--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne Wegner
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 9:05 PM
To: ombudsman@cbc.ca; national@cbc.ca
Subject: CBC Green Rush Segment March 12th National News
Hooey!
I've never seen such pandering propaganda by the CBC as the segment that I saw regarding the wind energy invasion of Wolfe Island by John Keating and his cronies at Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. What a crock of horse feathers about him and his company only going into communities that want them. Absolute nonsense!
Here's how it really works: The companies identify where the wind power is the strongest and then weasel their way in the back door by targeting cash-starved municipalities and farmers -- many of whom are fighting a losing game and are in dire financial straits. Does a lease fee of $5,000 per turbine per year sound like heaven to a near bankrupt landowner? You betcha. The municipalities also look at the easy tax dollars that will come their way from the wind industry. These back-door allies are made and then the grandiose plan is foisted onto the rest of the community which gets nothing for their troubles -- except the shaft. That's exactly what went on at Wolfe Island. The majority of residents were not even aware of where the turbines were going to be located -- that secret information was kept to the three stakeholders with visions of cash dangling before their eyes: Canadian Hydro Developers, the tax-collecting municipality and the cash-starved farmers who were easily bribed.
That's a great way to divide a community and that's exactly what's happened. Those who get the cash are happy and the rest have to put up with the industrial intrusion into their rural landscape. If you don't believe me, get it from the horse's mouth: www.wolfeislandresidents.ca/ This same scenario is being played out across southern Ontario. As for following all provincial protocols when siting those 400-foot high industrial giants, John Keating may be perfectly correct with his admission of compliance but he also knows that none of the guidelines or official checks amount to a hill of beans. That's why it's okay to dump a throbbing turbine 300 metres from a rural residence when medical evidence shows this is a major health concern. (Perhaps the CBC could dig into its own files about the D'Entremont family of Nova Scotia for the gory details. R emember them? www.dangerwind.org/ ) Nor is there a coordinated plan by any level of government to examine the cumulative effect of thousands of turbines spread along the Great Lakes shorelines from Lake Ontario down to Essex County -- a corridor that holds one of the greatest migration flyways on the planet.
Although the wind energy lobby group likes to pooh-pooh its impact on wildlife, including rare and endangered large birds like golden eagles and cranes, it's a well known fact that transmission lines and spinning blades can knock down flying migrants. A mere 38 turbines in the Summerview Wind Farm in southern Alberta slice and dice as many as 600 bats each year. And that array is not even on a known migration route. Now imagine if 3800 turbines are placed in the southern Ontario migration funnel. Do the math for a spinning gauntlet of that magnitude: That's potentially 60,000 bat deaths in a SINGLE year. Should people be worried, or should they believe the wind energy lobby group that says all is fine and dandy and going according to government regulations? (I suggest you look in the CBC files for the segment you did on the bat deaths in southern Alberta as well. If that isn't enough, dig up the U.S. congressional testimony given by Bat Conservation International last year at the hearing on the impact of wind turbines on wildlife.)
Not all of us are as gullible as Peter Mansbridge was made to appear. Yes, John Keating may write us off as old fuddy duddies who can't handle change but in reality a few of us are blessed with a bit more grey matter between our ears than he and his fellow propagandists would like. I and many others are the "vocal minority" that he speaks of. Why weren't we given a chance to rebut his nonsense? Maybe someone would like to point out that much of southern Ontario is soon to be transformed from a rural landscape into a continuous industrial zone -- because that's what's happening. Or do any of you at the CBC notice such things?
If you're interested in facts instead of fiction, you might like to peruse the following:
www.ieso.ca/imoweb/pubs/marketReports/OPA-Report-200610-1.pdf
See page 7 of 102 with Key Findings: In the smoggy summer months when power is most needed, wind energy is a flop. 10,000 MW of installed nameplate wind capacity amounts to all of 1,700 MW of actual generation capacity (or 17% of what is normally claimed). Wind has to be backed up with muscle -- ie a reliable power source that can be ramped up and down to balance the grid. That usually translates into coal-fired generation plants. Will wind power replace that reliable muscle? Nope. Germany, a country slathered in wind turbines, is on track to add dozens of coal-fired plants to its grid because it prefers them over nuclear plants. The more wind energy that's added to the grid, the more reliable muscle you need backing it up. That's a fact.
www.airqualityontario.com/science/transboundary.cfm
Okay, so wind energy isn't reliable and doesn't produce as much power as the industry claims. But surely all those turbines will clean up the air? Nope. See the prevailing wind direction in the link and hold your breath. You could take all the vehicles off the road in Ontario and shut down all of province's coal plants and the air quality improvement would range from 1 to 16%. Won't all those spinning turbines measurably reduce greenhouse gases and CO2? Nope again. What do you think backs up that on-again, off-again wind? It's called instant-on coal power. And those coal plants run constantly at either full power or on idle mode (which is less efficient and pollutes more). The overall improvement in air quality using wind energy alone -- if that were possible -- would not even be noticeable to the average person.
There are plenty of community groups being formed to deal with the human health concerns related to wind turbines and the "green rush" (this is just one unpaid and overworked organization; use its links for more):
http://essexcountywind.wordpress.com/
The Chatham-Kent Wind Action Group at www.ckwag.org recently hosted wind-turbine-illness specialist Dr Nina Pierpont on a radio health feature: http://handmaidenxstitch.ca/pierpont.mp3 (this may take a minute or so to load). According to John Keating's self-serving viewpoint, she's an old fuddy duddy who isn't in favour of change, either.
I believe the CBC would be doing its listening and viewing audiences an enormous service by pointing out the real culprit behind the so-called crisis facing the planet, and it certainly isn't CO2 and other greenhouse gases: It's a minor little thing called overpopulation. As Pogo once so solemnly declared: "I have seen the enemy and it is us!" Truer words were never spoken. Factoid: The number of immigrants that enter our country in any given month effectively wipes out all of the energy gained by a grandiose plan like the proposed 900 acre solar generating facility near Sarnia.
Follow the trail to the source of the real problem and you end up knocking at the door of ever-increasing human population.
If the CBC wants to do something constructive, why not do a series on the "Population Rush"? Or is that subject too hot to handle? All of the earth's problems are directly tied to human population. That's another fact. Perhaps you can add that in a follow up story about the effect the "Green Rush" has on rural residents. While John Keating and the rest of the wind energy industry is counting its cash, rural communities are being divided and landscapes transformed -- and not for the better.
Sincerely,
Wayne Wegner
Sunday, March 16, 2008
THE UBIQUITOUS RATIONALE OF GROWTHISM Vancouver and Melbourne victimized by the same sophistry
It’s uncanny. Two cities on two continents, but Growthists in Vancouver and Melbourne seem to be reading from the same playbook.
Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner who chaired Vancouver’s planning commission, praised the Mayor’s so-called “Eco-Density” initiative as the answer to the city’s ever-increasing house prices. Given that between 800,000 to one million new residents are expected to come to Greater Vancouver in the next 25 years, it can be assumed that developmental pressures on the city’s limited land base will steeply drive up land costs. It follows then, that “housing prices in Vancouver will keep going up, unless we substantially increase the housing supply to match the aging demand.”
For Berelowitz it is unconscionable that Vancouver, currently representing about 27% of the metro area’s 2.2 million citizens, continues to throw up a kind of cordon sanitaire around its perimeter and not “shoulder its load” by accepting its share of growth. To do this he offers several European solutions to shove more innovative housing units into the area. But what is interesting about his plan is that he failed to mention Vancouver’s housing surplus. Between 1991 and 2006 Vancouver grew by 126,000 people who required 15,000 new dwellings to house them. But developers built 69,000 units. According to activist Randy Chatterton, judging from BC Hydro statistics, 18,000 units are unoccupied, andMLS listings are up 26% while sales are down 10%. Now there are seven unoccupied apartments for every homeless person in Vancouver.
“Accepting our share of growth” is a standard line of urban planners and politicians. What they never reveal is their role in not only accommodating growth but promoting it. Developers build houses on spec. They are built on the expectation that compliant governments will continue to provide international clientele (migrants) and the monetary and tax policy necessary to lubricate investment in real estate. It is a case study of Say’s Law---supply creates its own demand. Berelowitz never once thought to question the necessity for Vancouver to grow by 45% in the next quarter century. He never thought to consult Dr. Michael Healey’s landmark 1997 study of the Fraser Basin ecosystem that recommended a halt to immigration and a Population Plan defend the region and others like it from runaway population growth. That’s because the ideology of urban planning is not growth-control but “growth management”.
Former real estate developer and media mouthpiece Bob Ransford recently “despaired” of those in Vancouver with, are you ready for this old chestnut, a “drawbridge mentality”, that is, “who think we can resist the global flow of population and somehow sustain our lifestyle.” One wonders what kind of lifestyle Ransford imagines for the Vancouverites forced to live like sardines in a sardine can just so more migrants can move in and buy the bachelor suite closets that his developer friends would obligingly sell them. It seems logical that the law of physics would place a limit on the process of densification that Berelowitz, Ransford and the Mayor would set in motion, but so far they have shown no apprehension of it. And the law of “livability” would surely fall well short of that physical limit.
One wonders how Ransford would behave if he were the last of ten passengers on an elevator that safety regulations set at ten. Would he hold open the door for more people in the lobby who wanted in because he feared being accused of “Nimbyism” or having a “drawbridge mentality”?. Would he suffer an urban planner who insisted that the elevator could hold 12 or 15 people, or a real estate developer who sold tickets to more people than could safely ride on the contraption? Would he listen to a human rights advocate who said that every person of colour from another country had a right to jam on board regardless of the elevator’s carrying capacity because it was a matter of social justice? If it was a matter of profit, one suspects he would. Growthists can’t grasp the concept that existing passengers, existing residents, be they of a city, or a nation, have a moral right to set limits .
Ransford ices his argument with more tired clichés. Cliché Number One: “Our kids will not be able to afford to live in a city where no new housing is built.” Trouble is “our kids” aren’t buying that new housing. In Greater Vancouver 85% of new housing is occupied by immigrants, while 70% of new housing in other Canadian urban centres is occupied by “New” Canadians. Cliché Number Two: “If we halted growth we will have a real labour shortage with our rapidly aging population.” Fact: the C.D. Howe Institute demonstrated that it would take an unsustainable immigration rate 28 times higher than its present rate for the next 50 years for Canada to maintain its present age structure. Postponed retirements and higher productivity will greatly lessen the impact of this over-hyped bogeyman.
Lastly, Ransford recruited the words of retired planner Peter Oberlander who said that compact settlement patterns were an inevitable feature of urban growth especially where we were committed to preserving agricultural land. “The city is humanity’s supreme achievement”, he maintained, in dismissing fears about continued growth. Apparently Oberlander never heard of the failure of “smart growth” in America or the compromise of British Greenbelts by developers or he might be less confident in his “compact settlement patterns.”And when it is recalled that a Greek polis was ideally imagined to consist of 5,000 citizens, one shutters to think that today a city of five million is considered a “supreme achievement”.
