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 19th 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
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"Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–ecological
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