[Editor's note: In early May 2010 CITinfoResource.com posted a letter by Charnal Macfie of Parksville, directed to Mark Holland. Ms. Macfie was in part responding to articles by and interviews with Mark at CITinfoResource, but she was also expressing concern about the kinds of things that sustainability "experts" – and Mark in particular – are saying when they work in her community. You can read Ms. Macfie's open letter to Mark here. What follows is Mark's response. We look forward to hearing more from our readers, whether you are land use & sustainability "experts" or "lay people," you are what the Real Estate Foundation of BC's Tim Pringle calls the "land use practitioners," people wrestling with the real challenges facing our communities.]
Charnal:
Thank you for the thoughtful letter. You raise a good question regarding the challenge of taking a position on growth in a specific (small) geographical area such as a community or the Island. It is one that brings up several conundrums and some logical and some counterintuitive observations.
These thoughts are of course my own opinions as are all positions on these issues – there is no consensus on these issues nor necessarily a true right or wrong as each position will have likely have tradeoffs. Moreover, none of us can know “the truth” because the number of elements in the systems we are speculating about are far more complex together than our brains can ever know – and therefore it’s all educated guesses, speculation and the drama of emotions – particularly “fear” in the minds of many.
As you will know from the discussion we had at the Qualicum workshops, I believe deeply in the concept of
carrying capacity at the global scale, but don’t believe that the global discussion of carrying capacity applies to any small area, because the scientific assumptions behind a calculation of carrying capacity don’t hold out when discussing humans, as opposed to nearly every other species. As a species, we are unlike all others. We can import (with renewable energy/technology) food and other things we need from many areas and we are the only species with advanced “tools” and the ability to massively change behaviour consciously to change our impact on our surroundings significantly, etc… Other species generally are geographically bounded and operate in manners with limited flexibility and few/no “tools” – and as such, calculating the food supply, water supply, breeding ground, etc… is something we can do, and thereby derive a carrying capacity. We can’t really do this for humans except at the global scale.
Once we begin to acknowledge that in the real world, we won’t be able to supply all the fuel, fiber, food, pharmaceuticals, steel, glass, plastics, TVs, furniture, building materials, computers, solar cells, wind generators, etc… that we on
Vancouver Island need/want within the geographical limits of the Island and the nearby Lower Mainland (etc), then we begin to accept that we will be shipping things in and out of Vancouver island – at which point the issue of carrying capacity becomes something quite different. It becomes a question of levels of impact.
There is a sense of “panic” emerging in society today based primarily on the environmental agenda that we have to become cave-people immediately – stop everything we are doing, start “culling the herd”, stop using any resources, stop all waste, etc…. The sense of panic is both unwarranted and highly unwise – and only primarily shared by highly educated, highly affluent individuals from the most industrialized countries – who interestingly generally refuse to reduce their quality of life in line with their fears, but continuously increase their personal impact on the world. I think that while we can’t continue to do what we have been doing, we need to separate “impact” from population or economic wealth.
We do need to start taking action right away to reduce impact, but we have many decades to achieve the change we need. Over the next 40 years or so, we need to invent and deploy a basically
carbon neutral economy / lifestyle – very challenging but probably doable. We need during that time to shift our energy supply to nearly fully renewable sources. We need to change our food supply to being likely 75% within several hundred miles, noting we’ll always bring in food from elsewhere (eg: a powerful part of economies for thousands of years), and the list goes on. If we think it’s not possible and ask ourselves why, we’ll likely come up with the observation that we know its possible technologically with off the shelf technology today – the reason we might be pessimistic is that we don’t think it politically will happen.
Sustainability isn’t a technology/impact issue – it’s a human nature and governance issue.
Regarding growth on Vancouver Island, we are in a bit of a conundrum here. We have built out the Island at unsustainable low densities and the result is we will be very challenged with only our current population to achieve a sustainable urban/community system and infrastructure in nearly any community on the Island. We need actually more people not less in order to hit the economies of scale for good transit, local businesses, demand for local food systems, district renewable energy systems, etc…
Regarding the fear of “massive impact” of these people, that is mostly a question of the technology we use to house and move our selves. If we adopt a more sustainable approach, then we can hold a lot more people and actually have less impact. For instance, we can build up to 6 storey wood apartment buildings that will reduce people’s housing emissions and impact by almost 30% immediately, and by 80% if done innovatively, but most people in Vancouver Island communities fight like hell to block anything over single family or 2-3 storeys in size – actually thereby making themselves less sustainable, rather than reducing the environmental impact on their communities. The untended result is also that developers study the market and find that everyone wants single family homes – and therefore they don’t’ build higher density on the island – and therefore the trades don’t learn how to do it, banks won’t finance it, etc… And what we get is the ubiquitous island sprawl we see everywhere.