In a speech that could have been ghost-written by any of the aforementioned Canadian growth-a-holics, Premier John Brumby of Victoria spoke of his Government’s plan to “manage growth”, because you see, growth is inevitable, and growth projections must be treated as, if anything, “pessimistic”, ie. conservative. Thus Melbourne is going to grow at least 44% by 2030, with 6.2 million people by 2020. “Demographer Bernhard Salt has projected we will regain our title (sic) as Australia’s largest city within 20 years.” Note that the Premier treats a population growth plateau like a sports trophy to be raised aloft in triumph. Melbourne will regain its “title” like Muhammed Ali regained his title against George Foreman. Similarly when Victoria was “losing” people in the 1990s, presumably the state of Victoria was a “loser”. But now “the exodus has been turned around and people are now voting with their feet in favour of Victoria.” It is as if Premier Brumby is fighting an election campaign and people moving to Victoria are casting a vote for him. A commonplace illusion among Premiers, Governors and Prime Ministers
But he does acknowledge the strain that in-migration places on infrastructure and states that a million extra residents will require 380,000 new houses or apartments. Given Melbourne’s growth rate, he projects only a 17 year supply of land, and housing affordability, planning and supply issues demand full attention. He confesses that “the faster we grow the greater the demand on land supply.” Yet the one option that Brumby will not consider of course is to lobby the federal government for a severe cutback on immigration. Out comes a variant of Canadian Cliché Number Two: “we are facing a skills gap of 123,000 jobs over the next decade, which could curb our ability to benefit from the climate change economy.” Victoria attracts 27% of Australia’s skilled migrants, and Melbourne 25% of migrants of all categories. It is curious that the Premier would think that the importation of workers would be key to fighting climate change, when research clearly indicates that the best climate change fighting strategy is reducing population growth.
Certainly the Vancouver experience leads one to question the party line of housing lobby groups that releasing more land is requisite to housing affordability. Australian Property Monitors operations director Michael McNamara argues that “demand for housing is extremely flat and developers haven’t been able to sell the projects that they’ve got, let alone launch new projects—so we totally dismiss the argument that releasing more land on our cities outskirts is going to affect affordability.” ANZ Bank senior economist Paul Braddick says “there is no strong evidence to suggest that a lack of land supply has been driving up prices.” The proof of that is house prices have gone up across the board—indicating it is not just land availability that is the culprit here.” Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson attributes the fact that city house prices have grown 75% faster than wages over the past 20 years to a halving of interest rates, the halving of capital gains taxes in 1999 and massive immigration which chose to settle in the eight capital cities.
Of relevance here is a study done by Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy of Monash University in 2003 entitled “Migration and the Housing Affordability Crisis”. While the authors acknowledge that Melbourne’s housing price spiral “cannot be attributed to recent migration levels,” they qualify their statement with significant findings. “The impact of migration varies sharply by metropolis. For Sydney the share of household growth attributable to net migration in 2001-2002 is 47.8% Migration makes the next biggest impact in Perth where it is projected to contribute 33.5% of household growth, then Melbourne where it constitutes 28.6% of growth in 2001-2002.” By 2021, however, migration will account for 63% of Melbourne’s household growth.
“Developers and builders are already heavily dependent on immigration to sustain their activities in Sydney. Within a decade those operating in Melbourne and Perth will be dependant on immigration for nearly half the underlying household growth. This will apply to Australia as a whole by 2021 when 48.4% of household growth will derive from overseas migration.” It is in this context that the idea advanced by population sociologist Sheila Newman that property developers are key lobbyists for the country’s ecologically suicidal policy of high immigration becomes very plausible. As Birrell and Healy state, “It is no wonder that the housing and property industries in Australia are so keen for high migration.”
That immigration has a crucial impact on housing affordability is not immediately apprehended in any correlation of housing price increases in six major Australian cities with a given volume of migrant settlers. From 1989 to 2002 Sydney increased 30.7%, Melbourne 20.5%, Brisbane 45.8%, Perth23.5% Adelaide 28.1% and Canberra 34.8%. What must be understood, however, is while certainly investors and speculators played a major role in the housing price spiral, immigration boosted their confidence, and without that the spiral would never have taken off. That is why, Birrell and Healy explain, Sydney’s housing bubble remained the strongest, for even if immigrants demanded mainly rental accommodations, “this is still vital to investors if they are to fill their properties with tenants.”
“In the case of Sydney, the intuition of residents and some politicians that immigration is a factor in the housing affordability crisis, is correct. The absence of the immigration component of household growth in Sydney would significantly reduce the underlying gap between demand and supply. There is little doubt that a reduction in the national immigration intake would improve affordability in Sydney.”
“The authors conclude by saying that “Immigration is an important underlying factor shaping growth in demand for housing prices because of its role in household formation…By 2021, according to our projections, the migration component of household formation in Sydney will be around 75%, in Melbourne and Adelaide 60% and in Perth 54%”.
As a rule of thumb, according to Albert Saiz of the University of Pennsylvania, “an immigrant inflow of 1% of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rent and housing prices of about 1% .” (Journal of Economics, Volume 6, Issue 2)
By that token then, immigration has added 18% to the price of Vancouver real estate, or to put it another way, it has reduced the supply of housing stock available to resident buyers and the price mechanism has adjusted accordingly.
The logic of Growthism calls for an increase in supply, for more housing units through more density and/or the release or development of more land. The logic of common sense, however, calls for a decrease in demand, that is, a decrease in tax incentives for real estate investors and speculators and a reduction in migrants.
Whether it be Vancouver or Melbourne, throughout the Anglophone world, the issues are the same, cloaked in the same euphemistic code language of Growthism. The choices are ours to make.
Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner who chaired Vancouver’s planning commission, praised the Mayor’s so-called “Eco-Density” initiative as the answer to the city’s ever-increasing house prices. Given that between 800,000 to one million new residents are expected to come to Greater Vancouver in the next 25 years, it can be assumed that developmental pressures on the city’s limited land base will steeply drive up land costs. It follows then, that “housing prices in Vancouver will keep going up, unless we substantially increase the housing supply to match the aging demand.”
For Berelowitz it is unconscionable that Vancouver, currently representing about 27% of the metro area’s 2.2 million citizens, continues to throw up a kind of cordon sanitaire around its perimeter and not “shoulder its load” by accepting its share of growth. To do this he offers several European solutions to shove more innovative housing units into the area. But what is interesting about his plan is that he failed to mention Vancouver’s housing surplus. Between 1991 and 2006 Vancouver grew by 126,000 people who required 15,000 new dwellings to house them. But developers built 69,000 units. According to activist Randy Chatterton, judging from BC Hydro statistics, 18,000 units are unoccupied, andMLS listings are up 26% while sales are down 10%. Now there are seven unoccupied apartments for every homeless person in Vancouver.
“Accepting our share of growth” is a standard line of urban planners and politicians. What they never reveal is their role in not only accommodating growth but promoting it. Developers build houses on spec. They are built on the expectation that compliant governments will continue to provide international clientele (migrants) and the monetary and tax policy necessary to lubricate investment in real estate. It is a case study of Say’s Law---supply creates its own demand. Berelowitz never once thought to question the necessity for Vancouver to grow by 45% in the next quarter century. He never thought to consult Dr. Michael Healey’s landmark 1997 study of the Fraser Basin ecosystem that recommended a halt to immigration and a Population Plan defend the region and others like it from runaway population growth. That’s because the ideology of urban planning is not growth-control but “growth management”.
Former real estate developer and media mouthpiece Bob Ransford recently “despaired” of those in Vancouver with, are you ready for this old chestnut, a “drawbridge mentality”, that is, “who think we can resist the global flow of population and somehow sustain our lifestyle.” One wonders what kind of lifestyle Ransford imagines for the Vancouverites forced to live like sardines in a sardine can just so more migrants can move in and buy the bachelor suite closets that his developer friends would obligingly sell them. It seems logical that the law of physics would place a limit on the process of densification that Berelowitz, Ransford and the Mayor would set in motion, but so far they have shown no apprehension of it. And the law of “livability” would surely fall well short of that physical limit.
One wonders how Ransford would behave if he were the last of ten passengers on an elevator that safety regulations set at ten. Would he hold open the door for more people in the lobby who wanted in because he feared being accused of “Nimbyism” or having a “drawbridge mentality”?. Would he suffer an urban planner who insisted that the elevator could hold 12 or 15 people, or a real estate developer who sold tickets to more people than could safely ride on the contraption? Would he listen to a human rights advocate who said that every person of colour from another country had a right to jam on board regardless of the elevator’s carrying capacity because it was a matter of social justice? If it was a matter of profit, one suspects he would. Growthists can’t grasp the concept that existing passengers, existing residents, be they of a city, or a nation, have a moral right to set limits .
Ransford ices his argument with more tired clichés. Cliché Number One: “Our kids will not be able to afford to live in a city where no new housing is built.” Trouble is “our kids” aren’t buying that new housing. In Greater Vancouver 85% of new housing is occupied by immigrants, while 70% of new housing in other Canadian urban centres is occupied by “New” Canadians. Cliché Number Two: “If we halted growth we will have a real labour shortage with our rapidly aging population.” Fact: the C.D. Howe Institute demonstrated that it would take an unsustainable immigration rate 28 times higher than its present rate for the next 50 years for Canada to maintain its present age structure. Postponed retirements and higher productivity will greatly lessen the impact of this over-hyped bogeyman.
Lastly, Ransford recruited the words of retired planner Peter Oberlander who said that compact settlement patterns were an inevitable feature of urban growth especially where we were committed to preserving agricultural land. “The city is humanity’s supreme achievement”, he maintained, in dismissing fears about continued growth. Apparently Oberlander never heard of the failure of “smart growth” in America or the compromise of British Greenbelts by developers or he might be less confident in his “compact settlement patterns.”And when it is recalled that a Greek polis was ideally imagined to consist of 5,000 citizens, one shutters to think that today a city of five million is considered a “supreme achievement”.
In a speech that could have been ghost-written by any of the aforementioned Canadian growth-a-holics, Premier John Brumby of Victoria spoke of his Government’s plan to “manage growth”, because you see, growth is inevitable, and growth projections must be treated as, if anything, “pessimistic”, ie. conservative. Thus Melbourne is going to grow at least 44% by 2030, with 6.2 million people by 2020. “Demographer Bernhard Salt has projected we will regain our title (sic) as Australia’s largest city within 20 years.” Note that the Premier treats a population growth plateau like a sports trophy to be raised aloft in triumph. Melbourne will regain its “title” like Muhammed Ali regained his title against George Foreman. Similarly when Victoria was “losing” people in the 1990s, presumably the state of Victoria was a “loser”. But now “the exodus has been turned around and people are now voting with their feet in favour of Victoria.” It is as if Premier Brumby is fighting an election campaign and people moving to Victoria are casting a vote for him. A commonplace illusion among Premiers, Governors and Prime Ministers
But he does acknowledge the strain that in-migration places on infrastructure and states that a million extra residents will require 380,000 new houses or apartments. Given Melbourne’s growth rate, he projects only a 17 year supply of land, and housing affordability, planning and supply issues demand full attention. He confesses that “the faster we grow the greater the demand on land supply.” Yet the one option that Brumby will not consider of course is to lobby the federal government for a severe cutback on immigration. Out comes a variant of Canadian Cliché Number Two: “we are facing a skills gap of 123,000 jobs over the next decade, which could curb our ability to benefit from the climate change economy.” Victoria attracts 27% of Australia’s skilled migrants, and Melbourne 25% of migrants of all categories. It is curious that the Premier would think that the importation of workers would be key to fighting climate change, when research clearly indicates that the best climate change fighting strategy is reducing population growth.
