’s all bull shit. And the word has been out for more than a year. But any environmentalist of his reputed caliber with a “holistic” vision, should have seen it.

The Toyota Prius is a hoax. Forget the focus on fuel economy, on depleting oil supplies. Look at the broad issues. Of energy costs incurred from inception through disposal, as only 15% of energy costs occur while driving the vehicle. Look at raw material production, sourcing, car production, car maintenance and the disposal of the vehicle at the end of its life. Look at, as a CNW Marketing Study put it, from “Dust to Dust”. When analyzed from that perspective, CNW’s verdict was unequivocal. A Hummer was will last three times longer, and use less continued energy over its lifespan, as incredible as that may sound to the conventional green mind.

Building a Toyota Prius is not an environmentally friendly process either. Toyota buys 1000 tons of nickel from that toxic nickel plant in Sudbury, Ontario---not a significant portion, but a contribution nonetheless---where it escapes a canopy of sulphur dioxide enroute to the coal-burning economy of China, which converts it to “nickel foam”. From there it goes to Japan and then by oil fuelled ships to the United States to become batteries for a “green” car. It would be poetic justice if the environmentalist who bought his Prius had to tour a battery manufacturing plant, or have a bucket of toxic goo delivered with his new car to his townhome in the suburbs.

And how long do these batteries last? Dr. H. confided that he was needing to replace his battery for $2000. But another customer called his Toyota dealer and was told that the cost of replacing the battery and the inverter for this “green” car whose lifespan is 100,000 miles was going to set him back a cool $4500. Now just think what that will do to re-sale values. Yes gas prices are high. But now you have to put up $4500 to get this hybrid on the road. Looks like the Sierra Club is going to send a lot of metal to our junk yards. And as one critic observed, “if we have problems disposing of flashlight batteries because of the harm done to the done to the environment, how are we going to dispose of batteries used to power cars?” Imagine if every Green Party dupe, every socialist bore, every holier than thou CBC listener bought a battery operated car, how many nuclear power plants would be needed to recharge the batteries? What would that do to cancer rates?

It’s no wonder that, according to the CNW study, the combined energy to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship of green energy crusaders, takes almost 50% more energy than a hated Hummer. The Prius costs $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles, while the Hummer costs a mere $1.95 per mile , in relation, over its expected lifespan of 300,000 miles. Of course, there are better alternatives to either in the Toyota Scion x B at $0.48 per mile or a Chevy Aveo.

Given these facts, one wonders why those literate in environmental matters and endowed with investigate skills would have fall prey to the marketing fad of hybrid vehicles? The answer can be found in this sentence from the March 14, 2007 issue of Science and Technology News: “The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care.” Stress upon the word “show”. Yes indeed. It is more important in yuppie Greendom to be seen to be ecologically correct than it is to be ecologically correct---or effective. And Doctor H. is a Master of Show. He is, after all, in show business. For his behaviour consistently conflicts with his professed ideals.

He rails against climate change but has sired five Suzukis who, if average, collectively emit 214 metric tonnes of green house gasses annually or 86 times more GHG than my compact Japanese car. That’s right. His five Suzukis do more damage than my one Suzuki. He would do the environment a greater favour by ditching the Prius and getting a conventional economy car to commute between his several energy-guzzling homes and to the airport, where he could make his plane trips to the Queen Charlottes to rendezvous with his native friends who provide cover for him to over-fish and over-hunt for needed “r an r”. Recharged, he can fly back to YVR, total CO2 expenditure .756 tonnes, and spend the same carbon on a connecting flight to his Ivory Tower at the CBC Studio in Toronto. The CBC Thought Police will then give him a podium to tell the world how us white-ass consumers are living beyond our means and having no respect for limits---like the natives, who are a model for us all, at one with nature. You know, the folks who get a free pass from environmentalists like Doctor H. while hunting the endangered polar bear, narwhals, and belugas with modern machines and signing contracts with logging, oil, gas and mining companies.

Here’s some questions for Dr. H. and his many millions of loyal CBC groupies across the land, and for those enamoured with hybrid cars. Since roughly 60% of us drive a car every day, mathematical symmetry would project that each year an additional 150,000 immigrant drivers would become daily users of Canadian roads. What dear green leftie, is the point of energy conservation of any kind in the face of your blind, determined and deliberate effort to create more energy consumers through mass immigration of the ridiculous scale of recent decades ? What is the point of improving efficiency but not reducing total energy consumption?

We don’t need energy efficient cars so much as fewer drivers.Fewer people fewer drivers.

NOW THEY WANT TO HEAR FROM ME? The Sierra Club's Selective Hearing

At the conclusion of the showing of the Gore documentary on global warming the local Sierra Club prevented me from circulating leaflets critical of Gore’s, and the Sierra Club’s omission of population growth as a factor in climate change. My opinion was not valuable to them.

In mid March of that same year, 2007, when the census report revealed that Canada suffered the highest population growth rate of all G8 countries, I , together with Brishen Hoff, took the Sierra Club to task for failing to publicly cite government immigration policy as a key factor in environmental degradation. All across Canada, director after director in the Sierra Club screamed of harassment and demanded that they be “taken off” our list.” Not a single one would engage our argument or debate with us. Our opinion was not valuable to them.

To commemorate Earth Day a tribute was sent out to scores of Sierra Club directors on April 18, 2008 to celebrate the life of three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Brower. It spoke of Brower as the catalyst in changing the Sierra Club from an insignificant group of affluent apolitical hikers to an aggressive player on the national environmental scene. For all intents and purposes he was the Sierra Club.

But imagine the Pope resigning from the Vatican in disgust over corruption. Well Brower resigned because he could no longer stomach a corrupt, money-grubbing, corporate-lackey that accepted a massive annual $100 million bribe to leave immigration, a vital ingredient of environmental ruin, out of the policy book. And unlike Elizabeth May, he knew that you couldn’t make the ecological consequences of an immigration wave go away with magic—“abra-kadabra Smart Growth”--- “ Poof” -- gone!

The directors of Canada’s Sierra Club did not want to read this. It was a replay of March 2007. “Take me off your list” was the chorus. One was incredulous. “I am just a volunteer. I am no corporate lackey.” All Sierrans have this self-image as white, or should I say, green, knights, as selfless crusaders, fighting off evil polluters , malevolent energy corporations, and logging companies etc. In fact, they are their junior partners, green collaborators in a neo-liberal agenda to import as much cheap labour as possible, whether in the form of white collar IT workers, unskilled labour or professionals that never get placed. All fuel for the consumer economy, all able to wipe out the gains in energy conservation or recycling or occupy the new subdivisions that developers want to spread over wildlife habitat. They will readily put the smallest energy proposal or mining application up against an environmental impact statement, but give a free pass to a government’s immigration policy that will add millions to the national population and have ecological impact far exceeding the brushfires they are trying to put out.

Once upon a time the Sierra Club, north and south of the 49th, did in fact believe in the IPAT equation. It was easier to then, before the age of political correctness. But now it is more important not to offend its yuppie subscription base than to tell the truth. The truth is, Canada’s environment cannot be saved unless we stabilize, and reduce, our population. For those who do not want to hear that truth, why ask for it? And why now?

These are the questions I must ask as the Sierra Club of Canada has sent out an opinion survey by email. I must pre-empt their survey with my own:

And if you think we should just keep tightening our belts to accommodate more and immigrants, cut back our per capita consumption more and more just increase total consumption through immigration more and more, tell us, how many immigrants is too many for you? Another 10? 20? 30? 40? 50 million? How many Canadians would there be in an ecologically sound Canada as defined by Sierra Club Canada? Do you have any evidence that wildlife “sanctuaries” and reserves enjoy permanent safety from human population growth? As for Sustainable Energy options, is there a technological fix for the species lost from human population growth? Is there a technological fix for marine life eradicated from over harvesting and pollution? Is there a technological fix for soils exhausted by 10,000 years of intensive farming? Why does the Sierra Club think that climate change warrants more concern than the loss of biodiversity services? Why does the Sierra Club not seem to understand that is population that is the underlying agency of both? No climate change without climate changers. Growing cities shrinking wilderness.

