More Sounds of Silence

In an earlier column I suggested that most politicians in this election campaign are unwilling to address the fatal flaws of our current economic structure. But the sounds of silence rumble on far beyond concerns related to the economy.

Who, for example, is giving more than lip-service to the global Peak Oil phenomenon? It is clear to most of us that the age of cheap and easy oil is over. We now drill four or five miles beneath a mile of water to try to find what oil is left. Or we rip up our boreal forests to get at the bitumen that lies below. We even devote increasingly large shares of croplands to produce ethanol or bio-diesel.

Why is no one casting a new vision related to energy use in the future? Who will stand up and say that we need to reduce our energy consumption and that much of that energy will need to come from renewable sources? Who is willing to talk about what rising fossil fuel prices will mean for the future of agriculture and the cost of food? Who can look food shortages and massive global starvation in the face and talk to us intelligently about ways to mitigate suffering? Silence. Mostly silence.

There seems to be a fair bit of attention in the election campaign about support for the middle class in our nation. It has long been an assumption that for a democracy to function well it needs a large middle class that wants to get involved in civil society. Has anyone noticed that our Canadian middle class is shrinking? That the wealth of our nation is flowing upward toward the super-rich, more so than downward toward the disenfranchised? Will someone please stand up for justice? I hear only a faint response. Mostly silence.

And what about our environment – the habitat we call home? Around the world, there is an emerging consensus that our global eco-system is in trouble. Different voices express differing concerns but all speak of an approaching tipping point beyond which it will be very difficult to restore any semblance of environmental integrity. Who is looking out to ensure that the thousands of chemicals in use today will not harm us? Or that our processed foods are in fact healthy for our families? Who will take responsibility for finding safe and permanent homes for spent nuclear fuel? There is an endless list of concerns. Any sound on the campaign trail? Mostly the sound of silence.

As Murray Dobbins notes in one of his recent articles: Our institutions are failing us in anticipating the consequences of the various catastrophes we actually know are coming. At some level it is simply a failure of the imagination. Our institutions have not been designed to create a response to something the world has never seen before.

Hence, only the sounds of silence on the campaign trail when it comes to things that really matter to us in the long run.

Jack Heppner