Certainly the Vancouver experience leads one to question the party line of housing lobby groups that releasing more land is requisite to housing affordability. Australian Property Monitors operations director Michael McNamara argues that “demand for housing is extremely flat and developers haven’t been able to sell the projects that they’ve got, let alone launch new projects—so we totally dismiss the argument that releasing more land on our cities outskirts is going to affect affordability.” ANZ Bank senior economist Paul Braddick says “there is no strong evidence to suggest that a lack of land supply has been driving up prices.” The proof of that is house prices have gone up across the board—indicating it is not just land availability that is the culprit here.” Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson attributes the fact that city house prices have grown 75% faster than wages over the past 20 years to a halving of interest rates, the halving of capital gains taxes in 1999 and massive immigration which chose to settle in the eight capital cities.
Of relevance here is a study done by Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy of Monash University in 2003 entitled “Migration and the Housing Affordability Crisis”. While the authors acknowledge that Melbourne’s housing price spiral “cannot be attributed to recent migration levels,” they qualify their statement with significant findings. “The impact of migration varies sharply by metropolis. For Sydney the share of household growth attributable to net migration in 2001-2002 is 47.8% Migration makes the next biggest impact in Perth where it is projected to contribute 33.5% of household growth, then Melbourne where it constitutes 28.6% of growth in 2001-2002.” By 2021, however, migration will account for 63% of Melbourne’s household growth.
“Developers and builders are already heavily dependent on immigration to sustain their activities in Sydney. Within a decade those operating in Melbourne and Perth will be dependant on immigration for nearly half the underlying household growth. This will apply to Australia as a whole by 2021 when 48.4% of household growth will derive from overseas migration.” It is in this context that the idea advanced by population sociologist Sheila Newman that property developers are key lobbyists for the country’s ecologically suicidal policy of high immigration becomes very plausible. As Birrell and Healy state, “It is no wonder that the housing and property industries in Australia are so keen for high migration.”
That immigration has a crucial impact on housing affordability is not immediately apprehended in any correlation of housing price increases in six major Australian cities with a given volume of migrant settlers. From 1989 to 2002 Sydney increased 30.7%, Melbourne 20.5%, Brisbane 45.8%, Perth23.5% Adelaide 28.1% and Canberra 34.8%. What must be understood, however, is while certainly investors and speculators played a major role in the housing price spiral, immigration boosted their confidence, and without that the spiral would never have taken off. That is why, Birrell and Healy explain, Sydney’s housing bubble remained the strongest, for even if immigrants demanded mainly rental accommodations, “this is still vital to investors if they are to fill their properties with tenants.”
“In the case of Sydney, the intuition of residents and some politicians that immigration is a factor in the housing affordability crisis, is correct. The absence of the immigration component of household growth in Sydney would significantly reduce the underlying gap between demand and supply. There is little doubt that a reduction in the national immigration intake would improve affordability in Sydney.”
“The authors conclude by saying that “Immigration is an important underlying factor shaping growth in demand for housing prices because of its role in household formation…By 2021, according to our projections, the migration component of household formation in Sydney will be around 75%, in Melbourne and Adelaide 60% and in Perth 54%”.
As a rule of thumb, according to Albert Saiz of the University of Pennsylvania, “an immigrant inflow of 1% of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rent and housing prices of about 1% .” (Journal of Economics, Volume 6, Issue 2)
By that token then, immigration has added 18% to the price of Vancouver real estate, or to put it another way, it has reduced the supply of housing stock available to resident buyers and the price mechanism has adjusted accordingly.
The logic of Growthism calls for an increase in supply, for more housing units through more density and/or the release or development of more land. The logic of common sense, however, calls for a decrease in demand, that is, a decrease in tax incentives for real estate investors and speculators and a reduction in migrants.
Whether it be Vancouver or Melbourne, throughout the Anglophone world, the issues are the same, cloaked in the same euphemistic code language of Growthism. The choices are ours to make.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
IMMIGRATION AS THE QUICK FIX
Is Canada's perpetual shortage of skilled labour real, perceived or conjured up for the purposes of creating a glut? In the case of engineers, the latter would certainly seem to be the case. We have been graduating thousands more engineers than needed when considered in the context of the deliberate import of engineers from the rest of the world, mainly developing world. Many are driving taxis, including Canadians, and many Canadian engineers who aren't have left for the United States because the glut has driven down wages here. My nephew graduated from four years of training in marine engineering three years ago. He has spent half the time since working as a non-union construction labourer and the other half in the Coast Guard for about $25 per hour, or as much money as an inexperienced painter. Only now has he secured a tenuous position in the company he was aiming to work for.
I was in my local drugstore today telling one pharmacy assistant about Bill Gates' latest scam. The H-1B visa program has allowed him and other technology companies to hire IT workers from India, China and similar locales on a two-three year contract in such numbers as to drive down the wage levels of Americans in the industry. People who are trained to earn $100,000 a year are earning $60,000 a year and many who hit 40 find themselves without a job. One of them, Gene Nelson, who graduated with a Phd in 1979 in computer engineering, is now having to file for personal bankruptcy.
But this isn't enough for Gates and his colleagues in the industry. Currently there is a cap on H-1B visas and he wants it raised to the sky. Why? Because there is a "shortage" of skilled labour in the field. If this were the case, which it isn't, that would be easily remedied. Gates and others could create a "longage" of salaries to attract more IT graduates. He himself has admitted that IT salaries have not kept pace with inflation. But instead he has run to Congress demanding changes to H-1B. When he didn't get it, what did he do?
He went to Vancouver to announce the creation of a Microsoft plant in Richmond where IT workers from India and China and elsewhere could be hired by the bushel under Canada's "Temporary Workers Visa". Good old Canada, no caps there. Gates can and will hire a surplus of these bargain basement brains----none from Canada no doubt-----for one devious reason. Under the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) these "temporary workers" will simply be able to take a car trip through American Customs and be in Microsoft headquarters in two hours. So much for the H-1B "cap".
It was at this point the Pharmacist injected. Colleen had been working long hours six days a week year after year unassisted in her store. She explained that she had tried many times to find another pharmacist to help her, but no one would reply to her advertisements because pharmacists in Vancouver and across the province were working similar hours to hers. That was because, she said, there was a shortfall of 600 pharmacists nationally and 300 in BC. "How did this come to pass?" I asked. "It began with the tuition freeze imposed by the Provincial BC NDP government on colleges and universities in the 1990s." (Presumably emulated by other governments as well). The freeze was a sop thrown to its working class constituency that on the face of it was positive because it made post-secondary education more affordable to lower-income students. However, by depriving the educational institutions of revenue, it forced them to cut back the construction of labs or the acquisition of equipment for training, the number of instructors hired, the number of courses offered and the number of placements available. "The result was fewer students graduated in pharmacology."
Colleen pointed out that Ontario and a few other provinces were now trying to close the gap by training more students. It is not simply a matter of making tuiton affordable but investing more money in the whole training system. In the meantime though, she said, immigrant pharmacists are a welcome relief.
Her attitude was shared by area residents last year when a petition made its rounds to demand that the federal government allow a South African doctor to stay in the country. Doctors are in extremely short supply in the hinterland. Some people simply can't find a General Practitioner. And South African doctors have the reputation of being the very best, even if their bedside manner is brusque. But here is the irony. After the effective public lobby, the doctor won his stay in Canada, and then pulled up stakes and moved to a more urbanized setting. As long as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of movement, how then can immigration ever solve shortages of this kind, when medicare fee structures prevent monetary incentives from being offered to hold personnel.?
We are caught in a vicious cycle. Immigrant-driven population growth drives economic growth (eg.demand for housing, construction materials, roads, automobiles etc). And economic growth in turn creates labour shortages, which beg for immigration to fill them because its a quicker, cheaper fix than long-term educational investment. The public, meanwhile, not only demand the quick fix for the very real shortfalls they see, but buy into the mythology that immigration must always be the answer for these chronic problems. And of course, no thought is ever given to the idea of putting our economic and social needs within a framework of ecological sustainability. Along with, "How many pharamicists and doctors do we need to import?" should be questions like, "Should we poach them from developing countries?", and more importantly, "How many immigrants, how many people, can the environment of this country sustain?"
Canada is a sugar-addict. Needing energy (skilled labour), we reach for a candy bar (immigration) and wolf it down. Within minutes, we not only feel relief but hyperactivity. But soon the insulin kicks in, and we crash, either into a recession or another severe shortage of labour (sugar). Ingest another candy bar and the cycle continues. Anything to keep the immigration rush going. From 16 million people in 1950 to 33 million people today in 2008. Unless we break this addiction to growth, our health will break. We must stabilize ourselves and shed some demographic weight.
We have our work cut out for us.
I was in my local drugstore today telling one pharmacy assistant about Bill Gates' latest scam. The H-1B visa program has allowed him and other technology companies to hire IT workers from India, China and similar locales on a two-three year contract in such numbers as to drive down the wage levels of Americans in the industry. People who are trained to earn $100,000 a year are earning $60,000 a year and many who hit 40 find themselves without a job. One of them, Gene Nelson, who graduated with a Phd in 1979 in computer engineering, is now having to file for personal bankruptcy.
But this isn't enough for Gates and his colleagues in the industry. Currently there is a cap on H-1B visas and he wants it raised to the sky. Why? Because there is a "shortage" of skilled labour in the field. If this were the case, which it isn't, that would be easily remedied. Gates and others could create a "longage" of salaries to attract more IT graduates. He himself has admitted that IT salaries have not kept pace with inflation. But instead he has run to Congress demanding changes to H-1B. When he didn't get it, what did he do?
He went to Vancouver to announce the creation of a Microsoft plant in Richmond where IT workers from India and China and elsewhere could be hired by the bushel under Canada's "Temporary Workers Visa". Good old Canada, no caps there. Gates can and will hire a surplus of these bargain basement brains----none from Canada no doubt-----for one devious reason. Under the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) these "temporary workers" will simply be able to take a car trip through American Customs and be in Microsoft headquarters in two hours. So much for the H-1B "cap".
It was at this point the Pharmacist injected. Colleen had been working long hours six days a week year after year unassisted in her store. She explained that she had tried many times to find another pharmacist to help her, but no one would reply to her advertisements because pharmacists in Vancouver and across the province were working similar hours to hers. That was because, she said, there was a shortfall of 600 pharmacists nationally and 300 in BC. "How did this come to pass?" I asked. "It began with the tuition freeze imposed by the Provincial BC NDP government on colleges and universities in the 1990s." (Presumably emulated by other governments as well). The freeze was a sop thrown to its working class constituency that on the face of it was positive because it made post-secondary education more affordable to lower-income students. However, by depriving the educational institutions of revenue, it forced them to cut back the construction of labs or the acquisition of equipment for training, the number of instructors hired, the number of courses offered and the number of placements available. "The result was fewer students graduated in pharmacology."
Colleen pointed out that Ontario and a few other provinces were now trying to close the gap by training more students. It is not simply a matter of making tuiton affordable but investing more money in the whole training system. In the meantime though, she said, immigrant pharmacists are a welcome relief.
