Bali Dancing

Based on this galloping separation between man and nature, and the discrediting of the UN at Bali in December, a remedial course in global warming appears necessary. Let us begin with the poets.

Many writers chronicled the widening gap in thought and feeling between town and country as England edged toward industrialization some 200 years ago. The dislocations were real, but as the “dark Satanic Mills” moved in, the Romantic notion that we are lost when divorced from the environment was lampooned as a quaint remembrance of times past. Anxious about emergent America and eager to assert its imperial advantage, British high society embraced the guiding narratives of exploitation and technological innovation.

William Blake’s sombre descriptions of the devastation wrought by industrialization found their prose counterpart in Charles Dickens, who portrayed the clustering of humanity in less-than-humane cities: crofters lost among the slag heaps, cold steel, heartless tycoons, and wayward street gangs. But change is an intoxicant, and when historical forces demanded it, the tried and true gravitated to the new paradigm with lust in their eyes. Like others, Britain moved on and up. In this era of globalization, market capitalism, international trade, and limitless growth (for some) gained acceptance, and the world divided again into haves and have-nots, into the developed and the backward.

Had the whole world leapt onto the train of progress, all would be lost. Hence, the pastoralism of romantics was censured at home but celebrated offshore. Intrepid travellers visited the Far East, Africa, South America, and strange archipelagos, seeking out local flora and fauna for motherland exhibits, or these anachronisms were simply exploited for indentured servants and resources, or used as dumping grounds for criminals and other toxic refuse.

Kyoto in 1997 was mindful of this history; Bali in 2007 denied it. No useful road map was agreed upon, because new calibrations had been made. And the top prize for this decade’s global warming recalcitrant goes not to the US, but to less-predictable Canada. We took heat for insisting that “all or none” must play at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there was more to it than that. At Bali, Canada framed itself as Britain, circa 1800: a developing country, not yet industrialized, even backward, and as a result its own and the world’s environmental hereafter will be sacrificed for the economic here and now.

This positioning — Canada like Britain then, like India and China today — was a stroke of strategic genius, and as markets remain volatile and we settle down to do our taxes, Harper believes it will sell. How might his vision work?

Our national self-image suggests that we are a pastoral people, in love with nature. Poppycock, says Harper. The migration to cities may be a global phenomenon, and half of the world’s people may now reside in large clusters, but in Canada 80 percent of us call concrete, steel, and skyscrapers home. Rich folks summer in Muskoka, the Eastern Townships, and the Okanagan Valley, but beyond visitation rights born of privilege into these “natural worlds,” and beyond aboriginal mythologies, our true environmental record is one of wanton disregard. Harper knows this, admires it, and is tapping into our dark corners (the ones we sublimate in polite company), and into our demand for winter heat and summer air conditioning at prices to which we have grown accustomed. The world can change, says Harper, Europe can go mushy and eco-friendly, California and Quebec can adopt clean car legislation, but our underpopulated hinterlands house vast untapped natural resources, and exploit these we will. Canada is the little empire that could, and nothing will hold it back.

Urbane professionals proclaim the “idea economy,” create think tanks, and chase the low-hanging fruit of enviro-retrofits, reduced packaging, and local agriculture; they insist that the service, information, and culture sectors — not natural resource wealth — are the keys to sustainable prosperity. “God save our green,” they say, and local urban initiatives are implemented. But such good efforts have been overwhelmed by Harper’s maximalist agenda: loaded with fossil fuels, and with oil at $100 (US) a barrel, Canada will be “a global energy powerhouse,” our very own manifest destiny.

It won’t happen overnight — the tar sands that spread from northern Alberta to northern Saskatchewan are largely untapped; the natural gas of the Mackenzie River region still needs to be extracted; aboriginal bands and ecotourists might demand that more distant acreage be turned into national parks. But the way forward has been established, and it is about oil, gas, nukes, and roughneck development, not hydrogen fuel cells, wind and solar power, or (perish the thought) reduced consumption. It is about Canada’s industrial revolution, located north of any major population centre, out of sight, “the True North, strong and free.”

Our federal strategy is obvious: global warming affects different regions of the world differently, and it happens to benefit Canada. So we’ve cocked a snook at hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions, offered the useless bone of “aspirational targets,” and argued that special “national circumstances” must allow Canada out of binding international agreements. In Bali’s aftermath, Canada signed secondary agreements that, absent hard numbers and a global consensus, will simply prolong the dance. Before Christmas, Harper promised to impose regulations that will force Canadian industries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 18 percent by 2010. The measuring stick for progress, however, will be reductions based on 2006 levels, not 1990’s, and few environmentalists believe that such restrictions will turn back the global warming clock.