This is MY survey. I will not be confined by your prefabricated questions. The questions I need answering involve your complicity in the overpopulation of Canada, and your focus on inconsequential feel-good concepts of consumption, conservation and recycling. Remember it is our total consumption which is relevant, not our per capita consumption.

I will value your opinion when you begin to value mine.

Tim Murray
Vice President
Biodiversity First
June 24/08

The Sierra Club Survey: Most revealing about the Sierra Club Survey is Question 5. Respondents are asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 what issue is most important to them, and how effective the Sierra Club is in responding to it. Of 16 issues listed, from “agriculture” to “youth empowerment”, there is no mention at all of population, overpopulation, immigration, or over-immigration. And of the 21 questions in the survey there is no mention of these topics either. Yet some Sierra Club directors will swear up and down that overpopulation is a “concern”. Yeah right. Maybe in Central Africa

SIERRA CLUB SURVEY (introduction):

We value your opinion.

We’re working to create our vision for Sierra Club Canada five years from now. Please will you help us by filling out this opinion survey. It will take a little of your time, but will make a great difference to our planning!
We would appreciate your reply by Friday, July 4. Please use this link to fill out your survey.
Thank you so much. (If you've already completed the survey - Thanks again!)

Votre opinion nous est importante.

Nous œuvrons pour créer notre vision de Sierra Club Canada dans cinq ans. Pouvez-vous nous aider en prenant ce sondage pour nous donner votre avis ? Il faudra y passer un peu de temps, mais fera une grande différence durant notre planification !
Remplissez ce sondage en ligne ici, avant le Vendredi, 4 Juillet, s’il-vous-plait.
Nous vous remercions d’avance de nous rendre ce service. (Si vous l’avez déjà fait – Merci encore !)

THE COLLUSION OF THE LEFT IN THE NEO-LIBERAL AGENDA

Alistair McConnachie explains how the Left is driven by its ideology of "equality" and how it dishonestly manipulates the fine idea of solidarity to collude in destructive capitalism and ecological disaster.
This article was published originally in the September 2006 issue of Sovereignty.
http://sovereignty.org.UK/
________________________________________
There were fears of a new wave of clandestine migrants from eastern Europe last night after Poland announced it is opening its doors to workers from outside the EU.
In an attempt to ease labour shortages, people from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus will no longer need work permits to enter the country.
With thousands of its citizens flocking to the UK, Poland finds itself short of skilled workers.
(Unaccredited, "Poland in new migrant alert",
The Scottish Daily Mail, 2-9-06, p.55)
Irony of ironies! Poland is short of skilled workers because they're all flocking to Britain because, allegedly, we're short of skilled workers!
Such is the absurdity of neo-liberalism -- the term which has come to refer to minimum government intervention in the economy, or government intervention intended to ensure complete freedom of movement of capital and labour.
This article demonstrates that neo-liberalism is upheld by those on the Left as well as those on the Right.
On the question of free movement of labour, the free-marketeers and capitalists on the Right meet the anti-capitalists and anarchists on the Left in complete agreement.
The reason the free-marketeers uphold a central pillar of neo-liberalism -- free movement of people - is their desire to make a lot of money.
The free-marketeers cannot speak out against free movement of labour because that would require them to re-assess their commitment to free movement of capital.
It's unfortunate that some anti-EU groups simplistically advocate "free trade" without thinking it through properly and realising that the full implications may often be the antithesis of their professed belief in national sovereignty, both political and economic. After all, even if we left the EU, cheap labour would still come here, unless there were restrictions set on this particular aspect of "free trade."
The reason the anti-capitalists uphold a central pillar of neo-liberalism -- free movement of people - is their desire to promote "equality".
In this regard, the Left emphasise "international workers' solidarity". This can often be a very good idea.
CONSTRUCTIVE SOLIDARITY and POLITICALLY PERVERSE "SOLIDARITY"
For example, I realise that if my job is shipped to Mexico, the Mexican worker will probably have a pretty crummy job working for low-wages in poor conditions.
I can accept that the system is screwing us both.
We all benefit when living standards and working conditions rise in other countries. It means there is less chance of an employer in this country bailing out and going abroad to exploit cheap labour and poor working conditions, and there will be less of a migration push from these countries.
I can understand that if I can help the Mexican build a better economic system for his own country, then maybe in time there will be less incentive for the system to ship my next job out there, or to force his family over here.
In this sense, solidarity with workers internationally is an appropriate and fine thing, to be encouraged. Sovereignty carries a slogan on its back page, with every issue, which advocates "Solidarity with Farmers Internationally."
However, the idea of "solidarity" becomes a very bad thing if it is misused as a rhetorical device to neuter my opposition to having my living space invaded, or my work and wages undermined, or my environment destroyed, or when I'm expected to condone unlawful behaviour in its name.
For example, when we're expected to show "solidarity" with the massive influx of immigrants, especially the illegal ones -- which the Left like to call "irregular" -- and bogus asylum seekers, and to put from our minds the political, social, economic and ecological consequences of this immigration invasion -- for the greater notion of "solidarity".
In that sense, "solidarity" is simply a slogan being used to undermine my rights and to prevent me articulating them and to stop me standing up for myself, and my group's interests. It is in this politically perverted sense that the Left today almost always use the term.
THE DRIVING IDEOLOGY OF "EQUALITY"
Why do the Left insist on doing this?
Why do they seek to geld opposition to neo-liberalism from the working class by misusing the idea of "international solidarity" when it is not appropriate to the circumstances, nor the interests, of the people to whom they are speaking?
The reason is because the Left's over-arching ideology of "equality" demands that they put "equality for all" before the interests of any specific element of the working class.
Therefore, if working class people in England are being displaced from apprenticeships, or jobs, by already qualified Eastern Europeans, or Somali refugees, then the Leftist will not stand up for the English indigenous working class because his doctrine of "equality" mandates that he cannot and must not "discriminate" between people in any way.
Therefore, he will argue that the Somali has a right to this job too and that the Englishman needs to see himself, not as part of a national citizenry, but rather as part of an amorphous "international working class" in which he is "equal" with this Somali and shares "solidarity" with this Somali "working class person". Viewed this way, the Englishman can only lose.
To promote "equality", the Englishman is expected to deny his interests, forfeit his rights and cede his space in the name of "solidarity" with someone he's never met, who is likely not a citizen, and is probably a law-breaker!
As a consequence of its ideological obsession with "equality", the Left cannot and will not oppose free movement of labour and so it must try deliberately to pervert and misuse the idea of solidarity in order to neuter any working class opposition to the open-borders of neo-liberalism.
The Left's obsession with "solidarity" can sometimes have its amusing manifestations.
I had a conversation with a Lefty in Buchanan Street this month. He was standing beside a stall and wanted me to sign a petition showing "solidarity" with some Cubans who, for reasons he was not able to explain clearly, had been thrown in jail in Miami!
Faintly amused, I smiled and said I didn't think that was of much relevance to people in Glasgow. Oh, but on the contrary, apparently, it was his group's aim to build "an international movement for working class solidarity".
I laughed out loud. "How are you going to do that," I asked, "when right here in Glasgow, we have the Scottish Socialist Party, who are now split right down the middle, and screaming hatred at each other. If they can't keep it together in Glasgow, how are you going to keep it together worldwide?" He didn't have much to say to that!
THE MARXIST BOGUS "GREENS"
The Leftist and Marxist "Greens" will point out that it is capitalism which drives immigration pressures.
Like all Marxists they will trace whatever it is they claim to be concerned about, to the economic system. They will try to claim that ecological crises are a product of social causes which themselves are products of the capitalist system and its injustices.
Of course, the economic system is often a factor, and one can recognize that without having to be a Marxist!
However, these people are Bogus Greens because the bottom line for them is not ecological sustainability, but like all other Leftists, the bottom line is their fundamentalist religion of "equality" which drives them on destructive routes.
Even if we work sincerely to correct the economic problems of which they complain, even if we work to ensure people want to stay where they are rather than migrate, even if the economics is changed for the better, they would still support ecologically damaging open borders and unlimited immigration -- in the name of equality!
In this regard, compare the difference between genuine ecologically-aware advocacy, as found in Sovereignty with that of the Marxist Bogus "Greens":
Sovereignty challenges neo-liberalism. We campaign for economic justice for all. To those ends, we advocate building Self Reliance Worldwide (see for example, The Principles and Purposes of Foreign Aid, and Appendix to our Asylum Policy, we support the Cancellation of Third World Debt and we advocate thoroughly throughout this website, the economics of Localism not Globalism.
At the same time we advocate restricting immigration and asylum levels severely, and enforcing the immigration laws. We campaign for ecological sustainability and emphasise its central relevance to the issue of migration.
Marxist Bogus "Greens" on the other hand, put freedom of movement above economic justice and ecological sustainability because they are fixated on their religion of "equality" in every field of human life.
This ideology demands that there must be no laws which "discriminate" in any way towards any particular person for any reason whatsoever. Thus, immigration laws are inherently anti-equality and "racist" and must be torn down and there must be open-borders.
Moreover, they try to justify this in economic terms because they believe that freedom of movement is a necessary tool to achieve their economic goals in the first place.
They believe that only when we can all move about unimpeded will the world economy stabilise at a level which is the same for all. Only then, as a result of this economic equality will the social problems caused by inequality be sorted and ecological sustainability achieved.
Of course, in reality this free movement of people will be politically, socially, economically and ecologically damaging and unjust to many areas and peoples of the planet -- but that is of little concern to them.
The Marxist Bogus "Greens" will destroy the planet in their efforts to achieve "equality".