Her attitude was shared by area residents last year when a petition made its rounds to demand that the federal government allow a South African doctor to stay in the country. Doctors are in extremely short supply in the hinterland. Some people simply can't find a General Practitioner. And South African doctors have the reputation of being the very best, even if their bedside manner is brusque. But here is the irony. After the effective public lobby, the doctor won his stay in Canada, and then pulled up stakes and moved to a more urbanized setting. As long as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of movement, how then can immigration ever solve shortages of this kind, when medicare fee structures prevent monetary incentives from being offered to hold personnel.?
We are caught in a vicious cycle. Immigrant-driven population growth drives economic growth (eg.demand for housing, construction materials, roads, automobiles etc). And economic growth in turn creates labour shortages, which beg for immigration to fill them because its a quicker, cheaper fix than long-term educational investment. The public, meanwhile, not only demand the quick fix for the very real shortfalls they see, but buy into the mythology that immigration must always be the answer for these chronic problems. And of course, no thought is ever given to the idea of putting our economic and social needs within a framework of ecological sustainability. Along with, "How many pharamicists and doctors do we need to import?" should be questions like, "Should we poach them from developing countries?", and more importantly, "How many immigrants, how many people, can the environment of this country sustain?"
Canada is a sugar-addict. Needing energy (skilled labour), we reach for a candy bar (immigration) and wolf it down. Within minutes, we not only feel relief but hyperactivity. But soon the insulin kicks in, and we crash, either into a recession or another severe shortage of labour (sugar). Ingest another candy bar and the cycle continues. Anything to keep the immigration rush going. From 16 million people in 1950 to 33 million people today in 2008. Unless we break this addiction to growth, our health will break. We must stabilize ourselves and shed some demographic weight.
We have our work cut out for us.
Monday, March 10, 2008
SOFTENING THE MESSAGE A Monster is Loose But We're Less Afraid of it than Panic
“(William Rees believed) that the truth was so shocking that he and Wackernagel felt a more moderate story might not turn off the audience completely.” John Feeney
Kind of reminds me of that Japanese horror flick I saw when I was a kid, “Gorgo”. It was about a gigantic reptilian monster who emerged from the Sea of Japan and rampaged from one continent to the next destroying everything in its path. Nothing could stop it. Planes, tanks, artillery, flame-throwers. Much like economic growth and development.
When after blazing a trail of devastation through the mid-west, it threatened to enter the Buckeye state of Ohio, one foremost herpetologist warned the Governor of the true state of the menace. Then an aide interjected emphatically, “We can’t leak this to the press, Governor—why if the people of Cincinatti knew that Gorgo was coming to town there would be a widespread panic!”
Well Gorgo did come to town and he laid it to waste, presumably killing everyone in the process. I remember wondering then, as a ten year old, what advantage there was to the population being kept in a state of ignorant calm, and I am still of that view.
We walk toward the abyss with the serenity of somnambulists. Yet William Rees, David Suzuki, David Attenborough and the celebrities of environmentalism are whispering warnings about symptoms when they should be shouting about root causes in order to wake us up. When Gorgo is approaching the gates of the city, they should be more afraid of him than of shocking us. The monster of population and economic growth will consume us all because too many of us opted to become politicians rather than truth-tellers.
Kind of reminds me of that Japanese horror flick I saw when I was a kid, “Gorgo”. It was about a gigantic reptilian monster who emerged from the Sea of Japan and rampaged from one continent to the next destroying everything in its path. Nothing could stop it. Planes, tanks, artillery, flame-throwers. Much like economic growth and development.
When after blazing a trail of devastation through the mid-west, it threatened to enter the Buckeye state of Ohio, one foremost herpetologist warned the Governor of the true state of the menace. Then an aide interjected emphatically, “We can’t leak this to the press, Governor—why if the people of Cincinatti knew that Gorgo was coming to town there would be a widespread panic!”
Well Gorgo did come to town and he laid it to waste, presumably killing everyone in the process. I remember wondering then, as a ten year old, what advantage there was to the population being kept in a state of ignorant calm, and I am still of that view.
We walk toward the abyss with the serenity of somnambulists. Yet William Rees, David Suzuki, David Attenborough and the celebrities of environmentalism are whispering warnings about symptoms when they should be shouting about root causes in order to wake us up. When Gorgo is approaching the gates of the city, they should be more afraid of him than of shocking us. The monster of population and economic growth will consume us all because too many of us opted to become politicians rather than truth-tellers.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE A SOFT GREEN?
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE A SOFT GREEN
(And Can’t Get To The Doctor)
So you think you might have come down with the disease but you don’t know exactly what a “soft green” is?
A soft green is a dupe of the corporate agenda who sincerely believes that he is on the side of the angels. A noble, selfless crusader for the “environment” whose real priority however is human, not animal or environmental rights. He thinks of himself as an internationalist. But he can more accurately be described as a globalist, for he promotes, in the name of immigrant and refugee rights, the shifting of cheap labour from countries of low consumption to countries of high consumption. In so doing, he kills two birds with one stone. He undercuts the wages of local labour while he greatly multiplies the ecological footprint of the newcomers at the same time, damaging both the global environment and the domestic one which seems to trouble him least. Opposition to his open borders mentality is met with cries of racism.
Are you infected with this variant of hypocrisy? Then take this test.
YOU KNOW WHEN YOU ARE A SOFT GREEN WHEN:
1. You think that population growth plays no role whatsoever in environmental degradation. Even though America has doubled its population since 1950 and will go from 301 million to 438 million by 2050 if immigration and birth rates are unchanged, and Canada will double its population in 70 years, you don’t care.
2. You don’t care because technological efficiencies and improvements will lessen our ecological footprint. Trouble is you never heard of the Jevons Paradox or the concept that the number of ecological “feet” might increase to wipe out those efficiency gains.
3. You don’t care because however many more people there are, all we need to do is consume less. Live “greener lifestyles” to make room for more immigrants and newborns. Problem here is that you have to be dead or unborn to have a zero footprint.
4. You don’t care because with “smart growth” we can shoe-horn half the world’s population into this country without ecological impact. Just confine them behind tightly defined urban boundaries in very, very, dense housing developments and all greenbelts, farmland, and wetlands will be safe from human intrusion. The difficulty here is that “smart growth” has failed in Portland, Oregon and other localities. And the folks confined in those sheep pens and high rises still consume and still generate wastes and emit GHG. No matter where they are settled, it is the number, not the distribution of people, that is ecologically decisive.
5. You don’t care because you believe that by working to set aside nature reserves and parks wildlife can be conserved alongside economic and population growth. Wrong again.There is no sanctuary from growth. Even Yosemite was violated when Congress decided to yield to mining interests. But if reserves could be guaranteed safety from development and incursion, it would not slow the intensity of the development of lands outside the reserves. In fact, population growth increases overall loss of biodiversity even as park dedication increases.
6. You don’t care because if population growth does indeed play a role in environmental degradation, it is a subsidiary role, as Monbiot claims, and it plays that role in distant undeveloped countries. Because you see, overpopulation is a GLOBAL PROBLEM, demanding GLOBAL solutions. Meaning that it is not anything we should do anything about here. Garrett Hardin had two ripostes to those tired clichés. One was that to say overpopulation was a Global problem demanding a Global solution implies that we have a Global government to apply such a solution. Since we don’t, we must act locally. Secondly he said that overpopulation was NOT a global problem, but the sum total of 194 national ones. We solve ours and set an example for the rest of the world.
7. You don’t care because you have never given a thought to how many people this country can sustain, or whether there is a certain number of people beyond which healthy biodiversity cannot subsist. You accuse others of being nativist, racist, or xenophobic, but when challenged, you won’t answer a simple question: “How many people do you ultimately want to see live in this country?”
8. You don’t care because the rights of immigrants and refugees are more important to you than the rights of the people and the wildlife who already call this country home.
9. You don’t care about wildlife when their survival conflicts with the “cultural” rights of indigenous peoples. Again, scratch your green veneer, and you are a bleeding heart human rights advocate.
You know that you are a Soft Green when, in spite of all of this, you still think you are an environmentalist. That is when you should seek help.
(And Can’t Get To The Doctor)
So you think you might have come down with the disease but you don’t know exactly what a “soft green” is?
A soft green is a dupe of the corporate agenda who sincerely believes that he is on the side of the angels. A noble, selfless crusader for the “environment” whose real priority however is human, not animal or environmental rights. He thinks of himself as an internationalist. But he can more accurately be described as a globalist, for he promotes, in the name of immigrant and refugee rights, the shifting of cheap labour from countries of low consumption to countries of high consumption. In so doing, he kills two birds with one stone. He undercuts the wages of local labour while he greatly multiplies the ecological footprint of the newcomers at the same time, damaging both the global environment and the domestic one which seems to trouble him least. Opposition to his open borders mentality is met with cries of racism.
Are you infected with this variant of hypocrisy? Then take this test.
YOU KNOW WHEN YOU ARE A SOFT GREEN WHEN:
1. You think that population growth plays no role whatsoever in environmental degradation. Even though America has doubled its population since 1950 and will go from 301 million to 438 million by 2050 if immigration and birth rates are unchanged, and Canada will double its population in 70 years, you don’t care.
2. You don’t care because technological efficiencies and improvements will lessen our ecological footprint. Trouble is you never heard of the Jevons Paradox or the concept that the number of ecological “feet” might increase to wipe out those efficiency gains.
3. You don’t care because however many more people there are, all we need to do is consume less. Live “greener lifestyles” to make room for more immigrants and newborns. Problem here is that you have to be dead or unborn to have a zero footprint.
4. You don’t care because with “smart growth” we can shoe-horn half the world’s population into this country without ecological impact. Just confine them behind tightly defined urban boundaries in very, very, dense housing developments and all greenbelts, farmland, and wetlands will be safe from human intrusion. The difficulty here is that “smart growth” has failed in Portland, Oregon and other localities. And the folks confined in those sheep pens and high rises still consume and still generate wastes and emit GHG. No matter where they are settled, it is the number, not the distribution of people, that is ecologically decisive.
5. You don’t care because you believe that by working to set aside nature reserves and parks wildlife can be conserved alongside economic and population growth. Wrong again.There is no sanctuary from growth. Even Yosemite was violated when Congress decided to yield to mining interests. But if reserves could be guaranteed safety from development and incursion, it would not slow the intensity of the development of lands outside the reserves. In fact, population growth increases overall loss of biodiversity even as park dedication increases.
6. You don’t care because if population growth does indeed play a role in environmental degradation, it is a subsidiary role, as Monbiot claims, and it plays that role in distant undeveloped countries. Because you see, overpopulation is a GLOBAL PROBLEM, demanding GLOBAL solutions. Meaning that it is not anything we should do anything about here. Garrett Hardin had two ripostes to those tired clichés. One was that to say overpopulation was a Global problem demanding a Global solution implies that we have a Global government to apply such a solution. Since we don’t, we must act locally. Secondly he said that overpopulation was NOT a global problem, but the sum total of 194 national ones. We solve ours and set an example for the rest of the world.
7. You don’t care because you have never given a thought to how many people this country can sustain, or whether there is a certain number of people beyond which healthy biodiversity cannot subsist. You accuse others of being nativist, racist, or xenophobic, but when challenged, you won’t answer a simple question: “How many people do you ultimately want to see live in this country?”
8. You don’t care because the rights of immigrants and refugees are more important to you than the rights of the people and the wildlife who already call this country home.
