The Green Dream

By James Glave

The biggest stumbling block on the path to a greener life isn't the hassle of rinsing out glass milk bottles, or the pain of ponying up for a hybrid. No, it's the unfortunate buzzword that comes with it: "sustainability." Even the eco-academics agree that there's something irritating and obtuse about the term. "We don't use the 's-word' in our workshops," says John Robinson, a professor with UBC's Institute for Resources, Environment and—well, you know. "It's too abstract."

He's right, but since you can't pick up a newspaper these days without tripping over the dreaded s-word, let's wrestle it down to size. Sustainability describes a range of practices designed to help us meet our needs not just today, but indefinitely into the future. It's about finding ways to live more within our means-both economically and ecologically. It rolls together fields as diverse as green building, organic agriculture, low-emission transportation and renewable energy. And it has come to dominate the cutting-edge of business, science, education, planning, development and just about every other major endeavour that shapes our world.

This is nowhere more true than in Vancouver. Birthplace of Greenpeace, site of some of the earliest experiments in (forgive me) urban sustainability, home of David Suzuki, Cornelia Oberlander, Terry Glavin and a long line of world-renowned shit-disturbers, our city boasts more eco-cred than George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and all their Prius-piloting pals put together. Which is why, these days, the s-word is pretty much inescapable in this neck of the woods.

Perhaps our society is finally approaching a tipping point. With each passing year, more evidence emerges that our current approach to living, working, eating, getting around—just about everything—may well be coming back to haunt us. Simply put, we're taking far more than we give, on a planetary scale, driven more by short-term concerns than by mature consideration of the impact we're having on the future of our children and grandchildren. And the "inconvenient truth" is that we can't keep carrying on as we have been indefinitely, torching fossil fuels, degrading our water and merrily farting gigatonnes of carbon dioxide—plus some 21 other assorted greenhouse gases—into the atmosphere. The problem is simply getting too big to ignore.

The good news is that most of us already know it. Last year, The Mustel Group, a market-research firm, surveyed hundreds of Vancouverites on behalf of the city, which at the time was developing its One Day climate-change campaign. The upshot? Eighty-one percent of residents knew that the planet was heating up, and the vast majority of that group-87 percent-believed that their own day-to-day choices could help inch back the thermostat. Separate research revealed that Vancouverites were far more inclined to reduce their individual greenhouse-gas emissions than comparable urban populations elsewhere in Canada and the United States. Not only is the Green Dream alive and well in this city, in other words, but we understand something of what's needed to make it happen.

So: We're already inclined to change our bad habits and embrace what we might call a "carbon-reduced diet," but that doesn't make the process any easier. And here's where things get interesting, because it turns out there's nothing tidy about sustainability. The movement is rife with opportunism, nagging inner conflicts and intriguing ethical paradoxes. Vancouver's first Wal-Mart may one day boast geothermal pipes in the basement and windmills on the roof but semi-trailer trucks will still pull up to the back door and disgorge bulk-container loads of plastic goodies from China. Other contradictions lie closer to home: Many of us know that the scrumptious pineapple we picked up at Save-On burned countless gallons of petroleum on its long journey to our table, but hey, at least we'll toss the trimmings in the compost, right? As for the second car, well, we've talked about dumping it and getting serious about carpooling but with the kids starting soccer and hockey and... well, maybe next year. Cynics may smirk at such paradoxes, but there is really nothing wrong with them. You start with what you know, you do what you can. The Eco-Wal-Mart, the frequent-flyer fruit and the talk of serious carpooling all exemplify what might be the single most powerful force of green change, circa late-2006: the quarter-step.

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