"Prairie Resilience:" A Document Passed Off As A Climate Change Strategy Suitable for Saskatchewan

Although the following remarks respond to the Saskatchewan government’s climate change strategy entitled “Prairie Resilience: A Made-in-Saskatchewan Climate Change Strategy” released on 4 December 2017 (Government of Saskatchewan, “Prairie,” 2017, henceforth PR), they are not addressed specifically to the ruling Saskatchewan Party but to all parties aspiring to form government or to contribute to deliberations concerning climate change.  They are not framed in terms of environmental best practices, a term beloved by technocrats in advancing their claim that what is best for us as a society can only be understood and determined by them.  They are, rather, constitutive policies: policies about the framework within which climate policy should be made.  They are hardly exhaustive, nor do they represent any startlingly new insights.  But they are principles that tend to be lost in debates over more specific proposals.  For this reason, they bear constant repeating.  When I speak as we or us, I am speaking as a citizen of Saskatchewan.

1.  Acknowledge the scope and gravity of the challenges posed by climate change.  PR assesses the probable effect of climate change principally in terms of more frequent severe weather events, which will most likely increase such nuisances as drought and flooding.  In consequence, it offers us a pastiche of existing or proposed programmes, something for all tastes.  If we are threatened by rising waters, it suggests, one expedient could be to build better highways, another to restore our wetlands better to serve as gigantic sponges to absorb the oncoming deluges.  Although both suggestions have merit, the overall tenor of PR is that of an uncoordinated exercise in speculation.  If, it suggests, we continue to explore and experiment among the types of options laid out, we will inevitably hit upon some fortunate arrangement allowing us to go right on pretty much as we always have.  This approach trivializes the global, existential challenges posed by climate change, not only to homo sapiens as a species but also to those human systems of relationships through which we now realize our sociocultural beings.  PR does not conceive that there will be global social consequences such as mass migrations, wars, or claims for justice of poor peoples against wealthy ones with which the people of Saskatchewan will have to deal.  Nor does it imagine the potential of these challenges as a stimulus for achieving positive social transformations.

2.  Clarify the meaning of resilience the better to understand and realize its potential.  The word resilience appears so frequently throughout PR—from its title onward—that it assumes the quality of a mantra.  Becoming resilient is clearly a linchpin of emerging government climate policy, but the meaning of the concept itself is not clear.  “Resilience,” we are told in a boldly highlighted headline, “is the ability to cope with, adapt to and recover from stress and change.”  But in the text itself we come across the curious construction resilient to, in phrases such as “[b]uilding infrastructure more resilient to climate change,” which suggests that resilient means resistant.  In some respect this is consonant with an older meaning of resilient, which Brian Walker and his colleagues define as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still maintain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (Walker, et al. 2004).  In other words, if we are resilient, we will weather the impending storms and come through them with our lifestyles essentially intact.

Yet PR’s own definition of resilience just quoted, in which adaptation appears as a key element in coping with and recovering from stress and change, suggests something beyond successfully resisting comprehensive change.  “In a resilient social–ecological system,” Carl Folke points out, “disturbance has the potential to create opportunity for doing new things, for innovation and for development” (Folke 2006).  That potential (as elaborated by Folke and others) transcends the technical engineering solutions in which PR places so much faith and to which it would have us tie our fate.  As Mark Roseland observes, the evolving notion of resilience “supports the normative nature of sustainability by recognizing that a sustainable society is one that is actively seeking to become a better society” (Roseland 2012, emphasis added).  PR is mute concerning this potential.

3.  Avoid rhetoric appealing to “Made-in-Saskatchewan” solutions.  The idea that the challenges posed by climate change are so specific or unique to any given place that only those who live there can understand them and come up with appropriate solutions to them is ludicrous.  Although the proposals in PR are standard fare, its insistence upon the peculiar nature of the challenges facing Saskatchewan seems like a gambit to exempt the province from taking decisive action.  Indeed, the defensive and self-justifying tone of PR seems calculated to fan the fires of western alienation to prevent Saskatchewan from participating fully in world climate science and co-ordinating its policy with other jurisdictions (other than, perhaps, the United States), as if climate change were simply a series of local problems rather than a global one best addressed by worldwide research and co-operation.  It belies the fact that Saskatchewan, like the rest of Canada generally, is increasingly urban and cosmopolitan, with a mobile, multi-cultural population with diverse sociocultural affiliations, one that lives not solely in Saskatchewan but in the larger world as well.

4.  Avoid balancing the economy and industry against the environment.  In its treatment of economic sustainability, PR defines it in part as “our ability to balance economic growth and industrial competitiveness with our commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”  In this statement, the economy is reified.  It is seen as a thing that can be figuratively set in a scale and balanced against other things such as our social commitments.  It is not seen as a process that adapts to changing conditions, in consequence of which it cannot function as a principle of the made-in-Saskatchewan resilience upon which PR so prides itself.

The same may be said for industry, which PR repeatedly reifies as a thing to be consulted rather than as the process of industriousness through which the people of Saskatchewan provide for their daily needs and give expression to the meaning that their lives have for them.  It rapidly becomes obvious that PR conceives industry primarily as private enterprises aimed at maximizing profits, principal among them being producers of oil and gas.  The interests of these private oil and gas producers are so consistently defended throughout PR as to leave little doubt that they were consulted in its production, so much so that one may reasonably suspect that a public relations department of one of their trade associations played a large part in writing it.  The upshot is that PR is so locked into an inflexible view of certain economic institutions—as if they were naturally ordained rather than historically and mutably determined—that its horizon of possibility is so shrunken as to afford no vision at all.

5.  Resist the temptation to declare that the solution to the challenges posed by climate change is principally and ultimately technological.  The document that introduces PR (Government of Saskatchewan, “Climate,” 2017) in fact proclaims this.  It declares that the “effective approaches to GHG (greenhouse gas) mitigation stem from technological innovation,” as if more and more computer scientists and engineers beavering away in laboratories were so many magicians capable of insulating and absolving the rest of us from the large-scale effects of human practice.  The allure of this line of thought for the materially fortunate among us is the belief that we can go on living pretty well as we always have—without considering how we relate to one another or to our environment.  It relieves us from reflecting upon the extent to which the challenges we now face derive from technologies that emerged at the beginning of the 19^th century—at the time when greenhouse gas emissions began to increase—that paved the way to intensive industrialization.  It relieves us from pondering the effects of ideological contraptions also devised at that time, such as the concept of the self-regulating market, which justified the commoditization of labour and land (or our natural environment generally) as merely things to be bought and sold in the pursuit of profit (see Polanyi 1975).  Such considerations, after all, might lead us to wonder what types of Faustian bargains are now being naively struck by our latest generation of technocrats.  Their works are promoted as the greatest of human benefits, but it is reasonable to suspect that they are also motivated (perhaps principally) by desires for power and social control.

PR makes it abundantly clear that one set of technologies to which Saskatchewan must remain committed are those involving fossil fuels.  Make no mistake, it declares, ‘[o]ur industries are heavily dependent on fossil fuels to produce energy, food, fertilizer, products and commodities needed around the world.”  But it proceeds as if the rest of the world in general were continuing to embrace the use of fossil fuels as well.  For instance, the introductory document justifies the province’s continued development of carbon capture and storage technology by baldly stating that “[t]housands of coal plants are in development around the world,” which contradicts the most recent evidence that the current number of coal plants is plummeting globally (Hill 2017).  For all that it says about the need to be competitive, it seems oblivious of the fact that renewable energy sources are already outcompeting oil and gas pricewise in the production of electricity, even though the batteries used are still relatively expensive compared to what they will be in the future (Pittis 2017).  It does not seem cognizant that even the World Bank has “vowed to phase out most of its finance for oil and gas by 2019” (Harvey 2017).  Indeed, by remaining silent in the face of such developments. PR exudes a plodding confidence that the maturation of fossil fuel industries in emerging post-staples jurisdictions such as Saskatchewan poses no threat to the future of such enterprises (Howlett and Kinney 2016). 