9. You don’t care about wildlife when their survival conflicts with the “cultural” rights of indigenous peoples. Again, scratch your green veneer, and you are a bleeding heart human rights advocate.
You know that you are a Soft Green when, in spite of all of this, you still think you are an environmentalist. That is when you should seek help.
REALITY AS A LINGUISTIC FILTER OF GROWTHISM
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.” A character in Orwell’s 1984.
Acquiring a language I think is like taking a trip to the optometrist. You see the world broadly if somewhat less sharply at a certain range and then the doctor places a lens in front of your eyes. Suddenly what you were looking at becomes clearer. But at a cost. The perimeter is less clear. That lens is your native language and you don’t recall the trip to the optometrist because it seems you’ve always worn glasses.
If you acquire an advanced degree, or pursue a certain profession, you find that another lens is placed in front of that one too. That lens may be the obfuscatory jargon of the law profession, a scientific discipline, law enforcement, or economics, for example. This lens will allow you to see one area of life with even more clarity and precision than commonplace vision, but a cost. Vital information about life will fall out of focus.
If in the pursuit of higher education, or foreign travel, you gain fluency in a foreign language, you find that all these lenses will be cast aside in favour of a new one—the new language. Objective reality may remain the same, but the classification system of each language—its structure, substance, gender, number, time and vocabulary assist the users to perceive the world in a certain way, but also limit that perception. To speak a different language is to think in that language and therefore to think differently because you perceive only what your language allows you or pre-disposes you to perceive. Your language shapes your world view because it acts as blinkers. Speakers of different languages, therefore, have different world views. People do not live in an objective world, but one where we are at the mercy of languages as both as a medium of expression and filters that admit only selected parts of reality into our consciousness.
As a university student I was struck by the fact that students who majored in various other disciplines seemed to inhabit perceptual solitudes that made cross-disciplinary communication difficult at best. It wasn’t simply the fact that each sector of students were informed by a different knowledge base, or even that each student spoke the idiom of his field of study, but that that idiom , that jargon, did not give him the conceptual tools to interpret information from another student’s area of study. Fostering cross-disciplinary discussion in this academic Tower of Babel seemed a more daunting task than arranging a conference at the United Nations.
It would seem obvious that some languages would be more equipped or more handicapped at describing certain concepts or objects and that if it was an environmental requirement to describe them adeptly a speaker of that language would be able to discern them more ably. He would not only be able to report his experience with the right linguistic ammunition, but experience it differently. This linguistic construction on experience can be illustrated by an example drawn from within a language, that is, between an American and a British dialect. Let me contrast the way I experienced a Wimbleton tennis match , the same match, as mediated by American English and then by British English. Two languages, one event, two realities.
The loquacious American commentators were incapable of saying anything with economy. One sportscaster would spend 60 seconds fumbling for words in an attempt to explain why the favourite was not at the top of his game, while his BBC counterpart tersely remarked “the champion lacks resolve.” What was so extraordinary about the British telecast was the silence. Often four, six points would go by before a soft and carefully enunciated crisp British voice would say “extraordinary shot, that”, reminding me that there were indeed commentators viewing the action. The long interludes of silence between volleys would allow me to become part of the match. I would hear the swells of crowd noise, the soft pop of the racquets striking the balls and the drama of the event, reminding me of how differently the two language styles could frame the experience. I didn’t hear the over-the-top American superlatives. Instead of “blistering returns” there were “imaginative replies”, a badly hit shot was “an awkward ball”, a “killer” volley was a “clever bit of improvisation” and a temper tantrum was described as “a piece of patented brinkmanship.” For Americans, silence is a dreaded void to be filled with flat-screen TVs that pollute every bar. That point here is, the spectator experiences the same sporting event quite differently in the Queen’s English than he does in the version across the Atlantic.
The concept of language as a kind of lens or filter, or even straitjacket, cannot be over-stated. Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of one’s world. By that token, bilingual or multilingual people have broader vision. It is not what we look at, the poverty, the injustice, the overpopulation, the environmental degradation, that is paramount. But the linguistic construction built in to filter that reality, to bring it into sharp focus, or make us blind to it.
The question becomes then, whose lens are we wearing? What filter are we looking through? How do we remove it?
In 1984 George Orwell revealed that the purpose of Newspeak, the language of his fictional totalitarian regime, was to rid old English (Oldspeak) of all adjectives and unnecessary words so that people would be not be able to feel or think. If one could not describe sadness, one could not feel it, and if there was no word for democracy or justice one couldn’t complain about the government. By eliminating words, Newspeak would eliminate the range of thoughts..
Lancaster University’s Professor Tony McEnery concluded that computer games and MP3 players have accomplished much the same thing in teenagers. (“Technology Isolation Syndrome”). His 2006 study of speech, blogs and questionnaires found that teenagers used half the average words of 25-34 year olds and that 20 words accounted for a third of their speech.
It looked for a time that a subtle totalitarian language would emerge from the Human Potential Movement in California in the 1970s. As R. D. Rosen dubbed it, “Psychobabble” was a mode of confession “that confessed nothing” and in its attempt to escape the confining vocabulary of Freudianism it substituted a jargon that had no theoretical roots. But it gave way to a puritanical tsunami that swept over every major institution in the English speaking world. “Political correctness”. It’s objectives are classically Orwellian. The notion is that if we don’t label people or things by conventionally harmful terms, then people will desist from thinking of them in those terms. And if politically acceptable euphemisms are substituted and repeated ad nauseum, the ideological brain-transplant will be completed. Whilst dangerous, some politically correct neologisms can be quite funny. .
For example, the homeless are now the “involuntarily undomiciled”. And a drunk is “a person of differing sobriety.” While a junkie is merely someone with pressing pharmacological preferences. Someone who is untrustworthy is just “ethically disoriented” while a lazy man is only “motivationally deficient”. Someone chronically late is “temporally challenged” and a prostitute is not a streetwalker or a whore but a “sex care provider” presenting themselves as a commodity allotment with a business doctrine. As a white man, I am a “mutant albino genetic-recessive global minority”, and the diction I practice is in reality just the style and writing imposed upon the world by “patriarchal white lexicographers.” Standard English is “capitalistic patriarchal hegemonic discourse.”
Each vested interest and lobby now seems to have its own “politically correct” euphemisms. The Pentagon were groundbreakers in this respect. A “clean” bomb was a nuclear device or neutron bomb that kills people but leaves infrastructure intact. Civilian deaths could be disguised as “collateral damage”. Assassination is “wet work”, bombs that hit civilians as “incontinent ordinance”. Dead soldiers are just “non-operative personnel or “terminally inconvenienced” or “non-viable”. Bombing an unintended target like a hospital could be dismissed as an “accidental delivery of ordinance equipment.” And military failure, like President Carter’s ill-fated Iranian desert raid, could be termed as an “incomplete success.”
Ministers of Labour, meanwhile call their union-busting legislation “right to work” laws and the scabs that are used to break strikes are accorded a more morally sanitized name, “replacement workers”. Trade union officials that haven’t the guts to tell their membership that they calling for amnesty for ‘illegal’ workers instead say they wish to “regularize” them. And they are not illegal, they are undocumented, even though they used forged documents to get into the country. Finance Ministers call the stock market crash “an equity retreat” and warn we may experience “negative economic growth”. Couldn’t use the word “contraction” if it killed them. Conservation officials call the mass slaughter of wild animals “game management” and the Environment Ministry describes the explosive destruction of a nuclear reactor core like Chernobyl’s as a “core management event”
. The nuclear industry has conducted its own unique detoxification of plain English. An explosion is an “energetic dissembly” and a fire is “rapid oxidation”. Plutonium contamination is “infiltration” and a reactor accident is to be referred to as a “normal aberration”. “Spin” is a new breed of deceit three decades in the making which attempts to effect damage control by the use of euphemisms. And what are euphemisms essentially but a kind of linguistic Demerol to diminish painful truth by re-labeling it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is gifted in that department. They once decided to sanitize their lexicon by banishing the “hazard” because it allegedly triggered panic in the American public. Health “hazards” were not to be mentioned and the Office of Hazardous Emergency Response was re-established as the “Office of Emergency and Remedial Action”. And Enforcement Personnel became the more friendly “Compliance Assistance Officers”.
But it is in Growthism where language makes it most incursive, dangerous and decisive intervention in the determination of what we perceive to be real today. The ideology that economic and population growth is beneficial, necessary and inevitable prevails, to a large extent, because the language which mediates that message has colonized academic forums, radio and television studios and print media. Consequently the reality of environmental Armageddon is seen by the audience through rose coloured glasses that are worn by the presenters, their guests and researchers and tinted by the vocabulary they use to interpret that reality. The audience therefore never sees or hears that every economic “boom” is an environmental “bust” and only comes to know “growth” via positive connotations.
For example, when Statistics Canada released its Census Report in mid March of 2007, those localities like British Columbia and Alberta which gained people from the previous census, were anointed census “winners” by the media as if a prize was going to be awarded for more pollution, GHG emissions, congestion, farmland and habitat loss. Prince Rupert, BC and Saskatchewan, on the other hand were designated as census “losers” for having fewer people than five years before. Newscasters consistently report that Canada “enjoyed” record growth or that the Maritimes “suffered” a “stagnant” economy with “sluggish” housing starts. The concept that Canadians might “enjoy” a steady state economy that didn’t cover arable land and habitat with subdivisions is foreign to news script writers.
The word “growth” itself has undergone many makeovers in recent years to make it palatable to those of us who wouldn’t swallow it otherwise. Growth has become “managed growth”, “deflected growth”, “smart growth”, and the ultimate oxymoron, “sustainable growth”. It seems that urban planners concoct a new label every year for the same snake oil it. To preserve all those wonderful green spaces that we love, planners propose to cram more and more of us into smaller and smaller urban compartments. But if we don’t like sprawl, we like density even less. So Great Vancouver planners tried to package it under the name of “compaction”. When ratepayers wouldn’t buy into that garbage, planners re-marketed it under the label “Coreplan”. No dice. Now its back as “Eco-density”. Density with green paint over it. The one name you won’t ever hear from planners though is “growth-control”. That is outside their frame of reference.
Our culture abounds with so many sweet-sounding buzzwords like “sustainable”, “livable”. “affordable”, “diverse”, “vibrant”, “inclusive”, “pro-active”, “choice” ---the vocabulary of deceit. Attach these adjectives to anything you want to sell or run past the planning objectors---any self-serving development scam for example---and you can jam it through as easily as candy down a baby’s hatch.
The filter of growthist language in Anglophone societies is combined with the filter of multiculturalism---a smokescreen of left-wing tolerance that cloaks the right wing development agenda. Cultural diversity is much like a leaky air mattress that can only be kept afloat by constant pumping, the air being people from abroad. The language of diversity and tolerance is thus recruited to rationalize the policy of mass immigration and economic growth, always couched in the most positive terms. Growthism and Multiculturalism are a lexical duopoly.
How then do we remove their lens? The first answer is to substitute it with our lens. Ecological economists are attempting to do just that by developing indices of real economic performance, as if the planet mattered. We have to continually challenge media terminology and offer our own. When the CBC boasts that the country is diverse we counter by saying that is culturally fragmented and has lost cohesion. When the CBC says that immigration is the solution we have to demand that they prove that there is a problem. When the CBC states that the population of Newfoundland has stagnated we must declare that it has stabilized.
