Not a book review today, I’m afraid – a talk review instead!

I happened to attend a talk by David Suzuki this morning, the Canadian academic, media personality, and environmental activitist. He’s a strong proponent of environmental sustainability and preserving our forests, waters, and other natural resources, instead of exploiting them into oblivion. To achieve this, he’s currently launching an attempt to change the Canadian constitution to guarantee access to a healthy environment, as is true in 110 other countries, as well as unite with other groups to change the Canadian culture more generally.

I’m very sympathetic to his aims: we need to do a far better job protecting the environment than we currently do, and let me say I enjoyed his talk generally: he’s very funny and makes some good poings. What I found striking, though, was that I just don’t believe his solutions will work. Constitutional change in Canada is a morass of unpleasantness, evoking as it does divisions over language and culture, and past attempts to change it in any way have failed: no matter how popular his suggestions might be, opening up a constitutional reform will lead to a huge argument with no consensus likely.

More generally, though, I think he falls into a common error in environmentalist thinking. To me, environmentalism actually makes more sense as a right wing issue than a left wing: ideals of conservation and Christian stewardship have a long history on the right. The left, however, having decided the right is evil, simply dismiss them out of hand, and in so doing lose the opportunity to find allies that could really make a difference. This morning, a young guy identified himself as Christian, and asked how Suzuki’s arguments could motivate Christians to save the environment. Rather than engage, Suzuki insulted Christianity and shut him down, managing to change what was a supporter into an annoyed and defensive critic. Christianity and the environmentalist movement surely have their differences, perhaps particularly over science, but dismissing others motivations to achieve your goals seems narrow-minded at best. Even business has more in common with the environmentalist movement than the environmentalist movement seems to recognize: what environmentalists call sustainability business calls preservation of capital, and both see them as the highest possible good. I’m always amazed they can’t seem to see that in each other.

I think it’s true of a lot of our causes in general: we identify with a side, and so we fail to reach out to others who, though on opposite ‘sides’, might easily agree with us on a given issue. The far left and the far right have a lot in common on issues of government intervention, environmental activism, and even decentralization of power, but they’re so busy hating each other they never get anything done. It seems a shame.