Environment

Almost everyone who looks at the history of North America through the lens of current times is appalled at the brutal decimation of native populations, at slavery, and at the complete absence of any concept of human rights.

It occurs to me that 50 to 100 years on, survivors of the environmental apocalypse will look at us in a similar way. Sadly, we'll be even more culpable. We've known the planet was destined to become overpopulated with humanity for at least 30 years, and our response has been indistinguishable from nothing.

Polar ice caps are disappearing more quickly than even the most alarmist had expected. Climate change wreaks trillions of dollars of damage on our economies. Critical ecosystems collapse and even species we deem to find attractive border on extinction. Meanwhile, we worry about bailing out car manufacturers.

It looks to me like we'll just keep on trying to get by and maintain our "standard of living" until there's a real environmental crisis, until we pass the "tipping point". Then we get to try to put our lives back together in the face of huge population migrations, limited food resources, war, disease, and eventually feudalism. Then we'll "buy locally" — there won't be any other choice!

Our legacy will be that we're the ones who ushered in the Second Dark Ages. Our barbarism will make the early history of the continent look like innocence. The worst, the saddest, part is that it might be too late to change a thing.

This weekend the Toronto Star announced the death of the SUV. One of the reasons this came up has to be the closing of the General Motors truck assembly line in Oshawa. It seems that as the price of gas gets above about $1.25 per litre (or $4/gallon in the U.S.), the number of people who "need" an unsafe gas guzzling SUV drops off pretty quickly. Now these same people "need" to unload their luxury land barges. There's nothing like a flexible definition of needs.

This is a good start. There's going to be a lot fewer road trips in the family road boat this year. Some people will argue that this is a bad thing, that families should be able to get out there with their kids to see all that this vast country has to offer. These people haven't actually seen a family in one of these vehicles. The parents are happily enjoying their time "together" while each kid is in their own isolated space with individual DVD players and noise-reducing headphones. They see as much of the countryside in their basements. Besides, a lot of travel options remain open. Our geography is every bit as dramatic from a train. Better yet, on a train it's a lot easier to get your kids to come out of their multimedia shells and look at something without risking a major accident.

Earth Hour has come and gone. Overall it was pretty successful: the statistic I heard was that electricity consumption in Ontario was down by 8%.

What does that mean? From a pragmatic viewpoint, not a hell of a lot. From a political viewpoint, it's pretty significant. I don't have the numbers that project the percentage of the population that participated, based on an 8% reduction, but I'll guess it's somewhere between 15% and 25%.

That's a lot of people sending a message. At this point it seems the big environmental problem is politicians. Most individuals get it, most corporations get it, but the politicians, who can actually manage the process of real change, just aren't there yet.

Maybe having as many as one in four voters demonstrate their commitment to change through Earth Hour will be enough to wake them up. I'm not holding my breath though.

It's interesting how often the question of online versus traditional shopping comes up. A friend asked me this earlier today and I gave him the same answer I've been providing for a decade now.

These days the response seems reasonable, but back in 1998 it was heresy. It used to be guaranteed to make a room full of start-ups and venture capitalists go dead quiet. Of course back then we were in the middle of the dot-com boom, when somehow geeks who don't like daylight managed to convince everyone that their concept of a good shopping experience was somehow universal.

So here it is:

Last month the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) released a report on dealing with the Gardiner Expressway an ageing elevated highway that cuts through the centre of downtown Toronto and pretty universally regarded as an eyesore.

In general it's a well reasoned report, but it's striking for its continuing embrace of car culture.

Ever hear someone rationalize their purchase of a gas-guzzling SUV as something they did to protect the safety of their kids? I hear that all the time. It's delusional, and here's why...

The "can't quite grasp the concept" set continues to argue that the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming is just too high.

Every time I see a freeway full of cars, I get angry. Aside from the environmental issues, which should get everyone riled up, I see a great mass of human brain power devoted to nothing. I see lost productivity. By lost productivity I mean not only in the traditional economic sense, but lost time. Time to spend with family and friends; time to play, to create. The "human capital" that we squander in service of our automotive fetish is astronomical. It's just an extra bonus that we're doing grave damage to the planet at the same time.

In the Greater Toronto Area alone, I wouldn't be surprised if we squander a million person-hours per day getting from home to work and back. If we say that this applies to a population base of roughly five million, extrapolate that to a North American population of 300 million, we come up with a cool 60 million hours. Of course, Toronto has legendary problems with traffic congestion, so let's be conservative. Divide by two and call it 150 million as a ballpark estimate for average. If everyone chose to work those hours, using an eight hour day, that represents a workforce of almost 19 million. Of course given the choice, probably 15 million of those would choose to watch television, but that still leaves four million to do valuable things, like think and create, to contribute to society. Even if my estimates are way out of whack, that's a lot.

Clearly there's a huge indirect payoff to building better, faster mass transit systems with comfortable environments that allow people to do something other than play human sardine. Then at least while you're stuck in motion, you have a chance of getting some work done instead of focusing on not getting in an accident. Is this likely to happen? No. Government policies seem to enshrine -- if not deify -- car culture. Support of the automotive sector is taken for granted as "the engine of the economy", when it's really an engine of decay. But trying to change this is tantamount to tilting at windmills, particularly since the capital investment required would probably be in the trillions.