The second answer is to be found in the pages of Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception”: “We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems: for it is by means of them and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively, but at the same time we must preserve and if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through the half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too-familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.”
Huxley is not suggesting that we abandon symbolic reasoning, but broaden our perception to grasp the real and not just its symbols, so we can appreciate the relationship of words and things. Words are, after all, just a proxy for experience, a shorthand to build or explore new avenues. Better to imagine how a piano could be carried up a staircase than try by trial and error. But conceiving and planning are not to be confused with the actual lifting of the piano. Words are not to be confused with reality, nor lifeless abstractions with life itself. Objective reality is not a linguistic construction.
When I was 19 years of age, under controlled clinical conditions, I walked through one of Aldous Huxley’s doors of perception, and I saw a reality that four years of intense undergraduate study had not shown me. The experience was very much like a journey, or “trip” to use the vernacular of the time, and it yielded insights that I have never had before or since. My brother was administered the same psychotropic, and it changed his worldview irrevocably. He abruptly quit his good career and moved his family into a 42 foot boat that he built at the back of his home, abandoned urban life and consumerism and spent the rest of his days close to wilderness. His decision recalled a comment by Carlos Casteneda: “Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have little influence in altering the course of our lives.”
It is ironic that mescaline is classified as an hallucinogenic drug, for surely it is those who believe that infinite growth can continue on a finite planet who are hallucinating. I would speculate that if somehow mescaline was dispensed on a mass scale the grip of Madison avenue would be broken and the concept of destabilizing society and nature to chase higher profit margins would seem absurd. So far, only North American indigenous peoples are permitted the use of peyote to embark on vision quests.
Some might be outraged by any suggestion here of advocacy of pyschodelics. I oppose the recreational use of drugs and would prefer that people employ deep meditation and study to expand their minds. But I suspect that more damage is done by benzodiazepines than was ever done by “acid”. Did some have bad trips and go mad?. In my entire campus life I never heard of one, but I’ll take your word for it. I have, however, heard of many people dying of an anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut, or of liver cancer from alcoholism, and they all died unenlightened. And I have read of 3-4 billion people who will die in a generation if there is not a radical change of consciousness. No matter, this is quite academic. Mescaline therapy won’t happen. The point here was only to say that stripped of language, a new understanding and a set of new insights can be revealed.
There is a dormant awareness that can be awakened, but the filters must first be removed, the lens put aside. It might take a psychedelic experience, an emotional upheaval or shock or a reality-mediated revelation like the long emergency of resource depletions and ecological collapse, but the consciousness which now seems set in concrete and apparently needs a jackhammer to break apart will indeed emerge. Whether it will be in time to save us is doubtful. In the meantime, all we can do is appeal to the limited awareness that people have using an alternative vocabulary to the one they have been given, or in the words of population sociologist Sheila Newman, exploit that “chink left in peoples’ consciousness and expose those marketed absurdities as shimmering but empty dust motes in the mad attic of culturally induced agnosia.”
Acquiring a language I think is like taking a trip to the optometrist. You see the world broadly if somewhat less sharply at a certain range and then the doctor places a lens in front of your eyes. Suddenly what you were looking at becomes clearer. But at a cost. The perimeter is less clear. That lens is your native language and you don’t recall the trip to the optometrist because it seems you’ve always worn glasses.
If you acquire an advanced degree, or pursue a certain profession, you find that another lens is placed in front of that one too. That lens may be the obfuscatory jargon of the law profession, a scientific discipline, law enforcement, or economics, for example. This lens will allow you to see one area of life with even more clarity and precision than commonplace vision, but a cost. Vital information about life will fall out of focus.
If in the pursuit of higher education, or foreign travel, you gain fluency in a foreign language, you find that all these lenses will be cast aside in favour of a new one—the new language. Objective reality may remain the same, but the classification system of each language—its structure, substance, gender, number, time and vocabulary assist the users to perceive the world in a certain way, but also limit that perception. To speak a different language is to think in that language and therefore to think differently because you perceive only what your language allows you or pre-disposes you to perceive. Your language shapes your world view because it acts as blinkers. Speakers of different languages, therefore, have different world views. People do not live in an objective world, but one where we are at the mercy of languages as both as a medium of expression and filters that admit only selected parts of reality into our consciousness.
As a university student I was struck by the fact that students who majored in various other disciplines seemed to inhabit perceptual solitudes that made cross-disciplinary communication difficult at best. It wasn’t simply the fact that each sector of students were informed by a different knowledge base, or even that each student spoke the idiom of his field of study, but that that idiom , that jargon, did not give him the conceptual tools to interpret information from another student’s area of study. Fostering cross-disciplinary discussion in this academic Tower of Babel seemed a more daunting task than arranging a conference at the United Nations.
It would seem obvious that some languages would be more equipped or more handicapped at describing certain concepts or objects and that if it was an environmental requirement to describe them adeptly a speaker of that language would be able to discern them more ably. He would not only be able to report his experience with the right linguistic ammunition, but experience it differently. This linguistic construction on experience can be illustrated by an example drawn from within a language, that is, between an American and a British dialect. Let me contrast the way I experienced a Wimbleton tennis match , the same match, as mediated by American English and then by British English. Two languages, one event, two realities.
The loquacious American commentators were incapable of saying anything with economy. One sportscaster would spend 60 seconds fumbling for words in an attempt to explain why the favourite was not at the top of his game, while his BBC counterpart tersely remarked “the champion lacks resolve.” What was so extraordinary about the British telecast was the silence. Often four, six points would go by before a soft and carefully enunciated crisp British voice would say “extraordinary shot, that”, reminding me that there were indeed commentators viewing the action. The long interludes of silence between volleys would allow me to become part of the match. I would hear the swells of crowd noise, the soft pop of the racquets striking the balls and the drama of the event, reminding me of how differently the two language styles could frame the experience. I didn’t hear the over-the-top American superlatives. Instead of “blistering returns” there were “imaginative replies”, a badly hit shot was “an awkward ball”, a “killer” volley was a “clever bit of improvisation” and a temper tantrum was described as “a piece of patented brinkmanship.” For Americans, silence is a dreaded void to be filled with flat-screen TVs that pollute every bar. That point here is, the spectator experiences the same sporting event quite differently in the Queen’s English than he does in the version across the Atlantic.
The concept of language as a kind of lens or filter, or even straitjacket, cannot be over-stated. Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of one’s world. By that token, bilingual or multilingual people have broader vision. It is not what we look at, the poverty, the injustice, the overpopulation, the environmental degradation, that is paramount. But the linguistic construction built in to filter that reality, to bring it into sharp focus, or make us blind to it.
The question becomes then, whose lens are we wearing? What filter are we looking through? How do we remove it?
In 1984 George Orwell revealed that the purpose of Newspeak, the language of his fictional totalitarian regime, was to rid old English (Oldspeak) of all adjectives and unnecessary words so that people would be not be able to feel or think. If one could not describe sadness, one could not feel it, and if there was no word for democracy or justice one couldn’t complain about the government. By eliminating words, Newspeak would eliminate the range of thoughts..
Lancaster University’s Professor Tony McEnery concluded that computer games and MP3 players have accomplished much the same thing in teenagers. (“Technology Isolation Syndrome”). His 2006 study of speech, blogs and questionnaires found that teenagers used half the average words of 25-34 year olds and that 20 words accounted for a third of their speech.
It looked for a time that a subtle totalitarian language would emerge from the Human Potential Movement in California in the 1970s. As R. D. Rosen dubbed it, “Psychobabble” was a mode of confession “that confessed nothing” and in its attempt to escape the confining vocabulary of Freudianism it substituted a jargon that had no theoretical roots. But it gave way to a puritanical tsunami that swept over every major institution in the English speaking world. “Political correctness”. It’s objectives are classically Orwellian. The notion is that if we don’t label people or things by conventionally harmful terms, then people will desist from thinking of them in those terms. And if politically acceptable euphemisms are substituted and repeated ad nauseum, the ideological brain-transplant will be completed. Whilst dangerous, some politically correct neologisms can be quite funny. .
For example, the homeless are now the “involuntarily undomiciled”. And a drunk is “a person of differing sobriety.” While a junkie is merely someone with pressing pharmacological preferences. Someone who is untrustworthy is just “ethically disoriented” while a lazy man is only “motivationally deficient”. Someone chronically late is “temporally challenged” and a prostitute is not a streetwalker or a whore but a “sex care provider” presenting themselves as a commodity allotment with a business doctrine. As a white man, I am a “mutant albino genetic-recessive global minority”, and the diction I practice is in reality just the style and writing imposed upon the world by “patriarchal white lexicographers.” Standard English is “capitalistic patriarchal hegemonic discourse.”
Each vested interest and lobby now seems to have its own “politically correct” euphemisms. The Pentagon were groundbreakers in this respect. A “clean” bomb was a nuclear device or neutron bomb that kills people but leaves infrastructure intact. Civilian deaths could be disguised as “collateral damage”. Assassination is “wet work”, bombs that hit civilians as “incontinent ordinance”. Dead soldiers are just “non-operative personnel or “terminally inconvenienced” or “non-viable”. Bombing an unintended target like a hospital could be dismissed as an “accidental delivery of ordinance equipment.” And military failure, like President Carter’s ill-fated Iranian desert raid, could be termed as an “incomplete success.”
Ministers of Labour, meanwhile call their union-busting legislation “right to work” laws and the scabs that are used to break strikes are accorded a more morally sanitized name, “replacement workers”. Trade union officials that haven’t the guts to tell their membership that they calling for amnesty for ‘illegal’ workers instead say they wish to “regularize” them. And they are not illegal, they are undocumented, even though they used forged documents to get into the country. Finance Ministers call the stock market crash “an equity retreat” and warn we may experience “negative economic growth”. Couldn’t use the word “contraction” if it killed them. Conservation officials call the mass slaughter of wild animals “game management” and the Environment Ministry describes the explosive destruction of a nuclear reactor core like Chernobyl’s as a “core management event”
. The nuclear industry has conducted its own unique detoxification of plain English. An explosion is an “energetic dissembly” and a fire is “rapid oxidation”. Plutonium contamination is “infiltration” and a reactor accident is to be referred to as a “normal aberration”. “Spin” is a new breed of deceit three decades in the making which attempts to effect damage control by the use of euphemisms. And what are euphemisms essentially but a kind of linguistic Demerol to diminish painful truth by re-labeling it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is gifted in that department. They once decided to sanitize their lexicon by banishing the “hazard” because it allegedly triggered panic in the American public. Health “hazards” were not to be mentioned and the Office of Hazardous Emergency Response was re-established as the “Office of Emergency and Remedial Action”. And Enforcement Personnel became the more friendly “Compliance Assistance Officers”.
But it is in Growthism where language makes it most incursive, dangerous and decisive intervention in the determination of what we perceive to be real today. The ideology that economic and population growth is beneficial, necessary and inevitable prevails, to a large extent, because the language which mediates that message has colonized academic forums, radio and television studios and print media. Consequently the reality of environmental Armageddon is seen by the audience through rose coloured glasses that are worn by the presenters, their guests and researchers and tinted by the vocabulary they use to interpret that reality. The audience therefore never sees or hears that every economic “boom” is an environmental “bust” and only comes to know “growth” via positive connotations.