WHAT CAN YOU DO? How To Save The Quality of Life On Earth: Specific Ideas For Taking Action Against Overpopulation

The notion that overpopulation is either not a problem (the "it's how people live, not how many there are", song and dance), or a global problem that cannot be addressed nationally or locally is a commonplace myth and a convenient cop-out employed by soft-greens. In fact you can still keep to that formula of thinking and acting both globally and locally. Try this: (Tim Murray, VP Biodiversity First)

1. Put bumper stickers on your vehicle to raise awareness of overpopulation.

2. Make your own custom T-shirts with slogans like "More people = More pollution"

3. Write "Letters to The Editor" on how biodiversity is declining due to overpopula tion, which forces down our quality of life and how no environmental problem can be solved when human numbers are rising.

4. Contact TV and radio show producers and tell them that you want to see more discussion on our overpopulation problem. This topic is far more important than any other. Until the problem is solved by reducing our population to a sustainable level (about 5% of the current population), there has not been enough media coverage of the problem.

5. If you live on a highway, put up an overpopulation awareness sign.

6. If you're a millionaire, run some TV ads on overpopulation encouraging a population reduction plan for Canada that involves stopping overimmigration (which is our present practice of more immigrants than emigrants). THIS DOES NOT INVOLVE BUILDING A GIANT FENCE ON OUR BORDER, but will involve heavy fines for employers hiring illegals.

7. Encourage yourself, your spouse, your friends, your family, etc to spend their time and money ON helping to solve this local, national and global problem (namely overpopulation), not ON having additional children.

8. Start your own Internet blog (which is free if you have Internet access) and document the media's incompetent coverage of environmental issues resulting from their convenient avoidance of overpopulation.

9. Attend your town council meetings and tell them that you are fed up with growth and how it lowers quality of life in your community. Tell your politicians that you don't want economic growth and the population growth that comes with it, because in the short term it makes our lives worse and in the long term it threatens our very survival. Do not accept their rhetoric that growth is inevitable or that you can't stop "progress". Those are just cop-out excuses for repeating the same mistakes.

10. Write letters to your po liticians demanding a population reduction policy and post their replies on the Internet. (your website, a blog, a friend's blog)

11. Talk about why you think overpopulation is the most important problem with everyone you know. Tell them that we need to redefine what "progress" is, because more human expansion is no longer in our best interests. Tell them how only extremely rich people at the top of the pyramid scheme (from central bankers to Royal Bank of Canada's CEO) profit from population growth, and the rest of us just suffer the environmental degradation that invariably results.

12. Complain to the environmental organizations that ignore the need to stop population growth in their home country. (David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Conservancy of Canada, The Sierra Club of Canada, etc) Immigration is easy to reduce through a simple policy change and doing so could eliminate the majority of the population growth for Canada, USA, Austra lia, Britain, France, Spain, South Africa, New Zealand, Italy, etc.

13. Complain to humanitarian aid organizations and our government that supports them for not making foreign aid conditional on reduced fertility rates.

14. Educate others that high immigration does worsen global overpopulation by removing barriers to human expansion into new territory, thereby allowing humans to convert biodiverse ecosystems into more and bigger human settlements. Also tell them how immigration drives down labour standards and wages in the destination country. Be prepared for their primative reactions. Explain to them that A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY WOULD BE HUMANE AND DOES NOT INVOLVE RACISM OR KILLING PEOPLE! A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY IS IN OUR BEST INTERESTS. WE SHOULD ALL WANT A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY IF WE DON'T WANT INCREASED WAR, STARVATION, DISEASE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS.

15. Tell the government to pay people to not have children and fine people that do until our population is at 5% of present levels. Then tell government to maintain a steady-state population.

16. Sign the Biodiversity First petition. http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/petition.htm

17. Donate money or volunteer your efforts to an organization that is committed towards helping establish public will for population reduction such as Negative Population Growth (www.NPG.org) or Population Institute of Canada (www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca) or Population Media Center (www.populationmedia.org) or The Rewilding Institute (www.rewilding.org).

18. Tell others that technology and conservation are not the answer to this unsustainable nightmare of 7 billion people by 2012.
The answer to our unsustainable nightmare is:
A) PEOPLE HAVE TO WANT THE LEGISLATION REQUIRED TO REDUCE THE POPULATION TO A SUSTAINABLE LEVEL IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE PUT IN PLACE
B) THE LEGISLATION: It is easy to reduce our population humanely with the legislation once it is in place.
Exclusively telling individuals to consume less is failing to reduce total consumption because the number of consumers is increasing, and each person must consume a substantial amount of resources just in order to survive and an even bigger amount just to have a decent life. The average person on earth doesn't consume enough resources to have a decent life, so redistributing wealth equally is not a solution. Expropriating more resources from other species is also not a solution. Reducing the human population to a sustainable level is the only sen sible choice, and a complete solution.


Brishen Hoff,President,Biodiversity First
June 22, 2008
http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm

THE QUESTION REMAINS: WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR DAVID SUZUKI'S SILENCE?

On September 22, 2006 an Australian interviewer asked Dr. David Suzuki on public airways, “Are you saying that Australia is overpopulated?” Suzuki replied, “You bet”.

To date, May 28, 2008, he has not given any indication that it is his belief that Canada is overpopulated. Publicly that is. Privately he has revealed to the Population Institute of Canada by correspondence that that indeed is his position. But he won’t take a public stance. Why not?

He knows that Canada has a limited carrying capacity. He has spoken of it many times. His foundation is aware that only 7% of our land base is arable, and that land is marginal by West European standards. And the Suzuki Foundation knows that a fifth of our best farmland has been built upon. So why hasn’t he spoken out? He can go down to Australia and tell them they are overpopulated, but he can’t tell us that we are overpopulated?

Tim Flannery had the guts---at one time----to tell the truth about Australia’s carrying capacity. But Canada’s opposite number doesn’t. That is the difference.

Perhaps someone can interview Flannery here in Canada and get him to tell the truth to Canadians----since no one of eminence or credibility with a Canadian passport has the courage to be candid about population growth in this country.

http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.come/index.htm
http://sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com
http://ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com
https://candobetter.org/

PAUL WATSON VS. ELIZABETH MAY

PAUL WATSON VS. ELIZABETH MAY

The following is a transcript of a CBC interview conducted on May 17/06 with Paul
Watson and Elizabeth May, now leader of Canada’s Green Party. It was transcribed
from a CD by Brishen Hoff. I highlighted those portions that best illustrated their
attitudes. As always, the CBC gave the last word to the politically correct, soft green,
growthist, Elizabeth May. Her clichés are now commonplace. The problem is not
population growth, but sprawl, which can be dealt with by land use planning. And of
course over-consumption, that great mea culpa of western culture. The debate is interesting because the participants represent the two poles of environmentalism. The authentic one, Watson's, which attempts to address the root cause of environmental degradation, and the counterfeit one, May's, which deals only with symptoms and attempts to recruit a wider subscription base by not offending key taboos like immigration.



