What Would You Be Willing To Sacrifice?

Ed Finn has a blog entry at rabble.ca that I highly recommend. His thesis can roughly be summarized in this excerpt:

The glue that holds any society together is faith in its governments, courts, churches, unions and non-profits -- faith that these organizations, no matter how flawed, will always be committed to serving their basic needs, to protecting them from the worst effects of poverty, unemployment, and sickness.

That glue comes unstuck when governments put private interests ahead of the public interest; when corporations put the uncontrolled pursuit of profits ahead of the well-being of workers and their communities; when unions are stripped of much of their capacity to help their members.

No wonder, then, that so many people have concluded that they can no longer depend collectively on these institutions -- that they are now on their own as individuals, each locked in a struggle for survival, with little or no help from any quarter.

The disastrous result, Finn suggests, is that we increasingly adopt a very selfish outlook on life, moving, if you will forgive a bit of hyperbole, into a stark survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle, a reversion to an almost Hobbesian state of nature.

There can really be no doubt that Western governments, including our 'new' one under Justin Trudeau, are neoliberal in nature. And the kinds of selfishness those governments foster are, without any hyperbole, facilitating the destruction of our world. The notion of sacrificing anything in service of the collective good is being steadily eroded, replaced by a widespread self-indulgence that has been transformed into a virtue.

My immediate concern here is the ever-accelerating rate of climate change, the greatest peril our planet has ever faced. While acknowledging that there are still some very good people today, I cannot escape the notion that the majority would obdurately refuse to make even the smallest sacrifice or lifestyle change that could, if done in sufficient numbers, slow down that rate. And quite significantly, our governments, beyond some paltry carbon taxes, are requiring nothing from us. That vacuum in leadership, in turn, gives licence to the very self-indulgent lifestyles that neoliberalism demands.

The kinds of sacrifices I am talking about are small ones we all could take: not idling our car while waiting for our spouse in the grocery store; combining errands to reduce GHG emissions; walking to the store instead of driving; eating one less meal of beef or pork per week; turning the air-conditioning temperature up one degree and heating temperature down one degree; buying energy-efficient products upon replacement; buying energy-efficient cars; air-drying clothes instead of using the dryer, etc.

All of the above require conscious choices, but none of them is onerous. I shall leave you with some video that highlights the peril we face, as well as this question: What small sacrifices are you willing to make or have made to reduce your carbon footprint?





If you go to approximately the five-minute mark on the following Global National newscast, you will see the impact climate change is having on Vancouver: