Liberalism, I would like to argue, is based on three notions (and I am drawing this from the historian Fernande Roy and her discussion of liberalism in her own work).

1.) Liberty 2.) Equality 3.) Property

Liberty rests in the individual foremost. This means that the individual functions as her own authority. This also means that government must be formed by the consent of the governed.

Equality is subordinate to liberty because it functions as the de facto (and somtimes de jure) recognition that all individuals in a society are equal before the law. But equality is contingent upon individual liberty.

And then there is property. Property, I would like to argue (again following the example of others before me like Roy and Ian McKay) is coupled with liberty. Liberty and property are perhaps inseparable because a person’s right to property is indistinguishable from her role as her own authority. In other words, because my right to work, to own and to acquire wealth is the basis of my own authority to govern myself (and to choose) government requires my consent to act on my behalf. I am an individual and a citizen because of my property in my own person and once upon a time because of my wealth. If you look back at the history of liberal democracies like Canada, Britain and the United States you will find that each one had a property requirement for the franchise.

But this is where the irrationality comes in. In liberal democratic theory we speak of the sanctity of property but we do not speak of the condition of property. So, for instance, I may have a right to own land and that land’s value as a liquid asset may be assigned by its exchange value in the marketplace, but liberal theory is not concerned with the condition of the land itself. In other words, the value of my land is not necessarily determined by how abused it is, how infertile it has become, or how degraded I’ve rendered it. And there is no guarantee that the damage I’ve inflicted on the ecology will show up (at least for a time) in the valuation of lands adjacent or downstream from my own. (See Ted Steinberg’s Slide Mountain for an interesting discussion about this.)

To give an even more specific example that speaks to a contemporary problem unknown even one hundred years ago: I own a farm and it borders a stream that is a tributary of the drainage system in my state. By stripping my property of the trees and brush along the banks of that stream I have made it easier for the fertilizers I am using on my acreage to seep into the stream. One of the chief sources of water pollution and damaging trophic algal blooms is fertilizer which raises the nitrogen content in water acts as a nutrient rich feed for algae.

So, my property might be valuable because of the price-per-acre it commands in the real estate market, but the pollution of water sources (especially downstream) is not taken into the assessment of that property. But what is the actual condition of my property if I have stripped it of trees and allowed the pollutants from my farm to spread through the drainage basin and damage the larger ecosystem? The condition of the property, if you look at the capitalization of my farm, appears to be fine. But the condition of my property so far as my neighbours are concerned and concerning the larger ecology is decidedly poorer than when I purchased it. Perhaps this reality will enter into the real estate market at some point. But the actual condition of the property as it goes to market is, I would argue, artificial and inflated.

Land is but one example. What about the condition of workers? I can make a similar argument. I own a factory that is highly profitable because of the low overhead costs involved in keeping wages and benefits down, but the value of the factory is assessed not on the impact this has on the workers themselves but on the overall profit/loss calculations of my business. This impacts the market value of my business and its stock value because high profits impress investors and boost investor confidence. Interestingly, my business is highly ecological because of its impact on the stock exchange and even the job employment and GDP numbers, but that ecology is measured through statistics and money; it is not measured in bodies and lives.

What about the condition of the workers and their property in their own bodies? If they are overtired, over-stressed and prone to injury or illness because of those conditions then the condition of their property in their own person is surely degraded. Sure, they could invest in my company (if they have disposable income) and thus possibly increase their monetary wealth, but the condition of their bodies and psychology is degraded.

If we use examples like these and then extrapolate this to something we call “society,” or something we could call “ecology” then we begin to see (I believe) the irrationality of a model of property that sees only market exchange value and does not calculate or consider “non-market” values such as health and sustainability unless those issues are re-introduced into the marketplace by the loss of working hours due to ill health, stress leave, injury or through the destruction of lands and resources needed for production. Usually by that point much has already happened and the solution profferred is not systematic but is instead a quick and targeted fix designed to salvage or patch up the visible problem.

I think this is highly irrational. Human beings, for one thing, cannot (and should not) calculate their self-worth on the basis of their exchange value. Surely human beings should not have to subordinate their health and well-being to so-called “market forces.” After all, regulatory laws were designed to curb this practice. And we certainly should not look at the natural world only in terms of exchange value because this allows for widespread abuse and destruction based on profit returns and investor confidence and not on the long-term viability of our enterprises or even the short-term cost to the conditions of the people and animals (and lands and resources) put to work.