6.  Develop and exercise capacity for moral leadership.  The foregoing remarks provide context for the insight that the solution to the challenges posed by climate change is principally and ultimately moral rather than technological.  As used here, the word moral does not refer to notions such as piety but to our ongoing practices: what we do and how we relate to one another and to the biophysical world in which we find ourselves.  Perhaps the challenges here being discussed arise in large part from our assumptions about what we need to do to thrive.  Testing these assumptions may lead to us raising some tough questions.  In what way do we thrive in a society predicated upon endless growth in which we are continuously stimulated to consume at levels that are clearly unsustainable?  Can we adapt to changing conditions by adjusting our expectations?  Can we live good lives without being surfeited by material excess? 

These are moral questions of a type that PR does not raise.  Addressing them would require a capacity for moral leadership of which PR provides not the slightest glimpse.  Moral leadership demands an aptitude to govern that transcends the bureaucratic techniques of governance currently so beloved by management theorists and practitioners.  An abdication of forthright leadership, governance involves assembling interested parties (stakeholders) to negotiate the solutions most agreeable to the group.  One solution to high GHG pollution—euphemistically called emissions in PR—is to buy pollution permits—euphemistically called offsets in PR—in markets that exist for such things.  Such market solutions are no more than social technologies that help stakeholders cope with the pollution they create by the simple expedient of allowing them to continue to pollute—on the assumption advances in reducing pollution achieved elsewhere makes everything all right. 

Governance manifests a normlessness that valourizes instrumental reason.  It focuses stakeholders upon clarifying the strategy and tactics best suited to get what they want.  Moral leadership attempts to establish norms.  In the face of climate change, it recognizes that everyone in society is a stakeholder.  It focuses discussion upon how we should live together in future and what we can do to achieve it.  Moral leaders throughout the world are declaring that GHG pollution is no longer tolerable and encouraging people to adopt new standards of conduct in recognition of this.  PR does not encourage any such revaluation of values.  In its introduction, PR makes the motherhood and apple pie statement that “Saskatchewan people are pragmatic, resourceful, innovative.  Throughout our history, we have faced complex, challenging problems imposed on us by geography and climate.  Our population spread over a vast land has taught us self-reliance and resilience.”  But it immediately announces that Saskatchewan people are also dependent on fossil fuels, implying that there is little or nothing they can do about this.  Apparently, they are so pragmatic that it nullifies their resourcefulness and capacity to adapt.  This is the final message one gets from the drafters of PR, after, of course, their extensive consultations with local industry as it currently exists.

7.  Defend and strengthen our public institutions and the tax structure that supports them.

The best response to any wide-scale social challenge is to enhance the capacity of people as citizens to engage in democratic discourse in search of the common good.  In the absence of this capacity, the values that they do defend can become parched and parochial indeed.  We need to become more engaged in questions such as what constitutes the good life?   Under what conditions can we best thrive?  Does the good life consist of endless accumulation and consumption?  Is it founded on endless growth?  Or are such beliefs principally disseminated by private capital battling the decline in profit margins that inevitably characterize mature markets?  To what extent are we free people capable of exercising agency?  Or is our society, marked as it is by increasing technological atomization, actually a structure of domination, the workings of which we are only dimly aware?  The more broadly such questions are discussed, the more likely that adaptations to climate change can be made that function as elements of social renewal.

To foster such deliberations, we need to defend and support our public institutions that prepare and enable us to participate.  More particularly, we need to defend liberal education.  We need to put more emphasis on educating people rather than training them for jobs.  The Latin root of education, educare, means to lead out.  A person who is educated is one who has been led out sufficiently from her daily existence to gain a critical perspective upon it, thereby enabling her to appreciate the consequences of her actions.  Too many people not educated in this sense are granted degrees and diplomas in Saskatchewan, people who have only been trained as little cogs of human capital to be fitted into some bureaucratic machine who otherwise have never read a book—not even an assigned textbook—and cannot compose a single, clear, English sentence.   We need to develop core curricula to ensure that people can engage in public life: to ensure that they can read and write and can think critically.  We need to ensure that they have some knowledge of concepts such as justice and freedom and the struggles in which our ancestors have traditionally engaged in search of them.  We need to ensure that they have some sense and feeling for our masterworks of the imagination.  Otherwise, public deliberations of the type and scale we need cannot proceed.