For example, when Statistics Canada released its Census Report in mid March of 2007, those localities like British Columbia and Alberta which gained people from the previous census, were anointed census “winners” by the media as if a prize was going to be awarded for more pollution, GHG emissions, congestion, farmland and habitat loss. Prince Rupert, BC and Saskatchewan, on the other hand were designated as census “losers” for having fewer people than five years before. Newscasters consistently report that Canada “enjoyed” record growth or that the Maritimes “suffered” a “stagnant” economy with “sluggish” housing starts. The concept that Canadians might “enjoy” a steady state economy that didn’t cover arable land and habitat with subdivisions is foreign to news script writers.
The word “growth” itself has undergone many makeovers in recent years to make it palatable to those of us who wouldn’t swallow it otherwise. Growth has become “managed growth”, “deflected growth”, “smart growth”, and the ultimate oxymoron, “sustainable growth”. It seems that urban planners concoct a new label every year for the same snake oil it. To preserve all those wonderful green spaces that we love, planners propose to cram more and more of us into smaller and smaller urban compartments. But if we don’t like sprawl, we like density even less. So Great Vancouver planners tried to package it under the name of “compaction”. When ratepayers wouldn’t buy into that garbage, planners re-marketed it under the label “Coreplan”. No dice. Now its back as “Eco-density”. Density with green paint over it. The one name you won’t ever hear from planners though is “growth-control”. That is outside their frame of reference.
Our culture abounds with so many sweet-sounding buzzwords like “sustainable”, “livable”. “affordable”, “diverse”, “vibrant”, “inclusive”, “pro-active”, “choice” ---the vocabulary of deceit. Attach these adjectives to anything you want to sell or run past the planning objectors---any self-serving development scam for example---and you can jam it through as easily as candy down a baby’s hatch.
The filter of growthist language in Anglophone societies is combined with the filter of multiculturalism---a smokescreen of left-wing tolerance that cloaks the right wing development agenda. Cultural diversity is much like a leaky air mattress that can only be kept afloat by constant pumping, the air being people from abroad. The language of diversity and tolerance is thus recruited to rationalize the policy of mass immigration and economic growth, always couched in the most positive terms. Growthism and Multiculturalism are a lexical duopoly.
How then do we remove their lens? The first answer is to substitute it with our lens. Ecological economists are attempting to do just that by developing indices of real economic performance, as if the planet mattered. We have to continually challenge media terminology and offer our own. When the CBC boasts that the country is diverse we counter by saying that is culturally fragmented and has lost cohesion. When the CBC says that immigration is the solution we have to demand that they prove that there is a problem. When the CBC states that the population of Newfoundland has stagnated we must declare that it has stabilized.
The second answer is to be found in the pages of Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception”: “We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems: for it is by means of them and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively, but at the same time we must preserve and if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through the half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too-familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.”
Huxley is not suggesting that we abandon symbolic reasoning, but broaden our perception to grasp the real and not just its symbols, so we can appreciate the relationship of words and things. Words are, after all, just a proxy for experience, a shorthand to build or explore new avenues. Better to imagine how a piano could be carried up a staircase than try by trial and error. But conceiving and planning are not to be confused with the actual lifting of the piano. Words are not to be confused with reality, nor lifeless abstractions with life itself. Objective reality is not a linguistic construction.
When I was 19 years of age, under controlled clinical conditions, I walked through one of Aldous Huxley’s doors of perception, and I saw a reality that four years of intense undergraduate study had not shown me. The experience was very much like a journey, or “trip” to use the vernacular of the time, and it yielded insights that I have never had before or since. My brother was administered the same psychotropic, and it changed his worldview irrevocably. He abruptly quit his good career and moved his family into a 42 foot boat that he built at the back of his home, abandoned urban life and consumerism and spent the rest of his days close to wilderness. His decision recalled a comment by Carlos Casteneda: “Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have little influence in altering the course of our lives.”
It is ironic that mescaline is classified as an hallucinogenic drug, for surely it is those who believe that infinite growth can continue on a finite planet who are hallucinating. I would speculate that if somehow mescaline was dispensed on a mass scale the grip of Madison avenue would be broken and the concept of destabilizing society and nature to chase higher profit margins would seem absurd. So far, only North American indigenous peoples are permitted the use of peyote to embark on vision quests.
Some might be outraged by any suggestion here of advocacy of pyschodelics. I oppose the recreational use of drugs and would prefer that people employ deep meditation and study to expand their minds. But I suspect that more damage is done by benzodiazepines than was ever done by “acid”. Did some have bad trips and go mad?. In my entire campus life I never heard of one, but I’ll take your word for it. I have, however, heard of many people dying of an anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut, or of liver cancer from alcoholism, and they all died unenlightened. And I have read of 3-4 billion people who will die in a generation if there is not a radical change of consciousness. No matter, this is quite academic. Mescaline therapy won’t happen. The point here was only to say that stripped of language, a new understanding and a set of new insights can be revealed.
There is a dormant awareness that can be awakened, but the filters must first be removed, the lens put aside. It might take a psychedelic experience, an emotional upheaval or shock or a reality-mediated revelation like the long emergency of resource depletions and ecological collapse, but the consciousness which now seems set in concrete and apparently needs a jackhammer to break apart will indeed emerge. Whether it will be in time to save us is doubtful. In the meantime, all we can do is appeal to the limited awareness that people have using an alternative vocabulary to the one they have been given, or in the words of population sociologist Sheila Newman, exploit that “chink left in peoples’ consciousness and expose those marketed absurdities as shimmering but empty dust motes in the mad attic of culturally induced agnosia.”
THE MYTH OF WISE ABORIGINAL STEWARDSHIP
Nothing is so pernicious as the profoundly racist notion that somehow indigenous peoples are genetically endowed with a special relationship, a spiritual kinship with nature that makes them superior caretakers of the land Europeans took from them. Like so many racist myths, there are just too many historical examples to cite that would discredit it. Easter Island was arguably the most notorious one, where 20,000 people committed eco-cide by deforestation and over-hunting. Australian Aborigines, meanwhile, exterminated 85% of the mega fauna of the continent before the British even weighed anchor at Botany Bay, and American Indians probably annihilated the horse before it was re-introduced by the Spanish. Given the time it took to cut down a mature Douglas Fir with a stone axe, one is moved to speculate that it was their primitive technology, not an inherent love for nature, which constrained coastal aboriginals from clearing more. Soil microbiologist Peter Salonius has pointed out that by the time of European contact Amerindians from mid continent south had established an unsustainable society moving toward collapse whose sustenance was increasingly from soil depleting cultivation agriculture.
And a biologist with Environment Canada maintains that “unless there is strong evidence that a code of ethics existed which dictated restraint I suggest that evidence is extremely weak that aboriginal societies necessarily exercised any form of wildlife management. I think evidence instead overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that aboriginal culture did not wipe out the food they depended on due to limitations in technology and population numbers.” But more relevant to our concerns is not what natives once did but what they are doing now. He relates the following experiences:
The profligate killing of caribou by natives for their tongues. The decimation of Greenland seabird colonies by Inuit due to hunting during the breeding season and wanton disturbance at sensitive colonies. The depletion of key beluga stocks in the Canadian Arctic. The insistence of opening a Bowhead Whale hunt in the eastern arctic by Inuit despite the scientific evidence that this population is in critical condition. The wildlife “halo effect” around native communities in North America where virtually no game can be found. Large-scale killing of Bald and Golden Eagles in North America by natives under the guise of fulfilling “cultural needs”. Widespread killing of colonial waterbirds in Manitoba by natives and Metis since these birds are seen as competitors in commercial fisheries. The general ignorance of large wildlife populations by aboriginal elders and young people simply because they were “not important” as a food source.
He is careful to qualify his experiences with the observation that all societies, native and non-native, have pushed their environment to the wall, and all have their good and bad apples. Nonetheless, the environmental record of Aboriginal economic development projects is less than promising.
Case in point. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act had given the various native corporations across the state ownership of lands they selected from federal holdings. The total in Southeast Alaska came to more than 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares). Advised by timber economists, the native regional corporations and villages picked out mainly lands with productive big-tree forests. Then they began to level them and sell the raw logs to Asian markets, almost matching the pulp mills’ rate of timber consumption. So much for the precious Tongas National Forest.
Ontario researcher Brishen Hoff has cited several Canadian examples of Aboriginal eco-vandalism. In 2002, the Cree Aboriginals and Quebec Premier Bernard Landry signed the “Peace of the Braves” accord. In return for a $3.5 billion grant from Quebec tax payers, the Cree agree to construct a massive hydroelectric project on the Rupert and Eastmain Rivers. In 2004, 1.3 million hectares of old growth boreal forest are up for clear-cutting near Red Lake in NW Ontario beyond the 51st parallel after Aboriginals agreed by accepting monetary incentives. The Wikwemikong First Nation, who own 55,000 hectares of eastern Manitoulin Island have chosen industrial scale logging as a revenue source. 80 years of unsustainable logging had already depleted the community forest by the early 1990s. The Zhiibaahaasing First Nation, also on Manitoulin Island, decided to make a quick buck by dumping an estimated 1.75 million used tires creating a massive fire hazard and costing taxpayers a $4 million clean-up bill.
The sham that is Aboriginal Canada’s unique affinity with the land is best illustrated, however, by the example of the Michipicoten First Nation people south of Wawa, Ontario near Lake Superior. They received $58 million in tax payers’ money and 3000 acres of federal Crown land for “Economic Growth”, including industrial forestry, and mining projects, a major hydro-electric dam and a gas station business along the highway.
On the main page of their website, the Michipicoten state: “To walk our path is to experience the breathless beauty of the wilderness and to feel and participate in our oneness with mother earth and all that is.”
Does the Michipicoten’s “oneness with mother earth” include damning her rivers with industrial scale hydro-electric dams for “Economic Growth”? This land was once Crown land that was open to walking and camping but now it is 3000 acres of Lake Superior waterfront wilderness locked up in the private hands of “wise stewards” who have it slated for industrial resource extraction.
This kind of partnership in environmental crime is happening all over Canada, where Aboriginals are teaming up with large multinational corporations. The natives offer their land and their approval and the corporations offer a share of their profits. The government is tickled pink too because it gets Economic Growth, the universal measure of well-being and the unquestioned God of our age. It’s a dream partnership for corporations in another important way too—public relations.
Just as nuclear corporations love to have a celebrity “environmentalist” like Patrick Moore speaking on their behalf, and the Royal Bank of Canada, a major engine of environmental destruction, loves to have Nature Conservancy of Canada advertising their mutual collaboration, corporations love to have Aboriginals on board to make the public think that they’re running a “green” operation. What better way to bypass arduous red tape like Environmental Assessments and Public Consultations than to get an endorsement by forming a partnership with the First Nations people. After all, the average urban Canadian still believes that if the Aboriginals are involved in land management decisions, the land will be preserved sustainably.