ANNA MARIA TREMONTE (host)
And the latest numbers show the population of the US grew by 2.8 million people from 2004 to 2005. Half of them identify themselves as hispanics. It is precisely those growth numbers that have some environmentalists raising concerns and raising hackles, arguing that immigration is central to the United States environmental problems. It's causing rifts among environmentalists and raising lots of questions and that is where the current begins today.
[THEME MUSIC]
Well what began as a skirmish is looking more and more like an all out war. For months now an intense debate about immigration policy has been simmering south of the border. Earlier this month supporters of an open immigration policy upped the stakes as millions of people took to the streets in cities across the US. On Monday, President George Bush fired back announcing he was deploying the National Guard to the Mexican border, "We do not yet have full control of the border, and I am determined to change that. By the end of 2008, we will increase the number of border patrol officers by an additional 6,000. When these new agents are deployed, we'll have more than double the size of the border control during my presence."
Well as both sides dig in for a prolonged fight, those advocating less immigration have found an unlikely ally inside the environmental movement. Paul Watson, the one-time co-founder of Greenpeace, later the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has thrown himself headfirst into the debate by challenging the environmental movement to come clean about what he says are the links between immigration, population growth and resource depletion. And Paul Watson is on the phone from Seattle this morning.
Good morning.
PAUL WATSON
Good morning.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Why are you convinced that immigration is a problem for the environment in the United States?
PAUL WATSON
Well you know the United States has got one of the fastest growth rates of any country in the world, and immigration is a major contributor to that. At a growth rate of 1.3% a year, that's going to give us a population of 1 billion in the United States by the end of the 21st century.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
And why is that bad?
PAUL WATSON
[LAUGHS] Well the average American consumes much more than the average citizen of other countries, so everytime you have a new American you increase the consumption of resources considerably. The US is also responsible for 25% of all the greenhouse gases emissions in the world, so more Americans, more pollution, more sprawl, more problems.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Well, but new immigrants aren't really the big energy consumers in North American society. Why do you focus on immigrants and not the stereotypical Hummer-driving air conditioning American?
PAUL WATSON
Well we do do that too, but the fact is is that every year almost 3 million people are added to the US population and most of that is from immigration. In fact, all we're advocating is that immigration numbers be reduced to levels to achieve stabilization of population. By birth rates alone in the United States, you don't have that increase. Immigration is solely responsible. Not only immigration but births by immigrants, because the birth rate amongst immigrants is far higher than the birth rate amongst non-immigrants.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Why is that?
PAUL WATSON
I don't really know except that people who enter the country have a higher birth rate than people who are already living here. That's just an established fact.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Are you looking at the US and looking at where there is ecological/environmental damage and attributing it to how many people are living there? Is that what you're doing?
PAUL WATSON
Well yes, because everytime people come into the US they greatly increase their rate of consumption of resources. The other problem we're concerned about is that there is terrific damage being done especially in the desert regions of the southwest because of people coming over that border everything from garbage to trampling of species and this is not only done by immigrants but also by the patrols against the immigration. So there's that consideration to be taken into account. You know the problem is is that if we don't control the numbers of the overall US population, we're headed for some very serious problems. The United States is already running out of valuable resources especially water.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
So, but is it a point of you just have too many people in one place in the US? What if they all moved to Missouri or something?
PAUL WATSON
No, I think generally its right across the board. But the other problem is that we have an acceptable form of slavery in the United States. When I was recently a director of the Sierra Club I put forth a motion that one way to deal with this is to demand that farm and factory workers wages be increased and that they be given full benefits and that would discourage a lot of the illegal immigration. But you know people don't really give much thought to the fact that in the fields of California, people are working in very toxic conditions for long hours, for low wages and no benefits and that's just really intolerable, and the only reason it's going on is because big business and big agriculture benefit from cheap labour.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
So you're saying that you think the US should curb immigration?
PAUL WATSON
Yes I think that they should reduce the numbers to achieve stabilization of the population.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Specifically over the Mexican border?
PAUL WATSON
Right across the board, I don't really discriminate against the origins of where the immigrants come from, it's right across the board.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Now this has been a divisive issue in the Sierra Club. You resigned from its board last month, in part over this issue. Tell us about that.
PAUL WATSON
Well I resigned in part because of that and also because of the Sierra Club's pro-hunting stance. But the Sierra Club, as is most major environmental organizations have taken a neutral position which means "We don't want to get involved -- We don't want to talk about this." You know back in 1972 at the UN Conference On The Environment the population issue was the number one concern on the environment. By the UN Conference in Rio in 1992, 20 years later nobody is talking about it.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Why is that?
PAUL WATSON
Well, it's become too politically correct. Nobody wants to talk about it. I much prefer to be ecologically correct than politically correct. We have to deal with the fact that it's a contributing factor and we have to deal with the fact that population is the single greatest source for all of our environmental problems. From diversity of species, to pollution, to greenhouse gas emissions. All of this is because there's more and more people. And also, the more people, that means that we have to steal the carrying capacity of other species. They have to disappear for our numbers to increase. And we're going to reach a point where we are going to run out of key species and everything is going to collapse because of the ecological law of interdependence.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
You, yourself are an immigrant.
PAUL WATSON
Yes, I'm a permanent resident of the US. I'm a Canadian citizen.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE

