Media Clipping — March 17, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Big footsteps towards an ecological showdown

By Ralph Surette

HERE'S THE big picture, in stark colours: as panic stalks the financial markets, taxes and interest rates are being slashed in an urgent attempt to stimulate consumer spending and keep the economy growing at all costs.

Meanwhile, a Nova Scotian study outlines how that same consumption and growth makes us ecology pigs which the natural world can't sustain forever, and maybe not even into the next generation.

There's a showdown somewhere down the road, obviously.

In an "ecological footprint" study, GPI Atlantic places Nova Scotians high up the global scale as big consumers and big wasters.

Contrary to the notion that progress consists of consuming more, the GPI study (part of a pilot project for Canada to create a "genuine progress index") asserts that "to exercise the choice not to consume" is the first step in true progress.

The "ecological footprint" idea, developed at the University of British Columbia and now used internationally, measures the amount of biologically productive land and sea it takes to sustain our consumption and the waste we produce, as expressed in hectares per person.

The average Nova Scotian, according to this calculation, requires 8.1 hectares. Canada's rate is 7.7 ha. (Nova Scotia's electricity is made from dirty sources - coal and oil - which accounts for most of our higher rating.) For Americans the number is 12.2 hectares.

According to the scientists, the best the world can sustain is 1.8 hectares per person - the rate that applies to China. (India, Africa and much of the Third World are lower, and are the only ones who should actually be consuming more.) The world average is 2.8 - nearly twice what the world's biology can sustain. It would take two earths to keep us going indefinitely at this rate - four if the entire world consumed at the Nova Scotian rate.

GPI breaks our "footprint" into three components: transportation, household energy and food. The elements of the first two are often discussed. What really held my attention was our "food footprint."

We're big food guzzlers. We have more obesity than the national average - although many people, if trips to food banks are any indication, are not getting enough amid excess. Unequal distribution, a world problem, is a problem here, too.

Citing many studies, GPI says costs connected to obesity in the form of increased disease and lost productivity are between $120 million and $250 million annually for Nova Scotia. To stop overeating, and eating the wrong stuff, mostly animal fats, would clearly constitute progress - although by conventional measurements pigging out and getting sick stimulate the economy.

There's also the perverse economics of agriculture. In Nova Scotia we import 88 per cent of the food we buy, and our average food item travels about 2,000 km to get here - increasing our "food footprint" because of high energy costs. Lettuce from California sells here cheaper than locally grown organic lettuce. Should we see that as a benefit of global economics, or as a result of cheap (but environmentally expensive) energy and chemical inputs, and highway subsidies? Meanwhile our own agriculture wilts, as do the communities that depend on it.

The GPI study has a list of recommendations, saying we could drop our ecological footprint to seven hectares quickly and easily, and improve our health in the process, by reducing auto use, buying more local foods, eating right, altering public policy to favour ecologically sound solutions in transportation, energy and agriculture, and so on.

There are instances here and there in the world where little victories of that sort occur. Recycling of garbage in Nova Scotia is one of them. But they tend to happen only when people are forced by some crisis - no more room for landfills, for example - and make up only a small part of the larger reality which is steamrolling the other way.

Personally, I've come to believe that we're not really going to change our ways before we hit a brick wall, as we nurse the illusion that the free market and magical new technologies will set everything right.

When we do crack up, reports like this one will be dusted off and sound downright prophetic.

Copyright © Ralph Surette