Environmental Collapse and Political Reform
by Lynn McDonald
(published in At Guelph 14 June 2006)

Earth Day came and went on April 22 with ever more worrisome warnings of species and resource depletion, global warning and environmental pollution. “Environment Week” is approaching, with Canada’s cancellation of its commitment to the Kyoto Accord and tinkering with Senate reform the federal government’s preoccupation. Why are we not acting on what we know we to be real, serious, fundamental problems concerning our health and indeed survival on this planet?

From ordinary warnings of decline there is now a “collapse” literature predicting environmental destruction on a scale to result in massive extinctions and societal collapse. Most of this writing includes recommendations for reform, how we can mend our ways and avoid collapse if we act now.

It is worth pondering the weight as well as the number of these contributions. Some were commissioned by respected organizations and draw on the work of leading scientists, e.g., the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, 1987; the Science Council of Canada’s Canada as a Conserver Society, 1977; and the Royal Society of Canada’s Planet under Stress, 1980. Some are by eminent persons, e.g., Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, 1962, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1997, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Ronald Wright’s Short History of Progress was commissioned as the Massey Lectures for 2004. It optimistically gives advice for reform before it is too late: “We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones.” But if we do not we will enter “an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages of our past,” and this before the 21st century grows very old: “Now is our last chance to get the future right” (132).

Some steps have been taken in response to these warnings, for example “round tables” were established in Canada after Our Common Future. Tougher laws on pesticides were brought in by many countries after Silent Spring. The warnings on the thinning of the ozone layer resulted in controls over ozone-depleting substances. Acid rain was taken seriously enough to result in curbs on emissions in cars and power plants. But on the Kyoto Accord--only a modest first step for environmentalists--Canada never moved to action at all and seems now even to be abandoning its token commitment.