Aren't you part of the problem?
PAUL WATSON
Oh yes, we're all part of the problem.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
What are you suggesting? Are you suggesting sending people back?
PAUL WATSON
No, I'm just saying that we have to reduce the number of people coming into the United States to achieve stabilization. That is, there's already limits, there is no open borders. So, I'm saying lower those limits so we don't have an increase in the population of 2.8 million people every year.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
You know, reducing immigration doesn't reduce the population on the planet, just the population of the United States. Why not focus on the global population?
PAUL WATSON
Well we do focus on the global population but by reducing the number of Americans you're actually addressing the issue of consumption because US citizens consume much more resources than other citizens so when somebody crosses that border they become a mega-consumer. You know, maybe not right away, but that's where they're heading and so the more Americans, the greater the level of consumption of resources, the greater the emission of pollution.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Well, it's the environmental footprint right?
PAUL WATSON
Americans have the biggest environmental footprint of any citizens on the planet.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
At the same time, immigrants have smaller environmental footprints in their countries of origin often because they're poor. So how fair is it to condemn them to poverty by not allowing them to enter the US?
PAUL WATSON
Well then, what you're doing is condemning the United States to poverty in the future, which is where we're all heading anyway unless we curb population. The other problem is that other countries are trying to solve their population surplus problem by pushing people into the United States. Also it's a brain drain too. A lot of people who
could be making a contribution to their countries of origin are coming to the United States. And that's not solving problems in countries like Guatemala and Honduras where people should be helping to make things better in their country.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
To what extent do you think the same issues apply in Canada?
PAUL WATSON
I think Canada also has a problem too because our population is growing and that means more wilderness area is being taken up. And my big concern is that as people come in, the sprawl increases, there's more and more impact on wilderness. I mean for instance we have this situation in the United States where they don't understand why the alligators are attacking people. Well the reason the alligators are attacking is we're moving into their territory, we're taking their ecosystems and they're trying to survive and everybody's saying "It's amazing, why is this happening?" Well because we're invading.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Do you think President Bush's announcement this week calling for National Guard troop reinforcements on the US/Mexico border is a step in the right direction?
PAUL WATSON
Oh I think he's just posturing. I mean, 6,000 National Guard isn't going to make any difference at all. Really what they should be doing is enforcing US law against employers of illegal immigrants and the key to that is to make sure that people couldn't hire illegal immigrants in the farms and the factories, that would certainly go a lot further to discourage illegal immigration. I mean we're talking here of legal immigration of 2.8 million people every year. But the other factor is illegal immigration which is anywhere from 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
But you want to see them cracking down on both essentially. Not only illegal, but you want legal immigration to be reduced?
PAUL WATSON
Yes
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Paul Watson, thanks for talking to us today.
PAUL WATSON
Thank you.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Paul Watson is the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He was also one of the founders of Greenpeace and he was on the phone from Seattle. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and on Sirius Satellite Radio 137. I'm Anna Maria Tremonte.
Well not everyone in the environmental movement agrees with Paul Watson's argument about the links between immigration and environmental degradation. Elizabeth May is a candidate for the leadership of the federal Green Party. She's also the former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, and she is in Syndey, Nova Scotia this morning.
Hello.
ELIZABETH MAY
Good morning Anna Maria.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Well what do you think of what Paul Watson is saying? He says that anti-immigration opinion is something that environmentalists are afraid to talk about.
ELIZABETH MAY
Well we've never been afraid to talk about it in Canada and as you mentioned I just recently stepped down as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and while I was there, we answered it across countries with a set of discussions and seminars and came up with what I think is a very good policy in relation to immigration and the interrelationships which are far more complex than Paul has suggested, between immigration, population pressures, consumption, militarism, women's rights. It's a very complex web, and to say that immigration is the problem is really to put the emphasis on something that is, when you really look at all the various factors, it's basically trivial. I mean, only 3% of the world's population dies in a country other than that in which they were born and most of that migration is from developing countries to developing countries, not coming into North American consumptive societies, so the key factor here in environmental destruction, as Paul hints of course, is that North Americans consume far more than any notion of fair share and far beyond any sense of the carrying capacity of the planet. So when you have 4% of the world's population which is the United States, producing 25% of the planet's greenhouse gases, the answer isn't to make as George Bush seems to think, to make the United States a gated community and put guys with guns at the border so that we can protect, you know, the United States and protect a completely unsustainable and highly polluting and unnecessarily consumptive way of life to achieve the quality of life they want. There's other ways to do that and it means unhooking themselves from their extremely wasteful use of energy; it's not beating up on immigrants.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
He says that global population growth used to be the global environmental movement's number one issue but it disappeared from the agenda in recent years. Why do you think that happened?
ELIZABETH MAY
Well it's not quite like Paul -- it is true that I don't think there's any question that environmental groups are concerned about population increases. I mean, the doubling from 3 billion to 6 billion people occurred in my life time. The historic trend it is more than, you know, an astonishing reality that 2000 years ago the population on earth was 200 million people. It took 1500 years for that to double to 400 million, so there are exponential rates of growth. Population is a clear global issue of which immigration is merely a trivial factor, but when you look at the issue of population and why it is such a significant environmental threat, it's entirely linked to the question of how much is each person on earth consuming, and whether those rates of consumption are sustainable.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
So where does global population growth rank then as a threat to the environment?
ELIZABETH MAY
No, I think it's a huge issue, but it's very much connected to how much we're consuming. So if you figure what the carrying capacity of planet earth, maybe it's six billion people living like Ghandi or, you know, a couple hundred thousand living like Bill Gates. It's very much related to how much each person is consuming and how do we, you know, it's critical that North American society, because Canadians have just about as large an ecological footprint as the United States, it's critical that we reduce that enormous impact that we're having, otherwise the climate crisis is going to rather redress our standard of living for us.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
So is it not true then that the one place that you don't want more growth then is a place like the US that already has such consumption?
ELIZABETH MAY
The issue is really one that's far too complex to say the problem is more immigrants. If you look at Canadian environmental problems, our biggest increase in greenhouse gases and our biggest loss of boreal forest is happening in the Athabasca tar sands and that's not because of a mass migration of people from other countries rushing there and destroying the environment. That's immigrants like Shell and Exxon. So we have to look at what the real issues are and where we have increased sprawl which is a real problem, it's related to bad land use planning. It's related to bad policies that'll affect where immigrants settle and it'll affect where Canadian born settlement occurs. This is, actually, you know, everyone in Canada who isn't First Nations is an immigrant, we've got to deal with land use planning so that we're not building increased levels of suburban sprawl in areas which are critical wildlife habitat. That is happening in Canada. It is a problem, but curbing immigration is really focussing on the wrong, and rather trivial aspect of the overall problem.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
How should countries then that rely on immigration for population growth balance that with environmental concerns?
ELIZABETH MAY
Well it's really that for all of us we need to reduce the amount of energy we're consuming, the amount, and that's a basically a factor in increasing the efficiency of the way in which we use energy and raw materials. The global economy just to give you an example, produced in North America, achieved a revolution in productivity, in reducing the amount of labour per unit of good produced per unit of energy. It was just a huge efficiency in the number of people employed to produce goods. We need to do that again by reducing by a factor of ten, which is doable on the technologies that are available, the amount of energy we're using to get the same quality of life; the same lighting, the same heating, the same cooling can all be achieved at a fraction of what we're now consuming because we've underpriced raw materials and carbon and underpriced energy and we've overpriced labour, so we've skewed, it's all a question of responding to, really to, fiscal signals.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Paul Watson though is not alone in what he says. How much of a wedge issue is immigration amongst environmentalists in the US?
ELIZABETH MAY
In the US it is and I think it's unfortunate because I know that Paul's motivations are completely honourable. People have attacked him as a racist or something. It's not the case at all. He's genuinely someone concerned particularly about the fate of non-human life on this planet and that is a critical concern. We're in a biodiversity meltdown. We're in an extinction crisis and by focussing on immigration I must say that's the most divisive and unhelpful way to approach the issue of what can humanity do to reorient ourselves on this planet so that we can both live in peace with each other and not destroy our life support systems.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Well how damaging do you think his line of reasoning is then to the image of the environmental movement?
ELIZABETH MAY
Well it was fairly disastrous in terms of just the mere fact that Sierra Club US was considering, because it's a democratic organization, by their constitution, they had to consider the referendum put forward by a minority of members to vote on an immigration policy. The immigration policy proposed, that Paul supported, was roundly seen by the membership of Sierra Club US, but I bet a lot of listeners right now are thinking "Oh yeah, I remember something about that, about Sierra Club US thinking that we should, you know, that we should, stop immigrants as if they were toxic waste". Well that is, you know, not an acceptable position but the mere fact that it was debated I think has done some long-term damage to the reputation.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
If the US experienced a serious population decrease, how much would that relieve the pressure on the environment?
ELIZABETH MAY
Well it depends on how much they're consuming. If the United States consumption of, particularly of fossil fuels, continues its current rate which, you know, if it's an advantage to reduce the population but if every family bought themselves an SUV or moved from an SUV to a Hummer, it would make no difference at all.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
So what should US environmentalists who are genuinely concerned about population growth be doing to address this issue?
ELIZABETH MAY
No, I think the key thing is to protect wilderness by having the kinds of laws that ensure that land use planning does not involve sprawl into areas which are critical and threatened ecosystems and at the same time we need to fundamentally re-examine the consumption patterns, our dependency on cheap and very highly polluting fossil fuels to improve and regulate vehicle standards. You know, the Bush administration in addition to putting guards at the border to Mexico is in court fighting Arnold Schwartzenegger in California having these tougher laws to get better fuel economy from their automobile fleet. So, they're opposing those very simple straight-forward measures that would mean that every American driving would pollute less. So it's a really complicated web and I'm sorry I'm giving complicated answers but a simple solution is wrong when the answer is, when the question is complicated.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Elizabeth May, we have to leave it there. Thanks for talking to me today.
ELIZABETH MAY
Thank you, Anna Maria.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Bye Bye
ELIZABETH MAY
Bye
ANNA MARIA TREMONTE
Elizabeth May is a candidate for the leadership of the federal Green Party. She's also the former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and she spoke to us from Sydney, Nova Scotia this morning.

Observations:

May says that immigration, at 3% of the world’s population, is “trivial”. Trivial to whom? To the workers whose jobs are displaced and whose wages are depressed? (Rubenstein, Briggs, Borgias). Trivial to the taxpayers who must pay for the social services of immigrants? (Robert Rector study, Heritage Foundation 2006, Grubel study, Fraser Institute 2006). Trivial to those who fight traffic gridlock, suffer pollution, housing shortages and inflated prices and loss of farmland?. Is it trivial to the Israelis, the Spanish, and the Indians who have also resorted to
building expensive walls to keep migrants out? Will the prospect of 300 million global environmental refugees be trivial?

