Don't Blame Us...What Can WE Do? (Shrug)

In the National Post, Bruce Pardy ("WWF report wrong about Canada's 'print'") claims that the recent World Wildlife Fund “Living Planet” report is wrong to say that Canada’s “ecological footprint” (negative impact on the environment) is among the worst (4th highest) in the world. This ranking, he says, reflects the “prevailing world view of the international environmental intelligentsia that the world's environmental problems are the fault of Western industrialized countries, each of which owes a debt to developing nations.”

“But it isn’t true”, says Pardy. He makes the following argument: True, on a per capita basis we consume far more in the way of national resources and exude far more in the way of harmful byproducts (including greenhouse gases) than do people in India and China, let alone people in sub-Saharan Africa. But in fact we are “living within our biological capacity”, and so are other “high-footprint” but low population density countries such as Finland, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand and Norway. For you see, what all these countries have in common with us is this: low population densities and plenty of natural resources. Thus, “even given the large amount of environmental resources consumed by each of their citizens, the total ecological load in these countries is still smaller than what their natural resources are able to provide. These are not the nations imposing massive environmental externalities on the rest of the world.”

Who then are the burdensome nations of the world? “The United States is in ecological deficit, but so are China, India and the oil-producing countries of the Middle East. These nations create significant environmental burdens upon the globe because their impacts exceed the capacity of their own ecosystems.”

Pardy does acknowledge that our being in “ecological credit” has nothing to do with any virtuous behaviour on our part: Canada is in this position "(not due to) superior environmental governance or resource management skills, but because it has a small population in a large, resource-rich territory. That's an accident of history.” Yet he still concludes that “Canada and these other developed countries are not the main culprits for global environmental problems.”

In other words, we have plenty of resources to waste, so our wasting of resources is not a problem. The problem is not that the world’s rich consume too many resources- the problem is either that the poor consume too many resources, or that there are too many poor. Perhaps we should consume the poor, as Jonathan Swift once suggested. The implication is that China and India, for example, are major culprits for environmental problems because unlike us they have high population densities and comparatively few natural resources. What are they supposed to do about that? Is there anything we should be doing about that? Pardy doesn’t say.

Pardy then goes on to suggest that there is little point in our trying to reduce our impact on the environment, because, you see, we are such a small country (in terms of population), and so our contribution to solving the problem will necessarily be slight. By the same reasoning, no one should ever vote because no single vote ever makes a decisive difference, and no one should give to charity unless one is rich enough to make a major contribution to the budget of the fundraising organization.

He also asks whether the growth in human impact on the planet can be halted “while maintaining democratic systems and fundamental freedoms.”

Well, look at it this way: the longer we put off making adjustments to our profligate lifestyles, the harder it will be to avoid draconian measures further down the line. When the crunch comes, people will likely choose survival over more abstract notions such as democracy and freedom, especially if our democratic institutions are seen as having been ineffective at averting catastrophe. Since I am partial to human rights, freedom and democracy (and survival too) I would prefer it if we could avoid that dilemna altogether. We’ll have to quickly overcome attitudes like Pardy’s if we’re to have a hope of doing so.