Another dimension of Aboriginal negative environmental impact is their alarming population explosion. First Nations are now experiencing a birth rate 1.5 times the Canadian average and has seen its population grow by 20% between 2001-6. With a higher population they will deplete more resources and multiply their footprint. What accounts for this population burst? Brishen Hoff attributes it to the two-tier nature of rights in Canada that favour Aboriginals. As he points out: “Aboriginals do not need hunting or fishing licenses. They can use gill nets for fishing. They can take as many walleye or moose as they can kill in or out of season. In the far north, Aboriginals are still hunting beluga and narwhals and with rifles. Aboriginals need not take the hunter safety course and they are even entitled to build a cabin on crown land. In addition they are not required to report their harvest. They also do not pay sales tax, property tax, or fuel taxes.
All of these things are conducive to a population explosion amongst Aboriginals. It is as if the federal government put out a bird feeder but left out bird seed only for a particular species of bird. Naturally one would expect then that particular bird would grow in numbers at rate relatively greater than competing species. It is ironic that perhaps the most serious racist group in Canada are not some extremists wearing white robes and burning crosses but a federal government that chooses not to collect taxes from natives, Inuit and Metis.
However, the revenue that governments fail to collect from aboriginals pales in comparison to the reckless abandon in which they spend on their behalf. Eighty percent of the Department of Indian Affairs $8 billion annual expenditure is transferred directly to native bands, and it is the Chiefs and their band councils who decide how they are disbursed and how programs are developed. Given this inherent politicization of band administration, it is not surprising that media accounts of corruption and mismanagement of reserve funds have been reflected in native complaints to the Department.
In 1999 the Department received 300 allegations about 108 bands ranging from nepotism to mismanagement, and even at that the federal auditor found their data to be “incomplete”, while in 2003 there were 297 such allegations. It is little wonder then, that governments can throw $10 billion a year at Aboriginal poverty without result, or spend $3.8 billion on native housing in the past decade and still see people living in run-down units. It is frightening to think that the “Wise Stewards” who are running the reserves are the same ones who will be partnering billion-dollar economic developments that will despoil our boreal forests.
One might ask then, how is the money that Ottawa has spent on aboriginal affairs substantially different than the money it has wasted on African development aid? In both cases it has been in the billions, in both cases it has been essentially without strings, that is, the recipients have been unaccountable for its use, in both cases it has not been conditional on any kind of family planning---in fact it has provoked a fertility boom. And in both cases the aid money has been filtered through corrupt political leadership that intercepts it before it reaches the intended beneficiaries. There is another similarity too---the corrupt tribal dictators hide behind and depend upon white Canadian political correctness not to blow the whistle and put an end to the game. Others prefer just to shift all responsibility onto a legacy of white colonialism.
The Myth of Wise Aboriginal Stewardship is just a contemporary make-over of Jean Jacque Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage, a superior being untainted by our corrupt European vices. That caricature of aboriginals is just as preposterous and harmful now as it was then in the eighteenth century, Just as inaccurate however would a representation of Aboriginals as more careless of the land than European North Americans. Roderick Nash (among others) has clearly documented in “Wilderness and the American Mind” that pioneers regarded wilderness with “defiant hatred” and treated it so. And for every John Muir there were one hundred robber barons who didn’t give a damn about the environment.
All of the foregoing was merely an attempt to make natives accountable for their record of eco-vandalism, as one would do with the multi-nationals. It is to humanize them rather than demonize them or as, the politically correct have done, deify them.
The sad fact is, people of various cultures and times for various reasons, have not been able to acknowledge limits. And just because they can sing, dance and beat drums should not give them license to trespass those limits.
Brishen Hoff deserves credit for the research re. the Aboriginal environmental track record in this article.
And a biologist with Environment Canada maintains that “unless there is strong evidence that a code of ethics existed which dictated restraint I suggest that evidence is extremely weak that aboriginal societies necessarily exercised any form of wildlife management. I think evidence instead overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that aboriginal culture did not wipe out the food they depended on due to limitations in technology and population numbers.” But more relevant to our concerns is not what natives once did but what they are doing now. He relates the following experiences:
The profligate killing of caribou by natives for their tongues. The decimation of Greenland seabird colonies by Inuit due to hunting during the breeding season and wanton disturbance at sensitive colonies. The depletion of key beluga stocks in the Canadian Arctic. The insistence of opening a Bowhead Whale hunt in the eastern arctic by Inuit despite the scientific evidence that this population is in critical condition. The wildlife “halo effect” around native communities in North America where virtually no game can be found. Large-scale killing of Bald and Golden Eagles in North America by natives under the guise of fulfilling “cultural needs”. Widespread killing of colonial waterbirds in Manitoba by natives and Metis since these birds are seen as competitors in commercial fisheries. The general ignorance of large wildlife populations by aboriginal elders and young people simply because they were “not important” as a food source.
He is careful to qualify his experiences with the observation that all societies, native and non-native, have pushed their environment to the wall, and all have their good and bad apples. Nonetheless, the environmental record of Aboriginal economic development projects is less than promising.
Case in point. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act had given the various native corporations across the state ownership of lands they selected from federal holdings. The total in Southeast Alaska came to more than 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares). Advised by timber economists, the native regional corporations and villages picked out mainly lands with productive big-tree forests. Then they began to level them and sell the raw logs to Asian markets, almost matching the pulp mills’ rate of timber consumption. So much for the precious Tongas National Forest.
Ontario researcher Brishen Hoff has cited several Canadian examples of Aboriginal eco-vandalism. In 2002, the Cree Aboriginals and Quebec Premier Bernard Landry signed the “Peace of the Braves” accord. In return for a $3.5 billion grant from Quebec tax payers, the Cree agree to construct a massive hydroelectric project on the Rupert and Eastmain Rivers. In 2004, 1.3 million hectares of old growth boreal forest are up for clear-cutting near Red Lake in NW Ontario beyond the 51st parallel after Aboriginals agreed by accepting monetary incentives. The Wikwemikong First Nation, who own 55,000 hectares of eastern Manitoulin Island have chosen industrial scale logging as a revenue source. 80 years of unsustainable logging had already depleted the community forest by the early 1990s. The Zhiibaahaasing First Nation, also on Manitoulin Island, decided to make a quick buck by dumping an estimated 1.75 million used tires creating a massive fire hazard and costing taxpayers a $4 million clean-up bill.
The sham that is Aboriginal Canada’s unique affinity with the land is best illustrated, however, by the example of the Michipicoten First Nation people south of Wawa, Ontario near Lake Superior. They received $58 million in tax payers’ money and 3000 acres of federal Crown land for “Economic Growth”, including industrial forestry, and mining projects, a major hydro-electric dam and a gas station business along the highway.
On the main page of their website, the Michipicoten state: “To walk our path is to experience the breathless beauty of the wilderness and to feel and participate in our oneness with mother earth and all that is.”
Does the Michipicoten’s “oneness with mother earth” include damning her rivers with industrial scale hydro-electric dams for “Economic Growth”? This land was once Crown land that was open to walking and camping but now it is 3000 acres of Lake Superior waterfront wilderness locked up in the private hands of “wise stewards” who have it slated for industrial resource extraction.
This kind of partnership in environmental crime is happening all over Canada, where Aboriginals are teaming up with large multinational corporations. The natives offer their land and their approval and the corporations offer a share of their profits. The government is tickled pink too because it gets Economic Growth, the universal measure of well-being and the unquestioned God of our age. It’s a dream partnership for corporations in another important way too—public relations.
Just as nuclear corporations love to have a celebrity “environmentalist” like Patrick Moore speaking on their behalf, and the Royal Bank of Canada, a major engine of environmental destruction, loves to have Nature Conservancy of Canada advertising their mutual collaboration, corporations love to have Aboriginals on board to make the public think that they’re running a “green” operation. What better way to bypass arduous red tape like Environmental Assessments and Public Consultations than to get an endorsement by forming a partnership with the First Nations people. After all, the average urban Canadian still believes that if the Aboriginals are involved in land management decisions, the land will be preserved sustainably.
Another dimension of Aboriginal negative environmental impact is their alarming population explosion. First Nations are now experiencing a birth rate 1.5 times the Canadian average and has seen its population grow by 20% between 2001-6. With a higher population they will deplete more resources and multiply their footprint. What accounts for this population burst? Brishen Hoff attributes it to the two-tier nature of rights in Canada that favour Aboriginals. As he points out: “Aboriginals do not need hunting or fishing licenses. They can use gill nets for fishing. They can take as many walleye or moose as they can kill in or out of season. In the far north, Aboriginals are still hunting beluga and narwhals and with rifles. Aboriginals need not take the hunter safety course and they are even entitled to build a cabin on crown land. In addition they are not required to report their harvest. They also do not pay sales tax, property tax, or fuel taxes.
All of these things are conducive to a population explosion amongst Aboriginals. It is as if the federal government put out a bird feeder but left out bird seed only for a particular species of bird. Naturally one would expect then that particular bird would grow in numbers at rate relatively greater than competing species. It is ironic that perhaps the most serious racist group in Canada are not some extremists wearing white robes and burning crosses but a federal government that chooses not to collect taxes from natives, Inuit and Metis.
However, the revenue that governments fail to collect from aboriginals pales in comparison to the reckless abandon in which they spend on their behalf. Eighty percent of the Department of Indian Affairs $8 billion annual expenditure is transferred directly to native bands, and it is the Chiefs and their band councils who decide how they are disbursed and how programs are developed. Given this inherent politicization of band administration, it is not surprising that media accounts of corruption and mismanagement of reserve funds have been reflected in native complaints to the Department.
In 1999 the Department received 300 allegations about 108 bands ranging from nepotism to mismanagement, and even at that the federal auditor found their data to be “incomplete”, while in 2003 there were 297 such allegations. It is little wonder then, that governments can throw $10 billion a year at Aboriginal poverty without result, or spend $3.8 billion on native housing in the past decade and still see people living in run-down units. It is frightening to think that the “Wise Stewards” who are running the reserves are the same ones who will be partnering billion-dollar economic developments that will despoil our boreal forests.
One might ask then, how is the money that Ottawa has spent on aboriginal affairs substantially different than the money it has wasted on African development aid? In both cases it has been in the billions, in both cases it has been essentially without strings, that is, the recipients have been unaccountable for its use, in both cases it has not been conditional on any kind of family planning---in fact it has provoked a fertility boom. And in both cases the aid money has been filtered through corrupt political leadership that intercepts it before it reaches the intended beneficiaries. There is another similarity too---the corrupt tribal dictators hide behind and depend upon white Canadian political correctness not to blow the whistle and put an end to the game. Others prefer just to shift all responsibility onto a legacy of white colonialism.
The Myth of Wise Aboriginal Stewardship is just a contemporary make-over of Jean Jacque Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage, a superior being untainted by our corrupt European vices. That caricature of aboriginals is just as preposterous and harmful now as it was then in the eighteenth century, Just as inaccurate however would a representation of Aboriginals as more careless of the land than European North Americans. Roderick Nash (among others) has clearly documented in “Wilderness and the American Mind” that pioneers regarded wilderness with “defiant hatred” and treated it so. And for every John Muir there were one hundred robber barons who didn’t give a damn about the environment.
All of the foregoing was merely an attempt to make natives accountable for their record of eco-vandalism, as one would do with the multi-nationals. It is to humanize them rather than demonize them or as, the politically correct have done, deify them.
The sad fact is, people of various cultures and times for various reasons, have not been able to acknowledge limits. And just because they can sing, dance and beat drums should not give them license to trespass those limits.
Brishen Hoff deserves credit for the research re. the Aboriginal environmental track record in this article.
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