CHAPTER 1: VIVE LA REVOLUCION

What is the intention of [this] movement? If you examine its values, missions, goals and principles, and I urge you to do so, you will see that at the core of all [these] organizations are two principles, albeit unstated: first is the Golden Rule; second is the sacredness of all life, whether it be a creature, child or culture. – Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest

Concerns about environmental problems have deepened since the first edition of this book was written, and for good reason. In the past few years, the acidification of our oceans, the loss of glaciers and ice caps, the destruction of forests and agricultural land and the increased instability of the planet’s weather have only gotten worse. Fortunately, human responses to this state of crisis have also mushroomed. Every day, more people are taking on the work of defending and restoring ecosystems, providing more equitable sharing of resources to local people, and assessing what constitutes real human happiness and purpose. And even allowing for the deepening general crisis, there have been some heady successes on the level of local ecosystem health.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the many groups and individuals worried about the environment were seeing evidence of rising cancers from waste and nuclear dumps, increasingly despoiled forests and farmlands, dead zones in the oceans and diebacks of once-common wildlife, like striped bass, wild turkeys, bald eagles and sea otters. Today, all four of those endangered species are on the rise, thanks to remarkable effort combined with tough protective legislation. For example, the establishment of the super-fund laws for toxic clean-up in the U.S. has prevented the growth of toxic waste dumps and cleaned up many that used to destroy rivers and neighbourhoods. There’s now an international treaty in place to eliminate “the dirty dozen,” the twelve most dangerous chemical compounds in existence, as well serious efforts in Europe to analyze and eliminate similar compounds, even before they get into the manufacturing stream.

Almost every country in the world now has national and provincial environmental departments and many municipalities have appointed environmental or sustainability commissioners. David Day in Calgary and Sadhu Johnston, Chicago’s Chief Environmental Officer, can exercise authority within all branches of city government, “making sure the green tint runs to the core.”1 There is barely a large supermarket left in the countries of the G-8 without an organic food section, and there are thousands of fully organic markets right across our continent. rBGH, the artificial bovine growth hormone used to make cows produce more milk, is being phased out of production. After heroic community and court battles, culminating in Walmart’s rejection of milk containing rBGH in 2008, Monsanto—the chemical giant that benefited most from the sale of this chemical—has given up the fight.

In many parts of the world, it is becoming common for farmers to receive grants to keep land in wildlife or wetland habitat; poor countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are taking more hands-on control over water and forests; and while the battle for the Amazon still rages, the decimation of remaining tracts of boreal forest in Canada has been slowed by some truly progressive legislation that does not try to replace wild ecosystems with monocultured plantations, but turns them over to the indigenous groups that know best how to manage them. The first clear understanding of sustainable habitat protection is the “cores, corridors and carnivores” movement that was just gaining steam in certain parts of North America a few years ago. It has become the accepted standard of remediation. Even more ubiquitous is the reaction against industrialized food systems, with the Slow Food and Locavore movements providing delighted gourmets around the world with delicious foods produced in ways that are as protective of soil, air, water and wildlife ecosystems as any punitive legislation.

The list of accomplishments goes on. The growth in every kind of sustainable building—from solar and wind-powered highrises to tiny, 700-square-foot “eco-houses”—has been nothing short of phenomenal. Scores of books, to say nothing of hundreds of websites, are analyzing the pros and cons of a bewildering new array of energy sources. Expanded geothermal and wind energy technologies are becoming more sophisticated every day, and new tidal and wave generators are generating relatively clean power in New York’s East River and off the coasts of Portugal and Washington state. As for solar, the safest and most basic energy source of all, large-scale solar technologies that go well beyond panels to heat water or generate small amounts of electricity are now in place. Methane and other greenhouse gas captured for energy use are becoming available even to small businesses and farms. Self-energizing cars that feed energy in and out of the grid are coming onto the market. These new energy sources and technologies will help address the biggest problem we have ever faced as a species: global warming.

The last big push to save the environment through such technologies was slowed by an economic downturn in the late 1980s that seemed severe at the time but was far less so than the one that started in 2008. After the heady moment of the Earth Summit in 1992, the economy suddenly became far more important than saving natural systems. Ecological concerns were pushed aside for more than a decade, spawning runaway, unregulated financial growth and industrial development. Today, with the unmistakable signs of systemic ecological breakdown in evidence—the loss of glaciers, the collapse of fisheries, the threatened extinction of thousands of species, to say nothing of the alarming changes in the chemical make-up of the planet’s atmosphere and its oceans—it is impossible for intelligent people to think that the environment and the economy are unrelated, or that we can tackle one without taking care of the other. People have recognized that there can be no economic wealth without a productive biosphere and are taking action in response to this fundamental truth.