Regarding food, fuel, etc… We can grow a staggering amount of food on the Island even through very low yield industrial agriculture approaches. More intensive, sustainable artisan agriculture could put us awash in food – so food is not a constraining factor, and may never be. While it feels that the area on the island is small, a very tiny fraction of it is actually impacted by settlement or agriculture.
Regarding forestry, if all major forest areas of the Island were managed in the way that Wildwood is, we’d have a sustainable supply of timber and fiber that would exceed any possibility of even a doubled population on the Island of every using – and we’d be continuing to ship it away to others who have less.
An effective train and local micro-electric vehicle transportation network on the eastern seaboard of the Island where everyone lives would reduce our transportation impacts by likely easily 80%, putting us where we need to be by 2050 – with no loss of quality of life.
And the list goes on.
The conundrum can be summed up in my mind the difference between 21st century sustainability thinking and 1970s environmentalism-thinking. Sustainability is focused on how humans can best fit with the planet and its ecosystems given that we’re here and are biologically mandated with surviving and maximizing our environmental niche – and are doing it in a rather ignorant manner now. Environmentalism is anti-human at its most core, and therefore any human impact is seen as horrible and untenable.
The irony of many policies and approaches based on “environmentalism” is that it is based on a paradigm of the “pristine natural world” without any significant presence of humans. The irony of this attitude is that it has given us an environmental regulatory approach that focuses only on protecting areas, or keeping humans out only when we find ourselves facing species extinction or species at risk – meaning we can do anything stupid we want until then and we only consider things when the species are already failing fast (and only occasionally recover). The “preservationist” paradigm when delivered by humans, corporations and governments whose DNA is the maximizing of human interests, ironically is programmed to fail from the start.
What we need instead is a new ethic of human stewardship where we accept we will dominate the earth for the next epoch (or go extinct or nearly so ourselves through ignorance)and that we need to manage ourselves to be stewards of this planet. That is hugely challenging and all the environmentalists who read this who hate people will launch many eloquent rants about our inability to have done this in the past - rants which lead us nowhere but to nihilism – which is only the purview of the wealthy and spoiled.
I personally work on “sustainability” because I believe an anti-human stance is untenable and frankly disingenuous – especially coming from all of us in North America who are the biggest sinners on that front and who continue to not-change our ways – even while we know our lifestyle is damaging - driving, flying, shopping endlessly, owning a big home, having huge closets full of shoes/clothes, - and most importantly, highly resource/energy intensive computers that we use to dialogue and spread our self-loathing. And I believe these actions are hardwired biologically into humans as part of our niche-maximization mandate as advanced mammals – a state we can only overcome through consciousness, learning, and strategic collective governance.
I believe that on Vancouver Island (and everywhere) we either have to be honest and personally chose and seriously go back to a 19th century way of life (95% local food, local woven clothes, animal based transportation, etc…) or we need to move forward to build a 21st century lifestyle that offers a great quality of life but has about 75-90% less negative impact on the planet than now. We have only those two choices. And when we consider its not really about Vancouver island in this question, but rather about China, India, Pakistan, and others, then I believe that with every nation on the planet currently living in or emerging from the 19th century lifestyle as fast as they can, that we have no honest, ethical choice at all – we must pursue the 21st century sustainable model.
We have put people on the moon and invented the electron microscope – we can certainly build a sustainable economy. It isn’t rocket science – it’s just grappling with human nature – and we have 4 decades to achieve our goal – many govt budgets, business cycles, changes in vehicles, etc...
If we put our minds to it, we can manage our species’ impact on the planet so that we can live effectively with all other species and be good stewards - and we can do it within 4 decades if we work hard at it. However, If we take a stance that is pro-environment in a manner that is anti-human, we will make almost no progress and ultimately, work against the very thing we are trying to achieve.
…and it is why I have structured my life, company and work around dealing with communities, developers and growth because I believe we can become sustainable.
By the above, I don’t intend to change your mind on anything, but rather to outline my thoughts on the good issues you have raised in your questions in your letter.
Regarding your last question, the role of OCPs in impacting resource extraction - it is almost impossible to use an OCP to do so. Firstly, local governments (who use OCPs) only have jurisdiction over small areas and their powers are limited in what they can do. For instance, the “right to farm” legislation makes it very difficult for a local government to stop a farmer from farming their land – and likewise forest companies, mining companies, etc… Large resource management issues are the purview of senior governments (prov/fed) and as such, legal challenges can be levelled at local governments that try to stop their activity in most cases.
The BC project of developing Land and Resource Management Plans (LRMP) for most of the rural areas of the province may have some insights into how to interface resource management and local communities, but I am not an expert on those processes.
Generally what I find more effective is developing a powerful compelling exciting vision and partnership with resource companies about how they can work with the community and help the community achieve their goals / quality of life, while taking steps to be responsible and innovative in their practices.
Respectfully,
Mark Holland
May, 2010
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