May speaks of laws that ensure that land use planning will not involve sprawl into areas that are critical to threatened ecosystems. What kind of ironclad laws would they be? The kind that Portland, Oregon had? The kind that was supposed to keep Yosemite safe from mining companies? The kind that is supposed save the Steve Irwin Nature reserve? Bullshit. There is NO sanctuary from human population growth. “Smart” Growth is a fraud and a snare.

May talks of vehicle standards and Bush’s opposition to Schwartzenegger’s fuel economy plans. The best fuel economy plan would be to reduce the number of drivers on the roads. With nearly 3 million of them entering the country every year by legal means alone, May’s focus on tech
efficiency is a joke.

“Everyone who isn’t First Nations is an immigrant”. Give me a break. When is someone going to call May out on her racist self-loathing? The “First Nations” emigrated from across the Bering Strait, and one wave displaced another. Each tribe or band occupies land that was taken by the conquest or annihilation of a previous “First Nation”. I am a Caucasian but I was born in this damn country. That makes me as “native” as anybody. If there is to be a hierarchy of Canadianism based on seniority, then I am more Canadian than 80% of the aboriginal population of the country who are younger than I am. May continually makes reference to the inherent “wisdom” of First Nations peoples in matters of resource management, despite their appalling record. Would she make similar references to the inherent “cleverness” of Jews, or the inherent “rythym” of blacks, or the inherent parsimony of Scotsmen?

Tim Murray

TIME TO REMOVE THE HALO---ABORIGINALS NEVER WERE IDEAL ENVIRONMENTAL CUSTODIANS

Some myths just won’t lie down and die. It doesn’t matter how many facts are thrown at them. Facts like:
1. According to microbiologist Peter Salonious the agriculture of the North American indigenous peoples was not sustainable and a population crash would have culled them if a European conquest hadn’t.
2. There are examples of how indigenous peoples wasted resources. Buffalo jumps, the stampeding of hundreds of animals over cliffs far in excess of tribal needs that strata examination shows were carried out centuries before European arrival. The extinction of horses before the Spaniards re-introduced them. The comment by David Suzuki that the only reason why the Haida did not chop down more Douglas Fir is that it took a full week to chop down a single tree with the axes they had. It was technology, not a spiritual reverence for nature, that constrained them.
3. Indigenous peoples in North America were tribalists like the Europeans. Go forth and multiply or a rival tribe will outbreed you and destroy you. Their numbers were limited by war, famine and shortage. But not by respect for limits.
Robert Whelan said it best. “We now know that native peoples can be as destructive of their environments as anyone else, and that historically aboriginal tribes often changed whole ecosystems by the repeated burning of forests and by hunting animal species to extinction. The noble eco-savage is a white , Western artifact. When policy issues, such as land rights, are decided on the basis of this misconception, it leads to disappointment…” (Wild in the Woods)
What it also leads to is a false sense of security. And this what makes this issue so important. So dangerous. Why? Because Aboriginals are being used. Just as environmental NGOs lead people to believe that the environment has a watchdog to look after it, Canadians believe that when Machiavellian logging and mining corporations name Aboriginals to their boards and form partnerships with them to strip the boreal forests that somehow the land will be protected because natives are genetically or culturally endowed with inborn wisdom to manage it. They believe this because they are taught by politically correct sociology professors and Green rhetoricians to think that is so. That is why it is important Anthropology 101 is not taught by Kevin Kostner, or that our image of natives is not conditioned by Hollywood movies like Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, and Dances with Wolves.
The repercussions of this romantic attachment to the myth of the noble eco-savage are the death of our planet. The boreal forest is being clear cut because these “noble wise stewards” are serving as PR front men for corporations who are doing it. The methane gas released by this logging will keep being released for the next 10 years and it is one of the worst GHG going. Must admit, it was a clever move for the companies to bring the natives on board. As Brishen Hoff shrewdly pointed out, it was very much the same as their trotting out Greenpeace founder Dr.Patrick Moore as a representative or spokesman to prove that their project is “green”. In British Columbia, Moore appeared for the big logging companies as a spokesman for the “Share the Stein Coalition”, and using the same formula, he has appeared as the token green voice for the nuclear industry.
To attack the native-corporate partnership is to also expose native complicity and greed. But political correctness will not permit us to do so. False anthropology has affixed a halo on their heads that we cannot knock off. The myth of their inherent ecological nobility is the political kryptonite which keeps the would be critics, the biologists and scientists of Environment Canada and maverick environmentalists at bay. Two attempts were made to challenge the myth. One was made in Canada by myself and Brishen Hoff in our article “The Myth of Wise Aboriginal Stewardship”. But the Thought Police saw to it that it was never published. Even conservative media ran for cover. http://sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html
But in America, the First Amendment still prevails. And finally there is man who, I think, has knocked that halo clean off. A comment follows.
First Americans, First Ecologists?
By Michael Medved

Political correctness portrays untamed America before European invasion as a natural paradise, where Indians maintained an exquisite ecological balance, living in a harmonious, idyllic relationship to the natural world. According to conventional wisdom, this pre-Columbian Eden flourished for peaceful millenia until brutal disuprtion by thoughtless, menacing and mercenary white colonists. Stewart Udall, one-time Arizona Congressman and later Secretary of the Interior for President Kennedy, became an early advocate of this point of view in his influential 1973 article, “Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists,” urging modern citizens to follow the native example of treating the landscape with love and respect.
Udall’s arguments received powerful support from the popularization of the moving speech of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish elder who addressed a meeting in 1854 in the raw settlement in Washington Territory that ultimately took his name. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people,” Seattle supposedly told his listeners. “Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.” Later, the aged sage assaulted the insensitive ways of the new arrivals. “There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities,” he lamented. “The clatter only seems to insult the ears…I’ve seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a train.”
Actually, it’s unlikely that Chief Seattle ever saw even a single buffalo, either rotting or otherwise, or ever looked at a train for that matter, since buffalo never lived in his verdant corner of the Pacific Northwest, and railroads (along with “the clatter” of white the man’s cities) only arrived several decades after the alleged speech. His poetic remarks (immortalized in a bestselling children’s book, “Brother Eagle, Sister Sky”) represent an internationally influential hoax-- a more or less whole-cloth invention by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a now-forgotten 1972 TV documentary, based very, very loosely on an account in a Seattle newspaper (twenty years after the kindly chief’s death) of a real talk he may (or may not) have delivered in his largely indecipherable native language to the drenched but respectful pioneers.
In the same era that school kids learned to memorize the bogus words of Chief Seattle, another aged Indian emerged in the pop culture with the sacred purpose of protecting the North American environment, and cementing the widespread image of Indians as eternal guardians of the sacred landscape. In 1971, a brilliant “Keep America Beautiful” public service announcement offered an eloquent plea for ecological consciousness, with the tag line “people start pollution; people can stop it.” The commercial showed garbage thrown from a speeding car landing at the moccasined feet of an elderly native in traditional garb who looks toward the camera with a fat, glistening tear flowing down his weather-beaten cheek. The actor featured in the commercial, a Hollywood veteran with the marvelous name “Iron Eyes Cody,” became famous for those few seconds of video, which easily overshadowed his more than 200 films (including Indian roles in “The Big Trail” with John Wayne (1930), “A Man Called Horse” with Richard Harris (1970) and many more. Iron Eyes became an impassioned advocate for Native American causes and a regular on TV talk shows before his death at age 95 in 1999. Only with his obituaries did the truth emerge about the cherished Native American symbol “Iron Eyes Cody” – whose parents (Antonio De Corti and Francesco Salpietra) both immigrated to the United States from Sicily, and possessed no hint of Indian blood.
The cherished notion of Indians as ecologically enlightened protectors of the natural order actually carries no more authenticity than Chief Seattle’s ruminations on rotting buffalo or the purportedly Cherokee identity of the Sicilian-American “Iron Eyes Cody.” In a densely researched 1999 monograph from Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs (“Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Eco-Savage”) Robert Whelan blasts the popular but puerile proposition that before 1492, Native Americans lived as blissful stewards of pristine environments they cherished and protected .
The truth is that native peoples, like all other aboriginal societies on the planet, did anything and everything to their surroundings that might help them to survive. "There is now a very considerable body of research," Robert Whelan writes, "which demonstrates conclusively that the Indians made a massive impact on their environment before the arrival of the white man, and that much of this impact was damaging and showed no conception of a conservation ethic."
For example, to hunter-gatherers who lived in temporary structures, trees constituted an impediment that separated them from the animals they wanted to eat. As forests grow, "The open savanna that once supported bison, elk, deer, antelope, beaver, bears, birds and wolves becomes the closed boreal forest inhabited by squirrels, ravens, and pine martens, but little else." So naturally, the Indians (particularly on the Eastern Seaboard) did whatever they could to get rid of the leafy interlopers. Early white settlers expressed surprise to see vast tracts of forest deliberately wiped out: "The Savages are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a year, vixe at the spring and the fall of the leafe," recorded the Puritan Thomas Morton (an outspoken admirer of the Indians) in 1637. Lewis and Clark reported in their 1805 diaries that "Indians in the Rocky Mountains would set trees alight as after dinner entertainment; the huge trees would explode like Roman candles in the night." In response to a 1992 earth summit, BL Turner and Karl Butzer researched the environmental impact of Native Americans, and found that "Deforestation in the Americas was probably greater before the Columbian encounter than it was for several centuries thereafter."
In fact, in their pursuit of succulent suppers, Indians did a great deal of collateral damage, even driving some species extinct. In 1998, our family accepted an invitation to spend a few days at an historic Wyoming ranch where the couple that owned it took us on an unforgettable tour of their property. They brought us to a red-earth outcropping that rose like a wedge from the surrounding terrain. "This was an Indian Buffalo Run," they explained. The local tribes developed a means to frighten huge herds of buffalo and to direct their stampede —right off the edge of the cliff into a heap of meat more than a hundred feet below. There, awaiting tribesmen could collect as much of the carcasses as they could eat and preserve. They left the rest to rot, creating a mountain of bones still visible (and formidable) below us. Continued...




