Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

Green Meanies (Part II)

Trying to put a stop to the Guppie stranglehold on the Environmental Movement is going to be difficult.  They have as their allies two of the most powerful forces on the planet – national governments and the international media.  In hugely oversimplified terms, here’s how it works.  Environmental groups need government money and media exposure to exist.  Governments respond to noise.  Nothing else gets their attention.  Furthermore, nobody wants to piss off the media, ‘cause they’re mean, and they will hurt you.  These three vultures actually hate each other but they all fly together for mutual survival.  Let me give you an example.

Several years ago, some brainiac came up with the idea of carbon credits or cap and trade or scratch ‘n’ sniff or whatever the hell they’re calling it this week.  This is a very complicated system which, in part, involves trading pollutants for clean air and money or vice versa – nobody really knows for sure.  In theory, this should work, but when you look at it a little closer, what it amounts to is paying someone else to quit smoking for you.  Environmental groups jumped on the bandwagon, shouting “Hallelujah! We’re saved!”  The media caught the trend and demanded action, and a ton of governments responded with legislation.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.  So, nothing much has changed except factories are now following carefully crafted regulations while they turn our planet into Venus.  Even worse, the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse decided to cover their bums and blame the Industrial Corporations they tried to hoodwink in the first place.  This is only one of a thousand situations, and it’s only going to get worse now that the Unholy Trinity has found a convenient scapegoat – Big Business, Corporate America, Corporate France, Corporate Borneo.  It doesn’t matter: Corporate Somebody.

Suddenly, the world has a resident bogeyman.  Don’t get me wrong: I would never trust my future to those soulless pirates at British Petroleum or Union Carbide, but I not going to offload my responsibilities to them either.  Unfortunately, in the great media battle of Good vs Evil, the simplest storyline works best.  They — who eat babies to fuel their nefarious plots — are bad; whereas we — who love sunshine and rainbows — are good.  We see this scenario everywhere, but if you’ve been living in a cave recently, just think Avatar, James Cameron’s remake of Dances with Wolves – tiny pastoral good against humongous industrial evil, at its finest. (I liked the movie.  I even bought a couple of McDonald’s Happy Meals to get the toys.)  My point is, however, that Guppie activists are always portrayed in the media as intellectually and spiritually superior, while anybody who opposes them is a dirty rotten scoundrel.  Big Business didn’t have to work very hard to become the new Nazis, but I’m a little tired of anybody with a Green Peace bumper sticker getting a free pass.

Media people are as lazy as old dogs in the sunshine so they’re allowed a little slack, but these days even journalists are singing to the choir.  Without an independent media, it’s hard to get information out to regular people, especially when that same media is only using its infinite power to draw the battle lines between Climate Change junkies and the folks who want to deny the whole thing.  The problem is Guppies love to be called brave little soldiers, and they respond with e-mails, phone calls and ratings.  On the other hand, you can’t correct the media, they are a vindictive crew and will stab you in the back.  Witness the recent demise of President Barack Obama who went from media darling to dunderhead in less time than it took Congress to butcher his legislation.  Luckily, there is a new underground resistance forming on the Internet that bypasses shoddy journalism and the vainglorious need for self-congratulation.  But it’s going to take time; time we might not have.

Meanwhile, in another part of the ever-diminishing forest, national governments are wasting everybody’s time in an tightening circle of uselessness.  Here’s the one big connection between the environment and government that nobody seems to get: they can fix it — anytime they want to!  Everybody seems to think it’s brain science or rocket surgery; it’s not.  Here’s the deal: within your taxpaying lifetime, your government (whichever one it is) gave every banker in this world enough money to wallpaper the boardroom in 50-dollar bills.  By the end of that same day, they’d mortgaged the souls of your grandchildren, in numbers that I can’t even comprehend.  They didn’t ask anybody; they didn’t study it; they didn’t give a damn: they just signed the papers.  Obviously, governments can do whatever they want.  Next Monday, they could make a law that prohibits dumping crap in our fresh water supply – done — and still have enough time left over to yip about Afghanistan all afternoon.

So why don’t they?  That’s an easy one.  Governments respond to noise, and Guppies are noisy.  They form committees.  They go to meetings.  They get on television.  They are going to defend their lifestyle.  If they think for 5 minutes that somebody’s threatening their 3-a-day latte habit, they’re going to scream bloody murder.  The only way to slow them down is to shout them down. (though not literally)  Ordinary people have got to get up from the kitchen table and start talking.  In a calm, determined voice, we have to make our feelings known, without name calling or rhetoric.  However, we have to make everyone understand that we are taking control of this situation, and no matter how long it takes or how much trouble it is, we’re going to fix it.  There’s no second choice.

As I’ve already said, trying break the Guppie stranglehold on the Environmental Movement isn’t going to be easy.  But either we stop them now or the human race’s carbon footprint is going to be just a misunderstood fossil in some extraterrestrial’s sample case.

“I can’t figure this out, Ragnar.  This species looks like it once dominated the planet.  How did they ever become extinct?”

