www.James-Strocel.com

If there were no barriers to life, would we still keep building them anyway? In life, we no longer have to struggle against predators, marauding hordes, and long journeys. But we still make our lives harder with bureaucracy, financial woes, and artificial rites of passage. Would we fight as hard for our ways of life if we had no opposition? This week I bore witness to a modern-day adventure. It had plot-twists, suspense and international intrigue, all the good stuff. On the plus side, nobody died, nobody got really humiliated, and best of all everything turned out okay. My friend Tarra got her K-1 Visa today so she could go down to the states to marry her fiancée, Theo. You can see a long version of the story here. Sara and I had the honor of helping the whole thing go smoothly. I made sure to thank the happy couple for sharing the whole ordeal with us. They were a little puzzled. Sure, there was a lot of stress, lack of sleep, lack of cheap parking, but I got to share a very important day with people I care about very much.

I will always remember…

The jokes about the tear gas

The glazed look the girls got when Theo and I talked about xbox 360

Making plans over a Green Tea Frappucino

Playing crossword puzzles in the sun

Getting worried when the hour-long wait turned into two hours.

Sharing smooth Sake over a job well done.

Thank you so much for giving me a day I’ll never forget.

Last week, I was surprised to hear myself let out a gasp when I saw the morning Province. Chuck Cadman had died the other night, two months after he had made Canadian political history. The newscasts made it all seem like yesterday when single-handedly stopped the non-confidence vote from bringing down the government and forcing a June election. It’s a great piece of newsfilm. Cadman stood, eyes wide with determination, chewing a piece of gum in front of an applauding house of commons. It’s one of those iconic images that remind us that this is still a world where victory means something. That an individual can stand at the Zenith of things for doing no more than his job.
The press said that cadman had made his decison a half hour before the vote, the minute he recieved the results of a 600 member voter poll that said his constituents were not ready for a summer election. Earlier in the day, he had recieved Chemotherapy for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. The story couldn’t have been better if he had been waylaid by a Canadian Alliance-hired Team of Ninjas.
I believe that Death is never in vain. Blood was spilled on a government being nibbled to death by ducks. We originally elected the members of this new conservative party because those of us in the West felt we needed a voice in Ottawa. That voice is now involved in a salacious power grab with the government that wouldn’t listen to us then as well as now. Chuck Cadman made his vote in the spirit with which the Canadian Alliance was voted to power in 2000. Stephen Harper may have a harder time getting his Conservative government now that this one rests on a dead man’s vote, but he should sit up and take note on how he was denied the goal he so furvently seeks.

Any post that ends in “Hail Ants” deserves some kind of epilogue. Fortunately I have found one. It may be a lengthy one at 50 pages, but this article I found at Changethis.com Outlines exactly what I was talking about in the last post, and it even reveals a couple of things I never would have thought of. It’s pinpoints exactly why many of the great plans of environmentalists are doomed to fail. It’s titled, aptly enough, “The Death of Environmentalism”.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus explain that the issue not that environmentalists think that their proposals have intrinsic value. The failure of many environmental movements is that they only frame their policies in terms of the environment. The rationale behind this is that environmentalists define themselves by their focus on the environment, and they believe that if they lose that focus, they will lose their effectiveness. The flaw in this reasoning is that it transubstantiates corporations and governments from organizations made of people into monolithic superbeasts, which they often do at protest time.

This cripples the environmental movement in terms of gaining any of the political capital it needs to realize its goals. Instead of trying to find common goals with industry and governments, environmentalists frame their policies as if they are going to be shot down by default. I think this quote outlines the argument the best: “More good news from the environmental community: not only won’t we kill as many jobs as you think, we only want to raise your energy bill a little bit!”

The article offers an antidote to this defeatist politics in the form of The New Apollo Project. It’s an organization that wants to rid America of its dependence on foreign oil along the lines of America’s race to the Moon in the 1960’s. Its proposals are framed around the concepts of job creation and economic competition to get its way. It’s stuff like this that gives me hope for the future. The Neo-conservative movement has created its political hegemony out of policies that captured the imagination and argued from a position of strength. If the environmental movement hopes wield that kind of power, it will have to do the same with organizations like the Apollo Alliance.

In reference to the car-free thing I was talking about in the last post, it looks like the fair city of Vancouver is well on its way, thanks to fine work being done at the GVRD. All the right intiatives are there, diversified land use, increased transport options and preservation of green space. It’s good to see that 5 cent gas levy being put into something.

Note: The Death of Environmentalism is best viewed on the Foxit pdf reader. Get it here.