In 1989, the Vore family donated a similar Buffalo Jump to the University of Wyoming, and scholars have been poring over the scene ever since. In the 1970s, during construction of Interstate Highway 90, "less than 10 percent of the site was unearthed at that time, but the analysis revealed at least 20 bone layers which extend about 100 feet across the sink hole and nearly 25 feet down." Because the bones had been preserved by annual layers of sediment called varves, scientists can precisely date the Indians' feasts, and easily glean information about artifacts, weather, and their dining habits.
Shepard Krech III, professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Brown University, describes the Olsen-Chubbuck buffalo run excavation in southern Colorado where, five thousand years ago, two hundred bison "of a species one-third larger than today's" produced 50,000 pounds of meat—and a total waste of the 25% of animals squashed in the bottom of the heap. "Archaeologists who excavated the site found skeletons massed on twisted skeletons, wedged in massive piles against piles and against the steep banks of the narrow gulch. The event probably happened in a flash."
Tribes displayed neither tidiness nor restraint in harvesting various animals for food. University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years sifting through the bird bones in a Native American dump near San Francisco Bay. "From 2,600 to at least 700 years ago," a University press release announces, "native people hunted some species to local extinction," and the animals only rebounded when the Indians became decimated by disease. Broughton's earlier research on Indians' quest for "anything big and juicy" turned up similar fates for fish such as sturgeon, as well as local varieties of elk, deer, geese, and ducks.
Anthropologist Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona thinks the arrival of the first peoples to North America in prehistoric times meant the end for several big animals: "The basic facts are clear. People established themselves, colonized and spread into the New World at least by 11,000 years ago, if not earlier. And, at this time, large animals—camels, and extinct species of horses, ground sloths, saber-tooth cats, in addition to mammoths and mastodons, and a dozen or two dozen more genera of large animals—all go extinct at roughly the same time."
Calvin Martin, in his fascinating Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships in the Fur Trade, explains that Northeastern Native Americans (Objiwa, Hurons, Micmac, League Iroquois, Cree, Montagnais) developed religions that ascribed spiritual powers to all animals, including beavers, and held that each creature existed in a sphere parallel to that of man. The process of hunting, then, became far more than the physical mechanics of trapping and killing, but involved a spiritual interchange of consent and mutual respect. After fur trading began, when natives began to perish in great numbers due to disease, Indians assumed the beaver were exacting retribution against the humans for the plundering of their pelts—leading to the conclusion that the natives could protect themselves only by securing the rodents' elimination. "By 1635, for example, the Huron in the Lake Simcoe area had reduced their stock of beaver to the point where Father Paul LeJeune, the Jesuit, could flatly declare they had none," Martin writes. In a matter of several years, the beaver had been slaughtered to near extinction, as well as moose and other furbearers. Martin concludes, "The game which by all accounts had been initially so plentiful was now being systematically exterminated by the Indians themselves" with a desperate, cultic, religious fervor.
The baseless myth of indigenous peoples living in respectful balance with their natural surroundings and making no mark on the space they inhabited for thousands of years plays an important role in most allegations of Indian genocide, because it reinforces the image of Natve Americans as childlike innocents, no more capable of protecting themselves than the noble beasts they supposedly revered. This vision supports an image of explorers and colonists as intruders, despoilers and mass killers, with nothing to offer the pure, proud peoples of the New World except for disease and exploitation, corruption and decadence, and feeds the toxic argument that Americans should feel guilty about the very origins of our civilization.

Michael Medved’s article documents rather thoroughly that Native Americans as “stewards of the environment” is a useful myth. Worldwide, in fact, one has few examples of people becoming conservationists until their way of life is utterly threatened and conservation becomes a matter of survival. Some, such as the Easter Islanders, have not made the transition in time. The Pacific Island Yapese, by contrast, did begin to conserve and limit population size and fertility, but only after a long period of famine.

Europeans and European-Americans are as early as any to become low fertility conservationists. Indeed, in abolishing slavery and founding societies for the Protection of Animals they have gone farther, extending a level of compassion for all humans other species, that seems unique in world history.
Virginia
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http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MichaelMedved/2008/06/18/first_americans,_first_ecologists
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

I have one further observation. In my youth, I made contact with many members of the Communist Party of Canada. Some of them were former members of the American party who fled the United States during the McCarthyist persecution. I asked them why they became Communists, and they all talked about the obvious inequity and brutality of 1930s, and how socialism offered a superior alternative. I was very sympathetic to their attitude to life until I asked them about the Soviet Union as it was now (1970s). Surely it disappointed them. Not at all. They not extolled its virtues, but more than that, they denied any grave injustices under Stalin. And obviously, during the 1930s, they refused to entertain the notion that their utopian alternative was not entirely utopian. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote a lot about mentality. It finds its analogue among Christians who must believe in a paradise beyond this world. No criticism can touch this vision, for people have a desperate need to hold on to it. Michael Crichton spoke of environmentalists requiring a belief in an unspoiled “Eden” that existed before we corrupted it and will again exist once we have had our comeuppance. My thought is that the belief that Aboriginals were noble eco-savages falls into this same category. The Platonic need to believe in perfection. In greener pastures, a measuring stick against which we can hold this society to account. It is very demoralizing to learn, alas, that there are no greener pastures. We are oh so much alike. Every culture seems to be flawed. All of us programmed to push the limits. If you show me exceptions, they are far too inconsequential to matter. What humanity requires, perhaps, is a predator. I have never observed the local deer population standing around discussing how to effect Limits to Growth. They have delegated that task to the local wolves. Tim

SAINT STEPHEN LEWIS

So Saint Stephen Lewis, heralded as a statesman and adored like a rock star, is coming to a town near me. His famous devotion to Africa, his heart rendering tales of grandmothers burying daughters and raising their babies only to leave them as orphans—his cause célèbre—will no doubt fill the papers as they always do.

But Lewis is wrong. The AIDS epidemic is not the worst disaster to have hit Africa. The worst disaster, as documented by the Canadian Senate report of 2007, was over four decades of development aid that did nothing but encourage a population boom that bred poverty, misery, starvation, resource exhaustion and war. In 55 years Africa’s population has increased 107% and in the next 40 years it is projected to increase by 233% in Burundi, 274% in Niger, 310% in Uganda, 198% in the Congo, 173% in Chad, and the list goes on. No, the theory that economic development is a contraceptive is a proven falsehood and a tired cliché. Only aid that is conditional on determined family planning is effective.