“It’s quite simple, Volnax.  They’re obviously too slow to hunt and too fat to hide.  They must have buried themselves in their own waste for protection.”

“But who were their natural enemies, Ragnar?”

“I don’t know, Volnax.  I don’t know.”

Green Meanies

Remember Yuppies — Young Urban Professionals — that crowd that infested the 70s and 80s?  Like the Politically Correct, nobody ever admitted to being a yuppie, but, for a while they were everywhere.  Do you ever wonder what happened to them?

They’re still with us.  They went back to the mall to spawn, and now they’ve mutated.  Yuppies have become Guppies – Green Urban Professionals — and they’ve had children and even grandchildren.  They’re still the all-consuming ratbags they always were, but now there are three generations of them and they’ve gotten cunning.  They’re using climate change and the death throes of our lonely planet to justify their shopping habits.  They’ve infiltrated environmental groups and they’ve enlisted the media to convince us we can actually buy our way out this mess. 

Let me set the record straight.  Climate Change, Global Warming, Ecological Disaster, etc. etc. is real.  If you’ve got another theory – wonderful – but like it or don’t, something serious is going on, here on planet Earth.  Don’t take my word for it: Google the glacier at Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada.  Now take a look at a picture of it 50 years ago.  Notice the difference?  Duh!  If we don’t figure out what’s happening to this little blue ball we call home pretty quick, we’re going be up to our asses in lukewarm water and poached polar bears.  This is no joke.

Environmental groups have been around forever.  I’m guessing the ancient Egyptians had big problems with people peeing in the Nile.  They’ve always been the canary in the mineshaft – a kind of early warning system – like the Sierra Club, formed in 1892 to make sure Yosemite wasn’t covered in condos by 1992.  In our time, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in ‘62, a direct warning to clean up our act and our planet or face the consequences.  Unfortunately, the consequences showed up long before most of us had finished reading Chapter 3.  The problem is, environmental groups have been infiltrated by a bunch of Guppies who have hijacked the movement.  (I’m looking at you, Al Gore.)  The first thing they did was bring their winning corporate ways along with them and so turned activism into a money-making proposition.  Make no mistake: there’s big money in saving the planet, and, as everybody knows the key to making money is marketing.  Here’s the Twitter version of a PhD in Marketing – give them a disease, and then sell them the cure.

The disease we’ve been given is Global Warming, recently rebranded as Climate Change.  One of the cures is the biggest retail bonanza since those nice people on Mad Men discovered cigarettes are addictive.  The shelves are literally sagging with new products.  They’re either Green, or Organic, or Energy Efficient, or Environmentally Friendly or yadda, yadda, yadda.   Each is guaranteed to ease the suffering of our guilty conscience.  There’s also a special in-house rebate – you get to recycle (throw away) the old junk you’ve just replaced.  You don’t even have to worry about buyer’s remorse because you’re “helping” the planet by buying Energy Efficient, Environmentally Friendly, etc. etc.

What’s wrong with this picture?  Aside from the scam part, not much.  I’ve seen such incredible items as Green toothpaste, energy efficient leaf blowers (no, it’s not a rake) and my absolute favourite: environmentally friendly Chartered Accountants.  In recent history, Guppies have bought enough useless crap to kill three planets.  I have no fear of toxic waste because, one of these mornings, we’re going to wake up buried in half-used small appliances and smart phones – in a variety of makes and models.

Another “cure” for Climate Change is – surprise! — more activism and its silent partner, the laying of blame.  Guppies have formed aggressive groups who roam the planet, pointing out just how environmentally screwed up the rest of us are.  (Just an aside: have you ever noticed that Environmental Conferences are never held in a place where you can get there on a bus?)  Anyway, these groups have two problems: 1) Guppies don’t know what they’re talking about – they’re urban professionals.  The closest they ever come to getting their hands dirty is visiting the community garden or playing Farmville on Facebook and 2) they’re all off the scale in the Pompous Ass Department, so every time they get an idea, no matter how stupid, they think it’s holy writ.  Individually, these two little items certainly aren’t going to do the environmental movement much good; combined they’re actually harmful.  First of all, we waste tons of time, money and human energy chasing every project that butterflies across the horizon and forget about programs that actually work.  For example, I live in a big city that doesn’t have residential water meters.  Think about it!  And each Guppie pet project, regardless of its merit, is defended like it was the Alamo – more time and energy wasted.  Secondly, their unholy arrogance and unerring ability to point out the flaws in everybody else’s behaviour has pissed off a lot of people.  Some of these are very folks we’re going to need if we’re ever going to fix this unnatural disaster.  Loggers, miners, farmers and factory workers are just ordinary people and they don’t like being pushed around by the big boys at Corporate Ecology.  It makes them reluctant to help with the heavy lifting; especially after they’ve been called every name but nice and compared to Adolf Hitler, Satan and George W Bush.  No wonder the debate is polarized.

In a nutshell, we’re going to have to deal with our Green Urban Professional problem before we can tackle the environment.  Unfortunately, they have pretty powerful friends.

 Friday: Guppies, Government and the Media: the New Axis of Evil

Aung San Suu Kyi

On November 13th, 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in Yangon, Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma).  In Canada, we clicked our breakfast juice glasses and said “Good on ya!”  In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi walked from her house to the iron fence: the voice of democracy, able to speak again.   I’m glad she’s free.  I’m glad that the world didn’t forget about her while she was in the hands of the Myanmar military.  I’m glad democracy has another chance in a country I know nothing about.  I’ve always thought of democracy as a delicate thing – a fragile institution that needed to be handled with care.   But what the hell do I know about democracy, anyway?  Not much.  In my world, democracy has always been there, like clean water, or warm socks or 30 different kinds of breakfast cereal.  The constant of it lulls you to sleep.  Canadians wouldn’t know repression if it bit them on the ass.

In other parts of the world, repression isn’t just an entry on the Word-of-the-Day calendar.   It’s a living, breathing thing.   It stands on street corners with bayonets and rifles.  It walks through the sunlight to work in the shadows.  It’s a slogan, marched down a wordless street, and it’s a scraping scuffle in the whispering night.  It lives on fear, and if you listen, you can hear it chewing in the darkness.  In other parts of the world, repression doesn’t have a name because people are afraid to say it out loud.  Yet it’s always there like, some tainted fog, hiding prisons and torture and a hundred other nameless horrors.  These are the weapons of the brutal, who seek to rule without law and to silence those who oppose them — like Aung San Suu Kyi.

 Aung San Suu Kyi wasn’t always in politics; actually, she half stumbled into it.  Although her father was one of the architects of Burma’s independence from Britain in 1947, and her mother was the Burmese Ambassador to India, she lived outside her country for many years, in Britain and the US.  In 1988, she returned home when her mother became ill.  At the same time, there were widespread protests in Burma and calls for democratic reform.  In the middle of this national upheaval, Ne Win, the general who had controlled Burma since 1962, resigned, and created a political vacuum.  It was filled with louder calls for democracy and surging protests against Burma’s military rulers.  This was called the 8888 Uprising, but auspicious dates and unarmed monks are no match for disciplined troops — thousands were killed.  Aung San Suu Kyi had a famous name and a love for her country.  She and others formed the National League for Democracy and came out of the chaos as the leading voice for reform.  They were so strong it forced the ruling junta to place Suu Kyi under house arrest and nullify the League’s 1990 election victory.  Since then, despite the world watching and a Nobel Prize for Peace, Aung San Suu Kyi has been isolated by the military rulers of Myanmar.  She has remained under house arrest, off and on, for the last 21 years, sitting in her home in Rangoon, playing the piano and reading philosophy.

Now, she`s been released.  But nobody`s taken off their uniforms yet or put away their riot sticks.  The Myanmar military is still firmly in control and quite willing to put a stop to anything or anyone they see as a threat.  Suu Kyi and the democratic movement in Myanmar have been here before, and there’s no guarantee that this isn’t just another empty gesture.  History has a way of showing us what happens next, though, and somewhere Aung San Suu Kyi and the military rulers of her country are going to have to face each other.  Then the choices become clear – Rule of Law or Might is Right.  There’s no way around it — tyranny and democracy can’t live together.

We fear for democratic institutions and with good reason: evil never takes a vacation.  There’s always a politician, a general, a religious leader or a fanatic who’s willing to take control of our lives for us — for our own good.  They always come with promises and just a “few” restrictions until things get under control again.  They have a knack for enlisting convincing arguments and well-meaning people to do their bidding, and they prey on the weakest of us to subvert our society.  I’ve always thought democracy was fragile in the face of this – until today.  It’s not, and I was wrong.

We live with democracy, so we have no idea how strong it is.  We see its frailty and worry about its flaws.  We have the leisure to debate its shortcomings and the luxury to criticize its inadequacies — sophisticated chatter across an after dinner living room.  In other parts of the world, democracy writes its name in purple prose.  It feeds children and protects their parents.  It powers learning and attacks ignorance.  It guards law.  It builds hospitals.  It shelters the weak and gives power to the strong.  No matter how many times dictators come to destroy it, it always rises again to topple their statues and prosecute their crimes.  Sometimes, it’s a playwright in Czechoslovakia.  Sometimes, it’s an electrician in Poland.  Sometimes, it’s a South African who never lost faith despite 27 years in prison.  Sometimes, it’s a guy in a white shirt, facing down a tank.  And sometimes it’s a little woman in Myanmar, playing the piano.  Tyrants tremble when democracy speaks because no matter how many tanks, how many soldiers, how many bayonets a dictator gathers around him, democracy always wins.

So this morning over breakfast, I’ve changed my mind. I’m putting my money on a tough little chick in a lilac dress.   And while I’m at it: Liu Xiaobo, good on ya, buddy: China, you’re next.