The problem with this irrational approach to property is we have developed a constricted and sterile definition of markets and market values. The most valuable parts of markets are the vibrant and living beings and their ideas and expressions that are exchanged there. Our current approach is too statistical, too abstract and too detached from lived and embodied realities to be considered even remotely rational.

Note: See Fernande Roy’s Progrès, harmonie, liberté : le libéralisme des milieux d’affaires francophones de Montréal au tournant du siècle (Montréal: Boréal, 1988) or Ian McKay’s essay on “The Liberal Order Framework” in Jean François Constant and Marcel Ducharme’s Liberalism and Hegemony : Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

What I find equally striking is that the government is citing ties between Canadian environmental organizations and foreign organizations and donors as evidence of foreign interests trying to impose their agenda upon Canada. While Enbridge may be a Canadian company, forgive me for asking when any of the foreign owned energy interests at work developing the Alberta oil sands became any less “foreign” than Canadian environmental activists and Canadian charities working to raise awareness of the risks of this pipeline to the coastal ecosystem and communities of British Columbia. And pardon me for wondering when the multinational oil industry became more “Canada-minded” than citizens groups calling attention to the risks involved in building this pipeline.

For years now multinational corporations have been developing the Alberta oil sands. The multinationals have always been at the forefront of energy development in the west. Apparently this government believes that because its own economic and energy development interests dovetail (for now) with the bottomline of companies like Enbridge that Enbridge is somehow more concerned about this country than Canada’s own citizens who oppose the project. I think that it is a tremendous mistake for the Government of Canada to turn against its own citizens simply because they disagree with its policies. And I am deeply offended that it refers to those who disagree with (and oppose) the Enbridge pipeline as its adversaries. I didn’t know until now that dissent automatically made a person an adversary of the Harper Government. An adversary is, after all, an enemy.

Here is a list of recent articles reporting on this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/01/11/pol-gateway-pipeline-strategy.html

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/sustainability/2012/01/25/scary-time-canada

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/greenpage/affidavit-accuses-prime-ministers-office-of-threatening-environmental-charity-137994418.html

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1120800–pmo-branded-environmental-group-an-enemy-of-canada-affidavit-says

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Feds+list+First+Nations+green+groups+oilsands+adversaries/6054920/story.html

http://www.globaltvbc.com/canada/affidavit+accuses+prime+ministers+office+of+threatening+environmental+charity/6442566233/story.html

I-Tunes has a live version of his performance which is just the man and his voice and his banjo (and I think a back-up guitar player). The tempo is faster than this version but it seems to bring out the emotion even more. It is my favourite and I give it my highest recommendation.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Positive Ecology

Canadians are given a false choice: the economy or the environment. TheAlbertaoil sands are a perfect example: they are presented as the backbone of the economy; without expanding oil production and pipelines to the B.C. coastCanada’s economy will falter. To question the feasibility (or appropriateness) of the oil sands is tantamount to questioning freedom. It appears there is little space for environmentalism in a country whose economic development model is built upon non-renewable energy.  This explains, in part, whyCanadahas withdrawn from the Kyoto Accord.

I do not accept this false dichotomy. Historically, human ingenuity and capacity for moral improvement suggest we have better options. We know that choosing the economy at the Earth’s expense is not only impossible, it is immoral. I believe we are in need of a new model of civil society to change this dynamic. We actually can accomplish this without a bloody revolution. We can give liberalism an ecological facelift.

Why liberalism? Because it is the constitutional, economic and political basis of our democracy. Our political order is founded upon the protection of individual rights, specifically the right-to-property. In the liberal tradition of Hobbes and Locke, we see the development of a political being, an individual that the Canadian political philosopher C.B. Macpherson called “the possessive individual.” We are all “possessive individuals” because we enjoy a right to own property and the right to work. We learn early that people benefit by acquiring wealth to ensure their security and to exercise their ingenuity and this teaches us how to calculate our “rational self-interest.” We value governments which ensure individuals of the right to safety, security and property or “peace, order and good government.”

“Peace, order and good government” is a noble but negative idea because it means freedom from war, disorder and tyranny. This negative approach is useful but it does not encourage thinking of society as a collaborative effort. It precludes thinking ecologically.