The problem here is not stopping people from dying, it is preventing people from being born---born into an environment that cannot sustain them. If people like Lewis, Bill Gates and Bob Geldoff had spent their prodigious energies promoting birth control rather than death control, the people of that unhappy continent would have been much, much better off today.

The road to hell is paved with sanctimonious intentions and applauded by politically correct myopia. True compassion comes with a hard edge.

TWO FAMOUS WARRIORS IN THE WAR AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

In the fight against climate change, it has never been a question of how many of us there are, but how we live. It’s all about our lifestyle “choices”. The prime minister could make a few “lifestyle” choices. He could drastically reduce the entry of migrants from countries of low consumption and high fertility to this country of high consumption and low fertility. He could also “choose” to eradicate pro-natalist policies which reward citizens for having children and creating more greenhouse emitters. But these are just the kind of choices that soft green environmentalists will never talk about. Nor will they talk about the choice your neighbour makes to have more than two children. That you see, belongs to the sacred realm of “personal choice”, as if bringing a child into the world that in North America will dump 23.8 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is “personal”.

Quite an interesting concept that. Throw litter out the car window and that is a very “public” act. Be a demographic litter-bug with your third child and it is nobody’s business. If you are a single mum on the dole, of course, you are a subject of muted scorn. But celebrities are given a free pass. Case in point. Let’s take our continent’s two most famous climate warriors, Saint Al Gore and Saint David Suzuki.

Gore has brought four children into this world and Suzuki five. To gauge their footprint let me put it in these terms. If your car burns 416 litres of gasoline, it will have emitted 1 tonne of CO2.. In one year I burn 572 litres or 1.38 tonnes of CO2. Al Gore’s kids dump 69 times more GHG into the atmosphere by living in the United States than I do driving my car. Dr. David Suzuki’s kids do 86.25 times more damage to the atmosphere by living in Canada than I do driving my compact car.

As for myself, I have never felt the need to replicate myself, feeling instead a biological urge to be an uncle. I have a dog, with an extremely low footprint, and I adopted him----as far as I know I didn’t sire him as the only thing noticeably Irish about him is that he walks on all fours.

When archaeologists are excavating the ruins of our “civilization” looking to render an autopsy, the one thing that is going to strike them as curious, I think, is that we forced to people to buy a license if they wished to catch so many fish or hunt game to preserve nature’s balance, but allowed them to procreate at will. Brishen Hoff has pondered that conundrum for years.

DR. DAVID SUZUKI AND HIS INHOSPITABLE HOST

Oh dear. It seems that “Norm”, the villain in a “Powerwise” commercial, has not been very hospitable to poor Dr. David Suzuki. While Suzuki is sitting in his T shirt shivering, Norm has his air conditioner set so low that the living room is comfortable for the penguins, but not for His Highness to whom he is apparently oblivious.

Dr. Suzuki tells Norm to forget about the Penguins and think about the fact that if we set our air conditioners (ACs) just one degree Celsius higher, it would release enough energy to power another 38,000 homes. Now that is just what the greenbelts outside our cities are crying out for. Another 38,000 homes each year.

This is an interesting proposition. Let’s think about where it will get us, like all the other conservation and green living tips the feel-good movement encourages us to follow.

Currently 260,000 immigrants enter Canada annually. But it is the insane ambition of all federal parties to boost this annual intake to one percent of the national population or more, that is, currently, to 330,000 consumers. Business lobbies like the Royal Bank have visions of 400,000. Half of this total is destined for Ontario (now about 129,000), which Environment Commissioner Gordon Miller warned would see another six million people crammed into the Golden Horseshoe in the next 25 years unless immigration rates are reigned in.

Let’s assume that the immigration quota of 1% is met next year but the 330,000 intake level remains frozen for the next decade. And let’s further assume that Ontario gets its annual 165,000 dose of cultural enrichment every year for that same ten years.

In that case, I suspect that Dr. Suzuki will have to re-visit Norm and get more demanding.

Do the math. He says that a one degree upward adjustment will deliver power to 38,000 homes. Now, according to 2002 census data, the average household is occupied by 2.6 occupants. Therefore those 38,000 homes that we’ve liberated by turning our ACs up by one degree will offer shelter to 98,800 immigrants or 38% of the current intake, or 30% of the target number.

However, to power the approximately 126,923 homes needed to accommodate 330,000 immigrants, ACs will have to be turned up another 3.34 degrees. Not a big deal, you say, unless you live in Ottawa and that 3.34 degrees is the difference between sleeping and not sleeping on a humid night. But that is only in year one. The energy needs of succeeding immigration waves is cumulative and will call for off-setting sacrifices. Suzuki surely will call for further cut-backs in our AC use. Each new crop of immigrants will require, for the integrity of his scheme to be maintained, that we turn up our ACs by 3.34 degrees year after year after year until the politicians have achieved their goal of erasing biodiversity in Canada with a human monoculture. In any case, by the end of five years, you’ll have consigned your AC to the junk heap because the setting will have had to have been raised beyond 16.7 degrees and there would be little point in having something that ugly and obtrusive in the house that didn’t kick in until it was 36 degrees Celsius.

But wait. All of this is assuming that every Canadian household has an air conditioner. In fact, 70% don’t. So just 30% of Canadian households will have to turn up their ACs to power homes for immigrants. That means that only 4.5 million homes would be carrying the burden for Dr. Suzuki’s green living feel-good plan. In Ontario, just about 1.9 million homes in that province of 14 million would be responsible for generating the power for 63,461 housing units immigrants would need. How high would their settings have to be?

Now of course, immigrants are not the only people who occupy houses, or consume power, so why scapegoat them? For one thing, they make up 70% of our population growth and that proportion will grow over time. Secondly, our fertility rate is already quite low at 1.53. Not much room for reduction there, although are criminal pro-natalist policies are ecologically irresponsible, and yet strangely immune from green lifestyle admonitions.

The point here is that Dr. Suzuki should be talking about the greenhouse effects of population growth in this country, of the fact that population growth, whether driven by immigration or not, wipes out the relatively trivial gains made by conservation efforts. Efforts like screwing in fluorescent light bulbs, recycling garbage---or telling “Norm” to turn up his air conditioner and lose his penguins. Those penguins, BTW, look more willing to adapt to Canada than many of Suzuki’s friends who want us to customize this country to their liking the moment they step off the plane. Penguins stay. Suzuki leave. Are you listening Norm?

GROWTH HAS ONLY MADE OUR LIVES WORSE How do the politicians and the CBC define prosperity?

It is time we ask ourselves: Has this "progress" called "Economic Growth" (of which population growth is the main factor) really made our lives better? Politicians say it improves our lives. The CBC's host of "The Sunday Edition" Michael Enright said on his June 7, 2008 radio show that we need immigration-driven population growth in order to "prosper". I would like to know what his definition of "prosper" is. Does Enright think that prospering means converting hundreds of thousands of hectares of Canadian land from biodiverse ecosystems into new roads, subdivisions, clearcuts, malls, parking lots, and open-pit mines to accommodate about 250,000 additional immigrants every year? Does that make life better for the average Canadian? Has real wealth per Canadian increased? When I was born in 1980 there were only 24 million people in Canada. 28 years later, would a middle class person be able to afford more quality and quantity of real resources now than in 1980? I don't think so. In 1980, a middle class person could easily afford a 40 hectare hobby farm where the climate is mild such as Southern Ontario. Today, you'd have to be upper class to have that. In 1980 a middle class person could afford more seafood with more varieties to choose from, thicker fillets and less chemical contamination in those fillets. In 1980 the furniture that the average person bought was made from solid wood, not particle board with a glued-on veneer that peels off when wet. In 1980 grocery stores in Canada gave patrons paper bags that could be used as tinder in your woodstove, used as mulch in your garden, or composted. Now we get non-biodegradable plastic bags, which are overflowing landfills, littering the countryside, and we are made to feel guilty for using them. The lesson: "Economic Growth", or increasing the GDP does so by increasing the population, which explains why it results in less real wealth per person. More people means less space and resources per person. No wonder "progress" has made life worse for the average Canadian.

Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First
( http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm )