GOTTA LOVE THOSE GREEN CONTRADICTIONS

Subject: Green Party critic downplays immigration as an environmental factor

This once from the International Affairs Critic of the Green Party of Canada, Eric Walton:

Tim,

“In terms of your other point that we are inserting low consumption people into a high consumption North American lifestyle I afraid that we are exporting that lifestyle with far greater impact than any immigration consumption multiplier effect. The other problem is that as a big trading nation our ecological footprint can continue to expand even with a stable population (because we a serving the U.S) unless we address the consumption/development/population issue comprehensively and globally.”

Your reactions?

It sounds like gibberish to me. Madeline
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Madeline,

This is one of Elizabeth May’s debating points with us. She told Paul Watson, and Dan on Cross Country Checkup, that the immigrants that we have to worry about are folks like Dutch Shell and Exxon for their involvement in the Tar Sands. By exporting oil, we are fostering climate change. Our footprint is largely a product of our exporting business. Does she think that by growing our population to 40 or 50 million will lessen the pressure to export? A larger population will demand more trade, will it not? Tim
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"Exporting that lifestyle" is a b.s. phrase. Are we to be held accountable for what undeveloped nations do? I think not. Typical liberal condescending mentality - these nations are perfectly capable of screwing up their share of the world on their own.

What ever happened to think globally but act locally? I guess this old liberal saw only applies selectively. Al
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So exactly who is addressing this issue globally in a successful manner? Answer: no one. So this provides even more reason for us to set an example at home for the rest of the world. Rick

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In thinking about this again, it appears as though we are trying to pin Green Jello to the wall here. After years of saying that we have to lower our own consumption, are the Greens now saying that our domestic consumption is not an issue any more, and that we need to be more worried about the consumption of other countries? Have they abandoned their principles and adopted a quasi-xenophobic platform instead?

If this were a dance, I'd call it the "consumption two-step." Rick
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Rick, brilliant point. We can nail them for contradictions like this. So far I have them for a few. For example, they tell us that building a wall around our country will not keep people out. Yet their smart growth nostrums assume that walls can be built around cities, Greenfield acreages, parks and nature reserves to keep the teeming millions of immigrants that they want to import away from these sacrosanct areas. They also say that we need to concentrate people into urban feedlots to lessen our per capita ecological impact. But at the same time Elizabeth May says that we can relieve the pressure that New Canadians will place upon these same urban centres by dispersing them to rural and northern regions that are “crying out” for more people. In other words, Greens want density and dispersal at the same time. I wonder how the New Canadians in a rejuvenated Cold Lake, Alberta or northern Saskatchewan will practice Suzuki’s 100 mile diet? “Dear, could you please pass that hard green tomato over here so that I can add it to my pine needle salad? You know, the one that came from the energy-intensive greenhouse down the road?”

And oh yes, they do want cultural diversity uber alles too. Diversity in the form of 40 million consumers with different skin colours, mother tongues and dietary habits, but all congregating on Sunday at the Church of Sears and Home Depot and mouthing the same multicultural-growthist cant. Biological diversity, buried by bulldozers and sprawling vynal mega homes to accommodate this human diversity, is not so important though. As Dr. Rees said, it is more important to save the relatively “bio-rich” Central American jungles from human overpopulation by siphoning people from there to here than it is to worry about our miserable examples of wildlife. We can do this at the same time as the Sierra Club is milking more donations for their Save the Great Spirit Bear or Rocky Mountain Cariboo or spotted owl or Marmot of the Month campaign. Our wildlife is precious after all---but then again---it isn’t so precious is it? Human Rights is what is paramount. That is why they call themselves the “Green” Party. Green for Green-back? Oh sorry, that is American currency isn’t it? Elizabeth grew up on that, and white guilt.

PS Alan is right. As Madeline has pointed out, the bottom billion of the world’s economic scale has done as much environmental damage as the reviled top billion. They invade national parks to poach protected wildlife, they denude the forests of the Himilayas and Africa for firewood, they mow down the Amazonian rainforests for short term farming, they sire children with the restraint of rabbits, they ape our consumption habits the moment it is possible-----in short, the poor of the third world are not paragons of green virtue. They are as flawed as we are. White mea culpas will not solve our problems. In fact, they will continue to exacerbate them. I am sick to death of Green moral posturing and hypocrisy. The only authentic environmentalist that I have ever heard of in Canada, aside from Paul Watson, was Dr. Henry Morgenthaler. That’s how you reduce consumption. You reduce the number of consumers.

Must go now and water my garden before the Green Police notice. After a two week drought, my region is imposing draconian penalties for water usage that is unprecedented. It is a Green-NDP bastion after all, and the simple expedient of ceasing to issue building permits is something that is never considered. We need more cultural diversity here too, apparently, so more and more must do with less and less. As Hardin would have asked, are we suffering from a water shortage or a people “longage”? We never had issues like this twenty years ago. Tim
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We are expecting ideologues to connect blindingly obvious dots that undermine their ideology. We should know better! Madeline