Finally, we need to defend a tax structure that supports public institutions.  We need to beware of parties that consistently campaign on the assumption that cutting taxes is the greatest public good.  PR is marked by the ideological sine qua non, delivered by fiat, that Saskatchewan cannot tax carbon.  It promises that we will proceed to public consultations concerning its contents, but the issue of carbon taxing seems to be off the table.  Why so?  Because it critiques carbon taxation as necessarily entailing a single policy, whereas documents such as PR that exclude it are therefore multi-dimensional?  If we believe that, our capacity for critical thinking is sadly underdeveloped indeed.

Like the drive to stimulate consumption, the drive to cut taxes seems linked to the declining profit rates that capital faces in mature markets.  If we can so hollow out public services that they no longer meet public needs, we can then justify privatizing them, thereby providing private interests new fields for investment.  Therefore, the payment of taxes comes to be characterized as some type of theft rather than an exercise in civic virtue.  If we are to address the challenges of climate change, it is essential that we have robust public institutions through which we as a people can deal with them.  Simply put, if we lose the battle to maintain a level of taxes adequate to fund just and effective social institutions, we lose the battle for democracy.

Works Cited

Folke, Carl. 2006.   "Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–ecological Systems Analyses."  Global Environmental Change 16: 253-267. Accessed Dec. 16, 2017. https://ac-els-cdn-com.cyber.usask.ca/S0959378006000379/1-s2.0-S0959378006000379-main.pdf?_tid=fa4b40ea-e2b3-11e7-af40-00000aab0f02&acdnat=1513465008_2a020e30bce309046c0b3d679848ae84.

Government of Saskatchewan. 2017.  "Climate Change."  Government of Saskatchewan. Dec. 4. Accessed Dec. 17, 2017.  http://www.saskatchewan.ca/business/environmental-protection-and-sustainability/climate-change-policy.

—. 2017.  "Prairie Resilience: A Made-in-Saskatchewan Climate Change Policy."  Government of Saskatchewan. Dec. 4.  Accessed Dec. 14, 2017. http://publications.gov.sk.ca/documents/66/104890-2017%20Climate%20Change%20Strategy.pdf.

Harvey, Fiona.  2017.  "EU Announces €9bn in Funding for Climate Action."  Guardian.  Dec. 12.  Accessed Dec. 17, 2017.  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/12/eu-announces-9bn-in-funding-for-climate-action.

Hill, Joshua S.  2017.  "Total Number of Coal Plants Plummeting Globally."  Clean Technica.  Mar. 23.  Accessed Dec. 17, 2017.  https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/23/global-number-coal-plants-plummeting/.

Howlett, Michael, and Nigel Kinney.  2016.  "The Current (Post Staples?) State of Canada's Resource Industries."  Chap. 3 in Canadian Environmental Policy and Politics: The Challenges of Austerity and Ambivalence, edited by Debora L. VanNijnatten, 38-56.  Don Mills, ON: Oxford UP.

Pittis, Don. 2017.  "Record Cheap Electricity is Transforming World Energy Markets as Canada Struggles to Keep Up: Don Pittis."  CBC News: Business.  Dec. 4.  Accessed Dec. 17, 2017.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/electricity-prices-markets-auction-alberta-1.4417616.

Polanyi, Karl. 1975 [1944].  The Great Transformation.  New York: Octagon.

Roseland, Mark.  2012.  Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments.  4th ed.  Gabriola Island, BC: New Society.

Walker, Brian, C. S. Holling, Stephen R. Carpenter, and Ann Kinzig. 2004.  "Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems."  Ecology and Society 9 (2).  Accessed Dec. 16, 2017.  https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/.