This is ironic because the very idea of “society” is an ecological one; ecology means “community.” And the price system is also an ecological mechanism valued both for responding to human needs and for bringing diverse enterprises together in common cause. Awareness of the ecological attributes of markets suggests that an “economy versus the environment” frame is truly uninspired economics.

The economist Franz Schumacher wrote in Small Is Beautiful that economics now defines “the good society.” While citizens might not espouse only materialistic concerns, Schumacher wrote “[T]he development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place.” This approach has actually come at the expense of growing the marketplace. For instance, right now a grove of black spruce along the Athabasca River are worth less than a barrel of bitumen crude and because of this, valuable resources like trees (and the value-added labour involved in forestry) are sacrificed for the short-term, non-renewable production of oil. The demand for non-conventional oil is depriving people of local fields for sustainable entrepreneurship and discouraging environmental alternatives designed to solve the oil dependency problem. Our federal government actually supports this.

Environmentalism is precisely the body of thought needed to provide innovative and profitable solutions to our fossil fuel and emissions problems. And environmentalism is not anti-capitalist; it has no cardinal tenet opposing market economics and sound ecological stewardship. The reason environmentalism can turn liberalism “green” is because both philosophies are fundamentally pluralistic. Liberalism recognizes the existence of manifold human experiences and champions a political economy of human experience; environmentalism supports this by recognizing the diverse possibilities inherent in our living world.

What “green” liberalism can do is expand our notion of civil society. We should keep our constitutional protections of life and property but we must add the principle of stewardship to our calculation of rational self-interest. Environmental abuse is a threat to property, work and enterprise which means it is anti-market. Because we are facing challenges like climate change which threaten the property of us all, a civil society that acknowledges stewardship is vital.

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

-Sylvia Plath

A fourth grade class in Massachusetts has taken action and has put together a petition pressuring Universal Studios to put environmental education onto the website promoting the film. After all, The Lorax  is about protecting our Earth from destructive greed. . . isn’t it terribly ironic then that a promotion for the movie focuses on the money and not the story’s message? Forgive me for not being cynical about this and thinking that, yes, it is ironic and shockingly so (even though it probably isn’t).

If you’d like to sign the petition, here’s the link:

http://www.change.org/petitions/z-let-the-lorax-speak-for-the-trees

And how could I not link to the original cartoon version itself? A film and story I love deeply and that has influenced my life profoundly.

And then there are some people of whom you can say the same. I’ve thought about the romantic tales of despondent lovers who never recover from the death of  their beloved: Robert Baldwin (here in Canada) or Edgar Allan Poe, to name just two that spring to mind. I think of Romeo and Juliet and the lyric in the Beach Boys’ pneumatic and achingly beautiful song “God Only Knows”: “If you should ever leave me/ Oh, life would still go on, believe me/ But the world could show nothing to me/ So what good would living do me?”

The same can be said of our relationships with the land. In colonial history there are tales of Aboriginals who were kidnapped by European explorers, taken to Europe to remain, and who never got over their exile and died. Nicholas Black Elk (in Black Elk Speaks) recounts a stunningly moving vision he had as a child of being taken from away his home and brought across the water. This was part of a visionary “illness” he experienced that forewarned him of the suffering that was to come to his people on the Great Plains. I’ve never forgotten it.

All of this is about something probably very familiar to you. I think most of us can relate to the experience of profound feelings of love and even the fleeting moments of completeness we feel with another person.  Perhaps many of us have also known the experience of communion with a place (is that personal or impersonal?). In religion, the devout talk about God as the beloved and completeness through divine grace (personal and impersonal?).

So, speaking of personal and impersonal experiences of love and grace. . . what exactly is a “Calling”? I would define it thus: the experience of a persistent and urgent need to see a task to completion. The task is perennial; it is a responsibility that is never met and a burden that, like the stone of Sisyphus, keeps rolling down the mountain. If you have a calling your life is directed toward pushing that stone. And you push that stone alone.

I think the idea of a calling relates to the experience of love intimately. A “called person” feels her energies and longing directed toward a point. That point is always close at hand, like a memory of someone or some place. There are times -speaking now of myself- that I am sure that I am here to do one thing. And that thing is always right there beside me, or in front of me, no matter how alone I am. It’s a strange experience because it is feels very real but is completely immaterial.

