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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 25, 2008
Ghastly green
Among all the gaudy, glossy, grisly ugly trash I must pull from my mailbox every day, to get at my bills and court summonses, perhaps the most irritating is a giveaway magazine-format piece of junk of undetermined periodicity, entitled: “Corporate Knights: The Canadian Magazine for Responsible Business.”The supermarket flyers and chain-store brochures at least alert me to sales and specials that may or may not be available locally. Or rather, they would do so if I ever glanced at them. They also have the virtue of being easily recognized as trash, and therefore of wasting a minimum of my time, as I transfer them from the clogged mailbox to the large rusting garbage can that my thoughtful landlord has placed only two steps away. And while a detectable thrill of aesthetic pain is associated with handling these things, it is just a quick wince, yielding an equally quick but palpable relief when the task is over. Indeed, I have come to positively enjoy the deep thunk-whoosh, as a thick accumulation of flyers drops into the can, and inflates its plastic liner. We are living now in what I call the Age of the Environmentalcase, when religious impulses that should be turned to God are instead directed to the latest ideological fad, and we suffer the irrationalism that follows naturally from every form of spilt religion. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” according to one of the deepest adages in the Bible, and there is nothing subtle about the battiness to which I am now referring. For the supermarket flyers themselves post the word “organic” over goods that could not possibly be anything else, and the glossier brochures declare a corporate “green consciousness” which is directly belied by the production values in the brochures themselves. (Okay, I have glanced at a few of these things.) The “magazine” that I, perhaps a little unfairly, named above, is one of many to which I have never subscribed. I haven’t space to name the others. To the publishers’ credit, they have never tried to send me an invoice. On the cover is a bar code with a price stating “$5.95” -- but I would further credit them with knowing that their journal is unsaleable on newsstands. It is instead supported by full-colour ads from corporate sponsors who use their space to preen themselves on their “commitment” to planetary ecology and -- according to me -- to exhibiting the widely-held corporate conviction that there’s one born every minute. I could more fairly blame myself for having twice conducted a copy of this shiny rag up to my ivory tower for further examination. In the strictest Catholic view, this was perhaps a sin, for I knew that the thing was going to annoy me, even before I’d read the coverlines. It was like waving a green flag before a dichromatically colourblind bull. In the first of these numbers, the city of Ottawa was being celebrated as Canada’s urban leader in “sustainable” whatever. I was proud to see a couple of actual Ottawanians correcting this nonsense in the “Mail Bag” of the subsequent edition. In the second of these numbers, I was afflicted with a column offering, “Ten Ways to Raise Green Taxes” -- each one of them providing a website link for the reader to “get involved.” Fair enough, this is Canada, a country whose citizens have long since proved, by their voting record, that they crave new taxes, and are easily outraged when anyone suggests lowering or abolishing the old ones. And democracy does provide a kind of free market in bureaucracy: how is a supporter of free markets to oppose lobbyists who only promise more of what this market demands? What struck me about this representative effusion, written in the usual “upbeat” manner one associates with the eager free-lance puppy, was that every item on the list, from “toxics use reduction fees” to “feebates on cars” to “pay-as-you-throw garbage fees” to (fast forward) “ocean conservation taxes” would carry unintended consequences so obvious that surely any intelligent reader could supply them for himself. It follows that intelligent readers are not being addressed. Instead, this bumph, and felled forests full of similar propaganda, is being delivered into a public space in which the costs and benefits of various public measures are pathologically ignored. The citizen-reader is treated as a little green automaton who simply waits for orders to deliver a uniform squawk. This is the principal environmental problem in our democracy today: the idiotization of the general public. It is the inevitable result of the bureaucratization of our public life. As the Nanny State expands, it sucks all the clean air out of civil discourse, and replaces it with the stench of “settled science,” and institutional priorities, enumerated by persons who in turn have no idea what they are talking about, because the nonsense they are spouting is never challenged. This is a terrible, and potentially fatal, environmental problem, for sleepwalking hardly ever ends well. It is why my own number one priority, is to find new ways to cut through all the crap.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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