At sunset the lone fisherman makes his toss. It’s a small circular net, weighted so it sinks, trapping the catch. It is a timeless gesture that goes back millennia. I watched it each evening in Mexico on holiday. But if you ask that fisherman how the fish are doing, he shakes his head.
We humans have been harvesting the Earth’s bounty from time immemorial. We take its endless abundance for granted. But now thinkers are talking about a sea change afflicting the planet. They call the change "anthropogenic." For the first time a species that lives on Earth is changing the planet to the point where its own survival could be affected. The centuries between 1800 and 2000 are being called the Anthropocene era – a period during which the human population went from 1 to 6 billion, energy use increased 40 times and our occupation of the surface of the Earth went from 10 percent to 30 percent.
After the Second World War we hit what researchers call the "Great Acceleration." The human population went from three to six billion in 50 years. The number of cars went from 40 million to 700 million, and continues to increase. As Louis-Gilles Francoeur of Le Devoir pointed out in Monday’s paper, humans can now create life in labs just as we have started the sixth greatest die-off of species ever seen on Earth.
That is the backdrop for a panel on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at the Atwater Library, organized by the Montreal Review of Books and the Association of English Language Publishers of Quebec.
Montreal boasts some of Canada’s best environmental writers. They write about what most of us instinctively feel about the natural world. Half of us now live in cities, places where there is little or no nature. We rarely see the stars or animals or birds. There is basically no diversity of animal or plant life. Most of us are descended from people who lived on the land. But we are mostly generations away from a direct relationship with it.
Even if we are far from our ancestral dependence on nature, we all have the sense that things are not quite right. We hear rumblings that the world’s fishery is being wiped out, that the tar sands development is probably not a great idea. We also suspect that there are better ways of harvesting the foods we all need without trashing the source.
On Thursday evening, three of Montreal’s leading thinkers on the environment will talk about what we can all do.
William Marsden is a senior investigative reporter with The Gazette. He is well known for his work digging up the dirt on bikers and various forms of corruption. Lately he has taken up the cause of climate change and the refusal of the political class to address it. Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change is his latest book. (His previous one was called Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care). Need one say more?)
Marsden is righteously indignant, and his book is a polemic on the global failure to deal with climate change. He is also funny – witness his dedication: "To my mother, who looked for the best in everyone; and to my father, who disagreed."
Taras Grescoe is from a slightly different demographic. He has written three books – one about living in Quebec as an anglo called Sacre Blues. Then The Devil’s Picnic looked at what you could call extreme food – the food and drink that are forbidden around the world. His latest, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, has been called "The aquatic version of Fast Food Nation" by the National Post. Grescoe is a piscivore, a fish eater who eschews other forms of meat and poultry. He made that choice years ago based on concerns about quality and the chemicals used to produce meat from land animals. But now piscivores are in trouble too. He points out that it is estimated that 90 percent of the top-level predator fish (tuna, sharks, marlin, swordfish) have been caught. It is predicted that all major fish stocks will collapse in our lifetimes – probably by about 2048. We are in the process of eating our way to the bottom of the food chain. That’s where we survive on peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches.
Enter Holly Dressel. She wrote a book about the demise of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in NDG called Who Killed the Queen? and co-wrote From Naked Ape to Super Species with David Suzuki. Most recently, Dressel and Suzuki wrote More Good News: Real Solutions to the Global Eco-crisis, an update of their bestselling Good News for a Change. She talks about a New Industrial Revolution, focusing on green technology, and a blueprint for helping a severely damaged planet. Dressel is inspired by the work of Bill McDonough, who says we have had two industrial revolutions. The first was about resource extraction and money. The second is happening now, and it is about resource conservation and values. Why not have paying, secure jobs and industries and a decent base of natural systems to support them?
Stephen Harper calls environmentalists who criticize the expansion of oil pipelines "radicals." Perhaps the people who are sticking to their old ideas are the real radicals. Marsden, Grescoe and Dressel are the real conservatives – those who are in favour of conservation.
Read their books. And if you can, come and hear them speak.
MRB Roundtable on Sustainable Living
w/ Taras Grescoe, William Marsden, Holly Dressel
Hosted by Anne Lagacé Dowson
At Atwater Library Auditorium (1200 Atwater)
January 12, 5:30 p.m.
www.aelaq.org