When I think about people and places that matter to me a curious element enters the picture. In my heart and in my head these people and places are images that glisten in the mind and slide before my eyes. Their presence is real and the variety of emotions they evoke can’t be put down in a simple descriptive sentence or paragraph. But their presence there -inside of me- is about me and not about them. They come to me because something inside of me wants and needs them. I call them to me without even consciously doing so. They are the opposite of fealty to an idea and yet . . . I live with the idea of them.

I think it is easier to be loyal to a calling because its source is unknown. When in doubt, you can say the source is yourself, faute de mieux. Or the source is divine and then you are simply serving. This is all quite odd, of course. Read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling about Abraham, Isaac and God and then, like a good modern, you’ll think a calling is probably maniacal if not criminal.

But a calling is about love, above all, because it is about mystery. I find when I love and experience love I am in the midst of a similar mystery.

I have spent a lot of my mental “capital” thinking about how land, land stewardship and a fine, nurturing regard for the Earth can be written into political language and even made a constitution. It’s a daunting task, especially for someone who comes by his political theorizing on his own and not from “proper” or practical training. But it also is an interesting exercise because it forces me to think like a political theorist while trying to hold onto my environmental sensibilities.

And what are those sensibilities?

A criticism of environmentalism is that it is “romantic.” But when you read about what romanticism actually is, I would argue that in many ways environmentalists are not the least bit romantic. “We” can’t afford to be because the threat of ecological destruction and environmental degradation is real, imposing and pressing on the world. In other words, “We” environmentalists have to be empirical, studious and eminently sober. We have little time for fancy.

Romanticism, you see, is a fancy. It is about flights of the imagination and it is sentimental and places human feeling and longing foremost in the mind. Now, I am a romantic because I am a sentimental person and I respond deeply to my own emotions. I am a reader of romantic poetry and fiction and I am enamoured of works of the imagination. But as an environmentalist I have to be a realist, plus royaliste que le rois. I believe this is the predicament of the environmentalist in our modern age and it is a predicament. So, what I do is I praise the dynamism and plurality of free markets. I abstract about property ownership and I try to think about how we can take a positive value like “stewardship” and write it into a workable definition of civil society. This is challenging because we live in a liberal society where property ownership is a protection against the aggression and avarice of others and we define freedom as freedom from coercion or even freedom from limitations. It is far too easy for environmentalists to think in terms of limiting human behaviour and telling people how they must behave because so much environmental degradation comes from wastefulness and resource abuse. But in a liberal society that is a one way ticket to irrelevancy. So, how do I convince people that if you want to be freer you’ve got to be more nurturing, perhaps even gentle?

It’s a task that requires imagination and originality and a dull doggedness. Somehow I’m supposed to (or I should) juggle inspiration with fact. I need to be imaginative but I have to remember and embrace the real, living experiences of the people I want to persuade. And in politics the best regime -in my mind- is the one that recognizes the plurality and diversity of human experiences. . . which suggests I should somehow tell them nothing and show them everything. Tall order.

To put a point on all this: I am finding that forms of thought and expression have everything to do with the content of what we are able to say. I find that by taking up political thought and the essay format I will not persuade by emotion. But this labour must be sustained by passion. And romantic sentimentality, the belief that my life is sustained, enhanced and improved by a world that is more diverse, more vibrant and full of myriad plants and animals and people who love the abundance of nature is my cause. I want to be the Lorax in the garb of John Locke.

Here goes. . .

Oh how I do yearn for the shared understanding that is supposed to come from moments of communion. I imagine all of us (humanity) standing on a cliff overlooking Lake Erie, let’s say, in late April or early May when the funnel of migratory birds comes north to nest in the boreal forest. And it is clear and sunny with a breeze. The lake is blue and the birds, in great streams of colour and song, come across the water and we all feel the rushing of their wings, the beating of their song and the sun light rays of the wind in one complete, measureless moment. We all have a shared experienced, let out a collective swoon and then we go home and say, yes, this is what life is about and what is worth protecting in the world. In one moment we have all felt like a community of human beings enjoying a shared understanding. We have seen beauty and agreed on its worth. We have recognized this beauty comes from non-human nature and we feel a deep respect for it and a primordial desire to protect it. We feel kinship with each other and with the entire world.

Romantic, yes? Philosophical? Yes.

-Isaiah Berlin

This is why I think it is wise to be plural in one’s outlook.

http://www.humanesociety.org/about/state/humane_state_ranking_2011.html