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Conservatives will save the environment: Out of the chaos will come light: As the world, post-Clinton, takes on an old familiar shape, and we see warships on the China Seas, spies expelled, Cold War posturing and recession looming, there is some comfort to be found. It's only when times get rough that we find the will to look for the solutions that percolate just beneath our radar. To the cockeyed optimist, the solutions this time will probably circle around repairing some of the chaos we've created in our environment. As each month inches by, our general progress is halted by oil shortages, water shortages or floods and problems in the food chain. In southern England, whole fields are under water, and on the West Coast of the United States and Canada the rains have been so absent that in Victoria, for instance, we can't even water our gardens. In April! And the energy problem is knotty and persistent. One can hardly imagine this summer in California -- the power grid there is so starved Los Angeles will resemble most closely one of Dante's circles of hell. Last month, in Alberta, a friend's two young sons almost died from eating fast- food burgers poisoned by E. coli. In England last week, I drove around Surrey with another friend. At each stop, we disinfected our shoes. We could not walk her dogs; in fact, the dogs could not go out except on a leash, which is unimaginable in the English countryside. All the foot paths were closed, so we could not even walk off our Sunday lunch. And that was in Surrey, where foot- and-mouth has not, to this date, been discovered. While I was there, I did a story on foot-and-mouth and was nearly flattened by the floods of research I received about our poisoned food chain. Most of it was sent to me by what amounts to former chemistry profs turned family farmer, a breed, I admit, who are not that familiar to the layperson, but they exist, and seemingly in impressive numbers. They know what's going on behind those neat stone walls we drive past on our way to the country, and they don't think it's a good thing. Industrial agriculture is, barring a sudden stoppage of problems such as BSE, foot-and-mouth and E. coli, on its way to a total rethink, and that is a good thing, to my mind at least. And to the minds of quite a few more people than you would imagine. Late last year, Random House (U.S.) published a book called, in typical American overstatement, Cultural Creatives, How 50 Million People are Changing the World. Researchers Paul Ray and his wife, Sherry Ruth Anderson, have been publishing extracts of an earlier, similar study, in left-of-centre journals for five years. Two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States commissioned an expansion of this study, no doubt to discover the breadth and depth of the commitment of their constituents to The Cause, just before the 2000 election. One can only imagine the jubilation in the halls of the agency. And in every green advocacy group in the United States capable of coughing up the US$25 for the book. Fully 25% of the American electorate hold to values that you can only call, I hesitate to describe it this way but it's easier: hippie values. And, horrifying fact, they are, on average, better educated and richer than the other two groups, which are Heartlanders and Modernists. Most of us are Modernists, more than 100 million, in the States and Canada. Heartlanders, well you can imagine who they are: small-town conservatives who go to church on Sunday, and to whom family life is sacred. Dying off, say Ray and Anderson. But the Cultural Creatives add folks to their rank with every passing month. Sixty-two per cent are female, and are centred on personal growth, a lot of which, one guesses, has to do with therapy and crystals and essential oils (but one must not be mean). The men among them are not so interested in personal growth, but are very green. They don't really understand how powerful they are, because they generally believe they act alone, or in sympathy with a few virtuous others. What they spend their disposable income on is as follows: sustainable economy, ecological lifestyles, healthy living, alternative health care and personal development, which, in a mad estimate (which will do for our purposes), runs at around US$230- billion for Canada and the United States and US$500-billion for the planet. These are impressive numbers and, given the social force of this demographic, if Ray and Anderson are to be believed, one imagines their sense of isolation will not last much longer. This may not be a good thing, but it does exist, so must be faced. The much anticipated riots in Quebec City at the end of the month will show us, as if we needed it shown after a whole year of such activities, the youthful edge of this movement. Chaotic it is, and if we allow their chaos to overwhelm us, solutions will prove harder to find. Solutions to all the pollution, toxicity and depredation that, in fact, already exist. They have been created in small labs by individual scientists, in universities and in the fringe research departments of transnational corporations. Some economists think they can prove that sustainable industry is more profitable industry. The moment sustainability means a competitive edge, we will all, quickly, be really really sustainable. All to the good, but where innovation leads, the smothering hand of bureaucracy follows and once more individual freedom is curtailed. Better that the Quebec protesters protest on Parliament Hill or at the UN.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.