Paris Notes 2: Climate Change, Sustainability, and My Role in Stephen Harper's Rise

Much of the appeal of Stephen Harper's years as Prime Minister of Canada has been a kind of stasis. While the United States experienced economic disaster, its banking system teetering for a moment on the brink of collapse, Canada under Harper just hummed along, seemingly affected by neither financial disaster, government shutdown, and political spectacle to its south nor financial disaster and near political dissolution in Europe. Harper's appeal is that, under his firm and boring hand, plain old Canada will keep doing its thing, insulated from the danger that surrounds it in a violent and difficult world. In this sense, Harper has been more philosophically conservative than his American counterparts who, at least since the mid-sixties, have been far more concerned with overturning the status quo than upholding it. Harper's appeal (and this is by no means necessarily a bad thing) lies in his affinity with the average and the boring.

In true Gramscian fashion, though, positions have shifted below Harper's placid surface. These shifts are numerous and seem likely next month to end his tenure as leader of a majority government if not to cost him his job as Prime Minister.

Ten years ago, I played a small role in the election in which Harper first became Prime Minister, serving as both de facto campaign manager and de jure Official Agent for my brother Nigel's campaign on the Green Party ticket. Those were heady days. The campaign stretched a then-longish 60 days through December and January. The Green Party flirted with double digits in national polls and there were high, if unrealistic, hopes that it would win a seat in Parliament. As befits a Green Party campaign with no chance of victory (the Liberal candidate in the riding was the Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale), we ran a low-carbon operation, travelling by bus and foot to events. Despite weather typical of Saskatchewan in December, I rode my bicycle to pick up campaign materials from the Elections Canada office once our petition to be placed on the ballot was accepted. I flatter myself that we were election office favourites for our commitment to principle.

From this distance, one striking aspect of that campaign was the frequency with which we evoked the promise of "sustainability." We uttered the word constantly in conversations and speeches. My most striking memory from the campaign is of Nigel appearing in front of a crowd of a few hundred at a University of Regina all-candidates forum. The NDP candidate touted a Sierra Club report stating that her party had the greenest of all party platforms. Nigel, the dreadlocked outsider candidate, responded directly with a lengthy list of provincial NDP governments' environmental sins, before adding, "And this is the NDP. They're supposed to be the good guys!" He then summed up his position that he had no chance of winning, and the Green Party had no chance of forming government, but someone needed to stand up and point out that if we did not start living sustainably, we were all doomed. This whole election, he concluded, was about sustainability.

Nigel's impassioned speech, one beautifully structured so that it moved from a narrowly partisan attack on the NDP to a philosophical cri de coeur, was very well received. I have surely romanticized this moment of youthful political action, but I recall an ovation that far outstripped anything granted any other candidate that day.

What strikes me today, though, is how quickly the basic message of that speech has become untenable. "Sustainability" as a battle cry has built into it a certain narrative of stasis. There exists, the word implies, a correct balance between human activity and the natural world, and our responsibility is to act only within the boundaries established by that balancing act. Thus we might sustain the earth in its natural state rather than render it changed.

This emphasis on sustaining the current state of things is written all over the hegemonic version of environmentalism: the happily cyclic emblem of recycling suggests that all materials can be returned to an earlier state in a never-ending process; household composting returns food to the dirt from which it came so that food might be grown anew; the very idea of renewable energy sources implies wind, tides, and sunlight that can be harvested forever. Where industrial society is headed toward collapse, sustainable development promises a human civilization that can continue in perpetuity.

But what if all of this is built on a fantasy? For the notion that we humans are in some kind of balance with an external nature, and that this balance might be maintained, seems increasingly fantastical. Slavoj Zizek has been making a version of this critique for some time, and it is clear now that many of the facts are on his side. Global climate change is a part of this; whatever balance may have existed in the past, humans have now committed the earth to significant enough change in the oceans and the atmosphere that sustaining a semblance of the status quo for more than a decade or two is impossible. In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert makes a similar point in the context of species loss; according to her reporting, we are already committed to change so significant it registers in geological time. To the extent that these facts are well established, the idea of sustaining the status quo seems woefully irrelevant.

I argued in an earlier post that climate change in some ways seems to rebut the postmodern notion of the death of metanarratives. Here, though, climate change would seem to push us in the direction of another postmodernist strain: that of contingency and indeterminacy. For if no "sustainable" future is possible, if the climate change and mass extinction die are already cast, then what is left for environmentalism is to make the best of conditions as they change beneath us. That kind of environmentalism could take on the heady, emancipatory swirl theorists like Ernesto Laclau see in the construction of multiple and shifting political coalitions and causes. But it could also look like a late capitalist nightmare of insecurity in an uncertain world. In either case, the old promise of mere stasis cannot be kept.

The battle cry of sustainability is hardly dead. Indeed, headlines about "Sustainable Development Goals" are everywhere in advance of next week's United Nations meeting on the subject, and the Green Party of Canada remains committed to the concept of a "sustainable economy." Stephen Harper may yet hold on to his job on the promise of continued normalcy for the indefinite future. Conditions, though, have shifted underneath the feet of conservatives and environmentalists alike. And those shifting conditions reveal that environmentalists were, in the specific sense outlined here, conservatives all along.