Hot Debate
Alanna Mitchell’s informative and accessible essay on global warming (“Here Comes the Heat,” March) failed to address two important issues that are too often missing from the discussion. The first one concerns China. We already know that China’s booming manufacturing sector is a major contributor of carbon emissions, yet many North Americans continue to buy cheap Chinese goods, which only encourages them to continue building factories and the coal-fired power plants that run them.
The second issue is population. The fact that human population is more than two and a half times what it was at the end of World War II is the elephant in the room. While the efficiency of combustion engines, furnaces, and electrical appliances has improved over the past thirty years, overall emissions continue to rise because there are so many more of these devices in use. Mitchell mentions deforestation but doesn’t make the connection to the increasing demand for building materials, paper, farmland, and housing.
Other species at the top of the food chain have adjusted their birth rates to their environmental conditions—and we’re supposed to be the smart ones. In his novella, Tracking, Jim Harrison points out that non-aboriginal people try to do everything big before they’re capable of doing small things well. Ultimately, all the best-intentioned policies to combat global warming could be futile if they aren’t accompanied by policies that reverse the growth of the human population. After all, what’s the point of having clean air if we’re slaughtering one another for a drink of water?
John MacMurchy
Toronto, Ontario
Alanna Mitchell offers evidence that 55 million years ago the earth went through more or less exactly what is being billed as the coming apocalypse—and somehow recovered from it, continuing to support diverse life forms. I was a little surprised and disappointed that Mitchell did not pursue this angle as it relates to the current debate about global warming. Using “only” a 600,000-year timeline, Al Gore et al. argue that we’ve never before been where we’re headed and offer the risk of no return as reason to avoid that journey. Now that we know that the earth returned from brink once before, the only question is whether humans will be among the survivors next time out. Something tells me that the natural advantage humans have leveraged into dominance will see a select few of us through. Why not reframe the call to action? Global warming: it’s bad for business to kill off your customers.
Jim Renahan
Toronto, Ontario
The Bug in the Rug
It is so very Canadian to blame Canadian writers for a lack of robustness and specificity on the subject of American culture (“An American Type of Sadness,” March). The fact is that in Canada, our discomfort with consumerism and its cultural byproducts is accompanied by the knowledge that these demons are not of our own creation or evocation—that they grew out of a management vat in New York and Los Angeles.
Unlike Rick Moody, we can’t use an ulcer as a metaphor for this cultural affliction because, unlike Moody’s ulcer, our disease was not self-generated. Maybe venereal disease would be more appropriate—we got it through the company we keep. Or we could use aids as an analogy; that is, maybe the disease really worth identifying is the one that made us so susceptible to others. When it comes to culture, it seems, each country has its own peculiar bug.
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