By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

Before you sell the ranch to buy armaments to protect your last bunch of carrots from pillaging outcasts from “the unravelling geopolitical order and accelerated climate heating of our times” as forecast by Bob Sandford’s Climate Community in his Aug 27 Dispatches from the other side of collapse, one might ponder the role of such dissonant writing.

Bob Sandford, who is Senior Government Relations Liaison for Global Climate Emergency Response at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, has much to relate from his recent three-year look into the future. He has been commuting back and forth between Calgary and New York, staying in fine hotels, drinking superlative wines and dining on haute cuisine with his Climate Community friends and seen the future and for Bob, it does not look good.

He urges us to believe that climate collapse and the end of humanity is at hand and that to prevent total collapse we must pressure politicians into believing in and supporting science.

According to Sandford “Nature is now providing new evidence daily of where we are going in terms of the breakdown of the global climate system.” Further, he states that “Our boreal is burning and it seems that half of British Columbia has been on fire. And now fallout from hurricanes off our West Coast.” It is not a pretty picture he paints.

However, before taking on the formidable task of influencing politicians I would like to clarify a few things. First, half of British Columbia is not on fire though during smoky days in the valley it might seem so.

About two million hectares have burned this year province-wide which is actually two per cent of the area of B.C., not half. And having lived much of the last 18 years on the North Coast I can testify that hurricane force winds are not new or uncommon on Hecate Strait.

Sandford’s style of journalism at times reminds me of Samuel Marchbanks, a journalist of an earlier era, who was infamous for his lack of restraint. If he needed a fact to support an argument, and could not immediately find one, he just made one up.

Even so many of Bob’s assertions are rooted in fact; his belief that science can solve problems is justified. Not long ago it was considered impossible for human know-how to overcome the world’s fundamental problems; when new tools and new knowledge appeared wrapped in the Scientific Revolution, industry, military technology and capitalism, our hope in divine intervention was supplanted by a belief in progress.

Science has solved many problems: we now live in a technological era and many conditions that were seen as inevitable disasters in the past have been solved with technological solutions, for instance, less than 200 years ago in England, 150 children out of 1,000 died within a year of birth and a third of them were dead by the age of 15. Today only five out of 1,000 die at birth and only seven out of a 1,000 by the age of 15. (Wrigly, English population history).

While it is true that sociopolitical failures have occurred in the past, I doubt that we are, as Bob says, on the eve of societal collapse. A little scare mongering can be forgiven from someone who has immersed themselves in future games for three years, however scaremongering must be seen for what it is, a strategy to gain or hold power.

There are those who would turn us toward the fortunes of controllers and oligarchs in the name of some sort of equity or equality; however, in the past that approach led to dogmatism and held innovation in check.

Progress and invention are not lineal, they take shortcuts and blind roads, stumble on solutions, discover new processes, finds solutions. When cognitive dissonance, the engine that drives cultural change, is celebrated and cultures remain unrestrained by bureaucracies’ then technological solutions and new discoveries are found and people believe that real progress can be made.

Science will find its way. Suggesting a political solution to a technical problem is an oxymoron, protecting one’s personal carrot stash or expending energy to influence politicians to support building bigger bureaucracy’s is wasted effort and results in stagnation.

Evolutionary biology takes place ever more slowly compared to cultural rate of change, it is better to acknowledge and comprehend the exponentially accelerating rate at which humans adapt when driven by cognitive dissonance, call it cultural dissatisfaction than to rely on bureaucracies for opportunity. New ideas and new technologies will emerge as need is identified.

I am optimistic that as long as we reject proposals for all knowing belief systems and are willing to admit that we are ignorant then the drive to create solutions to human problems will endure.

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley-based writer and poet

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